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Note: the following article on time in the Victorian era is a modified excerpt (pp. 29-35) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which can be downloaded (for free) from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, see here.

Theorizing Time in the Victorian Era: Changing the Scientific Paradigm

Theorizing Time in the Victorian era changed due to a series of scientific breakthroughs. Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, written in the early 1830s, as well as Charles Darwin’s 1859 On the Origin of Species, forced a reevaluation of history, suggesting the past had to be reconsidered.

In addition, the mid-century discovery of the second law of thermodynamics added further anxiety in relation to history and the future.

It was interpreted to imply the extinction of human life due to the exhaustion of usable energy – the so-called heat death of the universe. Suddenly, the existing definition, meaning, and destination of human existence seemed to be lacking. A dark, unfathomable past lay on the one side, while a rather ominous and equally uncertain future lay on the other.

Theorizing Time in the Victorian Era: a Discourse of Devolution

Ultimately, as the nineteenth century neared its end, the illusion of temporal control was all but shattered. Indeed, a considerable number of social anxieties that worried the British during the fin de siècle emerged as a result of the “heightened appreciation of the precariousness of their place in the world” (Kennedy 2002, 22). This realization had many temporal elements.

Following the contact of the British with the so-called primitive peoples of the world – who were sometimes seen as relics, unfit for the newly discovered Darwinian battle of survival – the inevitable observation was that the fierce competition between Britain and other industrial nations, such as Germany, meant that Britain could have the same fate (Kennedy 2002, 23).

Furthermore, developments such as the Venezuelan crisis of 1895–1896 forced the British to essentially acknowledge American hegemony in the Western hemisphere. This emphasized the fact that the Empire, although still covering a vast portion of the globe, was by no means invulnerable.

Gothic and Time in the Victorian Era

According to Mighall, the Gothic texts of the period followed patterns where focus was placed simultaneously on the imperial borders and “the domestic ‘savages’ which resided in the very heart of the civilized world, and even in the ancestral memory of the modern civilized subject” (1999, 136).

As a result, the latent idea is that of historical confrontation, a clash between (temporal) worlds, as the overextension of the Empire implies that just as modern Britain can meet the archaic Other simply by expanding outwards, then a reversal of the process can occur and the “primitive” past can appear in the heart of the Empire itself (Mighall 1999, 137).

H. Rider Haggard’s 1887 She is a typical such example. Haggard’s novel follows the journey of Horace Holly, a British professor traveling to a lost kingdom in the African mainland, where he meets the supernatural, immortal queen. His fear is eventually made explicit:

Evidently the terrible She had determined to go to England, and it made me shudder to think what would be the result of her arrival there. What her powers were I knew, and I could not doubt but that she would exercise them to the full … In the end I had little doubt, she would assume absolute rule over the British dominions, and probably over the whole earth. (Haggard 1951, 192–193; emphasis in the original)

Imperial Gothic and Time in the Victorian Era

Patrick Brantlinger uses the term Imperial Gothic to refer to novels such as She, describing a mode that “combines the seemingly scientific, progressive, often Darwinian ideology of imperialism with an antithetical interest in the occult” (1988, 227).

The Imperial Gothic is characterized by three major themes: regression, or devolution; invasion of the civilized modern world by barbaric or even demonic forces; the decline of heroism and the lack of opportunities for exploration and adventure (Brantlinger 1988, 230).

Read more: Angelis, Christos. “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic. Doctoral Dissertation. Tampere, Finland: Tampere University Press, 2017. Available from the repository of the Tampere University Press.

Works Cited

Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. NY: Cornell University Press, 1988.
Haggard, H. Rider. Three Adventure Novels: She, King Solomon’s Mines, Allan Quatermain. New York: Dover, 1951.
Kennedy, Dane. Britain and Empire 1880–1945. Essex: Pearson Education Limited, 2002.
Mighall, Robert. A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.