The poet, dramatist and essayist T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), whose personal commitment to literary Modernism placed him very much in reaction to the aesthetics associated with the century of his birth, was an acute commentator upon the innate fragility of language. In ‘Burnt Norton’ (1936), the first of his Four Quartets, Eliot noted, with staccato relish, how

Such an emphatic statement, the implications of which might indeed be applied to every evolving language, has a particular resonance for those who seek to study the Victorian period specifically – or who wish to extend their researches further into its greater context, the so-called long nineteenth century. The Victorian period, its words, conventions and discourses, is, perplexingly for such scholars, both historically close and conceptually distant, forming an uncanny bricolage of the past and the present, of alternating familiarity and strangeness, of once-mundane things turned curiously mythological when englobed in the gaze of a later historical period.

For those students of the nineteenth century who are physically based in the United Kingdom, the Victorian era persists as a constant and evocative backdrop to everyday life: municipal buildings, whether decayed or repurposed for the current century, speak hesitantly of cities whose economic focus and industrial viability have shifted fundamentally in a post-imperial and post-industrial world. The faded formality of public parks and the elaborate architecture of grand railway stations, the elegant iron-and-glass frameworks of the latter sometimes obscured by Brutalist concrete or garish synthetic cladding, testify that all was not utilitarian in the long reign of Victoria, that the functional might satisfactorily coexist with the decorative in the making of an harmonic whole. The devil, as the popular saying would have it, is in the detail. For those who view Victorian infrastructure and nineteenth-century artefacts with twenty-first-century eyes, the rich symbolism that is so-often applied to the visible surface of buildings and objects may as likely provoke questions as provide the reassurance of answers: why should the beehive feature so prominently in the public iconography of the Freemasons, the Oddfellows and the Co-operative Movement, or the bee itself have been chosen as an emblem of Victorian Manchester in 1842?