Episode Nine: Charles Dickens and the Ominous Bald Head Transcript

By Clarissa Mewhort

V: Alright

C: Oh we’re getting started! We’re going to jump right into it. ‘Cause, there’s— yeah—

V: Well, first, hello! Welcome to Lit With Vik, where I, Vik, talk books and other forms of media that are related to literature. And this is Clarissa.

C: And I... am a cryptid.

V: Yes. Sometimes Clarissa just comes out of the woodwork and disappears.

C: I don’t have social media, so I don’t exist. Except for when I do.

V: Yes, and that is on this podcast!

C: Exclusively.

V: You’ve appeared twice—

C: Yes.

V:— and will probably appear more times, we’ve planned a few things. So, this episode is very special because we’re doing a discussion presentation.

C: Yeah! So this is actually— this is equal parts your podcast and our project for one of our classes.

V: Yes!

C: We’re in a seminar for Victorian New Media.

V: Yeah, so this is Viktoria and Clarissa’s version of Victorian New Media.

C: Featuring Dickens.

V: Featuring Dickens. This Viktorian Media’s version of Victorian Media. . .

C: Viktoria’s new media’s version of Victorian New Media, I mean, how far down can we go!

V: Well— How many “Vi(k/c)toria”s can we put in here—

C: *laughs*

V: I mean... Viktoria with a “K” because god forbid people spell my name wrong—

C: Yeah.

V: — especially on my podcast!

C: Come after you with, like, a sniper rifle. *Ch-chk*

V: Yeah.

C: Moving on! Back to— no tangents!

V: No tangents! We’ve got—

C: We said that! We said no tangents.

V: Except for radiation buttons, that was it. But we’re not doing that!

C: We’re not doing that, no. That’s funny, but no.

V: *laughs*

C: We’re going to talk about Dickens, and we’re going to talk about Dickens in terms of new media, and I... so badly would like to know your opinion on the myths we tell ourselves about history and science and the science of— and the history of science. Like, that is such a fascinating topic to me, because we tell ourselves all sorts of stories about, like, “oh, rubber gloves were invented by a guy who loved his wife so much and he invented them for her” and Dickens, in Household Words, is really creating these sort of new... myths.

V: Yes. One of the things that I think people often think about Dickens is because he’s a Victorian, that then he’s against science, and from what we see, he’s fascinated by science. He’s putting it into Household Words, he’s putting it into his works, and it’s— he’s making it approachable for the public. I mean, one of the main missions for Household Words was to be in everyone’s household around the world. Even though—

C: Ehhhhhh...

V: —what’s in an English man’s household is gonna be different in a household all across the globe. Different cultures, different ideas.

C: Well, and that ties back into this idea that I touched on in our class briefly, where Victorians were really enchanted by thier new technology they saw nothing wrong with being in love with progress. Being enchanted by it and finding it magical how much science coud do, and I think is fascinating to read Dickens and to read it knowing now, as we do, all of the science behind it and being taught all the science behind it from a young age. But to read it and to read so much love for the science in his words?

V: I think that’s one of the reasons why I was really shocked by it, you know, when I was reading one of his short stories, there’s a— and I’m forgetting the name of it— the story we read, in class?

C: It’ll be cited in the footnotes in the transcript.

V: Yes. Anyways, um. It’s this man, he’s travelling all across the globe and... he’s very unlikely because he is a man who’s basically come up from nothing, he’s not agile, he’s a middle aged man— quite pudgy, and he’s going to all these places. He’s going to America, he’s going to the deserts, he’s ju— he’s going everywhere. Then we later o— later learn that it’s because he’s going in to this panorama, and he’s viewing everything inside of a panorama. Which, in Victorian times, you were basically just standing in the center of this thing, where you were seeing this three-sixty degree view. I worked at an immersive exhibition, so it’s like a modern version of this panorama, there, where you’re basically walking inside of a painting in three hundred and sixty degree view. People do this! It’s still a thing! And the joke at the end of this is, is of course, like he’s not actually travelled, he’s not actually learnt anything. But isn’t this technology great? I don’t need to learn anything, I don’t need to travel, I don’t need—

C: *laughs*

V: — to spend money and learn about a culture in order to feel like I’ve been somewhere!

