Lindsay Wilhelm is an Assistant Professor at Oklahoma State University. Her teaching and research interests include late nineteenth-century literature and science, critical prose, aestheticism and decadence, and Victorian Hawai`i. She has published articles on these and related topics in Victorian Studies, Nineteenth-Century Literature, the LA Review of Books, and other venues. Her book, Evolutionary Aestheticism in Victorian Culture, is under contract at Cambridge University Press. Address: 149 Humanities Building
Box 951530
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1530
Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies, 2023
The Hawaiʻi of literary renown seems to exist outside the normal flow of time. Charles Warren Sto... more The Hawaiʻi of literary renown seems to exist outside the normal flow of time. Charles Warren Stoddard, in his memoir Hawaiian Life: Lazy Letters from Low Latitudes (1894), recalls the beautiful ‘boat-boy of Lahaina’ in just such temporally ambiguous terms: although the travel writer had not seen the native youth in years, Stoddard muses that ‘the finger of Time doubles up the moment it points toward him’, so that ‘he must be still lying in wait for me, […] not a day older, not a particle changed’. In the case of Hawaiʻi, this pervasive trope of stasis exists in tension with alternative and often contradictory models of time as cyclical, regressive, and even hyper-accelerated, such that Hawaiian history appears to unfold in fits and starts, jumping forward and looping backward in ways that resist linear understandings of progress. Later in Hawaiian Life, for instance, Stoddard reflects on the fate of Kane-Pihi, a local fisherman who in the span of a few months transforms from a ‘gentle savage’ into a streetwise petty thief and eventual convict. For Stoddard, Kane-Pihi’s rapid evolution – which ends with his ignominious death in prison – recreates in miniature the story of a race doomed to collapse under the weight of modernity and its steady drumbeat of ‘development’.
South Seas Encounters: Nineteenth-Century Oceania, Britain, and America, 2018
In June of 1887, distinguished guests from all over the world poured into London to participate i... more In June of 1887, distinguished guests from all over the world poured into London to participate in Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee. Few visitors attracted more attention than the Hawaiian royal delegation, which included Queen Kapiʻolani, consort to King Kalākaua, and her sister-in-law Princess Liliʻuokalani, heir to the throne and last monarch of Hawaiʻi. When the party landed in Liverpool on June 1st, thousands of cheering bystanders were gathered on the wharves—eager, as Liliʻuokalani later wrote, to catch a glimpse of “the Queen of the far-off Sandwich Islands.” Contemporary newspaper representations of Kapiʻolani—hundreds of stories and blurbs chiefly concerned with what she wore, which functions she attended, and what ceremonial honors she received—bespeak the widespread public curiosity surrounding the pair's month-long stay. The tenor of British press coverage was remarkably variable: Kapiʻolani was alternately praised for her regal bearing and derided for her audacious claims to the full privileges of her title. The Hawaiian delegation's reports of the Jubilee similarly focused on the splendor of the occasion, though they spoke of their English hosts in uniformly cordial terms (Liliʻuokalani called Kapiʻolani and Victoria “sister sovereign[s],” and Curtis P. Iaukea, Kalākaua's envoy, later addressed England as Hawaiʻi's “sister nation”).
In this paper, I read the Hawaiian royal visit as a touchstone in the cultural relationship between Britain and Hawaiʻi. Accounts of Kapiʻolani's visit—both in the British periodical press and in the memoirs of Liliʻuokalani and Iaukea—become staging grounds, I argue, for overlapping discussions about the nature, function, and future of monarchical institutions. I first contextualize the visit by briefly chronicling the contentious partnership that joined these two constitutional monarchies in the period. Hawaiʻi relied on Britain for diplomatic recognition and political support against the ever-increasing threat of annexation, while Britain, in turn, exploited the islands' strategic location in the Pacific. Both nations also witnessed significant political upheaval in the Jubilee year. Even as Kapiʻolani attended parties and patronized charity bazaars in London, a cabal of predominately American businessmen in Hawaiʻi launched the first in a series of coups that would culminate in the illegal overthrow of Liliʻuokalani in 1893 (as several British newspapers noted, Kapiʻolani was forced to cancel her continental tour to return to her embattled husband). In England, meanwhile, debates over Irish Home Rule raged in Parliament and the press, and developments in Hawaiʻi and elsewhere raised fears about the gradual erosion of Britain's historical sphere of influence. In this vein, I also explore the ways in which Hawaiian and British depictions of the visit—particularly their fixation on pomp and protocol—speak to certain shared anxieties about the integrity and legitimacy of monarchical power. To varying degrees, the “sister soveriegn[s]” that met at the Jubilee presided over kingdoms in crisis, and the records and retellings of their encounter reflect diverse reactions to these crises.
