Abstract
Certainly throughout her life with G. H. Lewes — partly as a result of it — Eliot was in active dialogue with the contemporary scientific debate. Though the theme of the ideal organic society, which runs through her work, may seem remote from science, it has its foundation in scientific theories of natural history and experimental psychology. Underlying such theories one can detect a metaphysic based in Jewish mysticism and its relation to scientific and pseudo-scientific creation and experimentation, aspects of which are discernible throughout the varied worlds created in her novels, from fifteenth-century Florence to contemporary England.
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Notes
As well as following his experiments, Eliot was acquainted with Gregory’s accounts as given in Letters to a Candid Inquirer on Animal Magnetism. See Beryl Gray’s ‘Afterword’ to her edition of The Lifted Veil (London, 1987). It is interesting to note that the narrative recollection of Gustav Meyrink’s novel, The Golem, is a clairvoyant one induced by wearing the wrong hat.
Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: the Make-Believe of a Beginning (Cambridge, 1994), p. 22.
Shuttleworth, p. 8 quotes Walter Buckley, Sociology and Modern Systems (New Jersey, 1967).
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© 2002 Saleel Nurbhai and K. M. Newton
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Nurbhai, S., Newton, K.M. (2002). Science, Pseudo-Science and Transgression. In: George Eliot, Judaism and the Novels. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230288539_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230288539_7
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