Victorian Time: Technologies, Standardizations, Catastrophes ed. by Trish Ferguson (review)

Trish Ferguson's edited collection, Victorian Time, analyzes literary responses to temporality in the age of railways, steam engines, and Greenwich Mean Time, tracing the "psychological impact of the onset of a modern, industrialized experience of time as a new age of accelerated time began" (2). The volume is comprised of ten chapters that begin at mid-century with railway and clock time and progress towards apocalyptic visions of the end of time at the fin de siècle. Throughout, the chapters are alert to both industrial and scientific representations of time, and they extend their scope to consider temporality both in urban and rural England and in the empire.

While most chapters focus primarily on fiction, other forms of Victorian media play an important role throughout the volume. This is particularly the case in Brian H. Murray's "'Primitive Man' and Media Time in H. M. Stanley's Through the Dark Continent," which analyzes representations of media transmission in the writings of journalist and explorer H. M. Stanley. Murray demonstrates how intervals between Stanley's dispatches to the New York Herald and the Daily Telegraph during his Anglo-American Expedition (1874-77) came to represent Central Africa as existing in a time lag behind the rapidly expanding global telegraph network. While this delay fed into perceptions of African primitivism, Stanley's posthumously published Autobiography (1909) provides a more detailed account of communications among Congolese natives, likening the singing and drum language of a tribe on the Lualaba River to a "savage-telegraphy" that resists imperial authority (121). Murray convincingly argues that indigenous communications in Stanley's later account both critique and resist narratives of Anglo-Saxon technocracy (128).

Several other chapters also examine the role periodicals played in Victorian engagements with time. Daragh Downes's contribution on Dickens and time management considers the impact of deadlines and punctuality on Dickens's early work as a cub reporter for the Morning Chronicle, while Ferguson's essay on Hardy references his first prose article, an anonymous piece written from the perspective of the ghost of the almshouse clock in Dorchester. Ailise Bulfin's "'The End of Time': M. P. Shiel and the 'Apocalyptic Imaginary'" includes late-century apocalyptic images from Pearson's Weekly and from Shiel's The Purple Cloud, serialized in the Royal Magazine in 1901. Other allusions to periodicals abound, among them references to Anthony Trollope's fictional periodical the Jupiter and Samuel Butler's early articles in New Zealand newspapers. Additionally, many of the primary works under discussion were originally published serially and thus participate in the rhythms of incremental time that form this volume's larger concerns.

Given the collection's focus on standardization, some readers may be surprised that the notion of simultaneity does not come in for sustained discussion here. Nevertheless, Victorian Time provides a compelling, informative, and thorough study of Victorian literature in an age of rapid temporal change, and it is attentive to temporality across a range of topics that include media, science, technology, and colonialism. Ambitious in scope and precise in detail, this collection is a valuable contribution to scholarship on Victorian time in all of its multiplicity and complication.