An arresting, surreal urban vignette from the first of Freud's Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1910) illustrates and extends one of his best known formulations: ‘Hysterical patients suffer from reminiscences.’ ‘Their symptoms,’ he suggests, are ‘residues and mnemic symbols of particular (traumatic) experiences’, symbols which function in the patient's psyche like public ‘monuments and memorials’, such as the column at London's Charing Cross erected in memory of Richard Plantagenet's beloved Queen Eleanor, or the ‘towering column’ near London Bridge that was ‘designed as a memorial of the Great Fire’ of 1666. Hardly registered by the urban dweller ‘going about his business in the hurry that modern working conditions demand’, ‘unpractical Londoners’, Freud's figure for the hysteric, would ‘pause in deep melancholy’ before Charing Cross, or ‘shed tears’ beside the monument to the Great Fire. ‘Hysterics and neurotics’ ‘remember’ and ‘still cling to’ ‘painful experiences of the remote past’, for they ‘cannot get free of the past and for its sake they neglect what is real and immediate’.

The history of feeling that narrative or visual Victoriana seeks at once to memorialise and renew for the modern reader – the melodramatic excess of nineteenth-century fiction, the unembarrassed sentiment in its poetry – has something in common with the overemotional response to historical trauma that Freud described in his ‘impractical Londoners’. It might be an association too far to align the writer or reader of modern Victoriana with Freud's hysteric, yet his urban analogy catches something about the affective dynamics both of modern subjects and national history that speaks to Victoriana's affective relationship to the past, and to its compulsive recycling of Victorian material and discursive culture.