C: Right, right. And I think it’s fascinating how much of Victorian attitude towards technology has carried through. Not necessarily the wide-eyed enthusiasm and enchantment, I think that’s sort of faded off, more or—

V: Yeah.

C: — less, now that we live in a surveillance state, and every time something new happens we’re all like “and how are you going to use this against me?” But just in terms of the way we interface with new media was so deeply shaped—

V: Yes.

C: — with how new media was introduced in Dickens’s time. So the panorama! That’s a great example. What do we go to the IMAX for?

V: For that immersive experience!

C: For the immersive experience.

V: Or like when you go to Disneyland, they have Four D Experience! Where basically it’s 3D glasses and you get shot at in the face with like, fart smells or water...

C: I remember they like, jiggled our seats, and I got motion sick.

V: Oh, yep. Yep. God. Just, experience. I think Disneyland is like, one of those places where they’re like: “Look at this Science!”

C: Science!

V: And I think Walt Disney, because he grew up in that sort of time period—

C: —Yeah.

V: — where it’s- it’s new media, we’re- we’re not as overwhelmed with it as we are right now, and so of course, that reflects in a, like, like, not only his fiction, his sort of works like, say, 2000 Leagues Under the Sea— “Look at all this technology!”

C: Look at it isn’t it great!

V: “Wow!” But also in the Disney parks, because, you know, you’ve got Epcott, and The Lands of Tomorrow. You see this wonderful future, look at all this science, this is so cool! And now we’re just, we’re so overwhelmed with science, that now they’re just basically turning into regular theme park, for, you know, not learning! But for just, Disney- Disney movies.

C: Well, for getting cash out of pockets. And I think that that’s- I think there’s a temptation to say that the reason why Victorians were so enthused by all these new form of media was a certain degree of naivetè.

V: Mmm-hm.

C: And currently we’re reading... I’m gonna say this wrong... a lao-si-dee-an. A Laodicean!

V: A Laudicean.

C: A Laudicean—

V: Yes.

C: — and it’s a Thomas Hardy novel, which focuses so heavily on all of the negative parts of... this new technology of the telegraph and this new technology the photograph, where it’s talking bout how much fraud could be committed with them. So it’s not that the Victorians didn’t see these negative things coming in, but what we have now, in our response to new media is not a lack of naivetè, it’s not a jaded sense, it’s an overwhelming!

V: Yeah, it’s constant, we’re always being bombarded with this information about how everything we consume can ultimately go wrong. I mean, we joked about uranium buttons at the start of this.

C: And it’s a cultural ennui. A cultural sort of... depression, where if you’re enthused, you’re stupid.

V: Yes.

C: And I love the Victorians weren’t doing that. I love that Dickens is pretty much saying, “if you’re enthused about this, you’re smart!”

V: It—

C: “It’s something to be enthused about.”

V: It’s something to look into and ‘cause you know what, excitement creates innovation!

C: And I love— Dickens did a... tour of a photography studio, and wrote that up in Household Words. That was so fascinating because not only does he go really in-depth on what a Degaurrotype is and what all of these different photography types are— which of course, I already knew, because of my sister, who’s an artist— but— he goes into all the depths— but he’s also tying it into a narrative, and I don’t think that, at the time, this would have seemed like an intrusion into the narrative? It would have just seemed like part of it. It would have seemed so right to have all these explanations embedded in this text of the narrative of Dickens going to this photography studio and finding these things out. And there was just a deep interest in how things worked.

V: Yes! And you know what? One of the reasons why, as historians— and here’s me breaking in my history degree now that I’m done it—

C: Woo-hoo!

V: One of the things that historians do is we actually read quite a lot of fiction from the period we’re reading about. And people think, “well, you’re historians, why are you reading fiction?” And the answer is that you get to see the perspectives of people living in that time and how they interacted with thoughts and ideas in, like, their writing. And Dickens is doing this!

C: Yeah! And one of the things that you can really do with fiction is if you can find the central parts of it that make it... fictive— so whether that’s like, Anthony Trollop novel we read where it’s just that the story is made up and nothing else is made up—

V: Yeah.

