Launching Digital Victorians with Paul Fyfe

Let’s Celebrate on April 11

Join the RSVP Digital Events committee on April 11 in a celebration of Paul Fyfe’s exciting new book, Digital Victorians: From Nineteenth-Century Media to Digital Humanities (Stanford University Press, 2024), which has much to interest RSVP members. Dr. Fyfe will begin by introducing the book before focusing our attention on material especially relevant to Victorian media and periodical print. There will then be plenty of time for discussion and celebration.

In Digital Victorians, Dr. Fyfe reveals how today’s digital information challenges were foreshadowed by nineteenth-century media transformations. He argues that Victorian responses to their era’s telecommunications revolution and print explosion continue to shape our own reactions to digital change, suggesting that the anxieties and adaptations of the Victorian era laid the groundwork for similar concerns and affordances in modern digital humanities.

Engaging with the work of Thomas De Quincey, George Eliot, George du Maurier, Henry James, and Robert Louis Stevenson, Fyfe traces striking parallels between Victorian concerns—about machine-driven reading, technological obsolescence, privacy intrusions, and shifting professional landscapes—and our contemporary digital dilemmas. This groundbreaking work makes the provocative case that the Victorians were “already digital,” offering a compelling prehistory of current efforts within the humanities to adapt to changing digital media ecologies.