Paul Fyfe, Digital Victorians: From Nineteenth-Century Media to Digital Humanities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2024) 294 pp. $60.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781503640948
Paul Fyfe’s Digital Victorians eloquently takes readers on an exploratory journey bringing together the Victorian period’s ‘new media’ moment and our own. Indeed, for Fyfe, contemporary developments in media technologies and communication – and the responses to these – are part of a continuum, feeding from and mirroring particularly the advancements and discourses of the nineteenth century. Fyfe is not merely interested in locating the prehistory of digital technologies, however. Underpinning his study is a reconsideration of Digital Humanities, starting with a thoroughly researched overview of its emergence, its competing definitions and the interrogation of periodization, geographical focus and disciplinary demarcation that these reveal. From the outset, too, Fyfe shows acute awareness of the dangers involved in the enterprise ahead of him – the pitfalls of the interdisciplinary approach he is adopting as well as the risk of presentism, parallelism and anachronism – and is open about his efforts to navigate them.
The juxtaposition of ‘engaged presentism’ and ‘comparative historicism’ promised in the introduction (23) is immediately in evidence in chapter 1. Its epigraph – as elsewhere in the book – features a Victorian and a contemporary source, whose close analysis helps illuminate the chapter’s key concerns. In the case of chapter 1, Fyfe uses a poem from 1844 (‘The passing railway train’) and a 2007 comic sketch (‘internet train’) to set out his argument that ‘the dawning of the “tele-culture”’ in the nineteenth century (33) is not only a precursor to our own communication revolution but that it introduced enduring myths. For Fyfe, chief among these is ‘the myth of disembodied information’ (46). He first explores it through De Quincey’s ‘The English Mail-Coach’, which bemoans the displacement of the mail coach with the arrival of the railway and seemingly erases the new mode of transport by invalidating its ‘unfeeling materials’ and focusing on its ‘affective experience’ (41). This propensity to write off the unsavoury aspects of the communication circuit, Fyfe contends, continues in the twenty-first century – for example, in relation to digital media’s links with slavery, exploitation and geo-political control. To offset this, Fyfe examines an 1845 illustration, ‘The Post Office Van’, and surveys contemporary ‘transmission narratives’ (62) that recover, and sometimes celebrate, the materiality of communication and its production and distribution processes.
Chapter 2 changes tack to consider the cognitive and ethical disorientation that accompanies information technology revolutions. Here, Fyfe reads George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil (1859) and George du Maurier’s Peter Ibbetson (1891) as preoccupied with information overload and mental wellbeing on the one hand and (digital) memory and surveillance on the other, thus contesting the existence of these concerns as uniquely twenty-first-century ones. Fyfe’s analysis also astutely problematises the aspiration of Victorian high realism – the development of sympathetic connections – in the context of the technologized mediation of knowledge. He likewise ponders the frequently indiscriminate association, in the twenty-first century, of nineteenth-century novels with deep, attentive reading when, by mid-century, ‘novel reading was already the domain of distracted consumption’ (79). While using literature as the primary focus of analysis and discussion, too, Fyfe signals that the concerns around which this chapter revolves were and are shared, cutting across different fields (e.g., physiology, psychology, spiritualism and, more recently, the games industry).
Revisiting the intriguing erasure of human labour behind technologies in chapter 3, Fyfe produces an original reading of Henry James’s In the Cage (1898) against the backdrop of contemporaneous experiments in speed and efficient reading through association and anticipation. Through this, Fyfe simultaneously offers James’s text up as one of the ‘origin stories of distant reading’ (105) and provides a glimpse of the prehistory of large language models. Fyfe not only validates the telegraphist who successfully deciphers secret and compromising messages in In the Cage. The chapter’s concluding pages both attempt to re-institute Theodora Bosanquet, one of Henry James’s assistants, into his compositional processes and explore the uncanny connection between automatic writing, a nineteenth-century spiritual phenomenon, and generative AI tools.
Fyfe then switches from disintermediation to remediation in chapter 4, which overlays Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Digital Humanities in unexpected ways. The bodily transformations of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Stevenson’s interest in forms of writing, lead to questions around the connection between medium and message. An exquisitely detailed exploration of the text’s own transformations in turn helps Fyfe argue that adaptations of Stevenson’s novella, as exemplified by the text becoming one of the first talking books, can be mapped against moments of media shift precisely because it contains a non-conforming body. Tracing the afterlives of Stevenson’s work, Fyfe also surfaces adjacent debates about remediation, especially anxieties about matters of legitimacy, hierarchy and authority that beset Digital Humanities, too. In Fyfe’s reading, what links The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Digital Humanities is their Gothic emplotment. Yet while the gothic tropes within Stevenson’s work are inextricable from its enduring appeal, the metaphorical association of Digital Humanities with the Gothic dramatizes its contested institutional position (163).
One of the chapter 4 themes – that our understanding of the Victorian period is mediated by the transmission of its cultural artefacts in the intervening period – becomes the final chapter’s central concern. Fyfe starts by retracing, in meticulous detail, the decisions and processes behind the British Museum’s initial collection of nineteenth-century British newspapers, showing how the curation of knowledge and information depends upon – among others – political priorities and physical resources. Charting the subsequent selection of British newspapers for microfilming, Fyfe expands on the material factors conditioning the transmission of knowledge and re-embodies its gendered intermediaries. Finally, Fyfe situates the eventual digitalization process in a complex global context involving several commercial entities, each with their own standards, and evolving technologies. The themes of bias and invisible labour are compounded here through Fyfe’s acknowledgment of the inaccessible histories and memories of the process.
Overall, Digital Humanities succeeds in its mission to avoid ‘naturalizing or essentializing technologies as if they were unchanging’ (25). Indeed, its structuring strategy proves highly productive. On the one hand, moving between notions of (dis)intermediation and remediation insightfully highlight the competing discourses in which the communication circuit is embroiled. On the other, exploring nineteenth- and twenty-first-century texts and concerns in tandem leads to refreshing readings of old classics while putting contemporary debates in compelling historical perspectives. Ultimately, too, Fyfe demonstrates the clear interrelation between nineteenth-century studies and the development of Digital Humanities as a field and shows how Victorian studies and Digital Humanities alike are undergoing their own ‘age of transition’ (227).
Encarnación Trinidad Barrantes, The Open University
