Victorian Britain Category
The Principle of Uniformity and its Theological Foundations
Posted on August 13, 2014 1 Comment
According to John Herschel, Charles Lyell, and William Whewell, the concept of “uniformity” of nature is the defining feature of science. Nature’s “inflexible order,” its “uniform sequences and laws,” led many nineteenth-century scientists to reject miracles and divine intervention. According to Lyell, By degrees, many of the enigmas of the moral and physical world are […]
The Romanticism of the Victorian Scientific Naturalists
Posted on August 11, 2014 1 Comment
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 […]
The Nineteenth-Century Decline of Religious Orthodoxy
Posted on March 14, 2014 1 Comment
During the nineteenth century, scholarly clergymen like Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), J.R. Green (1837-1883), and J.E. Thorold Rogers (1823-1890) “felt it their duty of conscience to resign their orders.” Doubt and unbelief in the nineteenth century, it has been said, brought on by the concept of evolution and the “higher criticism” in biblical scholarship, led to […]
The Cambridge Companion to the Victorians
Posted on March 3, 2014 Leave a Comment
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 […]
The Late-Victorian Agnostic Popularizers
Posted on March 1, 2014 2 Comments
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 […]
What was Victorian Doubt?
Posted on February 20, 2014 Leave a Comment
“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 […]
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 […]
History, Humanity, and Evolution
Posted on February 19, 2014 1 Comment
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 […]
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 […]