Virginia Zimmerman's Excavating Victorians deploys the idea of the “trace”—a concept she derives particularly from the theorizing of Paul Ricoeur—to excavate, or reveal traces of, nineteenth-century geological and archaeological thought and practice as expressed in Victorian literature. Zimmerman's perspective entails interpreting the interpretations, in effect “excavating” the intellectual and imaginative “excavations” of nineteenth-century writers who formulated or responded to the new scientific and imaginative paradigm based on geological or “deep” time. For Zimmerman, a trace is a complex negotiation between past and present-time understandings of past—“past” as both the time when artifacts originate and the time elapsed since then. A trace is “a relic from the past … an object in the present … a marker of time's passage … the point where time and space come together … the paradoxical evidence of the subjectivity of objects as interpretations shift … over time” (177). A touchstone for Zimmerman's project is Darwin's Plots (1983), Gillian Beer's influential analysis of how narrative strategies shape scientific understanding as well as the poetry and fiction it influences.

In particular, Excavating Victorians registers the intimidating impact of uniformitarian geology. Propagated by James Hutton and Charles Lyell, uniformitarianism posited that small, gradual geological changes, reflecting always the same processes that exist today, produce great changes over expanses of time. As Zimmerman amply demonstrates, this idea, especially when coupled with a fossil record replete with evidence of species extinction, overwhelmed the constricted creationist time scale and left many Victorians feeling small and vulnerable. Furthermore, she asserts that in various ways scientists and writers pushed back by assuming the agency of interpreters. Of course, these are not entirely new ideas. For example, in their quests for reassuring certainties, even for a form of immortality, authors generally strive to create order out of chaos, wholeness out of pieces, and thereby assert their significance. What Zimmerman adds is how extensively the attitudes, activities, and discourses of the excavating sciences informed such recuperative efforts by establishing authority over physical and intellectual historical traces. Zimmerman notes this process in regard to both geology and archaeology, demonstrating that the latter, originally conceived as a branch of the former, was from the first imprinted with a geological understanding of time.

While Excavating Victorians does not reject the truth-value of scientific knowledge, its constructionist orientation toward novels, poems, scientific writings, fossils, geological strata, archaeological sites, and disinterred cultural objects—all serving as texts—allows great latitude for critical reconstruction, and the book ranges widely. On the most basic level, Excavating Victorians provides an engaging overview of nineteenth-century geology and archaeology. But as Zimmerman states, hers is not a history of science; rather, its “focus is on the literature inspired by advances in geology” (6). She models her approach upon Beer's “by attending to the literary discourse that arises out of the science of geology. This body of literature contains works by scientists … Lyell and Gideon Mantell [especially] … and more traditional literary figures, such as Tennyson and Dickens.” Concerning the remains of Londinium and Pompeii, she also “examine[s] writings … in the popular press, travel literature, and the reports of … archeologists” (6).

The introduction establishes the general background and theoretical premises of Excavating Victorians, but it also, like the entire work, engages many literary and nonliterary, canonical and noncanonical, publications, some of them as entertaining as they are obscure—for example, Mary Kendall's 1887 “Lay of the Trilobite” (15–16). Chapter 2 discusses nineteenth-century geological texts that promulgated evidence for an ancient Earth while augmenting the authority and prestige of the geologist. The chapter picks up on Zimmerman's master plot by asserting that, along with other geologists, “Lyell and Mantell ascribed the geologist with the authority to report Earth history,” in effect replacing God in this capacity (30). She shows Lyell's effectiveness in rhetorically crafting uniformitarian ideas for public consumption and maximum effect, especially by evading religious issues, and describes Gideon Mantell's influential textual construction of the heroic geologist who assumes “unequivocal authority” (45). Along the way she illustrates the Victorian passion for fossil collecting and display.

The centerpiece of chapter 3 is Tennyson's The Princess, which again illustrates “efforts to rescue the individual from insignificance” (65), efforts Zimmerman connects to the assertion and undermining of female significance (her book also applies geological interpretation to class structure and imperialism). Chapter 4 concerns archaeology, using parallels that Victorians perceived between the ruins of ancient London and those of Pompeii, which were excavated and interpreted along similar geology-influenced lines. Employing the archaeological model, chapter 5 examines two novels by Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend, whose characters “must stare down geologic and cultural pasts” and “assert themselves into the present urban landscape” while joining “fragments into whole narratives” (143). Chapter 6, a brief conclusion, is entitled “Final Fragments,” perhaps acknowledging the imperfection that necessarily arises from trying to gather together so many and varied types of evidence into one volume. In all of the chapters the protean idea of trace comes and goes, operating in various ways in different contexts, but always focusing on the complicity of time and interpretation.

An exercise in cultural studies and historical epistemology, Excavating Victorians perhaps is more successful in displaying, somewhat like the museum collections it discusses, evidence for the broad impact of geological thinking, including some interesting literary curiosities, than it is in opening up strikingly new critical readings of major texts. Occasionally Zimmerman's interpretations of individual passages, building upon the prevalence of geology-like phenomena in everyday environments and language—rocks, wearing away, metaphorical references to digging and uncovering, and so forth—seem like stretches. Overall, however, Excavating Victorians effectively works to alter readers’ readings of the Victorian cultural landscape. I learned much from it and recommend it to anyone wishing to delve into this terrain.