Reading the Victorians

Abstract

Contemporary society’s engagement with the Victorian era is often mediated through texts, not only the texts of Victorian novels (and their numerous film and television adaptations) but also the neo-Victorian texts with which this book is concerned. It is unsurprising, then, that a common concern in neo-Victorian fiction is the way in which the Victorian past is mediated to the present through its textual remains. This concern is most evident in the recurring plot in which a twentieth-century figure encounters the textual archive of the nineteenth century, usually uncovering some hitherto unknown information about the Victorian past. In their adoption of a dual plot structure, with events in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such novels dramatize questions about the nature of the relationship between the present and the past, and the possibility of accessing the past that, as we have seen, are central to neo-Victorian fiction. This chapter examines two such novels: Graham Swift’s Ever After (1992) and A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance (1990). Byatt’s novel is not only the most famous example of this approach, but also the most wide-ranging, incorporating as it does the textual remains of almost all of its nineteenth-century characters.¹