This essay, published in Victorian Studies, calls attention to the philosophical parallels betwee... more This essay, published in Victorian Studies, calls attention to the philosophical parallels between British aestheticism--the “art for art’s sake” movement founded by Walter Pater in the late 1860s--and a contemporary strain of optimistic evolutionism popularized by iconoclastic mathematician W. K. Clifford in the 1870s. Although evolutionism and aestheticism appear unrelated at first glance, Clifford’s and Pater’s bodies of work reveal common concerns about the influence of scientific materialism on culture and the place of the individual within the evolutionary process. By tracing these commonalities through the work of Clifford, Pater, and aesthetic poet Mathilde Blind, this essay posits a richer account of the interdependent formation of both aesthetic and evolutionary thought in the late nineteenth century.
The past 30 years have witnessed a marked growth in critical studies of science and literature in... more The past 30 years have witnessed a marked growth in critical studies of science and literature in late nineteenth-century Britain. This essay seeks to highlight a small, but expanding, subset of research within this larger field that specifically concerns the intersections of evolutionary science and literary aestheticism. As this essay explains, scholars have gradually uncovered the significant inf luence that evolutionary science brought to bear on aesthetic thought. By delving into the archive, literary historians have also come to recognize that this inf luence was reciprocated, in large part because the relationship between evolutionary science and aestheticism was widely recognized by Victorian readers: even as scientific language permeated aesthetic writing, popular associations between the two movements steered scientific inquiry in certain directions. In conclusion, this essay suggests areas for future critical expansion and considers several striking affinities between evolutionism and aestheticism that merit particular exploration.
A paper presented at the International Walter Pater Society 2018 conference, held at the Clark Li... more A paper presented at the International Walter Pater Society 2018 conference, held at the Clark Library in Los Angeles, California.
A paper presented at the North American Victorian Studies Association annual conference, November... more A paper presented at the North American Victorian Studies Association annual conference, November 2016, Phoenix, AZ
In June of 1887, distinguished guests from all over the world poured into London to participate i... more In June of 1887, distinguished guests from all over the world poured into London to participate in Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee. Few visitors attracted more attention than the Hawaiian royal delegation, which included Queen Kapiʻolani, consort to King Kalākaua, and her sister-in-law Princess Liliʻuokalani, heir to the throne and last monarch of Hawaiʻi. In this paper, I read the Hawaiian royal visit as a touchstone in the cultural relationship between Britain and Hawaiʻi. Accounts of Kapiʻolani's visit—both in the British periodical press and in the memoirs of Liliʻuokalani and Curtis P. Iaukea—become staging grounds, I argue, for overlapping discussions about the nature, function, and future of monarchical institutions. I first contextualize the visit by briefly chronicling the contentious partnership that joined these two constitutional monarchies in the period. Hawaiʻi relied on Britain for diplomatic recognition and political support against the ever-increasing threat of annexation, while Britain, in turn, exploited the islands' strategic location in the Pacific. Both nations also witnessed significant political upheaval in the Jubilee year. Even as Kapiʻolani attended parties and patronized charity bazaars in London, a cabal of predominately American businessmen in Hawaiʻi launched the first in a series of coups that would culminate in the illegal overthrow of Liliʻuokalani in 1893 (as several British newspapers noted, Kapiʻolani was forced to cancel her continental tour to return to her embattled husband). In England, meanwhile, debates over Irish Home Rule raged in Parliament and the press, and developments in Hawaiʻi and elsewhere raised fears about the gradual erosion of Britain's historical sphere of influence. In this vein, I also explore the ways in which Hawaiian and British depictions of the visit—particularly their fixation on pomp and protocol—speak to certain shared anxieties about the integrity and legitimacy of monarchical power. To varying degrees, the “sister soveriegn[s]” that met at the Jubilee presided over kingdoms in crisis, and the records and retellings of their encounter reflect diverse reactions to these crises.
