Time Travelers argues “that the past was no safe ground” in the Victorian period (xv). This volume, featuring distinguished contributors from literature, history, classics and religious studies, sets out to be “kaleidoscopic rather than encyclopedic” (xvi), emphasizing complexity and entanglement. The book’s key questions are about disciplines (how Victorian disciplines grew out of earlier practices, and what they shared between them), what drove “this newly voracious appetite for historical inquiry,” and the “kinds of narratives [that] emerged about the past” (xvi). It emphasizes change across the period (something “pertinent” in the 1850s might no longer be “relevant” by the 1870s) rather than trying to codify anything essentially “Victorian” (xxiv).
Part I focuses on “Narratives.” Qureshi examines competing theories of human evolution, emphasizing that “the 1860s witnessed a substantial proliferation, not homogenization, of theories” (12), even a “cacophony” (19). As this reviewer similarly argues elsewhere, this panoply “entrenched stadial visions...