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all of six years on and off to make the quilt from different uniforms, more than a few pieces from poor fellows that fought hard for their country and fell in the struggle.' Rawdon, British soldier in India, 1872 Letter to Mr Bootland of Bradford, quoted by Rae and Tucker 1995: 177. Joseph AbstractJoseph Rawdon's account of his making of a military quilt incorporates an emotional object biography of a kind typically attached to this kind of material. He recalls the long period of production, an investment of physical and emotional labour of a different, but related, order to the effort of his dead colleagues, those 'poor fellows that fought hard for their country and fell in the struggle', and whose then surplus uniforms contribute to the fabric of the patchwork. In this co-authored article we draw upon objects like that produced by Rawdon, and the narratives that accompany them, to explore the value and challenges of curating objects produced by soldiers in wartime. Focusing on patchwork produced by Victorian military men, we seek to extend the understanding of trench art, in terms of chronology and form.

Visiting Dickens at his home in Doughty Street in 1839, George Henry Lewes was dismayed to find no major philosophical, literary or scientific texts in the author's library.To Lewes, Dickens appeared mystifyingly indifferent to the latest scientific discoveries and their multiple implications for the writing of fiction, and he was also consistently unhelpful in assisting Lewes's research into the psychology of literary production. Despite a new 'seriousness which […] became more and more prominent in his conversation and his writings', the author nevertheless 'remained completely outside philosophy, science, and the higher literature'. 1 Lewes's damning verdict quickly became part of the critical consensus and Dickens was long considered ignorant of, unresponsive to, or even antagonistic towards the scientific endeavours, findings and insights of his era. This issue of 19 participates in the lively revision of Lewes's account, with contributors exploring Dickens's myriad engagements with scientific thought of many varieties. As this issue seeks to show, at the heart of Dickens's response to scientific ideas was his cherished ideal that culture should show 'the romantic side of familiar things', illuminating the wonder, even magic, of everyday phenomena for people of all classes, and affectively uniting them by quenching a shared thirst for imaginative succour. 2 The essays here also collectively demonstrate the value of holding open our definition of Victorian science, so that it can encompass, as it did so capaciously in the nineteenth century, diverse fields including medicine, psychology and other mental sciences, social science, forensics, evolutionary thought, palaeontology, ecology, and contested practices and bodies of knowledge, such as mesmerism. Science by the Book? Forms of EngagementIn 1955, Gordon S. Haight expressed the representative view that Dickens was 'indifferent or hostile to the scientific developments of his age' and that his novels sadly failed to engage with the 'new theories that revolutionized man's view of himself and his universe in the nineteenth century'. 3 However, the many scientific texts found on Dickens's bookshelves at Gad's Hill -including Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon's

The popular stereotype of the prudish Victorians has persisted for too long. This article charts the rethinking of Victorian sexuality in the academy and beyond. It presents a detailed examination of the effects of sexological categorisation, looking at the legacy of the invention of homosexuality and heterosexuality for approaches to the period. In particular it explores the ramifications of Michel Foucault's discursive thesis, under which the homosexual became a species. In a final section the essay traces recent developments in the field, unrestricted by the binary opposition of the homo and hetero, enabled by queer theory and the turn to affect. Such approaches have given rise to fuller accounts of the varieties of Victorian emotional and erotic experience, work that can counter far right misappropriations of the period as a type of heterosexual gold-standard.

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