In the 1890s, the historian, art critic, and fiction writer Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) dwelt at th... more In the 1890s, the historian, art critic, and fiction writer Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) dwelt at the center of a robust intellectual community of expatriates living in Europe. Among them were American art critic Bernard Berenson, Lee's lover Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, and the lesbian aunt/niece duo Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who together published poetry under the pseudonym Michael Field. Several scholars have addressed this coterie in terms of its sexual history, but few have linked Lee, Berenson, and Field's shared passion for the art gallery with their interest in aestheticism and its privileging of sensual experience. This paper traces within their work of this period conceptions of connoisseurship, aesthetic value, and spectatorial pleasure: concerns they inherited both from the criticism of Walter Pater and from wider nineteenth-century understandings of the physiological basis of aesthetic feeling. Without eliding their disagreements, I argue that Field, Berenson, and Lee look to the gallery as a model for the modes of selection and curation that they deploy in their own writings about art—especially Field's collection of ekphrastic poems Sight and Song (1892), Berenson's survey The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance (1894), Lee's Renaissance Fancies and Studies (1895), and “Beauty and Ugliness,” co-authored by Lee and Anstruther-Thomson in 1897. To varying degrees, these works assume that encounters with beautiful objects stimulate various “vital” processes in the spectating body, making art an important component of “the collection of things outside us” that Lee thought shaped subjectivity. To Lee and her circle, I suggest, galleries and their literary analogues represent powerful apparatuses for the cultivation of aesthetic sensibilities and the dissemination of “culture.” In this context, their critical works—which seek to induct adept readers into the pleasures of looking at art correctly—gesture toward an ethical connoisseurship that finds its most enthusiastic expression in Lee's work.
This essay discusses representations of female sexual desire in Charlotte Dacre's controversial n... more This essay discusses representations of female sexual desire in Charlotte Dacre's controversial novel, Zofloya, particularly as a response to Romantic discourses on the subject of love. As has been frequently pointed out before, male Romantic writers often characterized romantic love as self-completion, a reunion with one's likeness or mirrored self; the narcissism inherent in such a concept threatens the (generally female) other with complete erasure. In creating her notoriously assertive and wildly self-interested female characters, Dacre writes through, around, and against these masculine Romantic modes, staging a world in which female sexuality operates within a narcissistic logic—to explosive, often fatal, effect. This essay first seeks to demonstrate how the novel emphatically and repeatedly renders female sexual desire as self-reflexive: that is, attracted to love-objects that reflect the desirer's sexual power. The relationship central to Dacre's novel, between the “heroine” Victoria and the eponymous Moor, represents in this context a culmination of Victoria's narcissistic quest for her likeness, akin (as this paper argues) to the Shelleyan anti-type. In Dacre's description, Victoria and Zofloya's nominal racial differences give way to physical resemblance as Zofloya begins to couch their mutual desire in terms of their complementarity. The tantalizing prospect of conjugal union with one's likeness—a “dream of vanity,” as the narrator says—ultimately breaks down in the face of Zofloya's ever-increasing otherness, and Dacre finally forecloses on masculine Romantic visions of an other that is only an extension of the self.
Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies, 2023
The Hawaiʻi of literary renown seems to exist outside the normal flow of time. Charles Warren Sto... more The Hawaiʻi of literary renown seems to exist outside the normal flow of time. Charles Warren Stoddard, in his memoir Hawaiian Life: Lazy Letters from Low Latitudes (1894), recalls the beautiful ‘boat-boy of Lahaina’ in just such temporally ambiguous terms: although the travel writer had not seen the native youth in years, Stoddard muses that ‘the finger of Time doubles up the moment it points toward him’, so that ‘he must be still lying in wait for me, […] not a day older, not a particle changed’. In the case of Hawaiʻi, this pervasive trope of stasis exists in tension with alternative and often contradictory models of time as cyclical, regressive, and even hyper-accelerated, such that Hawaiian history appears to unfold in fits and starts, jumping forward and looping backward in ways that resist linear understandings of progress. Later in Hawaiian Life, for instance, Stoddard reflects on the fate of Kane-Pihi, a local fisherman who in the span of a few months transforms from a ‘gentle savage’ into a streetwise petty thief and eventual convict. For Stoddard, Kane-Pihi’s rapid evolution – which ends with his ignominious death in prison – recreates in miniature the story of a race doomed to collapse under the weight of modernity and its steady drumbeat of ‘development’.
