Victorian literary culture and ancient Egypt

By Manchester University Press

This edited collection considers representations of ancient Egypt in the literature of the nineteenth-century. It addresses themes such as reanimated mummies, ancient Egyptian mythology and contemporary consumer culture across literary modes ranging from burlesque satire to historical novels, stage performances to Gothic fiction and popular culture to the highbrow. The book illuminates unknown sources of historical significance – including the first illustration of an ambulatory mummy – revising current understandings of the works of canonical writers and grounding its analysis firmly in a contemporary context. The contributors demonstrate the extensive range of cultural interest in ancient Egypt that flourished during Victoria’s reign. At the same time, they use ancient Egypt to interrogate ‘selfhood’ and ‘otherness’, notions of race, imperialism, religion, gender and sexuality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Aug 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9781526141903

Book preview

Figures

1.1 Illustration for ‘Some Words with a Mummy’, in E. A. Poe, Tales of Mystery, Imagination and Humour; and Poems (London: Henry Vizetelly, 1852), p. 216 (courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society)

4.1 R. C. Woodville, ‘Chap. 25’, Illustrated London News (25 May 1889), 656 (reproduced with the permission of Special Collections, Leeds University Library)

4.2 R. C. Woodville, ‘Chap. 30’, Illustrated London News (15 June 1889), 756 (reproduced with the permission of Special Collections, Leeds University Library)

5.1 ‘Cleopatra in Paris’, Punch (1 November 1890), 208 (courtesy of the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham)

5.2 Untitled illustration for ‘A Pair of Spectacles’, Punch (6 December 1890), 268 (courtesy of the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham)

5.3 ‘The Last Scene of Antony and Cleopatra’, ‘A Pair of Spectacles’, Punch (6 December 1890), 268 (courtesy of the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham)

5.4 ‘The Run of Cleopatra’, ‘A Pair of Spectacles’, Punch (6 December 1890), 268 (courtesy of the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham)

7.1 Guy Boothby, Pharos the Egyptian (London: Ward, Lock & Co., 1899), front and spine (author's own)

7.2 John H. Bacon, ‘To Have Wasted a Puff Would Have Been a Sacrilege’, Windsor Magazine (August 1898), 247 (courtesy of the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham)

7.3 ‘Egyptian Deities’ (1904), Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library Digital Collections, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/f2ba1500-2987-0133-104d-58d385a7bbd0 (public domain)

Contributors

Hathem Bastawy holds a PhD in English and History. He is a Fellow of the British Higher Education Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute and a former Teaching Fellow in Drama and Postcolonial Literature at the University of Leeds. He received the John Murray Prize for his research in 2015 and the SWAPCA Languages and Literatures Award in February 2017, and has published widely on various aspects of English literature and history.

Angie Blumberg is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Auburn University, USA. Her current book project, Our Real Life in Tombs: British Literature and Archaeology, 1880–1930, unearths archaeological discourse at the centre of late Victorian and modernist discussions about gender and sexuality, decadent aesthetics and the First World War. Her work is published in Literature Compass, Victoriographies, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature and a collection of essays on the novelist Marie Corelli entitled Reinventing Marie Corelli for the Twenty-First Century (Anthem Press 2019).

Jasmine Day is a cultural anthropologist, teacher, Egyptologist and President of the Ancient Egypt Society of Western Australia Inc. She specialises in the history of mummies’ roles in popular media, literature and museums, and the ethics of exhibiting Egyptian mummies. Her work includes The Mummy's Curse: Mummymania in the English-Speaking World (Routledge 2006) and papers in Egypt: Ancient Histories, Modern Archaeologies (Cambria Press 2013), Histories of Egyptology: Interdisciplinary Measures (Routledge 2014) and various academic and popular journals. She has been a regular contributor to the International Congress on Mummy Studies and the Tea with the Sphinx conferences (University of Birmingham) and has appeared in several television documentaries and podcasts.

Eleanor Dobson is Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Birmingham, UK. She specialises in the reception of ancient Egypt in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as the Gothic and occult, and has published on subjects including representations of the ghost of Oscar Wilde, jewel imagery in Bram Stoker's Dracula, ghost stories set in Egyptian hotels and generic crossover between the imperial Gothic and the fairy tale.

