Victorians, Digitized

Paul Fyfe's monograph Digital Victorians: From Nineteenth-Century Media to Digital Humanities joins a body of work in the Victorian digital humanities that includes Sarah Allison's Reductive Reading: A Syntax of Victorian Moralizing and Troy Bassett's The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Three-Volume Novel. Instead of using digital humanities methods to facilitate new readings of Victorian literature and book history, however, Fyfe offers readers a media history that ties our own historical moment of a shift to digital media to similar moments experienced by the Victorians. Fyfe shares, with scholars such as Megan Ward, a dual interest in the Victorian roots of the digital present and in how the digital present can serve as an interpretive lens for the past. (In Ward's monograph, Seeming Human: Artificial Intelligence and Victorian Realist Character, she reads the emergence of AI in the twentieth century as both a formal afterlife of the Victorian realist character and a lens for rereading nineteenth-century novels.) Fyfe's book takes us from the transportation of newspapers via the railway to the telegraph to automatic writing practiced by members of the Society for Psychical Research. He presents a sustained argument that we can see the beginnings of what we now call the digital humanities in nineteenth-century encounters with media in transition. Fyfe argues that a better understanding of the history of such moments of media transition can help us reframe our contemporary relationship with the digital, especially in the context of its material history, and shows us how digital evidence can change the interpretive practices and professional landscape of scholars working in this area. His concern is not merely to draw analogies between Victorian technologies such as the telegraph and contemporary technologies such as the Internet, but rather to investigate how the Victorians negotiated the significance of new technologies. Fyfe explores what historical negotiations with shifting media can teach us about our own knowledge practices as we grapple with an ever-expanding pool of newly digitized sources—from provincial newspaper articles to census records—and how we might integrate such new forms of evidence into our scholarly practice. This line of argumentation leads Fyfe to one of the best definitions of the digital humanities that I have seen; he suggests that DH is a “meta discourse about changing knowledge practices in an era of media shift” (4).In chapter 1, Fyfe takes on the pervasive myth that the Internet is somehow disembodied, uncovering the roots of this idea in nineteenth-century reactions to the telegraph and the railway. Like the Internet, the railway and the telegraph served as forms of networked communications media, allowing far-flung readers to access the day's news in an astonishingly short time. For some, this led to a fantasy that communications were instantaneous and disembodied. Fyfe argues that Thomas De Quincey's 1849 essay “The English Mail Coach” presents railways as a “lifeless” and “alien” form of transportation as compared to the mail coaches of yore. Although some newspapers, such as the London Illustrated News, celebrated their material origins and printed statistics about production costs and illustrations of the post office van that delivered their papers, driving home the embodied nature of the newspaper and its distribution networks, the very fact that information networks were expanding so rapidly in the nineteenth century made it increasingly difficult to connect printed information to its complex origins. Like nineteenth-century media, the Internet is deeply material; myths of disembodied information tend to erase contributions by women and racialized people, ultimately serving white male innovators.In chapters 2 and 3, Fyfe traces concerns about privacy, information, and the Internet to their Victorian origins. In the second chapter, Fyfe reconsiders George Eliot's The Lifted Veil and George du Maurier's Peter Ibbetson in light of what they can tell us about contemporary problems of personal privacy in the Internet age. As Fyfe notes, The Lifted Veil, which features a telepathic protagonist, Latimer, is widely read as a meta reflection on Eliot's project of extending her readers’ sympathies through her fiction. In The Lifted Veil, Eliot asks what might happen if knowing more about others, or even knowing everything about others, as Latimer does, does not result in sympathetic understanding. In Fyfe's reading, part of Eliot's point is not what the new communication networks of the Victorian era spread, but the assumption that they established connections at all. Moving to the end of the nineteenth century, in Fyfe's reading, Peter Ibbetson presents a fantasy about the conservation and connection of souls even after death. But it is a reality that we are all now living with, as our data is continually captured and we are constantly surveilled, leaving traces of ourselves online that can and do survive past our deaths. Fyfe connects these nineteenth-century fictions to our current concerns with the right to be forgotten; in an era where people are denied jobs on the basis of inopportune photographs that survive for years online, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis's 1890 “The Right to Privacy” takes on new relevance. Warren and Brandeis framed their arguments about the right to privacy partially in terms of the role of women's sexuality in the public sphere, an argument which is perhaps even more relevant in the digital present.Fyfe extends this line of argumentation about gender and privacy in chapter 