C: —or if it’s something like Dracula, where the entire premise of “there’s a man who’s also a vampire” is made up. Once you take away the “there’s a man who’s also a vampire,” the— the stenograph. Stenography, shorthand, the telegraph they use, all of the photographs they use, all of those in Storker’s novel are being used in these authentic ways.

V: Yes. And also let’s also talk about travel!

C: Right!

V: Because travel was being revolutionized at this time with the steam engine, with the steamboat, we’re- we’re faster, like—

C: The world has expanded and contracted all at once.

V: Yeah. The sort of expansion and the shortening of space-time.

C: Mmm-hm. I talked about this quite a lot in the presentation I did. “Complete annihilation of space-time.”

V: Dun dun dun!

C: I love Victorian views headings so much. I love them so much.

V: We should learn much from Victorian news headings and just—

C: We should bring them back.

V: Yeah. Then again, Victorian news headings are part of the reason why we have such a bad relationship in the true crime community.

C: Mmm.

V: We're not even going to go into that. I have episode coming out on that. So stay tuned, shameless plug.

C: Yeah.

V: I’m sorry Clarissa.

C: I have Thoughts. But let's have thoughts on Dickens!

V: Let’s have thoughts on Chucky D, and not just like with regular technology, let's talk about the printing press and readings.

C: Let's talk about literacy.

V: Let's talk about literacy. We're talking about like also the fact that households are changing.

C: Household compositions are changing too. This is an important thing to remember as much as the Industrial Revolution started to change this in the early 1700s, this is a time period where you're no longer living with your married siblings. You're no longer living with your parents. Your parents don't move back in with you until they're really, really old. Like the family unit is shrinking in this period.

V: We're beginning to get the idea of what will eventually be the nuclear family.

C: It is fascinating.

V: And we're also seeing people who've never cooked before, beginning to learn how to cook. I mean, we get the first modern cookbook author, Eliza Acton, who I love very much. She's fascinating. Poetess turned cookbook writer, really, really cool. But Charles Dickens, he and his wife created their own cookbook together.

C: And also, I just love— the one part about Dickins that I love, I feel like I should have said this in the beginning of the episode. We have a Dickens fan and somebody who really deeply does not like him, I do not like him.

V: Yeah, I was gonna say can you guess who does and who doesn't who doesn't like Dickens?

C: I don't like him.

V: I love him. I've got a book in front of me called Dinner with Dickens, which takes some of his recipes and letters as well.

C: And I know that it might be a bit odd to hear that I don't like him, given how much praise I've been giving him in this episode. I don't like him because I don't like his fiction because of personal taste. I think he's an excellent author and I'm definitely in favor of studying him even personally—

V: Yeah.

C:— I think I need to study him, but he's not what I would pick up on the casual basis.

V: Yeah.

C: But I love, especially love, his depictions of food.

V: Yes, me too. And I think one of the reasons why we have such a big connection with Christmas in this time is because of Dickens’ portrayal of food.

C: The man who invented Christmas mayhaps?

V: Yes, yes, Dr. Martin, before I chose to become an English major, did a presentation on this way back. It was really cool. But also, we see a lot of Dickens' thoughts on food and other pieces of picture like Great Expectations, which I read as a little 17-year-old and made a big impression on me.

C: Hard Times.

V: Hard Times, yes. I mean, you've ranted so many—

C: Weirdest footnote I have ever read in my entire life. Goddamn Broadview editions. I was reading hard times for early Victorian literature class, not the same class. And it had a footnote on a luncheon. And it was like, it had lamb with mushroom ketchup and they drink an IPA and they had this salad and they had this other thing. And I was like, “Great, the hell is mushroom ketchup.” Like, what is that” So you go down to the footnote “an IPA is an India Pale Ale.” And I was like, “What the hell are you talking about?” People still drink that stuff! What— what is mushroom— I Googled it. It's like we would call it mushroom relish.

V: Yeah. Ketchup as we know, it was much later on then you would think, yeah, but I'm not going to get into food history here because I love it.

