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Also, 1895 isn't that long ago. These aren't exactly writings from ancient Greece. Lets remember this was a couple years after Chicago's 1893 fair where a lot of what we consider modern was ushered in, albeit slowly. And in this period books like War and Peace and Dracula were published. I view this period pretty contemporaneous to modern American culture in many significant ways.

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It's not just outside of living memory, nobody alive then was alive even 10 years ago. That's a reasonable definition of 'long time' in human terms.

It's a few years before Dracula. Frankenstein on the other hand would have been 68 years old and thus would have seemed like something written in the 1950's to us. I bring that up because we tend to compress history as the time spans are to large to really grasp.

1950 isn't that long ago, I've read books from that era in the last 12 months, even computer science papers from that era are not too uncommon.

CS is something of an outlier in that respect as it was so new a the time.

However, consider what percentage of those books / paper authors are still alive? If they where 35 then they would be 103 today.

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