Time Travelers

Victorian Encounters with Time and History

Adelene Buckland, Sadiah Qureshi, Adelene Buckland, Sadiah Qureshi

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780226676821
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

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 their preoccupations with the past were unprecedented and of lasting importance. The Victorians paved the way for 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 fresh debates, while seemingly well-known histories were thrown into confusion by novel 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 picture of the Victorian world and its historical obsessions.
 

Part One: Narratives

1

Looking to Our Ancestors

Sadiah Qureshi

New understandings of being human emerged in the nineteenth century. Until the 1860s, humans were believed to have originated in Asia and diffused across the globe after the post-diluvial grounding of Noah’s Ark. Human history was often calibrated using biblical chronologies and conflated with the remains of literate peoples. In the early to mid-nineteenth century, the prospect of another, unimaginably deep past arose. From pulpits and Sunday schools to learned societies and exhibition venues, the lay and the learned asked, Had humans been placed on earth by a benevolent God, or had they descended from the apes? Were humans one species or many, and how might anyone tell the difference? Had people wandered the earth since geological antiquity, or were they recent interlopers? Had some peoples become extinct, and were there others doomed to die? In disciplinary terms, these discussions helped found and sharpen divisions between history, geology, archaeology, anthropology, and paleontology.

Modern disciplinary divides make it difficult to recapture the experience of debating human descent, antiquity, and evolution; however, transcending the legacies of discipline formation remains the best way of understanding how human pasts were reimagined. Histories of race and evolution have substantial literatures devoted to the reception of evolutionary theories and descent.1 Recent interest in human antiquity has highlighted how our pasts were focal points for broader concerns about national identity, colonial policy, and the role of human beings in geohistory.2 Nonetheless, we know far less about how discussions on antiquity, evolution, and descent were encountered in broader public circles. Building on a growing body of work, “Looking to Our Ancestors” suggests that disputes about antiquity must be ranked alongside those on evolution and descent.3 By tracing discussions of human prehistory in public spaces, we see how debates on ancient humans involved making choices about which pasts could be known, which should be rejected, and which should be incorporated into human history. In particular, we see how nineteenth-century engagements with human pasts allowed for the proliferation, rather than homogenization, of views about what it meant to be human and what the differences between us signify. The discovery of fossilized humans, for instance, established the reality of prehistoric human existence; however, ancestral extinctions were quickly argued to presage the most devastating effects of modern settler colonialism through violent dispossession.

Petrified People

In June 1840, No. 18 Leicester-Square hosted the fossil of an “Ante-diluvian Child” (fig. 1). The proprietors proclaimed that even the comparative anatomist Georges “Cuvier, the most celebrated of his age, has denied the existence of human fossil remains: and others pretend that, previous to the Deluge, the human race had no existence.” Found “near Brussels,” the fossil was exhibited as “demonstrative evidence” of the “truth of the Holy Bible,” proving that people had roamed the earth before the Great Flood. Visitors had a fortnight to examine the specimen before the proprietors left to exhibit the child in Paris before “Members of the Academy of Science.”4 Interest was generated as far afield as Australia.5 It may seem obvious that a human fossil would draw significant attention; however, the “Ante-diluvian Child” exhibit was extraordinary in several respects. First, it was exceptionally expensive. The child was advertised on the same newspaper page as George Catlin’s North American Indian Gallery at the Egyptian Hall, a concert at the Royal Surrey Zoological Gardens, and daguerreotypes of the European continent, all of which cost a shilling. The exhibition was also remarkably early in the debates on extinction and human antiquity.6

Figure 1.1. Handbill, “Human Fossil,” Geological Society of London, LDGSL/547: image number 10–03. Reproduced by permission of the Geological Society of London.

In the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a new scientific consensus proposed that extinction was an endemic, possibly even foreordained, natural process.7 The permanent loss of species, such as the Mauritian dodo, were known, but attributed to human actions. Proposing that extinction was an endemic natural process raised religious and intellectual conundrums. For theists, extinction appeared to undermine the perfection one might expect of Divine creation and contradicted the belief that God created all possible forms of life, and that these would continue to exist to reveal Divine plenitude. Deists preferred explanations of species loss rooted in secular understandings of migration and transmutation: it seemed entirely plausible that apparently extinct species might be found in uncharted territories or that older forms might have transmuted, or evolved, into their present forms. Thus, in the early nineteenth century, extinction, migration, and transmutation “were treated as alternatives, as it were on a par with one another”; none was “obviously more plausible than the others,” and every one “entailed grave difficulties and further problems.”8 Important early studies of extinction were focused on megafauna, such as the megatherium, a giant sloth first discovered in Argentina in 1788, and the mastodon. Cuvier compared fossilized mastodon bones to living elephants in articles published between 1796 and 1806.9 Such detailed research established Cuvier as the premier authority on extinction and the reality of endemic natural loss by the 1820s.10

