Home and Away: On Visiting and Distanced Vision

In his 1895 short story “The Remarkable Case of Davidson’s Eyes,” H. G. Wells dwells on what it means to be physically at home but cognitively away. The story’s protagonist, Sidney Davidson, is injured when lightning strikes the laboratory in London where he works. Unable to see his surroundings, his visual sense relocated to the other side of the world, Davidson watches penguins nesting on an island he has never visited, his viewpoint on this distant and unfamiliar scene shifting as he moves around London. While he knows from the sound of familiar voices and the feel of surfaces that he is still at home, both his vision and attention are far away. More fortunate than Davidson in the matter of laboratory accidents, participants in the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) 2022 online conference were, in our own way, both at home and away, visiting the conference’s virtual spaces at the same time that we were present for the day-to-day of our home lives. As we presented and heard work proposed many months earlier, we also became involved in the goings-on of each other’s homes. People we had met with previously in a series of interchangeable conference rooms spoke with us from their kitchen tables. We opened up temporary windows into our living spaces where, in addition to the predictable piles of books, piles of laundry waited to be folded. Dogs and cats gained conference-celebrity status, and we prefaced papers with apologies for the piano lesson happening in the next room. While we habitually both develop our ideas and write them up at home, the domestic origins of our conference papers tend to be obscured by their presentation in public spaces. This conference was an exception. We did our visiting, talking, and thinking while sitting in our most comfortable chairs and wearing shabby slippers; at least, I did.