Luz Elena Ramirez is Professor of English at California State University, USA, where she specialises in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British literature. She is interested in themes of collection, the intrusion of the past into the present, and the intersections between literary and area studies, which provided the focus for her first book, British Representations of Latin America (University Press of Florida 2007). In addition, she has published scholarship on George Chetwynd Griffith and William Hope Hodgson. Recently, she helped to establish the Mediterranean Studies Academy at CSUSB, an interdisciplinary initiative that includes a partnership with the Robert and Frances Fullerton Museum of Art whose collections include Egyptian antiquities.

Giles Whiteley is Docent in English Literature at Stockholm University, Sweden. He has published widely on nineteenth-century literature and philosophy from Romanticism through to early modernism. He is the author of monographs: Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth Century British Literature (Edinburgh University Press 2020), Schelling's Reception in Nineteenth Century British Literature (Palgrave Macmillan 2018), Oscar Wilde and the Simulacrum (Legenda 2015) and Aestheticism and the Philosophy of Death (Legenda 2010). He is currently working on a book on nineteenth-century humour for Routledge and a critical edition of Walter Pater's 1885 novel Marius the Epicurean for Oxford University Press.

Sara Woodward (née Brio) received her PhD from the University of Leeds, UK. Her research focuses on the ways in which nineteenth-century authors create and authorise views of ancient Egypt in their fiction as a means of defining their own religious beliefs. Her other published works include ‘The Shocking Truth: Science, Religion, and Ancient Egypt in Early Nineteenth-Century Fiction’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts (2018).

Molly Youngkin is Professor of English at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, USA. She has published two critical monographs, British Women Writers and the Reception of Ancient Egypt, 1840–1910: Imperialist Representations of Egyptian Women (Palgrave Macmillan 2016) and Feminist Realism at the Fin de Siècle: The Influence of the Late-Victorian Woman's Press on the Development of the Novel (Ohio State University Press 2007). She has also published numerous articles and book reviews.

Acknowledgements

This volume has benefited from the input and ideas of many generous scholars, most notably the speakers and attendees of the Tea with the Sphinx conferences based at the University of Birmingham, and in particular to Nickianne Moody, to whom this volume is dedicated. My thanks also extend to Meredith Carroll and the anonymous reviewers for their patience, guidance and expertise.

Introduction

Eleanor Dobson

In 1929, in the wake of the death of ‘Mike the cat’, a feline that had frequented the British Museum for some twenty years, F. C. W. Hiley, the Assistant Keeper in the Department of Printed Books, composed a memorial poem. Published in a pamphlet that also included a brief biography and photographs of Mike, as well as a description of his preferences in fish, the poem is a satirical elegy that honours the animal who was, according to Time magazine a year later, ‘probably the most famed British feline of the 20th century’.¹ Hiley describes him as nobler in bearing than ancient Egyptian deities and guardians – ‘He'd sit and sun himself sedately, / No Sphinx or Sekhmet looked more stately’ – suggesting a parallel between Mike and the material traces of ancient Egypt that might be found within the Museum's walls.² Mike is thus immortalised in a text that casts him as a modern successor to the mummified bodies of his ancient Egyptian kin, collected and displayed in the Egyptian Galleries over the course of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.³ Most significantly, however, Hiley playfully hints that Mike's resemblance to ancient Egyptian models might be attributed to his friendship with E. A. Wallis Budge, the former Keeper of the British Museum's Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities:

A master of Egyptian lore,

No doubt Sir Ernest had a store

Of charms and spells decipherèd

From feline mummies long since dead,

And found a way by magic art

To win that savage feline heart.⁴

Budge, who began working at the British Museum in 1883 and retired in 1924, is depicted in this excerpt as a kind of sorcerer who accesses Egyptian magic through his translation of ancient spells.

While such a short – and, admittedly, unusual – text might seem fairly historically insignificant at first glance, on reconsideration it neatly encapsulates popular perceptions of ancient Egypt, museums with Egyptian collections, and Egyptologists themselves, which all underwent significant cultural developments over the course of the nineteenth century. Without the solid foundation of Victorian culture that preceded it, such a memorial to Mike in the twentieth century – steeped in ideas of the inheritance of ancient Egypt by modern Britain, ancient Egyptian magic as an ever-potent supernatural force and Egyptologists as occult gatekeepers – would not have existed.

