Introduction

That Ouida is a crucial figure in Victorian popular culture is hard to dispute. Yet Ouida herself might well have argued with that. For at least the last two decades of her life, she would have hated being connected to the ‘Victorian.’ She spent less than half of her life in England under Victoria and came to hate an Empress who supported the Boer war. She claimed in response to her award of a small Civil List pension in 1906 that she did ‘not approve of this kind of gift and [did] not think [she had] done England any service.’1 From her first work in the 1860s, she created worlds whose values were very far from what was once considered the Victorian norms of bourgeois sexual regularity and conviction in the goodness of prudence and profit. While she may have shifted a lot of copy as a generator of entertaining stories, Ouida herself came to disdain popularity in that sense. She hated the culture of celebrity. Certainly from the 1880s and probably earlier she believed in the value of the individual genius who could intervene in society and change it for the better. She had to sell the produce of her pen in order to live, true, but she was only really in favour of being ‘popular’ if it meant being listened to and taken seriously by a large number of people. She refused the logic of ‘loser wins’ that Pierre Bourdieu suggested came to govern the cultural field in the nineteenth century whereby status was conferred in inverse proportion to popularity.2 Neither was hers a popular politics in the sense that it stemmed from the ‘people’; instead, she advocated a politics of aristocracy – a rule by the ‘best’ who comprised a combination of feudal aristocracy and cultural leaders.