![]() ![]() Therein lies the tension: on the one hand the Victorian novel represents itself as something that transcends its status as an object, while on the other digitization insists on the words as objects. The digital humanities, however, examine the text to varying degrees as a physical object texts are bags of words, quantifiable, chartable, and otherwise constructed objects. William Cohen’s assertion that “in a particularly literary register, sensation affords writers a means of concretely representing emotions, desires, and impulses that tend-at least in nineteenth-century literary idioms-to be otherwise unrepresentably abstract or ethereal.” Simultaneously representational yet “actual life” embodiment in the Victorian novel forms a link to feeling that cannot be properly articulated. This something-that-exceeds comes together in the emotions and affects of the bodies entangled in Dickens’s “inseparable connexion,” both reader and character. Placing the Victorian family weeping over the hearth-angel (her adherence to this trope is admittedly wibbly-wobbly) Clara calls on a representation that recognizes itself as a representation: a novelistic depiction of sentiment as something exceeding the novel itself. ![]() In short, when we feel novels contain something that one simply cannot quantify, we feel that way because the Victorian novel told us that one cannot quantify the novel.ĭoctor Who’s neo-Victorian impulse, then, arises from a discourse regarding the representation of Victorian sentiment the Victorian novel put forward about itself. If one attempts to read these representations digitally, the impulse of these novels warns readers, one reduces bodies to machines and thus reads improperly. The root of this representation lies in Victorian novels’ self-representation, the novel’s paradoxical awareness that it attempts to represent an irreducibly embodied sentimentality. The Victorian Christmas as the epitome of sentiment suggests that emotion, feelings, affect-to have a fleshy body-resists the disembodying impulse of technology. But, The Doctor suggests, one cannot digitize sentiment. The impulse behind digital humanities, from topic modelling to mapping and beyond, is to represent digitally the representations the humanities investigate. Dickens, at a dinner in Edinburgh, declaims, “I feel as if the deaths of the fictitious creatures had endeared us to each other as real afflictions deepen friendships in actual life I feel as if they had been real persons, whose fortunes we had pursued together in inseparable connexion.” The Victorian novel presents itself as an “actual life” filled with “real persons” whose sentiments surge off the page and beyond the novel as physical object. Victorian novels insist on the embodiment of textuality. Doctor Who taps into a nostalgia that foregrounds the Victorian as a site where authentic sentimentality overcomes inhuman and disembodied technology. To be more particular, though: a Victorian family crying on a Victorian Christmas Eve. At the last moment, The Doctor stumbles upon the secret weapon to use against the horde: a family crying on Christmas Eve. ![]() In the latest Doctor Who Christmas Special (watch from 53:41 to 54:30), the Great Intelligence, a disembodied and purely intellectual power, threatens to take over Victorian London with an army of snowmen.
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