Excavating Victorians

Virginia Zimmerman

Description

Excavating Victorians examines nineteenth-century Britain's reaction to the revelations about time and natural history provided by the new sciences of geology and archaeology. The Victorians faced one of the greatest paradigm shifts in history: the bottom dropped out of time, and they had to reinvent their relationship to the earth and to time and history. These new sciences took the Victorians by storm, inundating them with fossils, skeletal remains, and potsherds—artifacts, or traces, that served at once as relics from the past, objects in the present, and markers of time's passage. Virginia Zimmerman explores how the Victorians utilized a nexus of literature, excavation, and reflections on time to ease anxieties about the individual's fate in the face of time's overwhelming expanse. The function of artifacts is also considered through careful readings of Tennyson's The Princess and Dickens's Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend. Zimmerman shows how these literary works make use of the language, tropes, and even generic conventions of excavation, and how they participate in the effort to rescue the individual from temporal insignificance.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

1. Introduction: “All Relics Here Together”

2. The Victorian Geologist: Reading Remains and Writing Time

3. Tennyson’s Fairy Tale of Science

4. Accidental Archaeology in London and Pompeii

5. Dickens among the Ruins

6. Final Fragments

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Reino Unido
• Ireland
• United Kingdom
• History of science
• History of Europe
• Stephen Ireland
• Great Britain
• Royaume-Uni

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 08 janvier 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780791479230
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

 Excavating Victorians



Virginia Zimmerman

EXCAVATING VICTORIANS

Suny series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century Pamela K. Gilbert, editor

EXCAVATING VICTORIANS

Virginia Zimmerman

S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS

Cover: Untitled geological still life, frontispiece to Gideon Mantell’sThe Medals of Creation (1844). Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

© 2008 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

For information, contact State University of www.sunypress.edu

Production by Marilyn P. Semerad Marketing by Michael Campochiaro

New York Press, Albany, NY

Library of Congress CataloguinginPublication Data

Zimmerman, Virginia. Excavating Victorians / Virginia Zimmerman. p. cm. — (Suny series, studies in the long nineteenth century) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 9780791472798 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. English literature—19th century— History and criticism. 2. Geology in literature. 3. Archaeology in literature. 4. Space and time in literature. 5. Time—Philosophy. 6. Authors, English—19th century— Philosophy. 7. Literature and science—Great Britain—History—19th century. 8. Literature and history—Great Britain—History—19th century. I. Title.

PR468.G38Z56

820.9'008—dc22

2008

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

2006101369

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Contents 5

1. Introduction: “All Relics Here Together” 2. The Victorian Geologist: Reading Remains and Writing Time 3. Tennyson’s Fairy Tale of Science 4. Accidental Archaeology in London and Pompeii 5. Dickens among the Ruins 6. Final Fragments

Notes Bibliography Index

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vii ix

1 27 65 97 143 177

179 207 225

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Illustrations 5

1.1. Figure of a trilobite, Gideon Mantell’sPictorial Atlas of Fossil Remains(1850). 2.1. “The Age of Monsters,” John Cargill Brough’sThe Fairy Tales of Science(1859). 2.2. “Awful Changes: Man found only in a fossil state— Reappearance of Ichthyosauri” by Henry Thomas De la Beche (1830), Francis T. Buckland’sCuriosities of Natural History. 2.3. The Temple of Serapis, frontispiece to Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology(1830). 2.4. Untitled geological still life, frontispiece to Gideon Mantell’s The Medals of Creation(1844). 2.5. “Dinner in the Iguanodon Model, at the Crystal Palace, Sydenham,”Illustrated London News(1854). 4.1. “The Museum of C. Roach Smith, Esq.” (c. 1850), courtesy Guildhall Library, City of London. 4.2. “View of the Court of the Piscina.” William Gell’sPompeii: Its Destruction and Re-Discovery(1880). 4.3. Photograph of plaster casts made from the impressions left by corpses at Pompeii. Photo by author, with permission of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attivitá Culturali-Soprintendenza Archeologica di Pompei. 4.4. Photograph of graffiti at Pompeii. Photo by author, with permission of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attivitá Culturali- Soprintendenza Archeologica di Pompei.

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4.5.

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4.7.

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Illustrations

“Pompeian Court” at the Crystal Palace, Sydenham (1854), courtesy Guildhall Library, City of London.

“The Metropolitan Railway and the Fleet Ditch,”Illustrated London News(1862).

“Tessellated Pavement,” Charles Roach Smith’sIllustrations of Roman London(1859).

“The New Zealander,” Blanchard Jerrold and Gustav Doré’s London: A Pilgrimage(1872).

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Acknowledgments 5

For permission to reproduce selected images, I would like to acknowledge with thanks: the Guildhall Library, City of London (figures 4.1 and 4.5) , and the Min- istero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali-Soprintendenza Archeologica di Pompei (figures 4.3 and 4.4). Special Collectons at the University of Virginia library made available the frontispiece to Gideon Mantell’sThe Medals of Creation, which appears on the cover of this book, for which I thank them. In addition, I am grateful to David Latané andVIJ: Victorians Institute Journalfor permission to use in chapter 2 a revision of my article published there in winter 2002. I would like to acknowledge the support, guidance, and kindness of James Peltz, Allison Lee, and Marilyn P. Semerad at the State University of New York Press, and of course I am also grateful to series editor Pamela K. Gilbert. I am grateful to Beth Cunningham and Eugenia Gerdes at Bucknell Uni- versity for generous grants of funds to travel to England, where I visited libraries, parks, and ruins, all of which have found their way into this project, and for the even more precious gift of time in the form of untenured faculty leave. Also at Bucknell, I would like to acknowledge the unflagging support and kindness of the members of the English department who, formally and informally, readily engaged with this work as it progressed. I am especially grateful to Michael Drexler, Meenakshi Ponnuswami, Greg Clingham, Harold Schweizer, and John Rickard for listening kindly through the latter stages of this project. I would also like to thank Chris Camuto and Eric Faden whose work reminds me that I am not isolated in what I do. I owe a particular debt to Saundra Morris for keeping me honest about how I spent my time, and most especially to Ghislaine McDayter for answer- ing innumerable questions, being an ever-patient sounding board, and most happily sharing in some much needed time away from work. In addition, I would like to thank graduate students Sean Martin, Ed Kelleher, and Rebecca Morris whose assistance made my life easier and my book better. I remain grateful to Alison Booth, Karen Chase, Michael Levenson, and Herbert Tucker at the University of Virginia. Each of them saw this project in ix