Michael Freeman, Victorians and the Prehistoric (2004)

I found this book at a used bookstore, when I was but a baby graduate student with a budding interest in Victorian science, and it was only six years old. Me being me, it took me fifteen years to get around to reading it. It's published by Yale University Press, but clearly aiming at a broader market; it's an oversized hardcover, richly illustrated, chronicling different aspects of how the Victorians (broadly construed, as the book goes back to the late eighteenth century) engaged with the prehistoric world.

Victorians and the Prehistoric: Tracks to a Lost World
by Michael Freeman

Published: 2004
Acquired: December 2010
Read: July 2025

I wish I had read it much earlier! But if I ever do finish my book manuscript, I will work in some citations regardless. The book is dense with detail, but pretty readable anyway, in that the details matter less than the overall story that Freeman is building. Freeman is a professor of geography, and the book apparently emerged from a previous project about railways: 

The task of railways excavation brought surveyors, engineers and navvies face to face with a perspective on earth history that was as raw as it was vast. As contractors' gangs cut their way through successive bands of rock to try to make for a level permanent way, they exposed not only sedimentary formations in all their rainbow-like hues... but fossil beds by the score. Just as the speed of railway travel turned the Victorians' everyday time-world upside down (what once seemed quick became slow in comparison), so the view from the track-bed opened their eyes to a succession of long-lost time-worlds, hitherto the province of fable and fairy story. (vii)

(Freeman does briefly discuss Thomas Hardy, and you can see both of those new time worlds in his work; in novels like Jude the Obscure, the countryside is criss-crossed so quickly in a way not possible in earlier Hardy novels, while in A Pair of Blue Eyes, you have the immensity of all time embodied in a trilobite.)

It was appropriate that I read the book so soon after finishing the anthology of nineteenth-century apocalyptic fiction, The End of the World, because the kind of perception of "deep time" that made those stories imaginable came from the scientific advances that Freeman chronicles here. There's a lot of good stuff in this book, but Freeman is at his best when discussing that change in the "time-worlds," how in the nineteenth century we went from seeing the world as six thousand years old to untold millions, and how the new vision of the past was filled with a constant stream of upheavals and extinctions and apocalypses.  (Of course, H. G. Wells—also briefly discussed by Freeman—gave us the greatest Victorian depiction of deep time of them all in The Time Machine.)

There's some great artwork illustrating the new imagination. I was particularly struck by J. C. Bourne's sketch of the Blisworth cutting from 1838 (scroll down a bit here to see it), which really uses perspective effectively, and juxtaposes the new technology of the train with the antiquity of the strata. I also really liked John Martin's The Great Day of His Wrath (1852); surely there is a straight line from this to the kind of apocalyptic fiction that emerged in the 1870s and '80s. Freeman effectively chronicles how popular this all was; these were no abstract scientific debates, but bestselling books. Geology was a popular pastime. I found his discussion of how Darwin's ideas about time emerged from this new geological understanding particularly effective.

Overall, I found this a quick, easy read, and I wish I had read it going into my dissertation rather than nine years after finishing it! But still, I can find Freeman a place as I (supposedly) finish up my book.