South Seas Encounters: Nineteenth-Century Oceania, Britain, and America, 2018
In June of 1887, distinguished guests from all over the world poured into London to participate i... more In June of 1887, distinguished guests from all over the world poured into London to participate in Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee. Few visitors attracted more attention than the Hawaiian royal delegation, which included Queen Kapiʻolani, consort to King Kalākaua, and her sister-in-law Princess Liliʻuokalani, heir to the throne and last monarch of Hawaiʻi. When the party landed in Liverpool on June 1st, thousands of cheering bystanders were gathered on the wharves—eager, as Liliʻuokalani later wrote, to catch a glimpse of “the Queen of the far-off Sandwich Islands.” Contemporary newspaper representations of Kapiʻolani—hundreds of stories and blurbs chiefly concerned with what she wore, which functions she attended, and what ceremonial honors she received—bespeak the widespread public curiosity surrounding the pair's month-long stay. The tenor of British press coverage was remarkably variable: Kapiʻolani was alternately praised for her regal bearing and derided for her audacious claims to the full privileges of her title. The Hawaiian delegation's reports of the Jubilee similarly focused on the splendor of the occasion, though they spoke of their English hosts in uniformly cordial terms (Liliʻuokalani called Kapiʻolani and Victoria “sister sovereign[s],” and Curtis P. Iaukea, Kalākaua's envoy, later addressed England as Hawaiʻi's “sister nation”).
In this paper, I read the Hawaiian royal visit as a touchstone in the cultural relationship between Britain and Hawaiʻi. Accounts of Kapiʻolani's visit—both in the British periodical press and in the memoirs of Liliʻuokalani and Iaukea—become staging grounds, I argue, for overlapping discussions about the nature, function, and future of monarchical institutions. I first contextualize the visit by briefly chronicling the contentious partnership that joined these two constitutional monarchies in the period. Hawaiʻi relied on Britain for diplomatic recognition and political support against the ever-increasing threat of annexation, while Britain, in turn, exploited the islands' strategic location in the Pacific. Both nations also witnessed significant political upheaval in the Jubilee year. Even as Kapiʻolani attended parties and patronized charity bazaars in London, a cabal of predominately American businessmen in Hawaiʻi launched the first in a series of coups that would culminate in the illegal overthrow of Liliʻuokalani in 1893 (as several British newspapers noted, Kapiʻolani was forced to cancel her continental tour to return to her embattled husband). In England, meanwhile, debates over Irish Home Rule raged in Parliament and the press, and developments in Hawaiʻi and elsewhere raised fears about the gradual erosion of Britain's historical sphere of influence. In this vein, I also explore the ways in which Hawaiian and British depictions of the visit—particularly their fixation on pomp and protocol—speak to certain shared anxieties about the integrity and legitimacy of monarchical power. To varying degrees, the “sister soveriegn[s]” that met at the Jubilee presided over kingdoms in crisis, and the records and retellings of their encounter reflect diverse reactions to these crises.
This essay, published in Victorian Studies, calls attention to the philosophical parallels betwee... more This essay, published in Victorian Studies, calls attention to the philosophical parallels between British aestheticism--the “art for art’s sake” movement founded by Walter Pater in the late 1860s--and a contemporary strain of optimistic evolutionism popularized by iconoclastic mathematician W. K. Clifford in the 1870s. Although evolutionism and aestheticism appear unrelated at first glance, Clifford’s and Pater’s bodies of work reveal common concerns about the influence of scientific materialism on culture and the place of the individual within the evolutionary process. By tracing these commonalities through the work of Clifford, Pater, and aesthetic poet Mathilde Blind, this essay posits a richer account of the interdependent formation of both aesthetic and evolutionary thought in the late nineteenth century.
The past 30 years have witnessed a marked growth in critical studies of science and literature in... more The past 30 years have witnessed a marked growth in critical studies of science and literature in late nineteenth-century Britain. This essay seeks to highlight a small, but expanding, subset of research within this larger field that specifically concerns the intersections of evolutionary science and literary aestheticism. As this essay explains, scholars have gradually uncovered the significant inf luence that evolutionary science brought to bear on aesthetic thought. By delving into the archive, literary historians have also come to recognize that this inf luence was reciprocated, in large part because the relationship between evolutionary science and aestheticism was widely recognized by Victorian readers: even as scientific language permeated aesthetic writing, popular associations between the two movements steered scientific inquiry in certain directions. In conclusion, this essay suggests areas for future critical expansion and considers several striking affinities between evolutionism and aestheticism that merit particular exploration.
