Otis - Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

LITERATURE AND SCIENCE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

THE material in this anthology comes from novels, plays, poetry, essays, scientific articles, lectures, treatises, and textbooks written throughout the course of the nineteenth century. It demonstrates the fertile exchange of ideas that took place between writers in very different disciplines, and reveals fascinating dialogues and confluences, as well as instructive distinctions.

It was not until the 1830s that the word science began to take on its modern meaning, and by the end of the century it had already divided into the branches we recognize today: medicine and psychology, zoology, geology, astronomy, mathematics and technology, sociology, and genetics. At the same time creative writers were exploring these emerging fields in their fiction and verse and using images, metaphors, and narrative techniques that fed both kinds of writing. Both scientists and literary authors wrote for a common audience, and their work was published side by side in periodicals and journals such as Household Words and the Westminster Review. Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century shows how such juxtapositions fed a hunger for knowledge, and with what excitement writers sought to communicate their discoveries.

LAURA OTIS is Associate Professor of English at Hofstra University, and the author of Organic Memory (1994), Membranes (1999), and Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (2001). Awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for her interdisciplinary studies of the nervous system, she is currently working at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

An Anthology

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
LAURA OTIS

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THIS anthology could never have emerged without all of the people who have suggested new ways to see the relationship between nineteenth-century literature and science. First, I would like to thank Robert Mighall, who recommended me as a potential editor, and my own editor Judith Luna, whose forthright advice and persistent enthusiasm for the project have kept me working these past four years. I am also deeply grateful to Hofstra University, which has granted me a full four years of research leave to work on this and other projects.

Research for this anthology was conducted almost entirely at the University of Chicago Libraries, and I would like to thank all of the librarians there who helped me locate texts. I am especially indebted to Jay Satterfield, Krista Ovist, Barbara Gilbert, Jessica Westphal, and Debra Levine in the Department of Special Collections. I am grateful to the University of Chicago Libraries for allowing me to reproduce these texts, and I thank Franoise Meltzer for inviting me to work at the University of Chicago as a fellow of the Comparative Literature Department. Some work was done at the New York Public Library, the Great Neck Public Library, and the New York Academy of Medicine, and there I would like to thank Caroline Duroselle-Melish, Reference Librarian of Historical Collections. I am also grateful to the Cambridge University Library for allowing me to browse its collection of nineteenth-century journals, and to Ellen Garske at the Max Planck Institute Library in Berlin for her assistance in obtaining additional sources.

I would like to thank Thomas D. Brock for permission to reproduce his translation of Louis Pasteurs On the Organized Bodies Which Exist in the Atmosphere (1861), originally published in his anthology, Milestones in Microbiology, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.

I am deeply indebted to all of the scholars who have offered feedback and introduced me to new texts. I am most grateful to my reader Helen Small, whose comments have made this a much more representative, thought-provoking anthology than it might have been. As an honest and helpful critic, Helen has greatly enhanced my knowledge of nineteenth-century British culture. I am also indebted to her as a writer, for all of my introductions have benefited from her insightful rephrasing. Her assistance with the selection and analysis of texts cannot be underestimated. I would like to thank Helens student, Julia Reid, for suggesting Richard A. Proctors essay The Photographic Eyes of Science, and Alison Winter for her suggestions of texts illustrating Victorian thoughts about mesmerism. I am grateful to Pamela K. Gilbert for introducing me to sensation novels, particularly to the work of Braddon. I owe a great deal to Gillian Beer, whose lectures at the University of Chicago in May 1998 opened my eyes to many issues in nineteenth-century mathematics and physics. I am grateful for her suggestions about Carrolls, Maxwells, and Kiplings works and for her own inspiring studies of nineteenth-century literature and science. I thank her student Jeff Mackowiak for his friendly support and his interesting study of Maxwells poetry. I am indebted to the many scholars at the University of Chicago whose feedback has shaped this anthology, particularly Larry Rothfield. I thank my colleague George Greaney at Hofstra for his assistance with the classical references, and John Bryant, Scott Harshbarger, JoAnn Krieg, and Julia Markus for their suggestions about Melville, Wordsworth, Whitman, and Browning respectively. I am grateful to my friends in the Society for Literature and Science whose thoughts have inspired my work during the past four years, among them Carol Colatrella, N. Katherine Hayles, Steve Kern, Tim Lenoir, George Levine, Richard Menke, Sid Perkowitz, David Porush, and Susan Squier. Finally, I would like to thank Sander Gilman, whose undying friendship and support have kept up my spirits as I have followed the connections between literature and science.