Postmillennial Victorian Studies

Abstract

Jay Clayton, Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of the Nineteenth Century in Postmodern Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. 270 pp.$35.00. Jay Clayton's Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of the Nineteenth Century in Postmodern Culture is a most welcome addition to both Victorian studies and postmodern cultural scholarship. It is a substantive and carefully researched work that offers provocative and incisive interpretations of Dickens and the nineteenth century while exploring the ways in which Victorian studies impacts on millennial literature. Comprising a dazzling array of textual readings, ranging from contemporary novels to films to hypertexts, Clayton maps a new theoretical approach that "could help define the place of the past in cultural studies" (29). Clayton highlights four "general attitudes toward the past [that] stand out in the current vogue for nineteenth-century culture" (23), namely "the neoconservative, liberal, identitarian, and postmodern." Finding shortcomings in each, the author moves on to detail his own interpretive strategy, which draws on "Paul Carter's spatial history, Paul Gilroy's transnational studies, Carlo Ginzburg's microhistory, and Judith Walkowitz's feminist cultural history" (29). This methodology, for Clayton, offers three broad features: it "[does] not shy away from tracing long historical relationships between the past and present" (36); it breaks down period distinctions, since "traditional modes of periodization are inadequate to [End Page 134] account for either the zones of difference that punctuate the past or the lines of continuity that stretch into some parts of today's world" (36); and it "value[s] alternative modes of writing, compositional practices that sometimes depart from linear structures" (37). Such an approach should result in a recognition "that narratives are partial and contingent; that storytelling has performative effects that may work in the service of counterhegemonic goals, not just on behalf of dominant norms; that the power to construct versions ofthings has a wide variety of productive social uses." Hence "recognizing all these aspects of storytelling permits the critic to return to narrative as part of a self-reflexive and historical cultural studies" (45). To support his call for a synthesized and historicized cultural studies, Clayton analyzes a wide variety of texts, concentrating on scientific and technological representations in the past and the present, and moving from Henry James and Thomas Hardy to Tom Stoppard, Greg Bear, and Neal Stephenson. Throughout, he outlines how Victorian texts echo and reverberate in contemporary works, how contemporary works reflect back and require rereadings of Victorian texts, and how a symbiotic relationship, in fact, exists between the two. Just as disciplinary formations are changing today, argues Clayton, so they were in flux in the nineteenth century (83): "The transformation taking place now, at the turn of the millennium, by no means revives the distinctive cultural circumstances of the early nineteenth century, but there are things to be learned from the comparison nonetheless. One of the premises of this study is that knowing more about earlier historical formations can illuminate what is distinctive about one's own" (83). Although this claim is not unique, Clayton's explication of it is. Demonstrating how disciplinary boundaries were not yet formalized, a state that allowed Victorian authors to "hack" (the author defines hacking as "the diversion of communications resources for sport or profit" [106]), Clayton illustrates the interdisciplinarity of the nineteenth century. He studies William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine to map their hacking of Charles Babbage's automaton: "Gibson and Sterling's exuberant hacking of nineteenth-century science finds a precedent in the era's own willingness to mix science [End Page 135] and entertainment" (109). Clayton also concentrates on figures like Mary Somerville, who was "the most eminent female mathematician and astronomer in the world. Respected as an equal by English and French savants, she moved at the center of a London social world that included renowned poets, artists, scientists, and aristocrats" (85). Clayton shows the possibilities open to figures like Somerville as a result of her placement in a time when disciplinary boundaries were...