Introduction

Abstract

The title of this volume of essays, each of which attends to issues of representation and media change in nineteenth-century literary culture, evokes a series of gaps: between the real Victorians and the virtual ones, between sheer presences and imagined avatars, between the made-analog nineteenth century and the born-digital now. Indeed, such divisions increasingly animate our conversations about the Victorian era, as it fades decidedly into the past—now two centuries removed, all of its residents dead, its creaky media and communication technologies more distant and more strange each year. We might well ask, what now do the Victorians have to do with reality? Yet such alienation also brings an enabling perspective and a set of tools for research and thinking that might alter our vision of the nineteenth century. As time and technology make plain that our Victorian period will henceforth always be a simulation or constructed model, we can investigate more assiduously those networks of remediation. Put another way, we can exploit the virtual to make the past operational. At the same time, we are able to see more clearly the era’s own immersion in virtuality, both optical and textual, as a result of its own novel technologies and networks.