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Mathilde Blind: Rhythm, Energy, and Revolution

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Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine ((PLSM))

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Abstract

In the late nineteenth century, theories of thermodynamics and electromagnetism indicated that matter was shaped and reshaped by rhythmic interchanges of energy. Building on the importance of rhythm to physics, poets and science writers alike claimed that the metres of verse might be understood as an expression or manifestation of the pervasive rhythm that structured natural processes across the universe. This chapter proposes that such claims helped to inform the politically radical poems of Mathilde Blind, who identified the cyclical transformations of matter and energy as the foundation of an egalitarian sympathy between people and things. Throughout her poetry, Blind combines materialist and idealist philosophies in her invocation of a universal and revolutionary motion which originates in matter, but which also guides the progress of human thought and history.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Mathilde Blind, “The Dead,” in The Prophecy of Saint Oran and Other Poems (London: Newman, 1881), 119.

  2. 2.

    Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 53.

  3. 3.

    See Katy Birch, “‘Carrying Her Coyness to a Dangerous Pitch’: Mathilde Blind and Darwinian Sexual Selection,” Women: A Cultural Review 24 (2013): 71–89; Susan Brown, “‘A Still and Mute-Born Vision’: Locating Mathilde Blind’s Reproductive Poetics,” in Victorian Women Poets, ed. Alison Chapman (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), 123–44; and Robert P. Fletcher, “‘Heir of All the Universe’: Evolutionary Epistemology in Mathilde Blind’s Birds of Passage: Songs of the Orient and Occident,” Victorian Poetry 43 (2005): 435–53.

  4. 4.

    Mary Somerville, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, 4th edn. (London: John Murray, 1837), 1–2. This paragraph is not present in the first edition.

  5. 5.

    Michelle Boswell, “Poetry and Parallax in Mary Somerville’s On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences,” Victorian Literature and Culture 45 (2017): 731.

  6. 6.

    William Whewell, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, 2 vols. (London: John W. Parker, 1840), 1:126.

  7. 7.

    Ibid., 1:134.

  8. 8.

    Blind, “Maxims and Reflections from the German of Goethe,” Fraser’s Magazine n.s. 13 (1876): 348.

  9. 9.

    James Clerk Maxwell, Matter and Motion (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1876), 93.

  10. 10.

    Ibid., 95.

  11. 11.

    Ewan Jones has also discussed some of the ways in which Maxwell and John Tyndall draw parallels between the rhythms of verse and those of the universe. See Jones, “Thermodynamic Rhythm: The Poetics of Waste,” Representations 144 (2018): 61–89.

  12. 12.

    Maxwell to Herbert Spencer, 17 December 1873, in The Scientific Letters and Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, ed. P. M. Harman, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990–2002), 2:962–63.

  13. 13.

    Tina Young Choi, “Forms of Closure: The First Law of Thermodynamics and Victorian Narrative,” ELH 74 (2007): 307.

  14. 14.

    See Gillian Beer, “Wave Theory and the Rise of Literary Modernism,” in Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 295–318; Anthony Enns and Shelley Trower, eds., Vibratory Modernism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and Michael Golston, Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

  15. 15.

    James Diedrick, Mathilde Blind: Late-Victorian Culture and the Woman of Letters (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016), 105–6.

  16. 16.

    David Friedrich Strauss, The Old Faith and the New: A Confession, trans. Blind, 1st edn. (London: Asher, 1873), 173–74.

  17. 17.

    Strauss, Der Alte und Der Neue Glaube: Ein Bekenntniss (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1872), 149.

  18. 18.

    Blind, “Memoir of David Friedrich Strauss,” in Strauss, The Old Faith and the New: A Confession, trans. Blind, 3rd edn. (London: Asher, 1874), xliii.

  19. 19.

    Strauss, Old Faith, 1st edn., 181.

  20. 20.

    Strauss, Alte Glaube, 156.

  21. 21.

    Strauss, Old Faith, 1st edn., 241–42.

  22. 22.

    Blind, “Shelley,” Westminster Review n.s. 38 (1870): 92–93.

  23. 23.

    Diedrick, Mathilde Blind, 159.

  24. 24.

    Blind, “Personal Recollections of Mazzini,” Fortnightly Review 49 (1891): 703.

  25. 25.

    Crosbie Smith, The Science of Energy: A Cultural History of Energy Physics in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 171.

  26. 26.

    John Tyndall, “The Constitution of the Universe,” Fortnightly Review 3 (1865): 141.

  27. 27.

    Tyndall, “Science and Man,” Fortnightly Review 22 (1877): 597.

  28. 28.

    Diedrick, Mathilde Blind, 147.

  29. 29.

    Blind, “L’Envoi,” in The Ascent of Man (London: Chatto and Windus, 1889), 198.

  30. 30.

    William Graham, The Creed of Science: Religious, Moral, and Social (London: Kegan Paul, 1881), 15

  31. 31.

    Blind to Richard Garnett, 10 October 1881, “Blind Correspondence,” vol. 2, British Library, Add MS 61928, 140r.

  32. 32.

    Graham, Creed, 309.

  33. 33.

    Graeme Gooday, “Sunspots, Weather, and the Unseen Universe: Balfour Stewart’s Anti-Materialist Representations of ‘Energy’ in British Periodicals,” in Science Serialized: Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals, ed. Geoffrey Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 111–47.

  34. 34.

    William Kingdon Clifford, review of Balfour Stewart and Peter Guthrie Tait, The Unseen Universe, Fortnightly Review 17 (1875): 777.

