The Victorians were living in a material world full of new and curious things, and they produced textual worlds in order to come to terms with this plenitude. However, it is clear that for many, the material and textual wor(l)ds were not legible in a satisfactory way (see Cunningham 1994: 4-80). The increasingly mass-produced Victorian things, on spectacular display, say, at the Crystal Palace in 1851, were, on the one hand, triumphantly celebrated and viewed with cultural discomfort on the other. Both responses are evident in the literature of the time (see Mersmann 2001). In many instances, the material intricacies in the textual manoeuvres of Victorian literature, itself a commodity on an increasingly mass-oriented market, predated the insights of recent Theory (with a capital ‘T’). Kurt Tetzeli reminds us of the Victorians’ theoretical sophistication before Theory:

Being fascinated and attracted by the material allure of things and being driven to assemble them, the rare as well as the common, the precious as well as the ordinary, the exotic as well as the homely [… the Victorians] supplemented their fascination and compulsion with a thorough scepticism, an incisive criticism. It did not need a Karl Marx or a Sigmund Freud to tell a Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot or James about the motives, appearances or effects of reification and objectification, idolization and fetishization. (Tetzeli von Rosador 2001: 116-117)

However, in Umberto Eco’s historical fiction The Name of the Rose (1980), Brother William of Baskerville, a medieval Victorian, hints that “signs and the signs of things are used only when we are lacking things” (Eco 1996: 28). It is therefore evident that, no matter how materially sophisticated the Victorians were, their unease with their material culture is substantiated by their signifying activities — or, sometimes, the conspicuous lacking of these. With this in mind, we can add another term to Tetzeli’s list of things the object-obsessed Victorians knew about well before twentieth- and twentyfirst-century Theory: absences — material objects under erasure, spectacles of the void. Visible and palpable as they were, in Victorian literature material objects went missing in a number of ways. There are, for instance, the absences which are a constitutive feature of the emerging crime novel: pieces of evidence, sometimes the corpse of the victim, and of course, the absence and enigma of the perpetrator that keeps the genre going. And, more than a hundred years before the death of the author was announced, the author’s absence in Dickens’s last novel gave rise to intricate cultural negotiations.

It has been observed that “Dickens’s novels are necessary reading for the historian of things, which are often brilliantly — and poetically — described” (Briggs 1990: 19). Indeed, Dickens’s material minutiae, the realia of all areas of the Victorian world and its views, are hallmarks of his fantastically realistic style. The absences inscribed into Dickens’s texts, subtractions, as it were, from fictional worlds teeming with minutely noted material objects, have proven intriguing over the last one and a half centuries — to readers, to critics and, more recently, to the writers of neoVictorian or, more specifically, neo-Dickensian novels. Therefore, if it does not want to treat the Victorian age as a mere cardboard prop, neo-Victorian literature has to come to terms with both the material plenitude of Victorian literature and its other, the circumscribed absences, which in the focus of this essay are Dickensian absences. How, then, do Dickens spin-offs of the new millennium intertextually revise the absent presence of the inimitable’s texts and of the age that neo-Victorianism is dialectically bound to?

Read more on the neovictorianstudies.com website