Time Travelers
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The Victorians, perhaps more than any Britons before them, were diggers and sifters of the past. Though they were not the first to be fascinated by history, the intensity and range of Victorian preoccupations with the past was unprecedented and of lasting importance. They paved the way for many of our modern disciplines, discovered the primeval monsters we now call the dinosaurs, and built many of Britain's most important national museums and galleries. To a large degree, they created the perceptual frameworks through which we continue to understand the past.
Out of their discoveries, new histories emerged, giving rise to new debates, while seemingly well-known pasts were thrown into confusion by new tools and methods of scrutiny. If in the eighteenth century the study of the past had been the province of a handful of elites, new technologies and economic development in the nineteenth century meant that the past, in all its brilliant detail, was for the first time the property of the many, not the few. Time Travelers is a book about the myriad ways in which Victorians approached the past, offering a vivid new picture of the Victorian world and its historical obsessions.
Adelene Buckland is a senior lecturer in English literature at King's College London. She is author of Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology, also published by the University of Chicago Press, and coeditor of A Return to the Common Reader: Print Culture and the Novel, 1850-1900. Sadiah Qureshi is a senior lecturer in modern history at the University of Birmingham. She is author of Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain, also published by the University of Chicago Press.