Nineteenth-century conceptions, reimaginings and redeployments of ancient Egypt as explored in all manner of literary types – much of which has continued to form the basis of engagements with ancient Egypt across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first – are the subject of this volume. The British Museum and Budge provide a useful window into this culture. In the nineteenth century the British Museum was an institution that not only collected and displayed artefacts from across vast geographical and temporal stretches (situated, significantly, in the metropolitan nucleus of the British Empire) but, with its Reading Room (open from 1857 to 1997), was also a significant literary hub.⁵ While the collections of the Reading Room have since been relocated to the British Library building in Euston, the British Museum continues to attract literary attention, and the narratives that are woven around such institutions continue to have a distinctive ‘Victorian’ flavour.

As Roger Luckhurst has demonstrated, for instance, the British Museum and Budge himself were both involved in the explosion of interest in narratives of the mummy's curse.⁶ Such stories – with their origins early in the nineteenth century – developed over the following decades, exploding in reach with the death of the Fifth Earl of Carnarvon shortly after the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in November 1922. Ancient Egypt fascinated the Victorians, as it continues to fascinate today. The galleries displaying the bodies and funerary paraphernalia of the ancient Egyptian mummified dead remain the most popular rooms in the Museum. Much has changed in the interim, but a cultural bedrock of how ancient Egypt is received by British audiences has remained solidly in place since the nineteenth century. Ancient Egypt is, to this day, used as a byword for religious fervour, dangerous magic, occult possibilities; as symbolic of cultural decadence, deathly queens and empowered womanhood; as evocative of luxury, wealth and intellectual enlightenment; and held aloft at once as the origin of Western civilisation and as a distant culture wholly unknowable. The origins of such ideas mostly predate the nineteenth century, but it was in the age of Victoria that literary culture wrestled with them on an unprecedented scale.⁷ Readers were eager for subject matter with an ancient Egyptian inflection, and the appetite for ancient Egypt which has proliferated since the nineteenth century has not been satiated. Yet, while public enthusiasm for all things harking back to Egypt's past has been sustained, academic scrutiny of how ancient Egypt has been reimagined in the modern world has, only in the past couple of decades, begun to flourish.

It is these relatively new and exciting critical conversations that this volume seeks to advance. While scholars (including those who have contributed to this book) – as I go on to outline – have recognised the rich seam of literature inspired by ancient Egypt that runs throughout the nineteenth century, these chapters take as their focus a broad range of primary objects of study, from novels and magazine serials to plays and poetry, from illustrations to advertising, that truly demonstrates that ancient Egypt permeated Victorian culture in ways that have heretofore been left undocumented. These chapters bring new sources to light, analyse underused material and re-read canonical and well-known works, highlighting the sheer scale of this multifarious cultural employment of ancient Egypt in the nineteenth century as their backdrop.

Recent years have seen a rise in interest in ‘Ancient Egypt Reception Studies’, the most common appellation given to the multidisciplinary meeting point where academics working across literary studies, history, art history, archaeology, Egyptology and beyond investigate how this ancient civilisation has been interpreted after the fact. The nineteenth century is a time of particular importance to such scholarship, largely as a result of French and British imperial involvement in Egypt across this period and subsequently.⁸ While ancient Egypt had been a source of fascination for Western culture since antiquity, European military presence in Egypt had significant cultural repercussions: these campaigns led directly to the emergence of the field of Egyptology, the increasing accessibility of Egypt to tourists and an influx of antiquities into European museums and private collections.⁹ In this era, ancient Egypt was, more than ever, scrutinised, studied, debated and enjoyed as entertainment. This has not escaped twenty-first-century scholars. Works including Donald Malcolm Reid's Whose Pharaohs?: Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I (2002) and Elliott Colla's Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology. Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity (2008) expertly detail the connections between Western imperialism, archaeology, tourism, scholarship and entertainment, as well as developments in modern Egyptian identity across the nineteenth century.¹⁰ Scott Trafton, in Egypt Land: Race and Nineteenth-Century American Egyptomania (2004), has explored the relationship between Egyptology, racial science and American identification with ancient Egypt. David Gange, meanwhile, in Dialogues With the Dead: Egyptology in British Culture and Religion, 1822–1922 (2013), explores Egyptology's impact on religion, most significantly Christianity, in the context of British Near Eastern archaeology more broadly. Multiple volumes by Stephanie Moser, including Wondrous Curiosities: Ancient Egypt at the British Museum (2006) and Designing Antiquity: Owen Jones, Ancient Egypt and the Crystal Palace (2012), demonstrate the pervasiveness of Egypt in Victorian culture through spectacle and museum exhibits.¹¹ Collectively, these works provide a vivid picture of nineteenth-century engagements with ancient Egypt out of which the literary culture that this volume addresses sprang.

