Time Travelers: Victorian Encounters with Time and History, edited by Adelene Buckland and Sadiah Qureshi

Abstract

Reviewed by: Time Travelers: Victorian Encounters with Time and History ed. by Adelene Buckland and Sadiah Qureshi Norman Vance (bio) Time Travelers: Victorian Encounters with Time and History, edited by Adelene Buckland and Sadiah Qureshi; pp. xxvii + 285. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2020, $82.50, $27.50 paper. Time Travelers: Victorian Encounters with Time and History is exciting and scholarly. This edited collection by Adelene Buckland and Sadiah Qureshi shows how the Victorians could travel in imagination through time and space, above and beneath the earth and under the sea. They could draw on the work not just of historians but of geologists, geographers, oceanographers, anthropologists, archaeologists, paleontologists, and more-or-less well-informed fantasists such as Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. The twelve chapters travel widely across different disciplines, using ideas of time to illuminate many facets of the Victorian knowledge explosion, from the age of the earth to the ambivalences of the new machine age, from Anglo-Saxon poetry and biblical scholarship to submarines and deep-sea cables. Verne's 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1876) is used in Clare Pettitt's chapter "At Sea," and Wellsian fantasy is briefly mentioned by Daniel Wilson in the concluding chapter on "How We Got Here," but Wells's The Time Machine (1895) and the time traveler who uses it are oddly absent. So is Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), which was inspired by geology and paleontology, which brought prehistoric creatures back to life and paved the way for later dinosaur fantasies such as Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912) and Steven Spielberg's film Jurassic Park (1993). Despite some helpful cross-referencing, the sheer range and diversity of encounters with time and history described in the book present problems of coherence. Rachel Bryant Davies's "Through the Proscenium Arch," an entertaining chapter on children's toy-theater focused on a cheerfully jumbled version of "The Siege of Troy" (a popular 1833 equestrian re-enactment), is interesting in itself, but it is a long way from the seemingly grown-up science and apparent high seriousness of other chapters. At first sight the four sections labelled "Narratives," "Origins," "Time in Transit," and "Unfinished Business" do not seem to have very much to do with each other. But Romanticism, particularly the Romantic quest and the Romantic cult of mystery and gothic strangeness, provides an understated continuity or common thread, even if the quests of scholars, scientists, and spiritualists were often inconclusive and the dawning awareness of complex antecedents and of unimaginable antiquity disconcertingly eroded earlier certainties. As Michael Ledger-Lomas observes in his chapter "On Pilgrimage," "the venerable urge to be a pilgrim shaped how Victorians thought about the passage of time and the scholarly investigation of time" (157). This extended to geological time. Well-travelled Lord Byron in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812–18) read about geology and made imaginative use of it, as Clare Pettitt observes. The influential geologist Charles Lyell, a contemporary of the younger Romantics, read his Byron, while Victorians such as the Tennyson of In Memoriam (1850) read their Lyell and found no comfort in the abysses of geological time that he disclosed. Simon Goldhill makes a valiant attempt to hold things together in an ambitious chapter on the quest for origins, "Ad Fontes." His title invokes Erasmus and, behind him, the Latin Bible. Goldhill contrasts humanist delight in Greek culture as the source or fountainhead of all knowledge with the sadder and wiser Victorian acceptance of the [End Page 585] elusiveness of their quest for ultimate sources and the destabilizing nature of the enterprise. A classical scholar himself, he draws on the history of textual scholarship, both classical and biblical, to illustrate the point. Special textual authority attaches to the original manuscript, but the original manuscripts of ancient texts have not survived. One of the great discoveries in nineteenth-century biblical scholarship was Codex Sinaiticus, now in the British Library, a fourth-century manuscript containing the earliest surviving text of the entire New Testament. Its scholarly primacy is indicated by identifying it as "aleph," the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, though the manuscript was a...