The Entropic Labyrinth

Abstract

The roots of most of the anxieties, physical and metaphysical, of the late-Victorian/Edwardian period can be found earlier in the nineteenth century. Many of the philosophic concerns of Conrad’s writing lifetime emanated from the advance of science, and the popular interest which it gradually created. It is not insignificant that three of the most widely read novelists of Conrad’s period all dealt, in some way, with the ideas of science, in a demotic form. Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde explored duality of personality in relation to scientific chemistry; Conan Doyle’s character Sherlock Holmes was a gentleman scientist who used the deductive method to solve mysteries; H. G. Wells wrote a number of novels in what has subsequently been categorised as the science fiction genre.