Meredith Martin Reviews Paul Fyfe’s Digital Victorians in Victorians Institute Journal

Meredith Martin, CDH Faculty Director and Professor of English, has published a review of Paul Fyfe’s Digital Victorians: From Nineteenth-Century Media to Digital Humanities (Stanford University Press, 2025) in the Victorians Institute Journal (vol. 53, 2026).

Martin praises the book for connecting nineteenth-century media history to digital humanities, and for challenging the divides that have long separated digital from analog scholarship and old media from new. She highlights Fyfe’s argument that today’s debates about AI and reading have deep roots in Victorian studies and decades of computational scholarship. She also recommends the book’s final chapter, on how digitized archives shape our access to the nineteenth-century record, for librarians and administrators, and for methods courses in English and history. Fyfe, she writes, “does the vital translational work of showing how our work matters.”

Read the full review.