Several scholars have indeed already turned their attention specifically to ancient Egypt within literature of the Victorian age. Keystone volumes such as Lynn Parramore's Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture (2008), Roger Luckhurst's The Mummy's Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy (2012), Maria Fleischhack's Narrating Ancient Egypt: The Representation of Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century and Early Twentieth-Century Fantastic Fiction (2015) and Molly Youngkin's British Women Writers and the Reception of Ancient Egypt, 1840–1910: Imperialist Representations of Egyptian Women (2016) have not only blazed significant trails in our collective understanding of ancient Egypt in Victorian literary culture but have also established the rich cultural context of and the diverse concerns addressed in such literary engagements; works such as the current volume are deeply indebted to the niches carved out by these forerunners. Luckhurst, writing of the emergence of the concept of the mummy's curse, laments that ‘[t]he question of Egypt, and Egypt at this particular historical conjuncture, tends to be reduced to sketchy background just when specificity might be most valuable’, while Fleischhack ascertains how ‘the image of ancient Egypt’ across the nineteenth century was coloured ‘by … a general Orientalist mind-set’.¹² Parramore asserts that, ‘sparked by Napoleon's campaign, images of [ancient Egypt] had … settled over Europe and America in a way that shaped modern identity’, and Youngkin identifies that while ‘both women and men … represented ancient Egyptian women according to … imperialist discourse’, ‘rather than exoticizing Egyptian culture’, proto-feminist writers ‘avoided references to Egyptian culture … while … expressing their visions for women's emancipation’.¹³ Together, they recognise and interrogate interconnected notions of empire and identity, as well as how these have operated for (largely) British audiences, from the nineteenth century to the present.

This collection adds to the critical conversations in which these aforementioned studies engage: all of the chapters in this volume analyse representations of ancient Egypt that are ultimately interrogations of the Western self. How have diverse aspects of ancient Egyptian culture been imagined by Victorian writers and illustrators? What do such representations suggest about the Victorians’ perceived relationship between themselves and the ancient world? How do the ways in which they persist or develop over the course of the nineteenth century reflect a variety of contemporary concerns? The chapters that make up this book address these questions, provide new readings of canonical authors and texts and introduce a wealth of new material into burgeoning debates. While much of the focus on ancient Egypt in nineteenth-century literature in recent criticism rests on authors such as H. Rider Haggard and Bram Stoker, this volume – following Youngkin's lead – brings works by female writers including George Eliot and Louisa Stuart Costello into consideration. Haggard, Stoker and their contemporaries are addressed in this volume, but as part of a much broader cultural spectrum stretching across Victoria's reign and ranging from the popular and the pulp to the elite contributions of the aesthetes and decadents. This breadth relies upon this volume's status as the first multi-authored study of ancient Egypt in literary culture. Through uniting essays written by scholars with diverse interests, this collection establishes that the Victorian fascination with ancient Egypt as demonstrated through literature is far more culturally widespread than single-authored studies have previously indicated.

The methodologies of this volume are necessarily multifarious given the nature of the project and its wide-ranging subject matter, though all of the chapters are informed by literary theory and historicist approaches. This provides the critical architecture that supports considerations of such distinct literary figures working over the decades in question: each chapter pays attention to the historical context of the focal text and its author, acknowledging and responding to the circumstances which shaped it. Ancient Egyptian history itself was being understood, revised and reconsidered in the light of major shifts in modern understanding of this ancient culture, its customs and language across the nineteenth century. Most modern histories of Egyptology suggest Napoleon Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt in 1789 as the discipline's point of origin, and while Egyptology certainly did not become professionalised in a steady linear sense over the course of the nineteenth century, the Victorian era encompasses significant developments in British Egyptology, from the establishment of specific departments for Egyptian antiquities in major museums, through to the creation of academic posts in several universities. While ancient Egyptian civilisation remained fixed in the distant past, new discoveries, translations of texts, and publications both scholarly and popular, contributed to a widespread cultural interest in ancient Egypt that relied on a sense of novelty. Modern Egypt was also a dominant subject in the press particularly after Britain's occupation of Egypt in 1882. In keeping with Angie Blumberg's recent suggestion that ‘in a move that seems paradoxical, Victorian authors regularly engaged with the past as a crucial mode of conceptualizing modernity’, these chapters demonstrate that ancient Egypt is a shifting signifier over the course of the Victorian period, metamorphosing as the modern world's relationship with ancient – and modern – Egypt changed.¹⁴

