Are We Victorian?
In 1875, Anthony Trollope published The Way We Live Now, a novel about financial crises, political corruption, debt, and xenophobia. These topics are familiar to us as well: The Way We Live Now is, in many ways, still the way we live now.
Much recent debate in Victorian studies has concerned “presentism”—the idea that we still live with in a Victorian world. Presentism says that there is not much new about “neoliberalism:” as the manifesto of the V21 collective puts it, “In finance, resource mining, globalization, imperialism, liberalism, and many other vectors, we are Victorian, inhabiting, advancing, and resisting the world they made."