C: No tangents!

V: No tangents. But like just talking about the revolutionizing of the household, Dickins saw that! And he and his wife, it's believed he'd co-authored it and had a huge influence on it. They created this cookbook or basically showing how to be a host or hostess.

C: Mm-hmm

V: And it had some recipes in there! There's a gin punch and stuff...

C: That sounds excellent.

V: Yeah. I feel like I would get hammered on— Dickens’s gin punch—

C: Oh yes. Oh yes, trashed, trashed. But looping back to this idea of the revolutionary aspect of the printing press and how much print is happening? Magazines?

V: Yes

C: As a new media form in this era, it's so interesting to me because Dickens’s household words, but also this is how Dickens gets his start.

V: Yes

C: He writes for newspapers—

V: Yeah.

C: —and he's paid by the word, which is another reason that I don’t like him. *laughs*

V: Well, n— That's actually a misconception.

C: Oh?

V: Yeah.

C: Do correct me.

V: Yes. Dr. Martin, actually clarified this on my Victorian literature course. It was the serialization, he was paid by the chapter.

C: Ohhh, of course, of course.

V: Not by the word. Not by the word.

C: Thank you.

V: Yeah. No problem. Because if many people got paid by the word, you would just have these endless.

C: Oscar Wilde? *laughs*

V: Yes. Oscar Wilde only published one novel, so it's probably a good thing. You would just have entire section just talking about, you know, porcelain plates which he collected.

C: Whoo, I’m gonna hurt my ribs, alright.

V: Okay don— don’t— But I was just going to save the revolutionizing of the household and stuff as well. Like we're getting cookbooks and we were talking about this earlier. We're getting reviews.

C: Restaurants!

V: Yes.

C: Yeah.

V: But this also brings in the downside to these new technologies, which I am like. We're going to talk about this, which is that we're getting, of course, mass propaganda and the newly literate public is of course consuming this. They might not have the best education, so we don't know, they don't know what they're actually consuming if it's actually true or not. This is why I have so many issues with the true crime community now, because it takes a lot of influence from this, the sensationalist papers and stuff.

C: Penny dreadfuls.

V: Penny dreadfuls. And also like these... A lot of true crime stories, they influenced a lot of the fiction at the time because a lot of, you know, people wanted to consume drama—

C: Yeah.

V: —and they wanted all this stuff. And so the advances in the printing press, the advances in literacy, the advances in technology. They have a downside.

C: This is also the time when we've been talking about this in a different class, our 17th century literature class.

V: Yes.

C: This is the time when people started reading alone and not reading out loud and not reading as a community thing. I think people don't quite grasp the huge shift that this was.

V: Yes.

C: To go from being sort of a communal activity where it'll be you and me and our friend and one of us will be reading and the other two would be like sewing or doing some sort of handcraft, into reading by yourself alone and nobody to talk too with this. And there'll be to react with this. And this I think ties into the propaganda thing because all of a sudden there's no second opinion built into the process.

V: Exactly. And, you know, one of the reasons why I think a lot of people, you know, think that historic literature, it's so hard to get into, is because it's not being written in the right way.

C: No, it’s not being read out loud.

V: Yep. So when I'm always telling people, if you're going to read classic literature or “classic literature”. Listen to it on audio book or read it aloud.

C: Don't read Milton. Listen to Milton.

V: *snorts* Yes.

C: Don't take that out of context. Listen to Milton, please. Paradise Lost is good I promise.

V: When I read Silas Marner, there were sections I would read aloud to myself—

C: Mmhmm.

V: —because it's so vernacular and you don't get that inside your head.

C: Mmhmm

V: Like it forces you to speak in a certain way—

C: Yeah.

V: —that you wouldn't just get. And this is one of the losses that we get—

C: Yeah.

V: —is even though people think, oh, literature is so great now, we have kinda lost this communicate— communicative aspect. And people now state that audio books are trashy.

C: Yeah, I would almost say it's neither good nor bad. It just is. It's one of those shifts in history that I don't— I personally wouldn't take back. I wouldn't necessarily go back and say that the only way you should consume a book is with four or five other people, one person reading it out loud.