Indeed, the evolution of how ancient Egypt is used, as demonstrated over the course of this volume – from Edgar Allan Poe to Bram Stoker – reflects these wider historical developments. The chapters in this collection tell us much more about the Victorian present than they do about the ancient Egyptian past. Broadly speaking, we begin with debates about the ancient Egyptians’ racial origins and the origins of Christianity. In these early chapters, we see Victorian publics being invited to question their relationship with ancient Egypt on myriad levels, their sense of imperial entitlement to Egypt's antiquities, and their relationships with Egypt's religious monuments: these are not simple relationships but complicated and conflicted ones, in which we can detect both imperial pride and guilt, religious doubt and, essentially, the questioning of modern Anglo-American selfhood. Ancient Egypt is, across the century, increasingly bound up in issues of gender, specifically with regards to women's rights and their involvement in the emerging male-dominated discipline of Egyptology: we see writers and artists fixate on the mummified bodies of the ancient Egyptian female dead, the body becoming a site for assertions of (usually masculine) national pride or anxiety, as well as ancient Egyptian queens and modern Western actresses equated, collapsing thousands of years of history to bring the past and the present into direct conversation in order to interrogate women's increasing autonomy. And, at the fin de siècle, we observe the sheer variety of people who were exploring their identities through references to ancient Egypt, from the literary and artistic elite, through to the lower-middle classes, to whom mass-produced goods and affordable literature were marketed. Collectively, then, these chapters argue for the significance of ancient Egypt in all manner of debates surrounding modern Western identity, spanning race, religion, gender and class, evolving across the nineteenth century.

Through emphasising the variety of literary engagements with ancient Egypt in this era through such diverse essays, a common thread that runs through the chapters, as well as the pertinent linkages between particular pieces, can be drawn out. The chapters are arranged in a broadly chronological fashion (though there are, of course, overlaps in the periods that they consider), so that the reader who is interested in this body of work as a whole can get a sense of the development of cultural uses of ancient Egypt over time. After the chapter summaries provided here, I also suggest groupings of the chapters for the reader pursuing a particular theme: the figure of the mummy, gender, visual and material culture, religion and the tension between the highbrow and middlebrow.

In this volume's first chapter, Jasmine Day focuses on a British illustration for Edgar Allan Poe's satirical short story ‘Some Words with a Mummy’ (1845) which was published posthumously alongside this tale in an anthology of his works in 1852. This illustration is the earliest known visual depiction of a revived Egyptian mummy, a character that later became an archetypal figure in Victorian literature. Day situates the unknown artist's vision of the fictional mummy Allamistakeo within the history of visual and literary depictions of mummies and the sociopolitical discourses they articulated, comparing the illustrator's engagement in contemporary debates with those suggested by Poe's text. While Poe does not assign a racial identity to Allamistakeo, the illustrator gives the mummy an African appearance, sidestepping Eurocentrism and evoking scientific disputes about the racial origins of the ancient Egyptians. Day is the first to suggest that Poe, similarly, objected to the xenophobia rampant elsewhere in the mummy genre. Through an overview of prominent British and American literary works that likely influenced ‘Some Words with a Mummy’, Day demonstrates Poe's determination to challenge the common use of mummies to promote modern Western values and denigrate foreign ancient ones. While Poe's satirical tale has often been treated as a light-hearted piece whose comedy probably derives from the use of mummies as stock characters in stage farces, it was in fact an original fusion and amplification of the critical themes emerging in mummy lore that later evolved into the ‘mummy's curse’ legends in literature of the mid to late nineteenth century. In bringing to light this illustration and analysing it as part of the wider corpus of mummy literature as well as the racial debates that this body of literature responded to and furthered, Day demonstrates that Poe and his illustrator invited contemporary readers to stop laughing at mummies and to start laughing with them and at themselves, questioning commonly held racial stereotypes and European imperialist ideology.

