Dr Danielle Mariann Dove

Drawing on existing work on the theoretical notion of the trace in neo-Victorian fiction, this article foregrounds the material trace as an appropriate framework for examining neo-Victorian gloves. Considering the ways in which gloves take on a ghostly life and agency of their own in neo-Victorianism, this article seeks to interrogate the material and spectral traces that they leave behind in Sarah Waters's  (1999) and  (2002). It aims to show the significance of sartorial matters in these contemporary re-imaginings of the Victorian period, and to examine neo-Victorian fiction's relationship with the traces and fingerprints of the past. Locating the glove as entrenched within cultural memory as an explicitly Victorian item, this article suggests that it acts as both a marker of Victorian situatedness and a palpable entity capable of transgressing the temporal, spatial, and sexual boundaries that exist between the past and present.

This article traces the emergence of the ‘Dolly Varden’ dress, a brief sartorial craze that rose to prominence shortly after Charles Dickens’s death in 1870 and which remained in vogue until 1873. Inspired by the lively heroine of Dickens’s historical novel (1841), the Dolly Varden dress was a specific type of polonaise. Its appearance on the fashion market thirty years after the text’s initial publication is intriguing, yet only a handful of academic works have considered the significance of this sartorial style. Existing scholarship has tended to focus on the fashion trend’s connection with nostalgia and the expansion of commodity culture in the late nineteenth century. Contrary to these viewpoints, this essay argues that Dickens’s celebrity and his untimely death precipitated the trend for such a gown. Seeking to reframe the dress as a particular form of parasocial interaction, this article aims to reposition the women that wore it as active and autonomous fans. Considering the cultural and sartorial ends to which the Dolly Varden dress has been appropriated is significant, this essay argues, because it illustrates the iterability and enduring popularity of Dickens’s characters, whilst also contributing to our collective understanding of the influence of the death of a celebrity figure in the late nineteenth century.