Introduction

This edition of RaVon grows out of the 2007 NAVSA conference on Victorian Materialities, and, more particularly, out of the panel on Materiality and Memory—a panel that attracted a large number of submissions, and that raised many issues that were energetically discussed not just in its three sessions, but in other panels as well. The title, of course, is strongly reminiscent of Matter and Memory (Matière et mémoire, 1896): Henri Bergson’s philosophical diagnosis of the nature of experience, in which he asserts the reality both of matter and of the spirit. It is through the body, with its own unarguable biological materiality, that one perceives the matter of the exterior world; it is in the mind—the unconscious as well as the conscious mind—that associations, apprehensions, and indeed memory is formed and found. Bergson’s is not a pathological model of mind, since Bergson believes in the existence and power of something more nebulous than this, however much he also understands the importance of physiological “cerebral vibrations” (Bergson 23). It is, nonetheless, a model that unmistakably elevates the importance of each human individual, whose sense of the present, of the immanence of duration, can only be apprehended through his or her consciousness of the body. While for Bergson the concept of the image—less than a thing, but more charged with interpretive potential than a mere representation—provides a crucial mediating concept between the real and the ideal, he keeps returning to the centrality of the individual consciousness. Only in such a consciousness do the “discontinuous objects of daily experience” hold—however tenuously—together. Without it, matter “resolves itself into numberless vibrations, all linked together in uninterrupted continuity, all bound up with each other, and traveling in every direction like shivers through an immense body” (Bergson 208). The whole of NAVSA 2007 could be seen as a celebration of these discontinuous objects as they manifested themselves within Victorian culture—or more particularly, a celebration of the idea of things, and hence a reflection of an influential turn in Victorian studies in recent years. In general terms, such a focus on the material world has several points of origin: cultural studies, especially those that examine the circumstances as well as the economics of production and consumption; visual culture, with its concern for the Victorian fascination with—and with recording—the surfaces of their world; book history, directing our attention to the physical volume or periodical or pamphlet or newspaper in our hands, with its advertisements and illustrations as well as its columns of print; and an understanding of empire (and, indeed, travel more generally) that has demanded that we become alert to the traffic in material objects as well as in people and in ideas. Asa Briggs’s Victorian Things (1989), with its interest in how things were used, valued, and related to one another, its first part taking its opening epigraph from T. S. Eliot’s Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (“Even the humblest material artefact, which is the product and symbol of a particular civilization, is an emissary of the culture out of which it comes”), and its early quotation of Karl Marx’s declaration that “to discover the various uses of things is the work of history,” has come to seem a particularly prescient volume. And there was plenty of scope for Victorianists to carry forward the work performed for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by the contributors to the magisterial volume of essays edited by John Brewer and Roy Porter, Consumption and the World of Goods (1993). Here, the editors describe how all their authors firmly believe that “our understanding of the development of western societies …