A paper presented at the International Walter Pater Society 2018 conference, held at the Clark Li... more A paper presented at the International Walter Pater Society 2018 conference, held at the Clark Library in Los Angeles, California.
A paper presented at the North American Victorian Studies Association annual conference, November... more A paper presented at the North American Victorian Studies Association annual conference, November 2016, Phoenix, AZ
In June of 1887, distinguished guests from all over the world poured into London to participate i... more In June of 1887, distinguished guests from all over the world poured into London to participate in Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee. Few visitors attracted more attention than the Hawaiian royal delegation, which included Queen Kapiʻolani, consort to King Kalākaua, and her sister-in-law Princess Liliʻuokalani, heir to the throne and last monarch of Hawaiʻi. In this paper, I read the Hawaiian royal visit as a touchstone in the cultural relationship between Britain and Hawaiʻi. Accounts of Kapiʻolani's visit—both in the British periodical press and in the memoirs of Liliʻuokalani and Curtis P. Iaukea—become staging grounds, I argue, for overlapping discussions about the nature, function, and future of monarchical institutions. I first contextualize the visit by briefly chronicling the contentious partnership that joined these two constitutional monarchies in the period. Hawaiʻi relied on Britain for diplomatic recognition and political support against the ever-increasing threat of annexation, while Britain, in turn, exploited the islands' strategic location in the Pacific. Both nations also witnessed significant political upheaval in the Jubilee year. Even as Kapiʻolani attended parties and patronized charity bazaars in London, a cabal of predominately American businessmen in Hawaiʻi launched the first in a series of coups that would culminate in the illegal overthrow of Liliʻuokalani in 1893 (as several British newspapers noted, Kapiʻolani was forced to cancel her continental tour to return to her embattled husband). In England, meanwhile, debates over Irish Home Rule raged in Parliament and the press, and developments in Hawaiʻi and elsewhere raised fears about the gradual erosion of Britain's historical sphere of influence. In this vein, I also explore the ways in which Hawaiian and British depictions of the visit—particularly their fixation on pomp and protocol—speak to certain shared anxieties about the integrity and legitimacy of monarchical power. To varying degrees, the “sister soveriegn[s]” that met at the Jubilee presided over kingdoms in crisis, and the records and retellings of their encounter reflect diverse reactions to these crises.
In the 1890s, the historian, art critic, and fiction writer Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) dwelt at th... more In the 1890s, the historian, art critic, and fiction writer Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) dwelt at the center of a robust intellectual community of expatriates living in Europe. Among them were American art critic Bernard Berenson, Lee's lover Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, and the lesbian aunt/niece duo Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who together published poetry under the pseudonym Michael Field. Several scholars have addressed this coterie in terms of its sexual history, but few have linked Lee, Berenson, and Field's shared passion for the art gallery with their interest in aestheticism and its privileging of sensual experience. This paper traces within their work of this period conceptions of connoisseurship, aesthetic value, and spectatorial pleasure: concerns they inherited both from the criticism of Walter Pater and from wider nineteenth-century understandings of the physiological basis of aesthetic feeling. Without eliding their disagreements, I argue that Field, Berenson, and Lee look to the gallery as a model for the modes of selection and curation that they deploy in their own writings about art—especially Field's collection of ekphrastic poems Sight and Song (1892), Berenson's survey The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance (1894), Lee's Renaissance Fancies and Studies (1895), and “Beauty and Ugliness,” co-authored by Lee and Anstruther-Thomson in 1897. To varying degrees, these works assume that encounters with beautiful objects stimulate various “vital” processes in the spectating body, making art an important component of “the collection of things outside us” that Lee thought shaped subjectivity. To Lee and her circle, I suggest, galleries and their literary analogues represent powerful apparatuses for the cultivation of aesthetic sensibilities and the dissemination of “culture.” In this context, their critical works—which seek to induct adept readers into the pleasures of looking at art correctly—gesture toward an ethical connoisseurship that finds its most enthusiastic expression in Lee's work.
