This final substantive chapter looks in detail at the festival of the Kalends of January as an extended case study for the persistence of popular culture in late antiquity. This distinctively late antique festival is examined from a number of angles, looking at its official and informal, public and private dimensions. Next, the longstanding ecclesiastical critique of the festival as ‘pagan’ is discussed. Key themes of the festival are then considered in turn, starting with the role of festive licence, often seen as a central feature of popular culture more broadly. The Kalends masquerades, including dressing up as animals and in the clothes of the opposite sex, are explored. Next the important element of gift exchange is discussed, providing a way in to look at the social and economic dimensions of the festival. In this way this chapter shows the continuing role of the festival in negotiating the unequal yet broadly stable social relations of late antique Provence, despite the hostility of the church.

One of the earliest patents for an automaton in Victorian America was for a steam-powered android, drawn as a caricature of a Black man. Most histories of the so-called Steam Man tend to treat this automaton in one of two ways: Historians of science have addressed the machine indirectly, drawing general connections between Victorian Black androids, white femininity, and imputed inferiority; literary and cultural studies have addressed the Steam Man directly as a product of Reconstruction-era white anxiety over free Black labor. In this chapter, we argue for a different way of understanding the Steam Man and other Victorian Black automata, one that sees them as concealing historical truths about the Black technological self in nineteenth-century America. We follow a counterhistory of the mechanics that underpinned Black automata and show that, although androids like the Steam Man portrayed Black people in pastoral, leisurely, and nontechnological roles, their reliance on blackface minstrelsy ultimately concealed the intimate relationships between Black Victorian Americans, contemporary technologies, and the self

This chapter examines late nineteenth-century instances of a fictional trope of “mind invasion,” in which the white male unconscious is controlled by the very subaltern mind that Western science associated with “primitive” levels of mental and cultural evolution. The psychical automatism of mind invasion sometimes reproduces the power dynamics of colonialism, but the chapter examines countervailing examples in which the colonizer’s unconscious is dominated by mental powers and occult knowledge attributed to the colonized. It also explores depictions of extraterrestrial or future-human mind invasion, which redraw the racialized hierarches of mind constructed by Western scientists. Reiterations of the mind-invasion trope satirized the claim of educated white males to possess superior rationality, detached objectivity, and the ability to resist automatist mental states. The chapter analyses the multivalent aims of this reversal, including antimaterialism, a defense of paranormal experience, and a decolonizing attack on the very concept of racial hierarchy.

In her final work, Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), George Eliot includes an essay, “Shadows of the Coming Race,” in which the fictionalized narrator speaks of his concerns regarding the growing power of machines. This chapter explores Eliot’s responses to actual machines of her time, and the impact they had on her conceptions of human consciousness and the animal/human/machine divide. It argues that the machine she had in mind for drawing the right conclusion was William Jevons’s “Logical Piano.” The chapter examines this connection, but also, more broadly, the various machines Eliot viewed when visiting laboratories. This was the great age for the development of experimental physiology and of the creation of “self-recording” machines that could measure every aspect of human physiological life and also, it was believed, the flows of thought and emotion. Starting with Lewes’s own work on “Animal Automatism,” the chapter explores how these new conceptions of mind, body, and machine enter into Eliot’s thinking.

This chapter looks at popular culture through the lens of lived religion, with a particular focus on the late antique countryside. After an initial discussion exploring the dimensions of ‘lived religion’, it is then explored through two extended case studies. The first looks at ritual practices associated with the midsummer feast of John the Baptist, including ritual bathing. The second case study looks at ritual activities aimed at mitigating the effects of hail, a persistent threat to agriculture and viticulture in the region. These rituals, and the responses from church and secular elites and authorities alike, are examined in their social and economic context. A range of different types of evidence is considered, from charms through to imperial legislation, as well as ecclesiastical texts of various kinds.

Early detective fiction’s anxious obsession with constructing a respectable canonical lineage ensured that texts in the genre are typically both explicit and repetitive in their intertextual referencing, and early detective fiction stories tend to link themselves back to a fairly limited set of precursor texts and tropes. This chapter argues that the automaton became one of detective fiction’s central recurring symbols in the Victorian period, a contested figure lying at the heart of a struggle over the genre and the worldview that it contained.

This chapter explains how and why Topsy – a “little negro girl” featured in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) – became a symbol of artificial life during the long wake of slave emancipation in the United States. It begins by recontextualizing Stowe’s abolitionist melodrama in relation to arguments about human–machine difference in the industrial North. Because the automated Black slave girl was a perfect foil to the autonomous white man, Topsy could critique slavery while affirming the race and gender hierarchies of white bourgeois society. Turning to the material history of plush “Topsy” dolls – the handicraft of enslaved women turned into factory-made commodities – the chapter argues that Topsy as doll gained its cultural power as a reaction to fears of Black autonomy in the South and white automatization in the North. It concludes by considering Topsy’s unruly afterlife in the “technopoetics” of Black modernism in the Jazz Age.

This chapter examines the countryside of late antique southern Gaul as a context for the development of popular culture at this time, making use of archaeological as well as literary evidence. It covers Provence, with a particular focus on the territorium of the city of Arles, although areas of western Languedoc are also considered due to the exceptional archaeological data available. Key themes and questions arising from recent scholarship are introduced to shape the discussion that follows before the landscape of the region is introduced. The inhabitants of the region are discussed next, in terms of their social and legal status, while the following section considers developments in settlement and social organisation, including the fate of the villa. A detailed look at livelihoods and patterns of productive activity follows. The final section looks at religious structures and landscapes, including the impact of the church in the late antique countryside.