V: No, you don't want to do that with certain books. Ah-hem But I'm just, but what I'm saying is like, you know...

C: but it's definitely something where I feel like, like you said, we've lost something here. And the trade-off is, of course now we can get books that deal with subjects. Maybe you, perhaps, wouldn’t want read out loud.

V: And we're just going to leave that here because we're not going to make this an explicit episode, even though every single other episode is explicit on this podcast.

C: No tangents! Moving on.

V: No swears!

C: No swears! I'm trying. I'm trying, I promise I'm trying.

V: We're both trying here.

C: But magazines also. I just, I want to come back to magazines because it was so interesting to me that that was such a short-lived form— because the magazine is dying.

V: It is.

C: It's been not even 200 years.

V: Yeah, it's going away. And same thing with comics! We’re now only shift— We're shifting to graphic novels, which I really don't like them name of, ever since I started my comic book course.

C: What’s wrong with calling a comic a comic? No, no tangents!

V: Well, but the comic book is basically the modern serial.

C: Mmhmm! Yeah, I agree. I like serialize novels. I like the idea of them. I wish there were more of them. Unfortunately, this is one of those cases in which community is not a spectator sport.

V: Mmhmm.

C: And I have to ask myself when I see these things like okay, but did have I done to support a serialized thing and of course, I have in the past when I was a child, but because I'm a little older than people think. And so I was still young and an arrow or we were getting monthly like Sabrina the teenage witches and I read those. But it's hard to keep up with that sort of thing. When you’re, so inundated with so many forms of media that can take the place of those things. So I think it's fascinating and I'd love to know what was being replaced. One thing comes in, another thing fades out. So was it poetry? Was it drama? Was it Jane Austen style like making up your own plays? I'd love to know what faded out as these things came here.

V: Gosh, we should randomly have like amateur theatrical is in our house, like Jane Austen, even though she in Mansfield Park, it's thought that she frowned upon it, even though she herself acted and broke theatrical is with her family. Tangent!

C: Tangent! No tangents. Dickens.

V: We're just going to have to give a drinking game where we say no tangents.

C: No tangents!

V: No tangents! Goddammit!

C: I need everybody's know that every time I say no tangent, I chop one hand into the palm of the other, cutting it off.

V: I had quotations in here, but that helped me formulate my thoughts, but not actually.

C: Actually, I think we might've...

V: Yeah, we covered everything.

C: Oh! One thing I want to talk about—

V: Yeah?

C: —to come back to this new advent of the printing press and everything. There used to be sort of this understanding that everybody could tell a good story if they tried to. And you see it in Canterbury Tales, you see it in Tolkien who did quite a lot of research into this topic is the idea of improv storytelling was very common. You would get a few drinks at the top with your friends and you would walk home and you would tell a story on the way home. And it would be probably not that good, but it would be fun. It'll be something that you did with your friends. And so when we get the printing press, suddenly, if it's not written down, it's not worthwhile. And suddenly there's a difference between just telling a story and being an author.

V: Yes. And suddenly everything has to have rules.

C: Everything has to have rules, everything has to be for profit in this era too. This is when we start getting into the idea of selling your stories a lot more.

V: Yeah, and we talked about this with our classes on Anthony Trollope, you know, like writing for money.

C: Writing for money! And I love Anthony Trollope, which puts me not in the majority of the population, I think.

V: I quite enjoyed him!

C: You're also not in the majority of the population.

V: True. I watched Dr. Thorn as a 19-year-old with my grandparents on PBS— wait no, not PBS— Amazon Prime, we’re going to bleep out the name of Bezos.

C: *Laughs” Don't summon him!

V: I'm just picturing is his weird naked bald head appearing between us.

C: Shhh, don’t talk about it, you’ll sommon him.

V: It’s so shiny.

C: Trollope! Trollope and writing for money. And so I love his works, but I cannot deny that the man tapped into what was popular. He wrote what was popular, and that's why he wrote what he wrote. And this is when we start getting this idea of literature as art, as a way to separate the wheat from the chaff. If I can use an entirely classist metaphor there. Where you put all of the things that are penny dreadfuls as all of the things that people just wrote for profit. All of the things that are popular into this pop culture, trash bucket and you put everything else that was good into the realm literature. And you can't properly pronounce that T because it's not, it's not literature, it’s literature.

