Abstract
This essay on the “English-speaking Caribbean” reflects on pasts that have not passed but have instead been passed on, for example in gestures of erasure, silence, or genteel substitution, whether in the Victorian novel or the twenty-first-century novel that insistently returns to the past, or in the rhetoric of law and statecraft. In addition, I consider how Victorianism has reproduced itself in postcolonial Caribbean and British life, with consequences for Black intimacy and kinship.