ABSTRACT
In the last year of Victoria’s reign, Natsume Kinnosuke, a young Japanese scholar sent to London for an advanced study of English, paid visits to the Tower of London and the Carlyle Museum. His imaginative appropriation of Victorian historians (not least Carlyle himself), English historical novelists and cartoonists, of continental historical painters and of British national historical monuments, is manifest in the two eponymous short stories, published in Tokyo in 1905, when Kinnosuke already became known as Natsume Soseki and began his career as Meiji Japan’s major author and one of Japan’s greatest writers. The stories juxtapose different images of the past and their relationship to modernity. ‘The Tower of London’ projects an image of Britain’s iconic historical monument as ‘a distillation of the history of England’ that mocks the ephemeral character of the present and defies technological progress (Soseki 2005: 92). Carlyle’s house is represented as an enclosed hermitage, preserving the life of the dead Victorian historian-prophet. However the small-scale history of the domestic and private, self-consciously pitted against the grand scale of the story on the Tower, does not cut the past from the speed and noise emanating from the modern city and the present (Soseki 2005: 121–29). Both stories astutely circulate a variety of Victorian historical texts and images of material remains of the past. Both demonstrate the transnational and colonial resonance of Victorian preoccupation with the past, and both capture the different configurations of the inescapability from the past in the Victorian city, its ubiquity and the power it exercised in a Victorian world, perceived by Soseki as a world of unstoppable change.
