Holly Furneaux

Children of the Regiment: Soldiers, Adoption, and Military Tenderness in Victorian Culture

The plot of soldiers becoming adoptive parents as they care for neglected children encountered on campaigns or displaced by war is surprisingly prevalent in mid-Victorian British literature and art. This article explores this persistent idea of the regimental family, asking why gentleness—tactile and emotional—is such a recurrent feature in representations of the soldier, and considering how a particularly domesticated paternal ideal is ideologically mobilized in war narratives.

Inscribing friendship: John Forster’s Life of Dickens and the writing of male intimacy in the Victorian period

Forsters Life of Charles Dickens (1872–4) was described in contemporary reviews as ‘The Autobiography of John Forster with Recollections of Charles Dickens’, and continues to be charged with making Forster a disproportionately large character in Dickenss life story. This article takes a different approach to The Life, viewing Forsters biography of his friend and literary advisee as a significant document for the exploration of personal and professional intimacy between men in the period; a document that reveals a plenitude of available languages for the expression of a rich emotional experience of male friendship, encompassing amity, tenderness, loss and mourning. In exploring the Life of Dickens as a narrative of the life in relation, this article endeavours to expand upon often rather fleeting critical references to the significance of a personal relationship between biographer and subject. I close-read Forsters biography alongside Dickenss own discussions of male friendship in his fiction, journalism and letters, using approaches from queer theory and a historical approach to friendship between men to offer a new framework for understanding the narrative and emotional effects of biographical intimacy.

'It is impossible to be gentler': The Homoerotics of Male Nursing in Dickens's Fiction

Eve Sedgwicks Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) has had a hugely enabling impact on gay, lesbian and queer studies, and its two chapters on Dickens do the initially useful work of recognising the existence of alternative sexualities within his work. Yet, Sedgwick insists that Dickens always offers such representations from an inherently homophobic perspective. Though recognising a debt to Sedgwick, this article is strongly committed to demonstrating the fallacy of her influential paradigm that the homoerotic emerges most strongly in Dickenss work through violence. Sedgwickian readings privilege the cultural currency of sexual violence, built up through contemporary modes such as flagellatory pornography. However, other, gentler ways of touching also had highly erotic connotations during the period of Dickenss career. This paper focuses on the Victorian sexualisation of nursing, arguing that Dickens deploys the eroticising of nurse/patient roles in Martin Chuzzlewit and Great Expectations to develop more affirmative, tender strategies for articulating desire between men.

Negotiating the Gentle-Man: Male Nursing and Class Conflict in the ‘High’ Victorian Period

This chapter could alternatively be entitled ‘Never Was There Such a Nurse as He’, after a ringing endorsement of masculine care in Charlotte’s Yonge’s hugely popular 1853 novel, The Heir of Reddyffe.1 Yonge’s gendering of her exemplary nurse and hero, Sir Guy, raises questions about mid-Victorian ideals of masculinity and the gendering of tenderness. A paragon of the sickroom, ‘Guy persevered indefatigably, sitting up […] every night, and showing himself an invaluable nurse, with his tender hand, modulated voice, quick eye and quiet activity. His whole soul was engrossed: he never appeared to think of himself, or to be sensible of fatigue; but was only absorbed in the one thought of his patient’s comfort!’ (p. 322). Like many, variously classed, male nursing figures of the period, Yonge’s heir confirms his moral worth through a sacrificial act of nursing. In these high Victorian explorations of the gentle-man, tenderness, rather than ancestry or class position, becomes the defining feature of social value.