Digital Victorians: From Nineteenth-Century Media to Digital Humanities by Paul Fyfe (review)

Paul Fyfe is eminently placed to give us Digital Victorians, an accessibly written, scholarly informed book. His background in literary studies and the digital humanities (DH) has seen him take part in a number of major international projects relating to Victorian literature and culture with a focus on digital methodologies, and this expertise is brought together here in a useful and illuminating work.

In his introduction to Digital Victorians, Fyfe immediately dispatches the potential charge of anachronistic analysis, arguing that such "presentism" makes the past "legible" and that bringing current academic thinking about DH to bear on the Victorian period only heightens our understanding of evolving knowledge generation practices and their associated media technologies (3). Fyfe situates his own intervention in such debates against the work of an impressive cavalcade of scholars, including Sharon Marcus, Matthew Rowlinson, Andrew Piper, Roger Whitson, Lynda Nead, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Megan War, Caroline Levine, Devin Griffiths, Mary Mullen, Wai Chi Dimock, Lisa Lowe, and others.