Extinction’s new epistemological status raised urgent questions regarding our ancestors. Had humans roamed among the mammoths? Had older species given rise to new species? Were there extinct archaic human forms? Since the 1820s, geologists had suspected that the Earth’s human presence was established much earlier than accepted, but the issue remained unresolved and contentious. As late as 1825, authoritative figures such as Cuvier insisted that human fossils did not exist. Unfathomably old human remains were known, but such “petrified” bones were considered insufficient evidence to recalibrate human history.11 Instead, humanity’s age was indirectly addressed by deciphering whether humans and extinct animals had lived together.12 Early British cave finds included bones in Kent’s Hole (1824) and, more dramatically, a skeleton in Paviland Cave in South Wales (1823). Some finds were dismissed as inauthentic; others were at classified as old, but not ancient, because they were not found in the same deposits as older animal bones. Ambiguity bred caution. William Buckland discovered the Red Lady of Paviland, as she was later named, and believed she was a Roman buried much later than the animal remains. Biblical chronology underpinned nineteenth-century histories of nations and peoples.13 Buckland reconciled the Bible’s account of human novelty with Earth’s antiquity by proposing a universal deluge in the recent past.14 Given his geological expertise, classifying the Red Lady as Roman sustained broader skepticism. In 1827, Paul Tournal found human bones and pottery shards in Languedoc in southern France. His published account insisted that the remains were mixed with extinct animal bones.15 In 1829, the well-known excavator of French cave sites Jules de Christol found human and extinct animal bones mixed together in caves near Sommières in France. He insisted that if the animal remains were fossils, so too were the human bones. Both Tournal and de Christol published preliminary reports that challenged Cuvier’s position. He contested the findings, and uncertainty remained.

In the 1830s the case for human antiquity strengthened substantially.16 In 1833 Philippe-Charles Schmerling sent a paper to the Société Géologique on two human skulls and tools found among animal bones in caves he had excavated in Liège in Belgium.17 The larger skull was found under a thick bed of rock speckled with extinct animal bones. Schmerling concluded that the human bones must be ancient. Flints and animal bones adapted for use as tools or ornaments corroborated his inference. Schmerling’s medical education, scholarly publications, use of lithographs, insistence that he had personally excavated undisturbed cave sites and a paper submitted to a major learned society all made the Belgian fossils famous and difficult, but not impossible, to dismiss. Geologists such as Lyell and Buckland still inferred later burial as the best explanation (as with the Red Lady). Shortly afterward, Boucher de Perthes made similar finds in Abbeville in 1838. He confidently claimed that his finds proved the existence of ancient humans, but he was accused of drawing bold conclusions from insufficient evidence.18 Ultimately, the “Ante-diluvian Child” exhibition profited from the search for indisputably human fossils. Despite Cuvier’s death eight years earlier, his disbelief created intrigue, while the child’s Belgian origin obliquely associated it with the strongest evidence for human antiquity ever found. The promotional patter worked.

Invitations to see the antediluvian child were taken up by journalists, naturalists, and geologists. The Morning Post’s article was generously peppered with scare quotations referring to the child. The “nodule of flint” was said to slightly resemble an “infant, wanting both arms,” but one “‘destitute of every trace of human organisation.” The writer felt that “we have never seen such a comical caricature of a backbone as this siliceous ‘child’” and so cannot “flatter our geological readers that there is any ground of serious interest or novel speculation attaching to the specimen.” The paper acknowledged that the origin of such flint masses had caused great controversy at the recent British Association of Science meeting in Newcastle. Moreover, while some formations of an “assez bizarre” nature had been found at Diehgen, and more were known from England and Guadeloupe, the child was unlikely to “add to our knowledge on the subject, for it is unaccompanied by any description of its previous (geological) relations.” Having procured the specimen for forty francs but now valuing it at fifty thousand francs, the owner hoped to make an ample fortune. In a telling final flourish, the article observed, “Nihil ex Nihilo fit.”19 The Patriot felt that the fossil resembled the “head and trunk of an infant, completely formed. . . . The head is perfect—the nape of the neck, the articulations of the vertebrae, the bones of the throat, the chest, shoulders, and parts of the arms equally so, and the ribs are distinctly visible. The right arm is broken short off by the shoulder; the left, which is unmutilated, adheres to the side, and is sunk into it. The lower extremities are indistinct, being thrown up into a circular mass below the abdomen.” The journalist confirmed that there was no other geological “problem whose solution offers greater interest than that which depends on the existence or absence of the human antediluvian fossil.”20

Advertisements explicitly welcomed London’s scientific communities. The Patriot enthusiastically noted that Members of the Geological Society were invited to inspect the specimen and hoped that their inspection could finally set the question of human antiquity “at rest.” The hefty admission fee may have been carefully calibrated to appeal to affluent gentlemen, since it was far beyond the means of most workers and commensurate with the membership cost of elite metropolitan societies and gentlemen’s clubs. William Buckland, a popular lecturer at the University of Oxford and twice president of the Geological Society, left unimpressed: “I saw the above, with Mr. Pentland and Sir Francis Chantrey, 12th June, 1840. It is nothing but conc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part One: Narratives
• Part Two: Origins
• Part Three: Time in Transit
• Part Four: Unfinished Business
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• List of Illustrations
• Index