This essay discusses representations of female sexual desire in Charlotte Dacre's controversial n... more This essay discusses representations of female sexual desire in Charlotte Dacre's controversial novel, Zofloya, particularly as a response to Romantic discourses on the subject of love. As has been frequently pointed out before, male Romantic writers often characterized romantic love as self-completion, a reunion with one's likeness or mirrored self; the narcissism inherent in such a concept threatens the (generally female) other with complete erasure. In creating her notoriously assertive and wildly self-interested female characters, Dacre writes through, around, and against these masculine Romantic modes, staging a world in which female sexuality operates within a narcissistic logic—to explosive, often fatal, effect. This essay first seeks to demonstrate how the novel emphatically and repeatedly renders female sexual desire as self-reflexive: that is, attracted to love-objects that reflect the desirer's sexual power. The relationship central to Dacre's novel, between the “heroine” Victoria and the eponymous Moor, represents in this context a culmination of Victoria's narcissistic quest for her likeness, akin (as this paper argues) to the Shelleyan anti-type. In Dacre's description, Victoria and Zofloya's nominal racial differences give way to physical resemblance as Zofloya begins to couch their mutual desire in terms of their complementarity. The tantalizing prospect of conjugal union with one's likeness—a “dream of vanity,” as the narrator says—ultimately breaks down in the face of Zofloya's ever-increasing otherness, and Dacre finally forecloses on masculine Romantic visions of an other that is only an extension of the self.
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In this paper, I read the Hawaiian royal visit as a touchstone in the cultural relationship between Britain and Hawaiʻi. Accounts of Kapiʻolani's visit—both in the British periodical press and in the memoirs of Liliʻuokalani and Iaukea—become staging grounds, I argue, for overlapping discussions about the nature, function, and future of monarchical institutions. I first contextualize the visit by briefly chronicling the contentious partnership that joined these two constitutional monarchies in the period. Hawaiʻi relied on Britain for diplomatic recognition and political support against the ever-increasing threat of annexation, while Britain, in turn, exploited the islands' strategic location in the Pacific. Both nations also witnessed significant political upheaval in the Jubilee year. Even as Kapiʻolani attended parties and patronized charity bazaars in London, a cabal of predominately American businessmen in Hawaiʻi launched the first in a series of coups that would culminate in the illegal overthrow of Liliʻuokalani in 1893 (as several British newspapers noted, Kapiʻolani was forced to cancel her continental tour to return to her embattled husband). In England, meanwhile, debates over Irish Home Rule raged in Parliament and the press, and developments in Hawaiʻi and elsewhere raised fears about the gradual erosion of Britain's historical sphere of influence. In this vein, I also explore the ways in which Hawaiian and British depictions of the visit—particularly their fixation on pomp and protocol—speak to certain shared anxieties about the integrity and legitimacy of monarchical power. To varying degrees, the “sister soveriegn[s]” that met at the Jubilee presided over kingdoms in crisis, and the records and retellings of their encounter reflect diverse reactions to these crises.
In this paper, I read the Hawaiian royal visit as a touchstone in the cultural relationship between Britain and Hawaiʻi. Accounts of Kapiʻolani's visit—both in the British periodical press and in the memoirs of Liliʻuokalani and Iaukea—become staging grounds, I argue, for overlapping discussions about the nature, function, and future of monarchical institutions. I first contextualize the visit by briefly chronicling the contentious partnership that joined these two constitutional monarchies in the period. Hawaiʻi relied on Britain for diplomatic recognition and political support against the ever-increasing threat of annexation, while Britain, in turn, exploited the islands' strategic location in the Pacific. Both nations also witnessed significant political upheaval in the Jubilee year. Even as Kapiʻolani attended parties and patronized charity bazaars in London, a cabal of predominately American businessmen in Hawaiʻi launched the first in a series of coups that would culminate in the illegal overthrow of Liliʻuokalani in 1893 (as several British newspapers noted, Kapiʻolani was forced to cancel her continental tour to return to her embattled husband). In England, meanwhile, debates over Irish Home Rule raged in Parliament and the press, and developments in Hawaiʻi and elsewhere raised fears about the gradual erosion of Britain's historical sphere of influence. In this vein, I also explore the ways in which Hawaiian and British depictions of the visit—particularly their fixation on pomp and protocol—speak to certain shared anxieties about the integrity and legitimacy of monarchical power. To varying degrees, the “sister soveriegn[s]” that met at the Jubilee presided over kingdoms in crisis, and the records and retellings of their encounter reflect diverse reactions to these crises.