I sometimes find myself idly wondering what certain historical personages would make of the modern world, supposing they were suddenly transplanted into it. It’s a fun game to play if you’ve nothing else to do, a sort of secular version of ‘What would Jesus have done?’. For example, what would Isaac Newton have made of quantum physics and relativity? Or how vindicated would Darwin have felt by the discovery of DNA and its success as a crimefighting and therapeutic tool?
I suspect that the overwhelming majority of people from the distant past would react with utter horror and abject terror if suddenly thrust unprepared into 2026. For most it would be a nightmarish realm filled with unimaginable danger and impossible challenges. How to get from one place to another without being killed on the roads? How to do something as simple as make a cup of tea or buy a loaf of bread?
No doubt there would be exceptions. Jane Austen might have felt quite at home in a world of Love Island and dating apps. And George Orwell would be looking around and thinking, ‘Hmm, told you so’.
But there’s one literary luminary above all others, one paradigmatic man, who transcends his age and would be perfectly suited to the modern world. And that person of course is Oscar Wilde. What would Wilde be up to now if he’d been born in the 1950s, say, or 1960s? No doubt turning out Oscar-nominated movie scripts with one hand while penning a witty aperçu for his millions of adoring followers on X with the other. A guest on every TV chat show, a regular on every celebrity quiz. Who knows, he might even be married to Stephen Fry. Unless he died of AIDS in the 1980s of course…
Fortunately we’re required to live in the era into which we’re born. The downside to this is, just as we can’t jump forward into the future, nor can we hop back into the past. Because this sounds like the far more attractive option of the two. Imagine how smart we’d all appear with our cornucopia of twenty-first-century knowledge if we suddenly found ourselves waking up in a pre-industrial age.
Except, when I consider this scenario in more detail, I’m not sure most of us would appear quite as smart as we like to imagine. I see myself rhapsodising about the miracle of electricity to a gaggle of ill-shod medieval bumpkins, but when asked ‘What is this electricity you speak of and how can we harness it?’ all I can do is shrug my shoulders in mute apology, adding lamely that ‘you just press a button on the wall’.
Robert Grossmith 