The “scientific movement” and Victorian literature

ANNA THERESA COSSLETT, The "scientific movement" and Victorian literature, Brighton, Harvester Press; New York, St. Martin's Press, 1982, 8vo, pp. viii, 188, £20.00. Interaction between arts and sciences has long been regarded as one of the characteristic features of the Romantic era. The scientific writings by the poet Coleridge and the poetical experiments by the scientist Davy are among the various classic examples of this interaction. Any study of "arts and sciences" automatically takes its historical case studies first and foremost from the Romantics.' In recent years, however, the influence of science on literature during the Victorian era has received a considerable amount of attention. Since Susan Gliserman's papers in Victorian Studies on Tennyson's science, several book-length studies have appeared on Victorian literature as a mirror of contemporary scientific values.' The influence of especially Darwin on such novelists as George Eliot, Conrad, and Hardy is a current focus of interest.3 Tess Cosslett's book is a fine example of this growing interest in Victorian "science and literature". It successively deals with the definition of a Victorian scientific world view, and its reflection in Tennyson's In Memoriam, Eliot's Middlemarch, Meredith's two poems 'Melampus' and 'Meditation under stars', and Hardy's A pair of blue eyes. Cosslett has selected, as her main representatives of Victorian science, Darwin, Huxley, and Tyndall. Their view of nature was characterized by gradualism instead of catastrophism, and by a form of naturalism which, applied to man, meant that man is ruled by natural law and not the other way round. In places, Cosslett refers to other intellectual and scientific influences, such as natural theology and German idealism. One would do well to infer from this that the Victorian scientific world view was not as homogeneous as the focus on Darwin, Huxley, and Tyndall might suggest. Tennyson in particular, whose In Memoriam was written long before the period of Darwin's influence, was significantly indebted to the Bridgewater Treatises tradition and to the geology of such clerical geologists as Buckland and Sedgwick.4