Abstract
As “King of the Aesthetes,” Wilde is often presumed to have distinguished his intellectual output from the more objective and concrete methods of the scientist. Even where Wilde invokes scientific thought, scholars have suggested, it serves primarily as a point of contrast or comparison to the knowledge availed by art. Such accounts often presume that science is aligned strictly with classification and the primacy of “factual” knowledge. Yet in Wilde’s time scientific discourse was far more varied in its presentation, methodologies, and associations. This chapter considers Wilde’s interest in science on its own terms—as a means of illuminating the secrets of the natural world through the combined efforts of empirical observation and imagination. Rather than proposing that science provided either a model or a foil for Wilde’s literary experiments, this chapter proposes that Wilde engaged with science as a mode of imaginative and speculative thought.
Is all human sorrow as meaningless as sea sickness?
Is the voice of one crying in the wilderness merely the result
of the molecular action of locusts and wild honey?
Oscar Wilde, Commonplace Book
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Notes
- 1.
Oscar Wilde, “A Bevy of Poets,” in Journalism 1, ed. John Stokes and Mark Turner, vol. 6 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 201): 44–47, 46.
- 2.
Mark Raffalovich, “The Root of the Matter,” Pall Mall Gazette (30 March, 1885), 5.
- 3.
Oscar Wilde, Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2000), 256.
- 4.
Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions (New York, 1916), 22.
- 5.
Harris, 27.
- 6.
See Giles Whiteley, “Oscar Wilde’s Reading of Popular Science Monthly,” Notes and Queries 64.1 (March 2017), 142–44. Whiteley carefully compares passages from Wilde’s college notebooks to passages from: Emil du Bois-Reymond, “Limits of our Knowledge of Nature,” Popular Science Monthly, 5 (May 1874); G. J. Allman, “Protoplasm and Life,” Popular Science Monthly, 15 (October 1879), 721; Eduard Oscar Schmidt, The Doctrine of Darwinism and Descent (London, 1875); Thomas Martin Herbert, The Realistic Assumptions of Modern Science Examined (London, 1879); and Henry Maudsley, Body and Mind (London, [1870] 1873).
- 7.
A good example of this can be found in the work of Philip Smith II and Michael Helfand, whose discussion of the Oxford notebooks presents the work of Friedrich Hegel, William K. Clifford, Immanuel Kant, and Herbert Spencer as at once philosophical and scientific in scope. To be sure, the procedural concerns of philosophy and science frequently overlapped in the nineteenth century. Still, treating philosophical subjects (logic, causation, and epistemology) as distinct from scientific disciplines (like biology, physics, or chemistry) yields quite a different understanding of Wilde’s intellectual range. See Oscar Wilde, Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of Mind in the Making, ed. Philip E. Smith II and Michael Helfand (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
- 8.
N.A. Rupke, “Oxford’s scientific awakening and the role of geology,” in vol. 6 of The History of the University of Oxford, ed. M.G. Brock and M.C. Curthoys (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997): 543–562, 545.
- 9.
The Novum Organon stood chiefly as a point of comparison to Aristotle’s Logic, to which it makes explicit reference. Montagu Burrows, Pass and Class: An Oxford Guidebook (Oxford: Parker, 1860), 146–7.
- 10.
See Smith and Helfand, “The Context of the Text,” in Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of Mind in the Making, ed. Philip E. Smith and Michael S. Helfand (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989): 5–34.
- 11.
Suzanne Raitt, “Immoral Science in The Picture of Dorian Gray,” Strange Science: Investigating the Limits of Knowledge in the Victorian Age, ed. Lara Karpenko and Shalyn Clagett (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016): 164–80, 166.
- 12.
Carolyn Lesjak has made a striking argument for regarding Wilde’s investment in scientific thought as inseparable from his aesthetic sensibilities. Wilde was, she avers, committed to no single way of viewing the world, and his reader must therefore attend to the “proximate” relations between different modes of thought, seeing them as simultaneously in competition and collusion. Lesjak notes that “the politics that emerge out of Wilde’s ecumenical aesthetic practice draw their energy from the complex interplay of different notions of affinity, influence, and transmutation, some of which are richly congruent with scientific thinking of the time.” See Carolyn Lesjak, “Oscar Wilde and the Art/Work of Atoms,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 43.1 (2010): 1–26, 5.
