Our proposed panel explores strange and aberrant forms of literary remembrance that complicate these claims. Many Victorian writers used retrospection not to create a reassuringly stable present but to disrupt normative temporalities—specifically, to mingle the past and future. This approach unsettled fundamental pillars of nineteenth-century society, including traditional understandings of personal identity, the heteronormative conceptualization of generational family relations, and gendered modes of domesticity and mourning.

Focusing on instances of déjà vu that appear during childhood reminiscences in the novels of Walter Scott and Lewis Carroll, Jessica Cook argues that nineteenth-century writers depicted déjà vu not just as the remembrance of the present as if it were the past, but also as the remembrance of the future. This special type of Victorian déjà vu, future memory, threatened John Locke’s influential model of identity, which was premised upon the existence of stable teleological memory, by upending the traditional understanding of memory as a phenomenon inherently grounded in the past. Scott and Carroll’s descriptions of childhood future memory destabilize this key moment of identity formation in order to offer new anti-Lockean theories of personal identity. These moments are also meta-representations that register the philosophical implications of remembering the future through novelistic form. Victorian déjà vu offers a new way of understanding seemingly clumsy, heavy-handed instances of foreshadowing that occur in novels by otherwise masterful writers. Rather than interpreting these moments as overdeveloped stylistic imperfections, heavy foreshadowing acts as metacommentary on the third-person retrospective’s overlay of fictional pasts, presents, and futures.

Ashley Miller turns from déjà vu to another peculiar interplay between futurity and memory: the Victorian “dream child,” an imagined visitor from an already-foreclosed future. Focusing on the poetry of Tennyson and Hardy, she examines depictions of imaginary pregnancies and hypothetical children that are used to unsettle anthropocentric and heteronormative ideas about productivity. Laden with loss, these counterfactual children offer a way of conceiving a human scale of reproductive time against the devastating “careless[ness]” of geologic time (In Memoriam LV.8). Poems that call into being imaginary children only to mourn their impossibility frequently perform a doubled interrogation of the experience of loss and waste, once on the scale of the human and again on the scale of the nonhuman. In doing so, these poems experiment with the self-reflective stance of the optative mode (to use Andrew H. Miller’s term) in the face of a self-obliterating awareness of deep time. Born in grief, dream-children body forth impossibilities and offer a peculiarly Victorian temporal fantasy in which one can “unknow” (Hardy, “At a Bridal” 14) the future.

Veronica Alfano takes up these concerns with grief, with the intertwining of memory and futurity, and with children who unsettle the Victorian family as she considers Christina Rossetti’s Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872). She argues that Rossetti’s meters, with their abruptly shortened lines that enforce intrapoetic pausing, create ambiguous memorial spaces for dead children. On the one hand, these spaces call for devastated remembrance; on the other hand, they cue readers to imagine the life of the world to come. And just as the speechlessness imposed by truncated lines can signal both heartbroken deprivation and fullness of possibility, so the silences of small children in Sing-Song both ennoble mothers and underscore their isolation, resentment, and even rage. Yet at the same time, Rossetti’s treatment of rhyme—which associates the dead or silent child with the first half of a couplet, a mnemonic encoding of promised future consummation—hints that a seemingly humble and restricted domestic position lends mothers powerful authority. Fittingly, as Sing-Song rewrites the Victorian nursery, its decorous formal restraint ensures that it both appears unassuming and is well-equipped to persist both in individual memories and in the consciousness of a culture.

In exploring these aberrant forms of remembrance, our panel builds upon Amnesiac Selves by illuminating the richly varied, and truly strange, world of Victorian memory.