Wired Victorians

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 2003 by Coleman, Dawn

Wired Victorians JAY CLAYTON, Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of the Nineteenth Century in Postmodern Culture (New York: Oxford UP, 2003), pp. 236, $35.00.

Despite its title, Charles Dickens in Cyberspace is not about hypertext editions of Bleak House or David Copperfield or about on-line discussions of the Inimitable. Although cyber-resources such as Mitsuhara Matsuoka's pioneering Dickens Page and George P. Landow's Dickens Page on The Victorian Web receive passing mention, Dickens's latter-day home on the Internet is less a literal subject of inquiry than a metaphorical gesture toward the book's broader interests. Reclaiming the Victorians for a postmodern moment defined by technological innovation, Dickens in Cyberspace brings to light nineteenth-century Britain's fascination with engineering novelties and scientific discovery and examines how this often-forgotten Victorian legacy resonates with contemporary literature and culture. Rightly speaking, the book's touchstone historical figure is not Charles Dickens but Charles Babbage, the mathematician, political economist, and prodigious inventor who in 1833 designed the Analytical Engine, a calculating machine with punch cards, internal memory, and a central processing unit; if built, it would have been the first digital computer. Babbage and his prescient invention appear throughout Dickens in Cyberspace, most notably in the analysis of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine (1991) (in which Babbage's proto-computer is called by the more familiar name of the calculating machine he invented in 1822). For clayton, Babbage represents both an early nineteenth-century pre-disciplinary culture that encouraged intellectual innovation and the quirky facts that defy standard historical plots, whether of continuity or rupture, and whose significance emerges only retrospectively.

Dickens in Cyberspace revolves around a central methodological question: how should cultural studies situate itself with respect to history? Clayton does not answer with a tired polemic against historiography. Distancing himself from deterministic and evolutionary models of history, he aligns himself with Michel de Certeau in calling for a self-reflexive engagement with the past, one that acknowledges the difference of history while striving for the sense of recognition that makes historical knowledge matter in the present. The book works from the premise that the nineteenth century and the present should be understood in a "dialectical relationship rather than the causal relation of organic growth that structures most history" (29). This approach is self-consciously "postmodern" and studiously defined with respect to theorists such as Fredric Jameson, Alan Liu, and John McGowan, but the "postmodern culture" of the book's title indicates not so much a concern with literary experimentalism and cultural fragmentation per se as with technological innovation, a global information network, and shifting disciplinary alliances. "Contemporary culture" (or perhaps "contemporary technoculture") would have been equally descriptive, and scholars who regard debates over "postmodernism" as dead horses of the 1990s should not be deterred by the title. Dickens in Cyberspace takes pains to engage with this term in part because the book continues the mission of Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century, edited by John Kucich and Dianne F. Sadoff (U of Minnesota P, 2000). That volume analyzed various forms of contemporary obsession with the Victorian period, especially insofar as that age functioned as a site of historical rupture and cultural emergence, and included an essay by Clayton on The Difference Engine and Tom Stoppard's Arcadia (1993) that became a central chapter in Dickens in Cyberspace.

Overt theorizing aside, one of the strengths of Dickens in Cyberspace is the rich vocabulary it provides for describing the anomalous historical phenomena called out of the shadows by a dialectical approach to the past. Such phenomena are "anachronistic," "uncanny," "untimely," "marginal," "false starts," "lost possibilities," "recessive," and "odd." They include not only Babbage's proposed Analytical Engine, but also the cyborg nature of Frankenstein's monster, the remarkable environmental consciousness that informed the construction of the Crystal Palace, and the surprising fact that the telegraph was perceived to intensify, rather than attenuate, somatic experience. Focusing on anomalous and neglected facts in the history of science and technology reveals the gaps created both by gradualist notions of "scientific progress" and by a Kuhnian model of collective paradigm shifts. And although Clayton does not dwell upon the connection between the historically "odd" and the "queer" in its more sexualized sense, his readings are unusually and productively attentive to the homoerotic dimension of his materials: e.g., the intense, decades-long relationship between Joseph Paxton, designer of the Crystal Palace, and his patron and friend, the sixth Duke of Devonshire; the association of the ephemeral, acoustic technologies of the telegraph with the subversive, same-sex relationship of Charlotte and Paula in Thomas Hardy's A Laodicean (1881); and the threat of homosexuality that haunts Jerome and Vincent in the film Gattaca (1997).