  35. 35.

    Balfour Stewart and Peter Guthrie Tait, The Unseen Universe or Physical Speculations on a Future State (London: Macmillan, 1875), 116.

  36. 36.

    Ibid., 156–57. Stewart and Tait acknowledge the similarities between their hypothesis and Charles Babbage’s arguments for the preservation of voice in the earth’s atmosphere (see Chap. 5). However, they do not discuss the important difference between the unambiguous materiality of the air and the hypothetical materiality of the ether.

  37. 37.

    Ibid., 159.

  38. 38.

    Bruce Clarke, Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 167.

  39. 39.

    Stewart and Tait, Unseen Universe, 47.

  40. 40.

    Ibid., 46 and 64.

  41. 41.

    Allen MacDuffie, Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 14.

  42. 42.

    Stewart and Tait, Unseen Universe, 90–91.

  43. 43.

    J. Norman Lockyer and Balfour Stewart, “The Sun as a Type of the Material Universe: The Place of Life in a Universe of Energy,” Macmillan’s Magazine 18 (1868): 327.

  44. 44.

    Ibid., 319.

  45. 45.

    Greg Myers, “Nineteenth-Century Popularizations of Thermodynamics and the Rhetoric of Social Prophecy,” Victorian Studies 29 (1985): 54–57.

  46. 46.

    Barri J. Gold, ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 138.

  47. 47.

    Lockyer and Stewart, “Sun,” 322.

  48. 48.

    Ibid., 323.

  49. 49.

    Sarah Alexander also notes that, in The Unseen Universe, “the universe is negentropic because it is not really a closed system.” Alexander, Victorian Literature and the Physics of the Imponderable (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), 89.

  50. 50.

    Algernon Charles Swinburne, “To Walt Whitman in America,” in Songs before Sunrise (London: F. S. Ellis, 1871), 148.

  51. 51.

    The Swinburne Letters, ed. Cecil Y. Lang, 6 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959–62), 1:201, 229, and 297.

  52. 52.

    Blind, “The Torrent,” in Poems by Claude Lake (London: Alfred W. Bennett, 1867), 10.

  53. 53.

    Blind, “Personal Recollections,” 707–8.

  54. 54.

    Blind, “The Orange-Peel in the Gutter,” in Poems, 55.

  55. 55.

    Ibid., 56.

  56. 56.

    Graham, Creed, 303.

  57. 57.

    Sara Lyons, “‘Let Your Life on Earth Be Life Indeed’: Aestheticism and Secularism in Mathilde Blind’s The Prophecy of St. Oran and ‘On a Torso of Cupid’,” in Writing Women of the Fin de Siècle: Authors of Change, ed. Adrienne E. Gavin and Carolyn Oulton (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 63.

  58. 58.

    Blind, “The Tombs of the Kings,” in Birds of Passage: Songs of the Orient and Occident (London: Chatto and Windus, 1895), 24–25.

  59. 59.

    Blind, “Soul-Drift,” in Birds, 80.

  60. 60.

    Diedrick, Mathilde Blind, 235.

  61. 61.

    Blind, “Commonplace Book,” Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, MS Walpole e. 1, 30r.

  62. 62.

    John Holmes, Darwin’s Bards: British and American Poetry in the Age of Evolution (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 43.

  63. 63.

    Lindsay Wilhelm, “The Utopian Evolutionary Aestheticism of W. K. Clifford, Walter Pater, and Mathilde Blind,” Victorian Studies 59 (2016): 27. See also Diedrick, Mathilde Blind, 214; and Fabienne Moine, Women Poets in the Victorian Era: Cultural Practices and Nature Poetry (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 254.

  64. 64.

    All references to The Ascent of Man are from the 1889 edition and will be cited in the text.

  65. 65.

    Graham, Creed, 6.

  66. 66.

    Charles LaPorte, “Atheist Prophecy: Mathilde Blind, Constance Naden, and the Victorian Poetess,” Victorian Literature and Culture 34 (2006): 427.

  67. 67.

    Gillian Beer, “‘Authentic Tidings of Invisible Things’: Vision and the Invisible in the Later Nineteenth Century,” in Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight, ed. Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay (London: Routledge, 1996), 88.

  68. 68.

    Jason R. Rudy, Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poetics (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2009), 156.

  69. 69.

    Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993), 376.

  70. 70.

    Blind later reiterates this sentiment: “Harmonies of confluent sound / Lift you at one rhythmic bound / From the thraldom of the ground” (57).

  71. 71.

    Blind, Shelley’s View of Nature Contrasted with Darwin’s (London: privately printed, 1886), 20.

  72. 72.

    See, for example, Stewart and Tait, Unseen Universe, 126.

  73. 73.

    Herbert F. Tucker, Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790–1910 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 506.

  74. 74.

    Helen Groth, “Victorian Women Poets and Scientific Narratives,” in Women’s Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian: Gender and Genre, 1830–1900, ed. Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 336.

  75. 75.

    Armstrong , “Msrepresentation: Codes of Affect and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Poetry,” in Women’s Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian: Gender and Genre, 1830–1900, ed. Armstrong and Virginia Blain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 12.

  76. 76.

    Strauss, Old Faith, 1st edn., 187.

  77. 77.

    Ibid., 259.

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  1. School of English, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK

    Gregory Tate

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Tate, G. (2020). Mathilde Blind: Rhythm, Energy, and Revolution. 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_6

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