3, which looks at the figure of the female telegraph operator in Henry James's novella In the Cage. The telegrapher in James's fiction learns to read and interpret texts on a large scale; like contemporary AI, she works at speed, makes predictions about text based on statistical regularities, and is not supposed to understand or interact with the words she transmits. AI, too, has relied on human labor, which it all too often renders invisible. Fyfe concludes the chapter with a reconsideration of the role of Henry James's secretary, Theodora Bosquanet, who did not simply serve as his amanuensis, but became capable of predicting what should or would come next in James's work. After James's death, Bosquanet, a member of the Society for Psychical Research, experimented with the uses of automatic writing to connect with James. Her relationship with James and his work brings to light complex questions about agency, gender, and authorial intent that are newly relevant in the age of AI. The case studies of the telegrapher in The Cage and Bosquanet drive home an important thread of Fyfe's work: that when we read new technologies like AI as disembodied, we often erase women's labor.In chapters 4 and 5, Fyfe considers even darker aspects of the digital humanities. In chapter 4, he extends Stephen Arata's reading of Jekyll and Hyde as a fiction about the anxieties surrounding the suitability of authorship as a profession for gentlemen. Fyfe suggests that R. L. Stevenson's work represents not only a crisis in the literary profession, but also a deep-seated unease with the media shifts that so often drive such professional crises. Fyfe's important final chapter, “The Archaeology of Victorian New Media,” was previously published in part in the Victorian Periodicals Review and received the Donald Gray Prize for the best article published in Victorian studies. In this chapter, Fyfe traces the circuitous and sometimes dark routes that Victorian materials take to arrive in the digital present. He takes as his case study the digitization of nineteenth-century newspapers, a collection first accessioned by the British Museum in 1822 and later incorporated into the British Library in 1973; parts of the British Library's newspaper collection are now available online through both Gale, which universities often subscribe to, and the British Newspaper Archive, which is aimed at family historians and individual subscribers. New technologies, including the Kodak camera and microfilm, have long been used to preserve the newspaper collection. Partnerships with for-profit companies such as Gale have also played a role; Fyfe brings to our attention that these Western corporate offices often farm out the laborious processes of scanning and XML tagging overseas. The digital turn is not entirely new: As Fyfe shows, our predecessors in Victorian studies were interested in the possibilities of new technology to instantiate a new field in the mid-twentieth century. At the first Research Society for Victorian Periodicals Conference in 1969, scholars discussed the possibilities of microfilm and even computers. Women's contributions to technological innovation are often erased, but Dorothy Veering explored the possibilities of using computers in bibliographic studies more than fifty years ago. All in all, Fyfe demonstrates that the growth of Victorian studies and periodicals research flourished in the context of postwar investments in interdisciplinary research at US universities and cannot be separated from US foreign policy and intelligence services. This history should be of particular interest to us now, Fyfe suggests, as scholars who are aware that we are in another period of media transition.It is possible, however, that we have reached the end of the period of digital transition, and that the engagement with the digital that was once a new professional practice at the turn of the twenty-first century is now the new normal. Fyfe posits the lockdowns of 2020 as a strong candidate for the beginning of the end of the first period of the digital humanities. Scholars such as Mark Algee-Hewitt have suggested that DH will now either split into an interdisciplinary computational field or merge into existing fields like Victorian studies. The merger may well already be underway. The first in-person conference I attended after the pandemic was that of the Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada, held in Winnipeg in April 2023. There, I was struck by how much the digitization of nineteenth-century resources, in particular the British Newspaper Archive, whose media history Fyfe traces so carefully, had silently and seamlessly changed the field. I heard presentations in which scholars casually cited seemingly every reprinting of a little-known poem through provincial newspapers or engaged with robust debates in London newspapers about a hospital scandal. The papers were in no way presented as DH papers, and that seemed right to me. My experience seems to confirm Fyfe's final argument in his afterword, which states that we are well past the beginning stages of DH in which it has been separately defined. So well-integrated are digital archives, perhaps especially the British Newspaper Archive, into the field of Victorian studies that such digital engagements are no longer evidence of a striking new methodology in the field, but rather par for the course. If there is one lesson that we might take away from Fyfe's book, though, it is that we should have more conversations about the media history of resources such as the British Newspaper Archive so we can better understand how they have come to us and how they are transforming our field.