The structure is not new and not technological. A curve, rising; a date, given with a specificity the method cannot support; a transformation after which suffering is optional and the dead are recoverable. Bodily resurrection, with a citation.

The nineteenth century did this with steam, with spiritualism, with phrenology, with electricity, with the telegraph — which was going to end war, because nations that could speak instantly could not misunderstand one another.

What is Victorian about it is not the optimism. It is the assumption that there is a here to be transcended from: a bounded natural human, unimproved, standing at the base of the curve, waiting.

That figure is the load-bearing element of the entire project, and no one has ever produced one. It is the baseline in a chart with no measurements at the origin.

Take the figure away and the curve is still there, and still rising, and no longer going anywhere in particular — which is the actual situation, and is stranger than the promise.