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

Victorian Time opens with the resonance of two major events in 1859: the completion of the clock tower (“Big Ben”) at the Houses of Parliament and the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Together they reset the conceptual spectrum along which Victorian attentions to time became stretched: between the minute particularity of an abstracted, standardized clock time and the extremely long horizon of time on geological and evolutionary scales. Each context challenged the imagination to reconceive the boundaries of the subject and the social. Likewise they pressured Victorian literature to take shape according to an industrialized time-consciousness or to expose the cultural anxieties and subjective alienation of the modernity that such Victorian time would bequeath. The collected essays in Victorian Time all offer readings in these contexts: they survey attitudes about time in the works of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and H. G. Wells; delineate contests to define the past, present, and future in particular texts including The Warden (1855), Around the World in 80 Days (1873), Erewhon (1872), and The Purple Cloud (1901); and propose additional domains in which notions of time were interestingly warped, such as colonial time, media time, and the “apocalyptic imaginary.”

The book’s opening gambit, pivoting on notable events in 1859, is indicative of a pattern that recurs throughout the collected essays to interpret literature in contexts of technological and scientific innovation—“innovation” in the sense of developments which, whatever their differences, all introduce themselves as if “new,” seeming to pinpoint a change from before to after. The crucial paradigmatic breaks for this volume were nineteenth-century changes from organic notions of solar time to the impositions of mechanical clock time, and then to the subsequent alienation that clock time provokes, a framework depending significantly on the work of Lewis Mumford, Walter Benjamin, Georg Simmel, and Stephen Kern. Victorian Time identifies the “technologies, standardizations, [and] catastrophes” which produce such breakthroughs of cultural and literary newness. On page four alone, things have “radically changed” because of “an entirely new transport technology” which, along with other “new technologies,” discloses a “new temporal environment” and “the new universe of disciplined time” in “a new industrial world” (4). The momentum of novelty occasionally carries the arguments into anachronism, such as the aforementioned “new transport technology” which turns out to be the mail coach, and “the new conception of deep geological time” with which writers like M. P. Shiel were apparently grappling in 1900 (159). Even “deep time” can only be suddenly new.

Behind the contrast of the immediate impact of On the Origin of Species and the belated aftershocks of James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth (1788) and Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–33) is the collection’s own heterogeneity in theorizing historical change. The essays emerged from a 2010 conference exploring how “Victorian literature and art reflects new ways of thinking about time,” and some essays too easily adopt that inaugural verb “reflect” as technological determinism following on Mumford. Other chapters are inspired by Gillian Beer’s “open field” model of interacting scientific concepts and literary visions, as in Darryl Jones’s colorful concluding essay on thermodynamics, the death of the sun, and the fog-obsessed apocalyptic fantasy literature at the fin de siècle. In yet other chapters, change manifests unevenly according to political inflection, rhetorical purpose, global context, and media specificity. The collection’s very diversity may inhibit its overall ability to theorize the events which organize its notion of historical change and which manifest for this volume almost entirely in fictional prose. Sue Zemka rationalizes such a linkage between moment and genre in Time and the Moment in Victorian Literature and Society (2012); the online historical encyclopedia BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History includes several essays which likewise reflect on the nature of the event as it structures their studies. The strongest essays in Victorian Time are persuasive in just these ways.

In her chapter on...