Literature and Science in the 19th Century: An Anthology

Citation

Cawkell, T. (2003), "Literature and Science in the 19th Century: An Anthology", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 59 No. 2, pp. 224-227. https://doi.org/10.1108/00220410310463536

Laura Otis is currently working at the Max Planck Institute for the history of science in Berlin.

The relationship between science and literature is discussed in a different book Bridging the Two Cultures by Wilson and Bowen. A reviewer writes: “The authors explore the use of scientific concepts and ideas in various literary works; they use Darwinian theories to extract contributions from John Fowles's the French Lieutenant's Woman; they use entropy, Maxwell's demon, and chaos theory to study Thomas Pynchon's the Crying of Lot 49, and they confront the notion of scientific progress with artistic notions of patterns and cycles in W.B. Yeats's poetry”. These ideas apply equally well to the book edited by Otis being here reviewed.

The editor explains her reasons for collecting the works of nineteenth century authors. “A close acquaintance with the literary heritage could be crucial to a scientist's ability to obtain an audience and make a favourable impression on society. To win the confidence of educated readers, 19th century scientists made frequent references to the fiction and poetry of the day and to that of earlier generations … Scientists knew that like literary writers, they relied heavily on imagination. Only a comparison of the unknown with the known can create new forms of understanding, so that metaphor plays a key role in original thought. Whether studying physical or biological events, scientists depicted the world imaginatively so that they could draw inferences about invisible phenomenon based on observable effects. Picturing the unknown, they acted like novelists or poets, inviting readers to imagine hidden worlds”.

Sometimes it is hard to distinguish whether a writer is operating in the literary or the scientific mode. Otis provides two examples from Lewis Carroll. In Through the Looking‐glass. Carroll writes “‘So she can't do subtraction’ said the White Queen. ‘Can you do division? Divide a loaf by a knife – what's the answer to that?’ ‘I suppose’ – Alice was beginning, but the Red Queen answered for her. ‘Bread‐and‐butter of course. Try another subtraction. Take a bone from a dog and a what remains’?” In The Game of Logic, writes Carroll, “If you were in a confectioner's shop and if a little boy were to come in, put down 2p, and march off triumphantly with a single penny bun, you would shake your head mournfully and remark ‘defective conclusion!’ Poor little chap!”.

In the introduction to her book Laura Otis describes how the Victorian scientist Michael Faraday ”struggled to explain how forces could act at a distance. With little formal training in mathematics he saw the problem by reasoning visually, proposing that electricity and magnetism exerted their power through a ‘line of force’. Such lines could never themselves be observed but the characteristic pattern of metal shavings around a magnet suggested their structure”. Faraday, who founded the Royal Institution, was a great scientist, communicator, and populariser of science. He was the first to realise that electricity could be generated by magneto‐electric induction; he also laid down the basis of electro‐chemistry.

If any confirmation is necessary, Faraday's activities are the perfect example confirming the raison d'être of Otis's interesting book. Faraday devised a series of lectures which included experimental demonstrations. Lectures given by Humphrey Davey, another eminent scientist, caused such a crush of carriages carrying people to the Royal Institution in the rather narrow Albemarle St, that it became the first one‐way street in London. Christmas lectures for young people founded by Faraday have been televised every year since 1966.

Otis concludes the introduction to her anthology with “this anthology invites readers to explore the fertile exchange and images, metaphors, and narrative techniques among writers who today – though not in their own day – are regarded as members of very different disciplines”.

Laura Otis was free to choose whatever publications she liked without having to ask permission or having to pay copyright royalties. She has made some very good choices. For George Boole she has chosen a part of An Investigation of the Laws of Thought– Boole's best known work – about the theory of probability. Boole is much better known as the inventor of the operators “and”, “or” and “not”. Boole, born in Lincoln in 1815, put forward his ideas many years before his mathematics was applied to computers, although his work led directly to the development of computer logic. He was the son of a shoemaker. Fortunately his father communicated his love of learning to his children. George taught himself Greek and his father proudly sent some of his translations to the local paper. A heated debate followed through “Letters to the editor”, from which George emerged as a confirmed child prodigy.

Eventually he started up a small boarding school. In 1840 he sent a paper to the Cambridge Mathematical Journal where the editor encouraged him to publish. He was also encouraged to take a degree at Cambridge but decided that it would interfere with his progress in self‐taught pure mathematics. Boole did not belong to the appropriate social class to make progress, nor did he have an appropriate education. However, he rose above these disadvantages, won a number of academic awards, and became professor of mathematics at the newly founded Queens College in Cork. He was made an FRS in 1857.

In the introduction Otis says “as scientists gained prestige, literary writers in turn gained credibility by incorporating the voices of scientists. This strategy worked particularly well in the American ‘tell‐tale’ genre. Writers like Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain consciously imitated scientist's styles and use of evidence exploiting their own writing techniques to play with scientist's ideas and encourage readers to rethink them”.

However the influence of science on the literature is less convincing than the effects of a scientist's literary erudition judging by the excerpts in this anthology. The examples provided by literary writers tend to be simply descriptions of scientific phenomena. For example Kipling's The Deep Sea Cables:

There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep,All the great grey level plains of ooze where the shell‐burred cables creep …

Or the piece about a train journey from Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son:

Away with a shriek, and a roar, and a rattle, from the town, burrowing among the dwellings of men and making the streets hum, flashing out into the meadows for a moment, mining in through the damp earth, booming on in darkness and heavy air, bursting out again into the sunny days so bright and wide; away, with a shriek, and a roar, and a rattle, through the fields, through the woods, through the corn, through the hay, through the chalk, through the mould, through the clay, through the rock, among objects close at hand and almost in the grasp, ever flying from the traveller, and a deceitful distance ever moving slowly with him …

This is a most entertaining anthology, containing as it does pieces from Herschel to Lord Kelvin, and from Mark Twain to Wilkie Collins.