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.
 

Adelene Buckland is a senior lecturer in English literature at King’s College London. She is author of Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology, also published by the University of Chicago Press, and coeditor of A Return to the Common Reader: Print Culture and the Novel, 1850–1900. Sadiah Qureshi is a senior lecturer in modern history at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Foreword
Mary Beard

Introduction
Adelene Buckland

Part One: Narratives

1. Looking to Our Ancestors
Sadiah Qureshi

2. Looking Around the World
Peter Mandler

3. The World beneath Our Feet
Adelene Buckland

Part Two: Origins

4. Ad Fontes
Simon Goldhill

5. In the Beginning
Helen Brookman

6. Under False Pretenses
Astrid Swenson

7. Through the Proscenium Arch
Rachel Bryant Davies

Part Three: Time in Transit

8. On Pilgrimage
Michael Ledger-Lomas

9. Across the Divide
David Gange

10. At Sea
Clare Pettitt

Part Four: Unfinished Business

11. Looking Forward
Jocelyn Betts

12. How We Got Here
Daniel Wilson

Acknowledgments
List of Contributors
List of Illustrations
Index