One of the premises of Time Travelers is that the flourishing field of Victorian studies is built on false pretenses. As historians, literary scholars, and historians of science and ideas, the majority of us find ourselves delicately setting aside an inconvenient truth. We tend to have little Latin and less Greek, whereas many of the men and women we study were steeped in those languages and the cultures to which they belonged—and deployed their knowledge in creative, scholarly, political, and scientific writing as well as in correspondence and at their dinner tables. The Victorians’ inherited sense of time and history was centered on the passage of centuries from Homer's time to their own, with that discrete period set within the somewhat longer biblical narrative of creation and its aftermath. New concepts of geological time and biological evolution, renewed convictions concerning European superiority to peoples elsewhere, and fresh pride in the evidence of progress—all these were interpreted through a set of linguistic and literary assumptions that are now almost impossible to reconstruct. The Victorian invention of scholarly disciplines (notably of history itself in its modern form, but also of political economy, biblical exegesis, and other fields) took place in this context. And the Victorian reinvention of universities happened, to a large extent, because contemporary students were not equipped for the linguistic barriers embedded in the old curriculum.

To overcome this obstacle, the contributors to Time Travelers engaged in a bold experiment in interdisciplinarity (funded by the Leverhulme Trust) designed to reassess the nineteenth-century sense of time and the past. Established Victorianists of several disciplinary stripes joined forces with classicists and then incorporated a handful of talented early career scholars to form the Cambridge Victorian Studies Group. A trivial but telling example appears in Mary Beard's foreword about the meetings of this extraordinary team: a Victorian author might be identified as quoting Horace, unbeknownst to the modernists in the room; but any resulting smugness on the part of the classicists is punctured by the information that the passage refers to a notorious divorce case. The result of this teamwork is an edited volume much more coherent than are others of the genre, twelve essays artfully organized around the themes of narratives, origins, time in transit, and unfinished business. Contributors engage with each other and with recent scholarship, challenging assumptions about nineteenth-century pride in progress and sense of superiority: Victorian complacency can also be read as anxiety and disquiet. Similarly, they challenge the narrowness inherent in humanities academia, interrogating the way that (in Simon Goldhill's words) “increasing professionalization and institutionalization of the academic disciplines through the century helped formalize these distinctions as constitutive firewalls” (72).

In “Narratives,” co-editor Sadiah Qureshi's powerful chapter “Looking to Our Ancestors” addresses the debates about human descent and extinction in the context of antiquity and evolution. Those conversations, now neatly subdivided into the disciplines of ethnography, imperial history, and history of science, were conducted, simultaneously and in public, in the political context of settler colonialism. In another chapter, “Looking around the World,” Peter Mandler discusses the way Britons in search of “primitive” societies developing into civilized peoples instead found themselves having to write unanticipated stories about unforeseen encounters. And Adelene Buckland turns to geology and literature, exploring magical beings like gnomes who helped Victorians to imagine the unimaginable.

Part two, “Origins,” begins with a superb essay by Goldhill (“Ad Fontes”) about the return to original sources that so preoccupied the first generation of professional academic historians and their counterparts in other disciplines. For the really important questions, whether about the annals of early England, the text of the scriptures, or the formation of rocks, the available sources were merely copies, often in multiple versions and ripe for editing. Helen Brookman's chapter “In the Beginning,” meanwhile, goes back to the beginning of English literature, to the status of the seventh-century Cædmon as the first English poet. That was important to the project of establishing English literature as a subject of university study, complete with periodization, language learning, and genre boundaries. For Astrid Swenson, in “Under False Pretenses,” the focus is the trade in fake antiquities and objects unearthed from the colonies. Forgeries were disquieting; they raised questions about authorship and attribution, about the recent past and deep history. But “telling lies about the past” (111) extended even to neo-Gothic and neoclassical architecture, and the rhetoric of authenticity could conceal a practice of reproduction. Part two concludes with “Through the Proscenium Arch,” in which Rachel Bryant Davies explores the way classical mythology, in the form of toy theaters and other ephemeral objects, was marketed for children.

With “Time in Transit,” part three offers a series of perspectives on the editors’ themes of origin and narrative. Michael Ledger-Lomas writes about pilgrimage as an encounter with scriptural time and imperial space. Working with responses to the Egyptian Book of the Dead, David Gage proposes a new chronology for the Victorian fascination with death. Clare Pettit, meanwhile, considers responses to the past in terms of the ocean, variously through travel, the telegraph, and sea creatures.

The final section, “Unfinished Business,” is about the “what it meant to be living inside a present so enriched, expanded, and multiplied by the proliferation of competing and contested histories” (Adelene Buckland's introduction, xxiii). Both Jocelyn Betts, in “Looking Forward,” and Daniel C. S. Wilson, in “How We Got Here,” qualify our conventional understanding of the Victorian faith in the future by teasing out tensions and skepticisms that were visible inside the rhetoric of progress. Both Betts's and Wilson's essays discuss books that were well known in their own time but have slipped out of both the literary and historical canons of Victorian studies.

Time Travelers is a useful, rich, thought-provoking set of essays that ought to make a substantial impact, not least in the interdisciplinary seminar classroom where it could shape a semester's conversation and inspire any number of research assignments.