- 13.
By juxtaposing scientific discourse to more speculative forms of thought, Lesjak argues, Wilde could erase, symbolically and methodologically, the boundaries between matter and spirit: “Within the multiple lines of influence that call on Wilde and vice versa,” Lesjak continues, “science holds a special place given its myth of sheer empiricism . It marks one side of the mind/matter divide and hence becomes an exemplary ‘given’ with which to think about matter—not in order to supplant it but rather to put in relation to ‘mind’ or thought” (Lesjak, 13).
- 14.
Oscar Wilde, Commonplace Book, in Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of Mind in the Making, ed. Philip E. Smith II and Michael Helfand (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989): 107–152, 126 [93]. For all references to Wilde’s Notebook Kept at Oxford and Commonplace Book, I have included the pagination from Smith and Helfand’s edition, followed by the manuscript pagination in brackets (as shown).
- 15.
John Pickstone, “Science in Nineteenth Century England: Plural Configurations and Singular Politics,” in The Organisation of Knowledge in Victorian Britain, ed. Martin Daunton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005): 29–60, 32.
- 16.
See Michael Wainwright, “Oscar Wilde, the Science of Heredity, and The Picture of Dorian Gray,” English Literature in Transition 54.4 (2011): 494–522. See also Chara Ferrari, “Subversive Aims: Science and Contamination in Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray,” Nineteenth-Century Prose 44.1 (2017): 67–86.
- 17.
William Wilde was extraordinarily prolific. His writings also include: “Medical Epidemics: Glaucoma and Iridectomy,” Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medical Science (August, 1860), 68–90; Austria: its literary, scientific, and medical institutions (Dublin: William Curry, Jun. and Company, 1843); and countless other articles, reviews, and volumes on subjects as far-reaching as surgical procedures, archaeological relics, and Irish folklore.
- 18.
William R. Wilde, “Medical Epidemics,” 69; William R. Wilde, Irish Popular Superstitions (Dublin: James McGlashan, 1852), 30. In Practical Observations, he likewise observes: “above all, I have labored to divest this branch of medicine of that shroud of quackery, medical as well as popular, with which, until lately, it has been encompassed.” William R. Wilde, Practical Observations on aural surgery: and the nature and treatment of diseases of the ear (Philadelphia: Branchard and Lea, 1853), 18.
- 19.
William R. Wilde, Practical Observations, 22.
- 20.
William R. Wilde, Practical Observations, 22.
- 21.
Craig Ashley Hanson, The English Virtuoso: Art, Medicine, and Antiquarianism in the Age of Empiricism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 9. See also Hanson, 9–13. Samuel Johnson’s English Dictionary had defined “empiricism ” as “dependence on experience without knowledge or art,” and this sense of the term persisted through the nineteenth century, as illustrated in an 1853 volume, which relentlessly satirizes quackery by focusing on “the false and destructive venom of empiricism.” Samuel Johnson, English Dictionary (Boston: Nathan Hale, 1835), 234; Sophistry of Empiricism (Dublin: James McGlashan, 1853), 73.
- 22.
Alex Warwick, “Margins and Centres,” Repositioning Victorian Sciences: Shifting Centres in Nineteenth-Century Scientific Thinking, ed. David Clifford, Elisabeth Wadge, Alex Warwick, and Martin Willis (London: Anthem Press, 2006): 1–16, 3.
- 23.
Jonathan Smith, Fact and Feeling: Baconian Science and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 4.
- 24.
John Tyndall, “Scientific Use of the Imagination,” Essays on the Use and Limit of the Imagination in Science (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1870): 13–51, 16.
- 25.
James McGeachie, “‘Normal’ Development in an ‘Abnormal’ Place: Sir William Wilde and the Irish School of Medicine,” in Medicine, Disease and the State in Ireland, 1650–1940, ed. Greta Jones and Elizabeth Malcolm (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999): 85–101, 85.
- 26.
McGeachie, 86.
- 27.
Practical Observations, 18.
- 28.
Practical Observations, 234.
- 29.
Practical Observations, 234–9.
- 30.
William R. Wilde, An Essay on the Malformations and Congenital Diseases of the Organs of Sight (Dublin: Fannin & Company, 1862), 88.
- 31.
William R. Wilde, Malformations, 88.
- 32.
See T.G. Wilson, Victorian Doctor: Being the Life of Sir William Wilde (New York: L.B. Fischer, 1946); Terence de Vere White, The Parents of Oscar Wilde: Sir William and Lady Wilde (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1967).
- 33.
Lambert, 145.
- 34.
William R. Wilde, Narrative, 255.
- 35.
William R. Wilde, Narrative, 256.
- 36.
Wilde, “Historical Criticism,” in Criticism, ed. Josephine M. Guy, vol. 4 of Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007):1–67, 52.
- 37.
Lady Jane Speranza Wilde, Ancient legends, mystic charms and superstitions of Ireland (London: Chattto and Windus, 1919), 3.
- 38.
Lady Wilde, Ancient Legends, 3.
- 39.
Iain Ross, Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 18.
- 40.
Wilde, Complete Letters, 85.
- 41.
Rupke, “Oxford’s scientific awakening,” 568.
- 42.
Iain Ross includes a comprehensive discussion of the debates between empirical and textual study at Oxford in Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece, 35–49.
- 43.
See Iain Ross, Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece, 50–1.
- 44.
Evelyn Abbot and Lewis Campbell, eds., vol. 2 of The Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett (New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1897), 145.
- 45.
Benjamin Jowett, “On Inscriptions of the Age of Thucydides,” in vol. 2 of Thucydides (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1881), cii.
- 46.
Oscar Wilde, Notebook Kept at Oxford, in Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of Mind in the Making, ed. Philip E. Smith II and Michael Helfand (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989): 153–74,154 [5]. Lady Wilde too would mention Boucher de Perthes’s findings in “Sketches of the Irish Past” (Ancient Legends, 264).
- 47.
Wilde, Notebook Kept at Oxford, 154 [5].
- 48.
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (London: Bell and Daldy, 1870), 239.
- 49.
Wilde, Notebook Kept at Oxford, 162 [43].
- 50.
Lady Wilde, Driftwood from Scandinavia (London: Richard Bentley and Company, 1884), 100.
- 51.
Lady Wilde, Driftwood from Scandinavia, 115.
- 52.
Wilde, Notebook Kept at Oxford, 159 [31]. No scholar has, to my knowledge, been able to locate an attribution for this source. The passage is formatted as a quotation in the notebook, though it is also possible (and has been suggested) that the words are Wilde’s own. It curiously seems to anticipate the words of theologian Charles Woodruff Shields, who would write in The Order of the Sciences (1882): “In chemical science we have penetrated through solids, liquids and gases, among infinitesimal atoms, so definite that they can be mathematically weighed and measured, and yet so indefinite that no microscope will ever deter them; now grouped as solid spheres, cubes or rings, and non clustered as mere spaceless centers of force.” See Charles Woodruff Shields, The Order of the Sciences (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1882), 82–3. The concept of “infinitesimal atoms,” of course, was also one Wilde would have encountered in the work of Democritus. See for instance, C.C.W. Taylor, The Atomists: Leucippus and Democritus. Fragments, A Text and Translation with Commentary (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999).
- 53.
Wilde, Commonplace Book, 164 [56].
- 54.
Kanarakis Yannis, “The Aesthete as Scientist: Walter Pater and Nineteenth-Century Science,” Victorian Network 2.1 (2010): 88–105, 103.
- 55.
Walter Pater, The Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1873), 207–208.
- 56.
In his lecture “The Doctrine of Motion” (1893), Pater likewise reflects: “Our terrestrial planet is in constant increase by meteoric dust, moving to it through endless time out of infinite space. […] The granite kernel of the earth it is said, is ever changing in its very substance, its molecular constitution, by the passage through it of electric currents” (20). If Darwin had established that living organisms are in a constant state of evolution, Pater suggests here that this precept applies to all matter, including the mind itself: “[…]as for philosophy—mobility, versatility, the habit of thought that can most adequately follow the subtle movement of things, that, surely, were the secret of wisdom, of the true knowledge of them. It means susceptibility, sympathetic intelligence, capacity, in short” (22). See Walter Pater, “The Doctrine of Motion,” The Works of Walter Pater: Plato and Platonism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011): 5–26.