V: Literature!

C: And so this is when we start getting this very classist distinction, not between those who can read and those who can't, but between different types of writing—

V: Yeah.

C: —that is carried on into today. I find it so fascinating that for all of the Victorian enthusiasm into this new media, as soon as they had this new media and they got used to it, they started put in class distinctions into it.

V: Oh yeah, and separating and gender distinctions. ‘Cause God forbid women, at first, read Gothics. Well, now men only read Gothics.

C: God forbid a woman do anything.

V: Yeah, and God forbid, woman would read horror. Well now men want to read horror, women can't do that. Well, what about sci-fi? Well, men want to read sci-fi, so we're just going to kick women out and make fun of them for it and quiz them about Star Wars and then romance novels. Now that they're getting even more popular than they were before, even though they were, like one of the most profitable genres, there are still considered trashy because God forbid, people have sex.

C: Well, and if we admit that this thing we had considered to be lower-class and not good is good, then we open up the cracks in the system and everybody starts thinking, well, hang on, who the hell is making these distinctions?

V: That's the thing is: who does it?

C: Who does it?

V: Answer is, who knows? Because it's honestly, it's shaped by society, shaped by trends and shaped by news and shaped by everything. And we can just pinpoint it.

C: I mean, my argument would be that it is all of us that we all look at a book and we read mostly some form of insecurity into it.

V: Yeah.

C: I think— I think— I love Terry Pratchett. Sorry, this is a bit of a tangent, but I'm the one saying it, so I'm going to allow it. I read Terry Pratchett, I love Terry project. I actually think that he is reading literature. It's just in a fantasy wrapper. But my first instinct is to say, well, but I enjoy it. So it can't be literature.

V: God forbid, people enjoy things.

C: That's so funny to me when I finally figured out and unpacked that thought. Because why— why must reading be a pennance?

V: Just because you're sitting around and just hallucinating at the skins of dead trees doesn't mean you can't, it can’t be fun.

C: If it has to not be fun. If it has to be unenjoyable, if it has to be dense, if it has to be inaccessible in order to be literature, then you're limiting yourself to the boring, to the difficult. And you're taking away the opportunity of anybody who is accessible or who's fun to have anything good to say in this sort of discussion. I would argue that Trollope is a pop fiction writer, a pop culture author. So I've studied Trollope now in two different Victorian literature classes because the man had things to say about his era. He wrote in this accessible style, he wrote in this easy style is fun style, but that doesn't make what he has to say any lesser.

V: And it's the same thing with Dickens. Like even though he's, even though he was popular, he published prolifically. He was still publishing because he wanted, he needed to put food on the table. One of the reasons why he brought a Christmas Carol was because he was struggling with money. Had to put food on the table. And that has changed the way we view Christmas and the consumer's holiday thing. We can thank him and curse him.

C: Yeah...

V: We can't say that just because someone is populated doesn't mean that they're not making an impact. We have authors now—

C: Shakespeare was popular.

V: Yes.

C: Let us, lest we forget. Shakespeare was a popular author of his time.

V: Yes, Jane Austen, even though they didn't know it was, even though they didn't know her name, she was popular. And now we have authors like, we have Stephen King. Even though a lot of his stories are formulaic, they're considered modern classic.

C: Well, there's a reason because if you read, Carrie like if you get into that book, that's such a vivid depiction of what it's like to be bullied in a teenage girl.

V Yeah, and you know what, formulas work!

C: Formulas work.

V: You can use formulas to subvert ideas and create something new. One of my favorite authors, and I talked about her all the time on the podcast, or I talked about her all the time on the podcast, Sylvia Moreno Garcia, she's a bit of a genre chameleons, chameleons right side that she writes Gothic. She writes murder mystery, she writes thrillers. She writes neo-noir all that kind of stuff, but she uses it to make comments about race and colonialism and all that in a genre that is sometimes— genres that are sometimes just overwhelmed by white middle-class people. And she's taking this and putting it into a perspective as a Mexican Canadian.

