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  • Victorian Self-Projection and Critique:Response
  • Regenia Gagnier (bio)

These three articles are from three distinct NAVSA panels and by scholars at distinctly different stages of their careers: a senior scholar, a junior scholar, and a graduate student. They are also from three different world cities, each a world city in its distinctive way with its distinctive history: Las Vegas, Amsterdam, and London. I was struck by how each of them presents the Victorians as self-conscious, self-reflexive, and mindful of their place in history. Kelly Mays's is an ingenious study based in archival database research of the Victorians viewing themselves as the agents of history, not only apprehending their present as a coherent "Victorian" Age but also envisioning their own fascination to futurity as "The Victorians." The figure she adapts is the "rearview mirror" of history for imagined backward-looking future experts (445), and she imagines the Victorians viewing their present in the mirror moving away from it, like some anodyne Benjaminian Angels of History. They imagined that their posterity would be preserved by their respectful followers, with H. G. Wells predicting neo-Victorianism and others writing about themselves as if they were the proverbial "future historian" New Zealander looking back.

At least since 2001 we have been debating whether we should use the term "Victorian studies" to designate our interest in the last three quarters of the nineteenth century in Britain, despite the fact that the term "Victorian" itself is historical, having first appeared as the self-described zeitgeist in 1839, a mere two years after Victoria took the throne. By 1873, the term "pre-Victorian" invoked their predecessors. There has also been much recent speculation "Whither Victorian Studies?," interrogating the future of Victorian studies. These three essays interestingly show the Victorians' own preoccupation with their present and past, and with how they would be perceived in the future. For this reason alone—the Victorians' own preoccupation with themselves as Victorian—we might think twice before giving up the [End Page 479] nomenclature for that self-projected image of power known as "the Victorian." I have often cited G. W. F. Hegel's definition of art as the drawing out of ourselves and making explicit for ourselves a representation of what we are (35-36). This is certainly a definition suitable to the Victorians. The standard objection to keeping the name "Victorian" for the field we study is that it connotes a single monarch, which is counter to modern republicanism; Mays's article shows a much more collective self-representation, a self-consciously Hegelian quasi-national self-construction, distinguishing itself from its forerunners and projecting its self-image into the future as an age to be reckoned with.

Mays, writing from the world's most self-consciously cosmopolitan theme park and until recently one of the fastest growing cities in the US, begins with John Stuart Mill's self-conscious "penchant for historical comparison" (1831). Marco de Waard (Amsterdam) begins with high Victorian intellectual history as in itself historic, led by Mill's belief in ideas as engines of change, and intellectual history as a force in itself for progress. This intellectual history was a moral science marching hand in hand with social perfectionism. Mill believed that human progress was dictated by the progress of the speculative intellect. The way he put it was, famously, the consilience of social progress and speculative faculties, implying that the Victorians' own thought about themselves was the agent of progress (114-15). This optimistic intellectual history lasted through the 1860s and 1870s only to be displaced by social evolutionism, or the processes of sedimentation and accretion in which ideas adapted to environments and survived well beyond their progressive utility. In his own "History of English Thought" (1876), Leslie Stephen found unconscious motivation in ideas that eventually occluded Mill's rational progress, just as the Freudian unconscious would eventually occlude Mill's liberal rationality.

This history of mind (worthy of Amsterdam, the home of Baruch Spinoza) shows how closely connected notions of progress were with belief in ideas and belief generally for the Victorians. Elsewhere I have written about hope as the natural consequence of the genetic under-determination of the...

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