In Chapter 2 Haythem Bastawy scrutinises George Eliot's Adam Bede (1859), the first essay to address exclusively the novel's ancient Egyptian dimensions. Using Eliot's opening lines likening authorship to Egyptian sorcery as a springboard, Bastawy argues for the continued significance of this reference throughout Adam Bede, demonstrating an interconnectedness between established Christian motifs and ancient Egyptian religion and mythology. In addition to the Wesleyan Methodist aspects of the novel, this chapter demonstrates the existence of a discernible recreation of the biblical Genesis story running throughout the text, combined with tangible references to ancient Egyptian gods and goddesses. For example, Bastawy recognises that Seth, one of the novel's major male characters, is the name of both the third son of Adam in the biblical Book of Genesis and the ancient Egyptian god of disruption and disorder. Hetty, a beautiful but sinful character, might similarly be read as an incarnation of Het Hatour, the ancient Egyptian goddess of beauty, lust, wine, birth and the underworld. Bastawy contextualises this analysis by suggesting texts featuring references to and illustrations of ancient Egypt that likely influenced Eliot, including Edward William Lane's Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836), his translations of The Thousand and One Nights (1838–40) and Charles Knight's The Pictorial Bible (1836–38). Overall, this chapter argues for a reconsideration of Eliot's first novel, placing this work within its contemporary Egyptological culture and, in doing so, proposes that Adam Bede retells the biblical story of Adam and Eve with a distinctly ancient Egyptian inflection.

Furthering the religious significances of Bastawy's chapter, in Chapter 3 Angie Blumberg examines the various ways in which nineteenth-century writers and artists remembered the biblical tale of the wife of Potiphar, who attempted to seduce her husband's enslaved advisor, Joseph, and accused him of attempted rape when her advances were repeatedly rebuffed. Potiphar's wife was recalled throughout Western history as a prototype for immoral, aggressive female sexuality, a vicious and manipulative temptress. Her profuse reappearances in Victorian writing and art, though, encouraged by the development of Egyptology and the rise of archaeological fantasy, complicate her character and her narrative. Blumberg details the resurgence of Potiphar's wife across a range of early and mid-Victorian texts, including Charles Wells's verse drama Joseph and his Brethren (published in 1823, but generally neglected until revised in 1850 and republished in 1876 with an introduction by Algernon Charles Swinburne), the discussions surrounding Wells's work by Pre-Raphaelites and Swinburne in the 1870s, and an edited poetry collection by Anglo-Irish writer Louisa Stuart Costello (1845). Drawing from the Quran's version of the tale, and from the medieval adaptations of this story by the fifteenth-century Persian poet Jami, some of these writers, particularly Costello, reimagine the seduction story as primarily about art and beauty. Writers and artists move beyond the biblical temptress to discuss the idea of a complex, sexually aware female character, and – in their obsession with discovering the woman's mummified body fuelled by widespread interest in Egyptological excavations – to theorise the connections between the sexualised body and experimental aesthetic form. By examining non-canonical, mid-Victorian adaptations of the wife of Potiphar, Blumberg uncovers how the stage was set for fin-de-siècle discussions of other figures of ancient Eastern sexuality, Salome and Cleopatra. Mrs Potiphar's mid-Victorian revival, she claims, propels the move towards considering ancient Egyptian femininity for models of modern female subjectivity and experimental art that would become more fully realised at the end of the century.

The next chapter also pays close attention to the perceived intersections and tensions between ancient Egyptian culture and Christianity. In Chapter 4, Sara Woodward explores the effects of Victorian Egyptomania on nineteenth-century Christian religion, as many began to look to the ‘pagan’ past to define religion's role in the present. Woodward examines the connection between the rapid influx of print material and growing doubt surrounding the idea of the Christian afterlife, arguing that the Victorians sought to understand and redefine Christianity by examining its relationship and connectedness to ancient Egyptian religion and vice versa. Specifically, she presents a typological reading of H. Rider Haggard's Cleopatra (1889), arguing that the novel is both a microcosm of shifting Victorian attitudes towards Christianity and representative of Haggard's personal struggle with traditional Protestantism. Woodward argues that Haggard capitalised upon the sensationalist discourse that surrounded Egypt and used a loose, typological structure within his serially published Cleopatra to present a complex, imaginative dialogue on religion in the nineteenth century as well as explore his own personal doubts surrounding the Christian faith. The nuanced combination of a typological dialogue and an Egyptian motif, she claims, allowed Haggard to address such topics as the value and implications of Christ's death as substitutionary atonement, the origins of Christianity and the inherent fear and doubt surrounding the extent of a Christian's security in eternal life after death. In Cleopatra, Woodward demonstrates, Haggard establishes that what passed long ago in Egypt still resonates with, and could possibly alter, preconceived assumptions regarding faith and humanity in nineteenth-century England. Using Haggard's posthumously published autobiography The Days of my Life (1926), she explores the author's conflicting statements on his beliefs, which favour the idea of reincarnation, while simultaneously dismissing Buddhism and affirming Protestantism. Woodward concludes by suggesting that the inherent tensions produced by Haggard's own fluctuating