Questions of survival were much discussed during the nineteenth century, ranging from debates over the likelihood of a personal immortality, to anxieties over the more dispersed and unpredictable aftermath of particular acts and utterances. sets out to recover this atmosphere, and to explain why its pressures are still being exercised on and in our own ways of thinking. Moving freely between different fields of inquiry (including literary criticism, philosophy, and the history of science), and written in a lively and accessible style, this major new study redraws the map of nineteenth-century culture to show what the Victorians made of one another, and what they might still help us make of ourselves.