In their everyday lives, the Victorians encountered mechanical reproductions of human and animal life with an unprecedented regularity. “A most extraordinary amount of mechanical ingenuity,” noted one of the era’s countless popular science writers, “has been brought to bear upon the construction of small automatic toys, which are sold in the streets for a few pence.”¹ This has led some latter-day collectors and museums to refer to the late nineteenth century as a “golden age of automata” (as Kara Reilly explores in Chapter 1). At the time, however, this proliferation of automata was typically accompanied, not by stereotypically brash Victorian techno-triumphalism, but self-deprecating, even self-effacing, comparisons with the automaton creations of old. “Inventors,” sighed the British author, editor, and lawyer James Burnley in 1886, “no longer take the trouble to construct automata of such wonderful capacity as the flute-player of Vaucanson, the trumpeter of Maetzel [sic], or the coach and horses of M. Camuz.”² We have come to expect doleful musings on belatedness such as this from the end of the nineteenth century, a period in which (as Grace Moore observes) many believed that “the great technological and creative accomplishments of the early and mid-Victorians marked the pinnacle of human achievement and that anything to follow would simply be a pale imitation of what had gone before.”³ But ideas of technological decline were already being expressed at the very beginning of the Victorian period. “Weak imitations of Vaucanson and Maetzel [sic] are to be found occasionally at popular exhibitions” noted Andrew Ure, in his entry on automata for A Dictionary of Arts, Manufactures, and Mines (1840), but “very complete automata have not been made of late years, because they are very expensive; and by soon satisfying curiosity, they cease to interest.”⁴ In the Victorian period, then, Victorian automata were devalued in more ways than one.

However, if the hundreds of Victorian-era books, articles, and encyclopedia entries on automata are any guide, automata did anything but “cease to interest” the Victorians. It is just that these manifestations of Victorian print culture are often largely retrospective, and concerned with constructing the historical automaton-maker canons that we remain familiar with today: Typically, they devote the vast majority of their time and space to first touring classical automata, then outlining the creations of Maelzel, Maillardet, and Vaucanson, before only then (possibly) finishing with a few lines on Robert-Houdin and/or Maskelyne and Cooke.⁵ In Victorian literary fiction, too, automata often occupy a retrospective space: One might think, for instance, of J. Walker’s 1866 comic romance Modus Operandi; Or, The Automaton Chess-player: A Play in Three Acts. Even Victorian automaton stories ostensibly set in the present day – such as the demonic mechanical “dancing man” that makes a cameo appearance in Jerome K. Jerome’s Novel Notes and the mock-chess-playing android in Clementina Black’s “The Troubles of an Automaton” – typically revolved around one-off, artisan, clockwork creations of a kind more suited to the pre-industrial, pre-mass-production, eighteenth rather than nineteenth century.⁶ What does it mean for artificial images of human and animal life to figure not as avant-garde emissaries of ever-advancing technological progress (as they did in the eighteenth century and as they do today) but as awkward hangovers from the not recent, not distant, but middle past? How did these machines complicate Victorian understandings of progressively linear technological advancement? In Chapter 15, Richard Menke casts Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s automaton novel L’Ève future as an intensely Decadent production; in some ways, we can see Victorian automata more generally as simultaneously anti-Decadent and Decadent: cheap, newly democratic symbols of domestic, bourgeois, mass-produced conformity, occupying a space of self-consciously post-classical decline.

The Victorian effacement of Victorian automata continues to maintain a powerful hold over our own historical imaginings today; and, with a few notable exceptions, scholarly discussions of mechanical life tend to skip from Enlightenment and Romantic androids to twentieth-century robots, overlooking Victorian automata almost entirely.⁷ Indeed, Adelheid Voskuhl uncannily echoes the Victorian voices just quoted when she proclaims that, “in the long and diverse history of attempts to create artificial life,” “the eighteenth century stands out … in the nineteenth century, automata became mechanical dolls that were mass-produced and no longer android automata.”⁸ This, though, is a curiously elitist foreclosing of the category automaton – after all, to the extent that mimetic reproduction is a defining feature of automata, mass reproduction surely makes the kind of anxieties that automata provoke and embody only more acute. Indeed, while the Victorians might have sometimes presented their automaton creations as derivative historical afterthoughts, they did also insist on the categorizational affinity of their cheap mass-produced automata with automata of the past.⁹ Moreover, as scholars of the fin de siècle have long realized, rather than justifying a turning away, the expression of belatedness is itself a richly fascinating and affective pose to strike – a pose that rewards focused study.

As is sometimes noted, the Victorians were the first “autonymic” period (i.e., this was the first historical time period in which those then living gave themselves the name – Victorian – that we know them by today). What Victorian discussions of automata underline, however, is the lingering fluidity of this kind of periodization for the Victorians. Their clockwork innards ensure automata serve as emblems not just of mechanicity but of time and temporal standardization. But the Victorian automaton discourse complicates these associations: Victorian automata almost always contain ghosts of the Romantic and Enlightenment automata that they simultaneously canonize, echo, and subvert. One might think, for instance, of the many board-game-playing automata created in this period (Ajeeb, Mephisto, Psycho …). As such, the chapters in this collection range across conventional periodic boundaries. Minsoo Kang explores continuities and schisms between Romantic and Victorian uses of words like “automaton” and “puppet.” My own chapter with Stephen Knight chases refractions of Kempelen’s Chess-Playing Turk, through Poe, into Victorian detective fiction. Simone Natale uses Poe to look forward to the human–machine interactions of twenty-first-century artificial intelligence (AI).

Fiona Coll has perceptively argued that the “unceremonious dethroning of the automaton as the acme of technological innovation [opened] up the machine’s more figurative register of signification.”¹⁰ In other words, presenting their automaton creations through the register of belated afterthought enabled the Victorians to move from automata to automatism – a movement this collection tracks.