Victorian Paperwork‪.‬

It seems a melancholy certitude now--in the year 2003, several years beyond a century since they could have been born--that the last Victorians have passed from this world. Indeed, scholars of my vintage will necessarily belong to the final generation that actually knew and touched living beings from the nineteenth century; and even if the precise effects of our direct contact are unclear, we can be sure that our hungry generations of students will experience greater mediation in their experience of the Victorian as they tread us down. (1) With such mediation comes the threat of attenuation: more noise, less signal. The current historicist and cultural-materialist leanings of scholarship on Victorian literature surely represent a collective attempt to stem this tide of forgetting, to recollect the scattered and fading portions of a century now two removes away. It seems we postmodern Victorianists, like our subjects, find a strangely anxious satisfaction in confronting issues of legacy and of loss. What the next age of readers will be able to hold, rather than the living hands of Victorians, are things made of paper and cloth. Swinburne speaks of the dead Baudelaire in words such readers may well find familiar (as we do now) when endeavoring to touch this past: