Research Category

The Romanticism of the Victorian Scientific Naturalists

The scientific naturalists were, according to Frank M. Turner, “successors to the eighteenth-century philosophes.” “Combing research, polemical wit, and literary eloquence,” Turner writes,  “they defended and propagated a scientific world view based on atomism, conservation of energy, and evolution.” Turner, however, in his “Victorian Scientific Naturalism and Thomas Carlyle” (1975), urges caution in showing the […]

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The Cambridge Companion to the Victorians

The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1740-1830, edited by Thomas Keymer and Jon Mee, The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1830-1914, edited by Joanne Shattock, and The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Culture (2010), edited by Francis O’Gorman is yet another useful collection of smart, lucid, and engaging essays by British Victorianists. Keymer and Mee’s volume […]

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The Late-Victorian Agnostic Popularizers

Bernard Lightman’s “Ideology, Evolution and Late-Victorian Agnostic Popularizers” in Moore’s  History, Humanity and Evolution (1989) deserves special mention. He argues that agnosticism was presented as a religious creed that had evolved out of Christianity by agnostic propagandists such as Charles Albert Watts (1858-1946), William Stewart Ross (1844-1906), Richard Bithell (1821-1902), Frederick James Gould (1855-1938), Samuel […]

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Science, Ideology, and World View

I made brief mention of John C. Greene’s Science, Ideology, and World View (1981) in an earlier post. Greene’s volume is composed of six essays with an introduction. He argues that the essays collectively “constitute a fairly unified interpretation of the interaction of science, ideology, and world view in the development of evolutionary biology in […]

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Reading the Magazine of Nature

“For the Victorian reading public, periodicals played a far greater role than books in shaping their understanding of new discoveries and theories in science, technology, and medicine.” Indeed, not only were many notable nineteenth-century scientific texts first published in magazines and journals, the periodical press also provided an important source of income for many of […]

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Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science

Few subjects elicit stronger responses than the relationship between science and religion. How best to characterize this relationship? According to recent historical work, “No generalization has proved more seductive and tenacious than that of ‘conflict.’” Such generalizations, or assumptions, are widely prevalent in contemporary culture. In popular press, in journalism, and even among some academic […]

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The Cambridge Companion Series on Charles Darwin and The Origin of Species

I have begun reading two related volumes on Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and his masterpiece, On the Origin of Species (1859). As part of the Darwin anniversary celebrations of 2009, the Cambridge Companion series issued two new volumes, Jonathan Hodge and Gregory Radick’s (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Darwin (2009) and Michael Ruse and Robert J. […]

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What was Victorian Doubt?

“There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds.” So writes Tennyson in his In Memoriam. According to Lance St John Butler, in his Victorian Doubt: Literary and Cultural Discourses (1990), Victorian doubt was not some “mere shadow of faith, a ghost prowling at the feast of the believers, but […]

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Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability

When Richard Owen (1804-1892) denounced T.H. Huxley’s (1825-1895) paleontological methods at the Geological Society of London in 1856, he did so on peculiarly moralistic grounds. But this should come as no surprise, for Owen “drew upon a long, well-worn tradition connecting materialism and unbelief with moral corruption and debauchery, including the entwinement of pornography and […]

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History, Humanity, and Evolution

In a festschrift honoring John C. Greene, most well-known for his seminal volumes, The Death of Adam: Evolution and its Impact on Western Thought (1959) and Science, Ideology and World View: Essays in the History of evolutionary Ideas (1981), James R. Moore (ed.) has collected thirteen essays in History, Humanity and Evolution: Essays for John […]

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