The chapter views automatism in the light of the Victorian emphasis on the value of free will and individual responsibility. Daily life involved repeated practical synthesis of contradictory judgments about the determined, or automatic, and moral sources of action. Criminal court cases in which there was a defense of insanity exemplified the issues at stake in relating the disordered brain and the moral will. In the Victorian period, medical experts began to play a large part in legal judgments about insanity and criminal responsibility, and they articulated evidence for the involuntary, or automatic, form of insane actions. Public interest in these issues preceded and informed debate about automatism in philosophy and science. The chapter uses a spectacular 1854 case of multiple child murder by the children’s mother to shape discussion of the wider issues. The case both shows the complexity of social issues touching on automatism and offers insight into the imagination that accompanied Victorian fears about automatism replacing free will.

This chapter considers the ways in which Anthony Trollope at first defied but eventually exemplified alternate ideas of creativity for successive generations. With the appearance of each of his books, contemporaries acknowledged his almost continuous labor. Later critics agreed, using more psychological terms: If Trollope was a genius, his sort of genius bordered on automatism: habitual, lacking in forethought, and suspiciously unbeholden to inspiration. Through the first half of the twentieth century, Trollope’s writing process (as described in An Autobiography) and his prose were implicitly evaluated against two dichotomies permeating behavioral studies: The first pits introspection against habit, and the second sets remote against inhibited associations. Each dichotomy poses an invidious distinction between the first and second terms. An evaluation of Trollope’s composition and style within this framework yields differing models of creative writing.

This chapter examines the conscious automata theory as advanced by Thomas Huxley in his controversial essay “On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and its History” (1874), which posits that human consciousness is a mere byproduct of neural processes, not, as is widely thought, the initiator or controller of voluntary behavior. This chapter asks why a theory that denied the efficacy of consciousness strongly captured the Victorian cultural imagination, and considers the implications of the view for aesthetic production. It explores late nineteenth-century responses to conscious automatism in philosophy, psychology, literature, and popular culture, before looking more closely at the treatment of the ideas in Samuel Butler’s “Book of the Machines” and George Eliot’s “Shadows of the Coming Race,” alongside George Henry Lewes’s Physical Basis of Mind. The chapter argues that rather than diminishing consciousness, Huxley’s theory removes consciousness from science and hands it over to aesthetics and, especially, literary texts.

The brief concluding chapter begins with an anecdote from the Life of Caesarius raising issues of lower-class agency in a context of shifting power structures. It proceeds to reflect upon the key questions at the heart of the book, including the relationship between popular culture and the ‘end of antiquity’.

Since their inception in the middle of the twentieth century, digital technologies developed from big machines accessed only by small groups of scientists and corporative experts, to “personal” devices providing opportunities for interaction to large masses of users. As a wide range of hardware and software interfaces were introduced, the field of human–computer interaction (HCI) tackled the pragmatic and theoretical implications of this change. This chapter takes up the toolbox developed in this context to ask new kinds of questions about the history of automata in the nineteenth century. As automata were offered to public spectacle and, to some extent, consumption, commentators discussed the reactions of “users” and observers of these devices, creating a body of theoretical reflections that can be read as HCI ante litteram. By considering cultural texts and artifacts that contributed to debates about “human–automata interactions,” the chapter mobilizes later debates in HCI and artificial intelligence to reconsider the ways in which Victorians discussed and imagined how people react to automata exhibiting the appearance of intelligent behavior.

Darwin’s theory, in its uniformitarianism, its materialism, and its elimination of all metaphysical explanations and any element of intelligent agency from the world’s biological phenomena has been taken as an important influence in the growth of the idea that all living creatures are automata – more or less “conscious machines.” Darwin himself, in a least four different aspects of his writing, belies this inference from his theories: the metaphorical work done by his dominant idea – natural selection; his anthropomorphism; his views on instinct; and his theory of sexual selection.

In recent works on the symbolic significance of artificial beings in literature, the descriptions of humans as puppets or automata have been analyzed in singular terms, signifying people who lack autonomy in action or thought. This chapter demonstrates that in European literature of the early nineteenth century, the puppet and the automaton are used in disparate ways, the former in positive terms as a representation of a being that is in tune with natural forces and the latter in negative terms as a dead being that mindlessly follows the dictates of its programming. Through the examination of both objects in the works of E. T. A. Hoffmann, Jean Paul, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Heinrich von Kleist, George Sand, and Carlo Collodi, the symbolic difference is explained through its connection to the Romantic worldview of the period, which valorized the surrender to higher forces while decrying the mechanization of humanity.

This chapter introduces key structures and developments in the cities of late antique southern Gaul as relevant as contexts for the development of popular culture at this time, with reference to archaeological as well as literary evidence. While Arles and Marseille come under particular focus, other smaller urban centres including Aix and Narbonne are also considered. The general built urban environment is discussed first, then the occupations, social status and identities of the cities’ inhabitants. Next, the impact of the church upon the late ancient city, social and political as well as topographical, comes into focus. Urban social relations are examined before the final section looks at the transformation of performance and leisure in late antiquity.