The Success Of Zimmerman's Study

A chapter on Tennyson and geology might seem unsurprising in light of In Memoriarrfs

celebrated view of the extinctions evidenced on 'scarped cliff and quarried stone' but Zimmerman takes her analysis in a more novel direction by analysing the place of geology in The Princess (1850), published the same year. Earth science proves equally resonant here, even offering, in her account, a model for a 'medley' (Tennyson's description of the poem) in which pieces with different temporalities is assembled in a museum-like collection. As this chapter explores nature, science, the landscape, change, gender, and a geological expedition within the poem, the various geological connections it makes become themselves a bit medley-like, but its Thomas Sabo Jewellery central claim seems original and striking: that part of the point of Tennyson's ambitious yet strange work is to imagine 'the possibility of meaningful life lived in deep time'.

As a science, mid-Victorian archaeology was newer and less codified than geology. But here too Zimmerman finds a coeval relation between past and present, and an emphasis on both the power of the individual observer and the strange endurance of the traces of individual life. In her account, these themes loom especially large in nineteenth-century fascination with Pompeii including a frame of mind that treated Pompeii as a something of an echo of modern London, rather than the other way around and with the relics of Londinium paradoxically thrown up by Victorian civic modernisation. Zimmerman unearths similar views of literal and figurative excavation in two of Dickens's great novels. Her analysis of Little Dorrit emphasises its tracing of Thomas Sabo Charms the past via relics to be variously interpreted in the present (the pocket watch with the initials 'D.N.F 'do not forget') and its uniformitarian approach to time, as well as highlighting Amy Dorrit's coeval vision of the ruins of ancient Rome and of her life at the Marshalsea Prison. And Zimmerman enlivens a longstanding critical obsession with the symbolism of the dustheaps of Our Mutual Friend by reading them as literal dustheaps, collections of leftover matter to be excavated and removed, in a novel obsessed with recovering and identifying human relics, including bodies.

Part of the success of Zimmerman's study is her ability to uncover geological tropes in unexpected places: the tears of Princess Ida, the pebbles of Matthew Arnold's 'Dover Beach' (1867). (In fact, Zimmerman's brief remarks on 'Dover Beach' are suggestive enough to make one wish she had broadened her literary focus beyond three works by two writers.) She also convincingly argues for subterranean connections between geological or archaeological questions and more familiar issues such as women's education in The Princess and bureaucracy in Our Mutual Friend. Furthermore, her book is accessible and fluently written, although it does have the strange tic of repeating entire quotations, in one case a passage more than ten lines long, without any acknowledgment that the reader has come across these relics before. But in keeping with its emphasis on the coevalness that comes into play when we interpret the traces of the past, Excavating Victorians unearths and analyses its material compellingly enough to become an essential quarry for future investigations of its subjects.

by: Shirley Green

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