The most interesting of recent developments in Victorian literary scholarship has been our obsession not with the Victorians but with ourselves. We have become fascinated by invoking the Victorians in order to consider our contemporary conditions. This self-interrogation has been both welcomed and contested. For literature and science scholars it has been puzzling, for Victorian literature and science has a long tradition of scholarly critique that takes account of both past and present. It has also been satisfying, since the turn towards our own historical moment has seen the study of literature and science take up a place at the very heart of Victorian literature and culture. This interest in our present moment and its attachments to Victorian cultures is important because it is making us think creatively about the future praxis of Victorian scholarship. It is enabling us to consider new ways of conceiving of the temporal gap between the Victorians and ourselves and what knowledge crossing that gap might generate.

This temporal turn is clear in the significant proportion of recent Victorian research that has focussed, for example, on ecological crises: from environmental violence and studies of the anthropocene through energy security to animal welfare.Footnote ¹ There is such impetus behind this work that its various specialisms often signal their intent to make interventions into debates about the value of the humanities by adding that term as their own suffix: environmental humanities and energy humanities have joined medical humanities and others as recognisable pairings.

In Victorian literature and science scholarship the temporal turn has not been sudden but rather an evolution (no pun intended). Harriet Ritvo's first book on Victorian animals, The Animal Estate, was published in 1989, and even before that, Gillian Beer's foundational research on, yes, evolution, was suffused with questions about the two cultures of science and literature that spoke equally well to the present day.Footnote ² Victorian literature and science's extended interrogation of the inchoate power of the sciences through the nineteenth century has always been refracted through the relationships of the disciplines in the late-twentieth and twenty-first century. This has given us a scholarship that is alert to different forms of knowledge-making and their historical situatedness. It is probably the case that Victorian literature and science scholars look to the nineteenth century because it was here that so many of the relations between the sciences and humanities emerged and were worked out. In thinking about the value of our subject in the present day, then, it is natural to turn to those predecessors who might offer us ways of knowing where we are and what we might do about it.

However, one of the problems with this and with the other recent work in our temporal turn has been its inherent teleology. Only the present gains from strategic attempts to consider the relations between the Victorians and ourselves. As scholars of Victorian literature and culture, we would surely wish our understanding of the Victorians also to be enhanced?

In literature and science an important recalibration of methodological approach is underway, and since the work of its scholars has become so central to Victorian literature and culture it is worthy of wider account. Literature and science scholars are beginning to investigate anew some of the recursive relationships between the two disciplines and in turn how the past and the present might also be seen in similarly recurring and successive formations. Experiences of engagements with contemporary science have shown scholars of Victorian literature and science how valuable it is to take present knowledge back into the past and apply it there. One recent example of this is the Constructing Scientific Communities project, one arm of which is using contemporary citizen science and its knowledge to reexamine histories of Victorian citizen science.Footnote ³ There is a great deal to be gained from what Edward Bellamy called, in another context, looking backwards. Nor need thinking with present knowledge disrupt current methods if undertaken sensitively. Rather it adds to the kinds of questions that might be posed for, say, Victorian narratives and opens possibilities that the historical record itself does not easily reveal.

Some of this work is formal, on the role of actively mobile analogies moving both between the two disciplines of literature and science and also across time.Footnote ⁴ Other work is thinking through new forms of conciliatory practice where literary study and the sciences might work more closely together in the present and the results of that be used also to inform how we interrogate and come to understand the past.Footnote ⁵ The ScienceHumanities Initiative at my own institution, Cardiff University, is a fine example of this.Footnote ⁶ What all of this work has in common is its temporal suppleness: the present and the Victorian past are both informed by its research. The emerging methodologies in Victorian literature and science might well offer fresh impetus to the temporal turn in literary studies. If we are to take this up, though, it requires the throwing off of certain disciplinary constraints. To think of temporality as unfettered is to accept movements that are, at least to literary scholars and historians, undisciplined, and perhaps unpromisingly so. As literature and science scholars would say, though, if we aim to understand our Victorian universe, and ourselves, we might want to accept a more unusual physics where knowledge in and of the present might enact change upon knowledge of the past.