Excavating Victorians.(Book review)

Excavating Victorians, by Virginia Zimmerman; pp. x + 231. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007, $65.00, $21.95 paper.

"A Roman bracelet discovered in the mudflats of the Thames," Virginia Zimmerman writes in her introduction to Excavating Victorians, not only "suggests the mortality of the woman who once wore the jewel," but also presents the finder with an "opportunity to reanimate the woman." A trace from the past, the bracelet "asserts its presence as ... an object of study and interest, both scientific and aesthetic" (20). The recovery and, indeed, invention of the remote past by nineteenth-century geology and art in their encounters with trace fragments, including fossils and human artifacts, is the unifying thread in Zimmerman's analyses of a diverse selection of geological, archaeological, and literary works by Charles Lyell, Gideon Mantell, Alfred Tennyson, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, …