Looking Backward, Looking Forward: The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror of Future History

This essay argues that nineteenth-century Britons came to understand their present as peculiarly "Victorian" not only by peering into what A. Dwight Culler calls the "mirror of history," but also by imagining how they might appear in the "rearview mirror" of the future (to adapt Simon Joyce's metaphor). H. G. Wells' A Story of the Days to Come, for example, features a twenty-second-century couple whose nostalgia for "Victorian" times and things derives largely from their reading of what we might call "Neo-Victorian" fiction. Much more commonly, however, Victorians envisioned themselves from the interestingly fallible perspective not of ordinary denizens of the future, but of scholars much like us, often invoking "the future student of the Victorian age" or Macaulay's "New Zealander" and occasionally writing as if they were he.