Salvaging the Victorians

This week I gave a creative-critical workshop at the Cardiff Hub of the 2024 British Association of Victorian Studies annual conference!

It was lots of fun to be back after having studied and worked at Cardiff University almost a decade ago, and I was blessed with a genuinely warm and lovely group of Victorianists (and neo-Victorianists) for the session. We had a fruitful discussion and they produced some really fun and smart responses to the workshop prompt.

In the workshop I introduced the concept of ‘salvage’, in theory and in practice, and how it is relevant to the long 19th century as well as today. Our modern understanding of salvage comes from the Victorians, who developed the practice across a thriving series of industries (insurance, fire brigades, military salvage). Before the late 19th century, ‘salvage’ is a noun that refers not to the practice, but to the payment for saving a ship or its cargo.

Salvage is also a theoretical concept tangentially considered by scholars looking for alternatives to (colonial, capitalist) practices of conservation, museums, and heritage. As an event, salvage attempts to ‘save’ an object or idea, but it is simultaneously a process of destruction and transformation. We salvage things because they have been or are about to be destroyed, or are not able to carry on in their current state. As a practice salvage sits somewhere between destruction and rebuilding.

As Evan Calder Williams writes, salvage practices ‘strive against and away from the ruins upon which they cannot help but be built and through which they rummage’ (Calder Williams 2010, 20). Since we cannot stop repeating, we need to shift our focus onto ‘how to repeat differently, how to make from the broken same the livelier constructs of something other’ (69). In the context of commercialisation, crisis, and the anti-colonial in the UK university, what can salvage offer us as scholars of the long 19th century? How do we salvage our work, and what does this look like in practice? For this workshop, the idea was for us to think (and make) through these ideas together by ‘salvaging’ materials from Victorian texts and objects. This collaborative event allowed us to explore, very briefly, how salvage attitudes and practices can be avoided or employed in our own research. And doing this with our hands as well as our heads let the people in the room approach the problem in a novel way.

For 30 minutes, individually or in teams, the ten workshop participants had to creatively respond to the question ‘How do we salvage the Victorians?’ The end aim being to produce one page (ideally A4 or smaller) that expressed their answer. They were given the remains of a number of Victorian and Victorian Studies books that has been rescued from the remaindered pile, along with old newspapers (sourced from Bute Library next door), pens, scissors, glue, tape, and leftover materials from the conference packs.

I am always amazed by what people can do creatively with limited materials, and in a very short amount of time! It was also interesting for me to reflect on the kinds of answers you get when you ask people a question intellectually vs creatively or practically. Below are the results of the workshop (titles have been added by me retrospectively; click for larger versions):