Matters of Memory: Response

There is no doubt that if we could look into the households of . . . that period, we should see some things which would seem strange to us, and should miss many more to which we are accustomed. . . . We should miss the sliding bookcases and picture-stands, the letter-weighing machines and envelope cases, the periodicals and illustrated newspapers—above all, the countless swarm of photograph books which now threaten to swallow up all space. (29; 31–32)

—J. E. Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen

The members of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism and the North American Victorian Studies Association who commingled in Indiana in August 2006 were the joint beneficiaries of numerous papers on memory and remembrance, delivered on panels dedicated to trauma, neural sciences, the history of historicism, collecting practices, and even the "recountings" at stake in financial record keeping. As the conference committee had promised, conversations across the romantic-Victorian divide allowed us to imagine ourselves a united front, students, all, of a (very) long nineteenth century. But the occasions when the particular aide-mémoire at issue was the photograph could not help but offset that goal a tad. Those necessarily worked to emphasize what the memberships of NASSR and NAVSA do not and cannot share. After all, to ponder that "mirror with a memory" (Oliver Wendell Holmes's 1859 epithet for the daguerreotype) is to be reminded of what a romanticist scholar cannot do to remember the dead who supply her with her disciplinary identity, and of what a Victorianist, by contrast, can. In this response I isolate some strands from the rich weave of histories of media and remediation, representations of the object world, and analyses of bygone conceptions of consciousness and epistemes of memory that are brought to view in essays by Laura Mandell, Alexandra Neel, and Athena Vrettos. And this will lead me, via a brief excursus in book history meant to remind us of nineteenth-century people's investment in remembering themselves remembering romanticism, to ponder a bit the Victorians' own construction of the disciplinary discrepancy between those who can remember through photography and those who cannot.

There are photographs of nearly every author whose writing is anthologized in the Victorian-period volume of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, the sheer quantity of opportunities that the twenty-first-century person has to encounter a Tennyson or a Dickens face-to-face, or close to it, a testimony to the Victorians' fascination with the insights to be obtained from the sight of another's countenance. By contrast, very few of the authors whose works comprise the romantic-period volume of the Norton—and whose lives form a litany of premature, tragic, and consumptive terminations—ever sat before a camera lens. Most never knew that they might remember or be remembered by means of this mnemic apparatus for producing a new kind of fidelity to presence, this medium that seemingly transcends mediation.

Apposite here is a detail that caps Helen Groth's argument in her Victorian Photography and Literary Nostalgia (2003) that the experience of reading was injected by the Victorians with a new time-consciousness and a new sense of the disparity between "poetic time" and "photographic time" (45). "L. E. L.'s Last Question," Elizabeth Barrett's poem memorializing Letitia Landon, a eulogy that effectively declared one epoch of cultural history at an end with its references to the last and lost words of the "minstrel" who had been England's "oracle" of love, appeared in the same January 1839 number of the Athenaeum that heralded the advent of the photographic epoch. Sharing the page with Barrett's poem, in the "Foreign Correspondence" column, was the news from Paris of Louis Daguerre's invention of a device that could indelibly fix the scenes imaged by the camera obscura and could thus keep back something of what time, moment by fleeting moment, was removing (135). (Minstrelsy is dead. . . . vive le daguerréotype.)

To begin her essay on Jane Austen's affective life with her older sister Cassandra, and on present-day readers' own love-hate relationship with...