- 57.
Wilde, Commonplace Book, 126 [93]. As Smith and Helfand rightly point out, Wilde was likely responding to John Tyndall’s “Professor Virchow and Evolution” (1878), Fragments of Science: A Series of Detached Essays, Addresses, and Reviews, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1900), 2: 407.
- 58.
George Stoney first related the concept of the electron (which at the time he referred to as the “Electrine”) at an 1874 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
- 59.
Interestingly, Wilde and Spencer were in New York at the same time during Wilde’s 1881 tour of America. Rumors circulated that Spencer had denounced the young aesthete, though Spencer insisted: “I have expressed no opinion whatever concerning Mr. Oscar Wilde. Naturally, those who put in circulation fictions of this kind may be expected to mix much fiction with what fact they report.” Edward Livingston Youmans, Herbert Spencer on the Americans and the Americans on Herbert Spencer (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1883), 10.
- 60.
Herbert Spencer, Social Statics (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1873), 29.
- 61.
Herbert Spencer, “The Classification of the Sciences,” Recent Discussions of Science, Philosophy, and Morals (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1871): 62–86, 62. It is worth noting that Spencer suggests here that challenging the serial arrangement of the sciences was the object of his 1854 essay “The Genesis of Science.” Wilde similarly grapples with Spencer’s system in his “Notebook on Philosophy,” 1876–8, “Oscar Wilde and His Literary Circle Collection,” MS W6721 M3 N9113, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library (Los Angeles, CA): 0201–2.
- 62.
Spencer, “Classification,” 62.
- 63.
Spencer, “Classification,” 86.
- 64.
Wilde , Notebook Kept at Oxford, 171 [97]. Such a comment sounds strikingly akin to the words of Lady Wilde in “The Divinity of Humanity,” where she remarks that “science goes but a short way along the shrouded path of infinite mystery, and can affirm only with a hesitating asseverance what may be afterwards overthrown by wider views and more perfect knowledge of the physical world.” Lady Jane Wilde, “The Divinity of Humanity,” The Dublin University Magazine (May 1877): 627–639, 633.
- 65.
Spencer, “Classification,” 66.
- 66.
Wilde, Commonplace Book, 110 [13].
- 67.
Wilde, Commonplace Book, 108 [4].
- 68.
Michael Wainwright does an excellent job of tracing some of Wilde’s most noteworthy scientific influences. His reading of the novel rests upon the notion that the relationship between Dorian Gray and the painting is akin to the relationship embryologist August Weisman posits between soma and germ. Dorian ultimately remains static, undeveloped, and unproductive because he defies a critical law of biological reproduction. See also John Foster Wilson, “Against Nature?: Science and Oscar Wilde,” University Toronto Quarterly 63.2 (Winter 1993/40): 328–46. Wilson emphasizes Wilde’s special fixation on evolution, noting his thematization of “flawed heredity” in both Dorian Gray and De Profundis (338). Moreover, Wilson articulates in clear terms the relationship between developmental theory and Wilde’s understanding of the self: “It was by his Oxford reading that Wilde discovered the evolutionary foundation of his belief in individuality, thereafter lifelong” (336).
- 69.
Wilson, “Against Nature?,” 340.
- 70.
Wilde would have had at least a passing exposure to the work of George Cuvier, who was central to his father’s work in A Voyage to Madeira. He alludes to work by Huxley and Darwin in Commonplace Book, 134 [139], 151 [214], 127 [22]; Notebook Kept at Oxford, 163–4 [49–55], 165 [57–61]; and Wilde, Complete Letters, 388.
- 71.
Wilde, Commonplace Book, 129–30 [119].
- 72.
In such a remark, we might well detect a harbinger of Wilde’s “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” a poem in which the speaker, a prisoner awaiting the execution of a fellow inmate, is able actually to feel the guilt of a crime he has not committed:” Alas! it is a fearful thing / To feel another’s guilt! / For, right within, the sword of Sin / Pierced to its poisoned hilt, / And as molten lead were the tears we shed / For the blood we had not spilt.” The collective guilt of the inmates, who do not merely understand but actually share the guilt of their fellow prisoner, reflects Wilde’s enduring interest in the possibility that scientific precepts might be linked to the moral or imaginative faculty. Oscar Wilde, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” in Poetry and Poems in Prose, ed. Bobby Fong and Karl Beckson, vol. 1 of The Complete Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000): 195–216, 203 [line 265].
