Abstract
This introduction argues that poetry and the physical sciences in nineteenth-century Britain were seen as mutually complementary because of their shared focus on the observation and experimental manipulation of nature’s materiality, on the inductive use of material evidence as the basis of theoretical arguments, and on the difficulty of communicating those arguments in language. It then sets out the methodology of this book, a combination of historicist scholarship and formalist close reading which aims to show how particular forms of writing helped to construct nineteenth-century understandings of poetry, the physical sciences, and the relations between them. The introduction also discusses the speculative theories of matter (the atomic theory, the undulatory theory of light and sound, the hypothesis of a universal ether) that underpinned nineteenth-century science.
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- 1.
Thomas Hardy’s “Poetical Matter” Notebook, ed. Pamela Dalziel and Michael Millgate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3.
- 2.
Ibid., 46, 53, 38, and 27.
- 3.
Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1983), 3rd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 5.
- 4.
For a discussion of literary and scientific definitions of experiment at the start of the nineteenth century, see Robert Mitchell, Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 14–42.
- 5.
John Herschel, A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy , 1st edn. (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1830), 77.
- 6.
For another perspective on the opposition between materialist and idealist theories of poetic form, focusing on the contexts of technology, physiology, and experimental psychology, see Jason David Hall, Nineteenth-Century Verse and Technology: Machines of Meter (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
- 7.
Alice Jenkins, Space and the “March of Mind”: Literature and the Physical Sciences in Britain 1815–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 208.
- 8.
John Dalton, A New System of Chemical Philosophy (London: R. Bickerstaff, 1808).
- 9.
See Humphry Davy, “An Essay on Heat, Light, and the Combinations of Light,” in The Collected Works of Sir Humphry Davy, ed. John Davy, 9 vols. (London: Smith, Elder, 1839–40), 2:5–86.
- 10.
See Thomas Young, “The Bakerian Lecture: On the Theory of Light and Colours,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 92 (1802): 12–48.
- 11.
Mary Somerville, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, 1st edn. (London: John Murray, 1834), 250.
- 12.
Sarah C. Alexander, Victorian Literature and the Physics of the Imponderable (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), 3.
- 13.
Alexander Bain, “On the Abuse of Language, in Science and in Common Life,” Fraser’s Magazine 35 (1847): 135.
- 14.
Michael Faraday, “Thoughts on Ray-Vibrations,” London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science 28 (1846): 345.
- 15.
Ibid., 347–48.
- 16.
James Clerk Maxwell, A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1873), 2:437–38.
- 17.
Maxwell, “Molecules,” Nature 8 (1873): 440.
- 18.
Mary Thomas Crane, Losing Touch with Nature: Literature and the New Science in Sixteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 2.
- 19.
Anna Henchman, “Outer Space: Physical Science,” in The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry, ed. Matthew Bevis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 695.
- 20.
On Shelley and chemistry, see Barbara Estermann, “Attraction and Combination: The Science of Metamorphosis in Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam,” Studies in Romanticism 50 (2011): 413–36. On Hopkins and physics, see Gillian Beer, “Helmholtz, Tyndall, Gerard Manley Hopkins: Leaps of the Prepared Imagination,” in Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 242–72; and Daniel Brown, Hopkins’ Idealism: Philosophy, Physics, Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
- 21.
However, in his youth, Faraday wrote poems, and essays that quoted poetry, as part of a programme of self-education. See Michael Faraday’s Mental Exercises: An Artisan Essay Circle in Regency London, ed. Alice Jenkins (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008).
- 22.
On Lucretius, see Amanda Jo Goldstein, Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); and John Holmes, “Lucretius at the Fin de Siècle: Science, Religion and Poetry,” English Literature in Transition 1880–1920 51 (2008): 266–80.
- 23.
Marjorie Levinson, “A Motion and a Spirit: Romancing Spinoza,” Studies in Romanticism 46 (2007): 367.
- 24.
Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 61.
- 25.
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), 51 and 81.
- 26.
Latour, Reassembling, 76.
- 27.
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 20.
- 28.
Ibid., 10.
- 29.
Levinson, “Motion,” 374.
- 30.
Graham Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer: Object-Oriented Literary Criticism,” New Literary History 43 (2012): 184.
- 31.
Ibid., 190.
- 32.
Richard Grusin, Introduction, in The Nonhuman Turn, ed. Grusin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), x.
- 33.
Noah Heringman, Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 21.
- 34.
Paul Gilmore, Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).
- 35.
Gowan Dawson and Bernard Lightman, Introduction, in Victorian Scientific Naturalism: Community, Identity, Continuity, ed. Dawson and Lightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 2.
- 36.
Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 154.
- 37.
Felski, “Latour and Literary Studies,” PMLA 130 (2015): 738.
- 38.
Ibid., 741.
- 39.
Caroline Levine, “Strategic Formalism: Toward a New Method in Cultural Studies,” Victorian Studies 48 (2006): 632.
- 40.
Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 10.
- 41.
Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian, “Form and Explanation,” Critical Inquiry 43 (2017): 652.
- 42.
Levine, “Strategic Formalism,” 647.
- 43.
Henry S. Turner, “Lessons from Literature for the Historian of Science (and Vice Versa): Reflections on ‘Form’,” Isis 101 (2010): 584.
- 44.
Herschel, “Sound” (1830), in Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, vol. 4 (London: B. Fellowes, 1845), 755.
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———. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Young, Thomas. 1802. The Bakerian Lecture: On the Theory of Light and Colours. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 92: 12–48.
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Tate, G. (2020). Introduction. In: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31441-5_1
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