Excavating Victorians (review)

"A Roman bracelet discovered in the mudflats of the Thames," Virginia Zimmerman writes in her introduction to Excavating Victorians, not only "suggests the mortality of the woman who once wore the jewel," but also presents the finder with an "opportunity to reanimate the woman." A trace from the past, the bracelet "asserts its presence as … an object of study and interest, both scientific and aesthetic" (20). The recovery and, indeed, invention of the remote past by nineteenth-century geology and art in their encounters with trace fragments, including fossils and human artifacts, is the unifying thread in Zimmerman's analyses of a diverse selection of geological, archaeological, and literary works by Charles Lyell, Gideon Mantell, Alfred Tennyson, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Charles Dickens. Building on the work of Gillian Beer, she explores the ways in which Victorian artists and intellectuals answered the challenges of a shift from a Biblical cosmology, which "framed time and stressed the centrality of human life," to a geological time scale that "exceeded the limits of plot" (1). Nineteenth-century artists and men of science did much more than register a sense of loss when their feelings of human uniqueness began to falter as they encountered a new secular vastness. They also reinvented themselves as imaginers and narrators of a compelling new vision of time.

In her introductory chapter on the semiotics of excavation, Zimmerman's theoretical discussion of the "multi-temporality" of trace objects, especially fossils, weaves together elements of the work of Paul Ricoeur, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Anne McClintock, Tony Bennett, and Johannes Fabian, among others. This probing if sometimes repetitive discussion begins with Ricoeur's concept of the trace, the "tempo-object" that transcends time, acting as a bridge between past and present. Like the shingles rattling rhythmically in Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" (1867), these objects dissolve "temporal boundaries" (8), linking the present to a past of unsettling proportions. Drawing on museum historians like McClintock and Bennett, Zimmerman argues that texts, like museums, offer "spaces where time is miniaturized into a controllable system" (11). As time is compressed in the arrangement of objects in narrative and in space, the beholder stands both inside and outside of time. As the geologist and poet interpret remnants of past worlds, they gain a measure of control over the past, even as their own position within the framework of that past diminishes. This imaginative encounter with the past through the medium of the trace, Zimmerman argues, saturated the excavatory media of Victorian popular science and literary texts devoted to "rescuing the individual from the abyss" (24–25).

In her next chapter, "The Victorian Geologist: Reading Remains and Writing Time," Zimmerman examines the development of a new form of geological narrative that converted artifacts into the plots and processes of popular stories. She explores the changing concept of authorship that enabled writers like Mantell and Lyell to shift "time's story" from a Biblical to a geological one in sweeping narratives of "the Earth's agents of change" (28, 27). From geological writing, we turn to a long chapter on Tennyson's The Princess: A Medley (1847). This epic poem, she argues, reflects a narrative strategy self-consciously modeled on that of the geological narratives: Tennyson's subtitle "references the temporal medley associated with a collection of traces, each excavated from its own historical moment and then brought together and displayed in the present, whether in a museum or a poem" (71). Although the parallels she draws between geological and poetic narrative are debatable, the exploration of geological themes in Tennyson's work is detailed and convincing.

The final two chapters examine the Victorian use of archaeological narrative and the endurance of the human past, as well as the "broad use of archeology and excavation" in two of Dickens's novels, Little Dorrit (1855–57) and Our Mutual Friend (1864–65) (24). In "Accidental Archeology in London and Pompeii," Zimmerman offers a meandering yet stimulating meditation on the decay of civilizations and the efforts of...