- 73.
See for instance Smith and Helfand’s treatment of the subject in “The Context of the Text,” 29–32.
- 74.
Herbert Spencer, First Principles [1862] (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1898), 338.
- 75.
Wilde, Commonplace Book, 125 [83].
- 76.
Wilde, Commonplace Book, 154 [2].
- 77.
Wilde, Complete Letters, 335.
- 78.
Frank Granger, Notes on the Psychological Basis of Fine Art (Nottingham: James Bell, 1887), 10.
- 79.
Granger, Notes, 10.
- 80.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections (London: Macmillan 1906), 183.
- 81.
William K. Clifford, Lectures and Essays (London: Macmillan, 1879), 58.
- 82.
Wilde, Commonplace Book, 125 [83].
- 83.
John Tyndall, “Inaugural Address Before the British Association,” Popular Science Monthly 5 (October 1874), 652–86, 655.
- 84.
Tyndall, “Inaugural Address,” 686.
- 85.
Wilde, Notebook Kept at Oxford, 162. Smith and Helfand suggest that this passage invokes the words of Henry Thomas Buckle in The History of Civilization (1862).
- 86.
Wilde, Notebook Kept at Oxford, 172 [101].
- 87.
Wilde, Commonplace Book, 125 [89].
- 88.
See Bristow, “Wilde’s Abstractions.”
- 89.
Buckle, 307.
- 90.
Buckle, 31.
- 91.
Wilde, “Historical Criticism,” 27.
- 92.
William Wordsworth, “Observations [Preface to the Lyrical Ballads],” Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth (Paris: A. and W. Galignani and Co.): 251–9, 255.
- 93.
Oscar Wilde, “The English Renaissance of Art,” Miscellanies, ed. Robert Ross (London: Methuen and Company, 1908): 241–77, 247.
- 94.
Wilde, “The English Renaissance of Art,” 247.
- 95.
Wilde, “The Truth of Masks,” in Criticism, ed. Josephine M. Guy, vol. 4 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007): 208–28, 208. Wilde’s remark is a close paraphrase of a footnote included in Lytton’s essay: “The attempt to archaeologize the Shakespearean drama is one of the stupidest pedantries of this age of prigs. Archaeology would not be more out of place in a fairy tale than it is in a play of Shakespeare. This scene is beautiful and animated, and that is all that is wanted.” Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton, “Miss Anderson’s Juliet,” The Nineteenth Century (December 1884), 886.
- 96.
Wilde, “The Truth of Masks,” 215.
- 97.
Wilde, “The Truth of Masks,” 215.
- 98.
Wilde, “The Truth of Masks,” 218.
- 99.
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), in The Picture of Dorian Gray: The 1890 and 1891 Texts, ed. Joseph Bristow, vol. 3 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 28.
- 100.
Heather Seagroatt, “Hard Science, Soft Psychology, and Amorphous Art in The Picture of Dorian Gray,” Studies in English Literature 38.4 (Autumn 1998), 741–59, 742.
- 101.
Wilde, Dorian Gray, 306.
- 102.
Wilde, Dorian Gray 336. Emphasis added.
- 103.
See Wilson, “Against Nature?,” 331, 334.
- 104.
W.B. Yeats, “More Memories,” The Dial 73 (September 1922): 133–58, 135.
- 105.
Wilde, Dorian Gray, 47.
- 106.
Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” 175.
- 107.
Wilde, Dorian Gray, 219.
- 108.
Wilde, Dorian Gray, 49.
- 109.
Wilde, Dorian Gray, 111.
- 110.
Wilde, Dorian Gray, 111.
- 111.
Wilde, Dorian Gray, 105.
- 112.
Wilde, Dorian Gray, 249.
- 113.
Wilde, Dorian Gray, 83.
- 114.
Wilde, Notebook Kept at Oxford, 162 [43].
- 115.
Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” 142.
- 116.
Wilde, Commonplace Book, 125 [87].
- 117.
Wilde, Complete Letters, 256.
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Stern, K.J. (2019). The Scientist. In: Oscar Wilde. Literary Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24604-4_4
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