"Dickens's As If": Analogy and Victorian Virtual Reality

This essay treats "as if" as a traceable signature of a historically specific Victorian form of knowing according to which writers represented their objects—from geological forces and the light refracted by motes of dust to feelings and unconscious motives—in the form of characters. Working with texts by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Lyell, and John Tyndall, the essay describes how Victorians capitalized on the speculative potential and decorous self-abnegation articulated by "as if" and other conditional analogies and subjunctive phrases. In exemplary figures like David Copperfield and Esther Summerson and in the science of Lyell, "as if" signifies self-reflective depth of character, sympathetic imagination, and inductive reasoning, but Micawber, Skimpole, and Tyndall reveal the concomitant detachment and relativity that underwrote this figure of virtual reality.