Rebecca F. Kuang: evaluation

Transcript context

…Going back to the distant past, what is it about the 1830s in Victorian England that you find so interesting? Everyone has such a preference for the late 19th century. When we think about the Victorian era and contemporary film and novels that are set in the Victorian era, they’re all post the Industrial Revolution, they’re post Dickens, they’re post the inventions of all sorts of technologies that linger in our imagination as the steampunk Victorian-era aesthetics. When I was drafting Babel and doing some research into what technologies existed, what my characters’ lives would have been like, I was at first disappointed to find that I couldn’t rely on shows like Penny Dreadful, things set in the late 19th century because a lot of that stuff had not been invented yet. The reason why is because the Industrial Revolution was really kicking off in the early half of the 20th century. As I sat with that for a while, I realized I should not be so disappointed to be on the early end of the Victorians, but rather that this too was an era of incredible change and also the start of incredible social inequality. This is when the movements that later Disraeli and Gaskell and Dickens were describing — this is the seed of all that tremendous social change. Why do you think that British imperialism worked so much better in Singapore and Hong Kong than most of the rest of the world?…

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