Home and Away: On Visiting and Distanced Vision

Abstract

Home and Away: On Visiting and Distanced Vision Vanessa Warne (bio) In his 1895 short story “The Remarkable Case of Davidson’s Eyes,” H. G. Wells dwells on what it means to be physically at home but cognitively away. The story’s protagonist, Sidney Davidson, is injured when lightning strikes the laboratory in London where he works. Unable to see his surroundings, his visual sense relocated to the other side of the world, Davidson watches penguins nesting on an island he has never visited, his viewpoint on this distant and unfamiliar scene shifting as he moves around London. While he knows from the sound of familiar voices and the feel of surfaces that he is still at home, both his vision and attention are far away. More fortunate than Davidson in the matter of laboratory accidents, participants in the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) 2022 online conference were, in our own way, both at home and away, visiting the conference’s virtual spaces at the same time that we were present for the day-to-day of our home lives. As we presented and heard work proposed many months earlier, we also became involved in the goings-on of each other’s homes. People we had met with previously in a series of interchangeable conference rooms spoke with us from their kitchen tables. We opened up temporary windows into our living spaces where, in addition to the predictable piles of books, piles of laundry waited to be folded. Dogs and cats gained conference-celebrity status, and we prefaced papers with apologies for the piano lesson happening in the next room. While we habitually both develop our ideas and write them up at home, the domestic origins of our conference papers tend to be obscured by their presentation in public spaces. This conference was an exception. We did our visiting, talking, and thinking while sitting in our most comfortable chairs and wearing shabby slippers; at least, I did. [End Page 656] It is, of course, to the great credit of our conference hosts, Carolyn Lesjak and Margaret Linley, that we were able to shake off our disappointment at yet another pandemic-necessitated pivot and make the most of the wonderful online event they created. In addition to the unexpected pleasure of visiting one another’s homes and campus offices, albeit virtually, other gains lessened our sense of loss. These included our lowered environmental impact and the reduction of barriers to participation, such as the cost of travel, challenges related to caregiving duties, and disabilities that are too often inadequately accommodated. We also came to a new appreciation of the beings with whom we share our homes, not least of them the housemates who gifted us all the internet bandwidth they could spare. Visiting across many time zones, we were reminded too of just how widely dispersed our homes and home institutions are, with British colleagues at the end of a long day joining West Coasters on their first cup of coffee to share ideas. Invited to suggest papers from the conference for publication, I chose three papers connected by their interest in spaces where people live or meet. While it’s possible I was predisposed to admire these papers by our shared experience of at-home-ness, I deeply appreciate the invitation these papers extend to us both to return to familiar rooms in the Victorian literary canon and to think in new ways about how built spaces either support or limit social connection. In his essay, Jon Rachmani takes up Bleak House (1852–53) and its definitions of home, offering a rich analysis of Phil Squod’s experiences of the city, of selfhood, and of unconventional forms of domestic space. In an essay on Little Dorrit (1855–57), Sarah Mason focuses on sensory experience and social connection, again in the context of the city. Alerting us to the role of London’s Iron Bridge in the novel’s depiction of intimacy, she contrasts the surprising quiet of the bridge with, for example, the Clennam house’s permeability to noise. And, returning us to one of the most readily visualized yet complex domestic spaces in nineteenth-century literature, Summer...