Suzy Anger and Thomas Vranken, eds, Victorian Automata: Mechanism and Agency in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024), 360 pp. £100.00 HB, ISBN: 9781009100274
Automata and automatism were not new phenomena in the nineteenth century. So well established were such mechanical reproductions of human and animal life, that encounters occurred with, as Thomas Vranken reflects, ‘unprecedented regularity’ (26). The rise of industrialisation and the resultant mass-production of affordable ‘automatic toys’ resulted in the proliferation of automata during the period. It was ‘the Golden Age of Automata’ (33).
In contrast to their eighteenth-century cousins, those automata of the period between 1848 and 1905 were a ‘pale imitation of what had gone before’ (26) and often overlooked by scholars, who chart the creation of mechanical, artificial life with a ‘skip from Enlightenment and Romantic androids to twentieth century robots’ (27). Automaton creations of the nineteenth century were regularly portrayed derisively by the Victorians as ‘derivative historical afterthoughts’ (27). Yet despite this, they insisted on categorising their mimetic automaton creations with the unique, handcrafted ‘automata of the past’ (27). The Victorian automata therefore contain ‘ghosts’ of earlier automata that they ‘simultaneously canonize, echo, and subvert’ (27). For the Victorians, automata became emblems of ‘mechanicity (…) time and temporal standardization’ (27), but these lingering ‘ghosts’ of the past complicate such periodic boundaries. As such, the ‘unceremonious dethroning (…) as the acme of technological innovation’ (27) of Victorian automata enabled a transition to be made from automata to automatism.
The proliferation of automata in Victorian daily lives led to the language of automatism and the cultural representation of automata ‘taking on varied forms and moving across multiple sites’ (1). As a result, automata enabled the expression of assorted ideas and values, raising questions about ‘efficacy of consciousness and volition, the limits of agency, the boundaries between the organic and mechanical, and what it is to be human in a scientific and industrial age’ (2). Whilst the ‘industrial “automata” in factories outproduced the human body’ (1), others ‘charmed and entertained crowds’ (1). These ‘bespoke performing objects’ (33) were for their middle-class owners, a display of ‘social status, via ownership of a highly crafted (and expensive) device’ (33). Furthermore, for the Victorians, automatism was ‘credited with intellectual and creative achievements impossible for the conscious mind’ (2) and therefore enabled ‘access to higher planes of reality and (expansion of) mental powers’ (2). As Suzy Anger deduces, the ‘discourse of automatism were capacious, ubiquitous, and multivalent (…) They conveyed limitations and dissolved them. They expressed fears. They delivered fantasies’ (2).
The theories of automata and automatism during the nineteenth century became central to the creation of a ‘significant organising structure of knowledge’ (3) within the period. The essays collected in this volume examine this schema within a range of sites, including theatre, media, literature and science, as well as examining the social, racial, technological, scientific, aesthetic and philosophical developments that automata generated. The volume consists of an introspective collection of essays by a multi-disciplinary group of scholars who consider the engagement of science and culture arising out of Victorian thought on automata and automatism. Essays make close analysis of the presence of the automata in Victorian literary texts, including those of Richard Marsh, Anthony Trollope and Harriet Beecher Stowe.
The collection is divided into four cohesive sections: “Mechanical Automata”, “Automatism”, “Literary Genre and Popular Culture”, and finally, “Interactions”. Essays under the section of “Mechanical Automata” consider the history and uses of automata, as technology, commodity, and entertainment, as well as race, human labour and the intelligence of machines. The first essay by Kara Reilly explores the automata as a collectable commodity, which was ‘influenced by popular performers of the period’ (33) and reproduced the performances of ‘actual named performers’ (45) as well as more general performers, such as ‘circus clowns and magicians’ (45). These automata enabled the consumer to ‘possess a “living” version’ (12) of the performance, and ‘by extension, their glamour’ (45). Reilly’s essay offers an insight into the construction of celebrity, as well as commodity fetishism and commodity culture during the Victorian period. The historical development of the automata in this section reaches its conclusion with Simone Natale’s consideration of the history of automata and the development of computing and AI. Natale charts how automata are ‘commonly indicated as progenitors’ (80) of the field of today’s AI. However, the essay goes on to innovatively emphasise the ‘role of users and audiences’ (81) in this history.
