“As if we suddenly remembered it!”

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850).

The first Oxford English Dictionary citation for déjà vu  in English comes from a 1903 publication. But the term first appeared in 1876, in the work of the French philosopher Émile Boirac.

A passage from Dickens’s Pictures from Italy (1846) is another example of déjà vu before its time.

Related reading
All OCA Dickens posts (Pinboard)

[Why is the first déjà vu in this post italicized? Because it’s words as words, as in the sentence before this one.]