C: Alright, so to tie this back, to Dickens, to wrap it up. ‘Cause we’re now over 30 minutes and we said we weren't going to do that.

V: I said 45 min at most—

C:At most! But we said we weren’t going to go over thirty. So to tie it back to Dickens, this is what Dickens is doing Household Words, this is what he's doing with his short stories about new technology, is He's wrapping these strange new worlds, these strange new spirits, these strange new haunts in... the fabric of something that people are used to, to make it old. Worn in. Traditional.

V: Comfortable.

C: Comfortable. To make it easy to understand, easy to use.

V: Easy to bring into your household and to accept.

C: Far less terrifying, than it needs to be.

V: Because now you're bringing into your home. And now we might actually bringing the ideas and concepts into your home and bring about change.

C: Yes.

V: And that's one of the things that he wanted to do with that, even though like—

C: Victorians involved change—

V: Yes!

C: We have this idea of them in our heads, I think, as a cultural consumption of just these staid Victorians, but they were, they were— if there was one thing that encapsulated Victorian era, it was their deep and abiding love for change.

V: And people forget the Victorian period was long, like we live through the modern Elizabethan period, and that was a long time. Would you say that the 50s is the same as the '90s?

C: 1929 until when did Edward, the Edwardian period of start 18, 90 something.

V: So the Edwardian period starts— so Victoria took the throne in 1837 and she died in 1901.

C: Yeah, so, but what we consider to be the Victorian period of I’m pretty sure is from the early 1830s all the way up to 1890s. And then we start looking at more Edwardian stuff. And then we start talking about early modernism, and we...

V: Yeah.

C: Not the point.

V: But, well, Victorian period ends when Victoria dies.

C: Yes.

V: But you did get the beginnings of the Edwardian style and stuff. But—

C: Well, I think that that just goes to show that— like I always say the 90s didn't end until 2004.

V: Yeah, I say the same thing.

C: Yeah. So this is a case in which a period is not defined as much in literature— not defined as well in literature as it is in history. In history, I totally agree with you. From when she got on the throne to when she died, Victorian period, firm dates. For literature, it's a little more flexible.

V: Or even then... ah, like, and all those things like history is flexible too. History is arguably a fiction because we can actually jump into the minds of people living through that or walking behind someone throughout their day, watching us, they take a dump because they're so important, you must watch them do this. That is invasive. There's a lot of conjecture. You have to make there—

C: A lot of assumptions.

V: —and they don't have documents and sources like that all the time. Some people really like to write down their days, but that's not everyone. So we can't put firm dates on anything, but we are making a tangent. I am cutting us off here!

C: But that ties us right back into the beginning where we said, what myths do you think are fun about science and history of science. And I hope that today you've learned a little bit about Dickens new media in Victorian period, and about how that all relates to who we are today.

V: I hope you've enjoyed listening to us talking about this, about us getting really, really, really nerdy eso—

C: No tangents!

V: No tangents! No more tangents.

C: *Laughs* No more tangents.

V: But thank you for listening. I will havem you know, the information for the podcast if you want to check out more, follow me on social media. I'd suggest Clarissa give stuff, but we know that—

C: I’m a cryptid.

V: You’re a cryptid, you're going to go back into the woods, scamper off.

C: Gonna go bury myself in my sewing and never see the light of day again.

V: Clarissa lives in a burrow in the woods surrounded by a wool and—

C: I do live underground.

V: Yeah. You do you live under—

C: That is factual.

V: Yeah. You're surrounded by wool and stuff It's like, it's like—

C: I’ve got a little hobbit-hole.

V: It’s like a hobbit hole or like something out of like Brambly Hedge—

C: Tangents, tangents, tangents, tangents!

V: But essentially—

C: Follow Vik everywhere, she’s great. Don't follow me anywhere because if it's me, it's not me.

V: You can hear me talk about uranium buttons on my Twitter.

C: Yes.

V: Yeah. So I'm going to cut to the end stuff. Enjoy. Thank you for listening.

V&C: Byeeeee!