Part two of the volume, entitled, “Automatism”, successfully explores the abundance of ideas surrounding mental automatism in a plethora of cultural spheres, including legal, psychology, literature, and evolutionary science. As a reflection of this impressive variety of fields included this, the largest section of the volume, consists of five essays. Roger Smith’s opening chapter considers automatism as a way of ‘understanding human conduct’ (90), in the context of criminal legal proceedings. The essay interrogates the debates surrounding human deeds and agency, as well as questions of free will and culpability. Anger then goes on to investigate the mind and body problem and considers Thomas Huxley’s proposed answer to this conundrum, which suggested that ‘humans are conscious automata’ (107). Anger effectively relates this to the broader culture which ‘lurks in the shadows behind a surprising range of thought and writing’ (107) and the representation of human consciousness and literature. This section concludes with George Levine’s exploration of the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin. Levine offers an interesting and thought-provoking alternative to the interpretation of Darwin’s theories, by considering the role of automatism in relation to the natural world.
The volume then moves in part three, “Literary Genre and Popular Literature”, to consider the influence of automata in a selection of Victorian literary texts, in the occult, detective and popular fiction genres. The section opens with an essay by Thomas Vranken and Stephen Knight, which examines the place of the automaton as ‘one of detective fiction’s central recurring symbols’ (197). This novel argument focuses on Poe’s 1836 essay, “Maelzel’s Chess-Player”. In their essay, Vranken and Knight suggest that the automata, being the ‘thematic motif’ of Poe’s essay also shaped ‘the burgeoning genre’ (197). Throughout the chapter, Vranken and Knight interrogate the requirements that the Victorian detective fiction genre required – firstly, the need for a ‘clockwork world, in which clues can be traced back with absolute (…) certainty’ (203). Concomitantly, the genre also assumed the need for more personable protagonists, rather than simply unfeeling, ‘calculating machines’ (203). Whilst this essay offers stimulating arguments, the inclusion of an extended discussion of an American novel in a volume on Victorian (British) culture is questionable. Shuhita Bhattacharjee’s essay considers the automaton in the genre of the occult, with a close analysis of several of Marsh’s texts. Bhattacharjee discusses the depiction by Marsh of the mesmerised human subject. The analysis of the texts offers complications to the issue of criminal responsibility, volition, and power. The mesmerised, ‘automaton-like humans fracture’ the commonly held notion of the ‘connection between mesmerism and painlessness’ (208) with the mesmerised human (outsider)-automatons experiencing internal agony. By revealing such inner turmoil, at the hands of the ‘mesmerist’s cruel power’ (209), Marsh’s texts expose the suffering of the automatatized subject as well as a protest ‘against socioeconomic injustices’ (209).
The concluding part of this volume, entitled ‘Intersections’, develops the studies of the preceding sections, with chapters considering the development of automata becoming synonymous with puppets, and the representations of new media technologies. Chris Dingwall’s essay reveals the scientific racism embedded in the production of Topsy dolls, discussing the character of Topsy, in Beecher-Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. As with the essay by Vranken and Knight in the previous section once again an American novel is being closely analysed in a book exploring Victorian automata. The essay charts how Topsy is ‘less an embodiment of natural racial difference than an artificial product of the slave system itself’ (272). Topsy is ‘not a person but a thing’ (272) and as a mechanized human, she came to ‘symbolize the artificial world that had “grow’d” out of capitalism’ (273). Sally Shuttleworth’s essay analyses George Eliot’s fiction, specifically, “Shadows of the Coming Race” (1879). This essay considers the development of the automata possessing cognitive abilities. These machines which were created with the ability to ‘measure, extend, and amplify human senses and capabilities’ (290). Within this close reading, Shuttleworth draws on the questions of boundaries between animal, human and machine becoming ‘unstable’ (290), with Eliot’s own fascination with the development of machines with the aptitude of ‘exploring a world beyond the human senses’ (305) as well as her fears for the future as an author ‘in a world where machines could make their own transcriptions of everyday life’ (306).
Overall, Suzy Anger’s and Thomas Vranken’s Victorian Automata: Mechanism and Agency in the Nineteenth Century, is an impressive volume of essays that explore the many guises of automata in the nineteenth century. The essays demonstrate Victorian thoughts on automata and its various intersections between scientific developments of the nineteenth century and popular culture. With enlightening readings of popular and lesser studied literary texts of the period by the essays’ authors, the volume will be a useful source for scholars interested in both science and literary disciplines. Each essay has been impressively researched, utilising a vast selection of primary and secondary sources. This is an engaging and highly readable collection with much of interest for those in the field.
Jessica Thomas, University of Chester
