Science and Literature Category
Visions of Science: Humphry Davy
Posted on December 26, 2014 1 Comment
My Christmas gift this year was James A. Secord’s recent Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age (2014). After reading Secord’s magisterial Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (2000) earlier in the year, I have looked forward to […]
Reading the Magazine of Nature
Posted on February 22, 2014 2 Comments
“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 […]
Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability
Posted on February 20, 2014 1 Comment
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 […]
Science and Literature: Nature Transfigured
Posted on February 17, 2014 Leave a Comment
Over the weekend I continued thinking about science and literature through a reading of John Christie and Sally Shuttleworth’s (eds.) Nature Transfigured: Science and Literature, 1700-1900 (1989). This volume, according to its editors, sketches the “ways in which the cultural division of literature and science was historically initiated and has been historically maintained by unpacking […]
Pickering & Chatto: Victorian Science and Literature
Posted on February 14, 2014 Leave a Comment
I have recently acquired several copies of Gowan Dawson and Bernard Lightman’s (general editors) Victorian Science and Literature (2011; 2012), published by Pickering & Chatto Publishers. This amazing eight-volume collection provides rare primary sources on Victorian science, literature, and culture. It comes in two parts. Part I contains four volumes. In Volume I Dawson and […]
The Triumph of Time: A Study of the Victorian Concepts of Time, History, Progress, and Decadence
Posted on February 10, 2014 Leave a Comment
Jerome Hamilton Buckley’s The Triumph of Time (1966) is a “little book” with an enormous and exceedingly complex subject. It pretends to be no less than a survey of Victorians’ attitudes towards time. Buckley proposes to “test the truth” of John Stuart Mill’s suggestion, articulated in his The Spirit of the Ages (1831), that his own […]
Victorian Science in Context
Posted on February 4, 2014 Leave a Comment
“Victorians of every rank, at many sites, in many ways, defined knowledge, ordered nature, and practiced science.” This introductory remark, in Bernard Lightman’s Victorian Science in Context (1997), unveils the aim of the volume as a whole. Presented as a series of connected vignettes, it focuses on the local and the contingent. Situating a range […]
Laura Otis’ Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology (2009)
Posted on January 24, 2014 Leave a Comment
It is perhaps fitting that my 100th post on this blog should be Laura Otis’ Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology (2009). My research began in September with historiographies of the Scientific Revolution, only to converge in recent months on nineteenth-century narratologies of “conflict” between religion and science, which, I believe, depended crucially […]
Charlotte Sleigh’s Literature and Science (2011)
Posted on January 24, 2014 1 Comment
Since my post on Huxley’s treatment of “Nature,” I have occupied my time with readings from Laura Otis’ Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century (2009) and Charlotte Sleigh’s Literature and Science (2011). Otis’ work is an anthology of over 500 pages of excerpts and explanatory notes. Sleigh’s work is a sustained argument about the […]
Lay of the Trilobite (1885), by May Kendall
Posted on January 21, 2014 Leave a Comment
A mountain’s giddy height I sought, Because I could not find Sufficient vague and mighty thought To fill my mighty mind; And as I wandered ill at ease, There chanced upon my sight A native of Silurian seas, An ancient Trilobite. So calm, so peacefully he lay, I watched him even with tears: I thought […]