Narratives of Nature: Response

The scientists who founded Nature in 1869 chose the title of their magazine to encompass the full range of studies of the physical world. The first issue thus offered articles about protoplasm, moths, dinosaurs, heat, cholera, plant fertilization, a solar eclipse, and the Suez Canal. They hoped (with justification, as the subsequent success of Nature has demonstrated) to bring these topics to the attention of a broader audience than any specialized scientific periodical could command. This Victorian extension of interest has continued— or retroactively reconstituted itself—after more than a century. Of course nature has many other, less concrete senses, as a glance at the OED or at Raymond Williams's Keywords will show, but the sense enshrined in the name of the journal has received increasing attention from scholars in the last twenty-five years or so. That is, Nature's understanding of nature has increasingly attracted the notice of humanities scholars who, unlike scientists (or historians of science), are not obligated to turn their professional attention in that direction.

This expanded scrutiny has had various effects. In the field of literary studies, it has enriched and diversified the material available for interpretation. In the history of science, there has been a corresponding or reciprocal expansion, not in the range of topics studied, but in the range of methods available to analyze them. The three preceding essays illustrate both these trends. Amy M. King and Michelle Elleray are literary scholars who apply critical methods to noncanonical texts, King's drawn from natural history and Elleray's, from anthropology; James Elwick is a historian of science whose analysis of anatomical research is enhanced by his appreciation of linguistic nuance. Each of these essays illustrates the rewards of cross-disciplinary borrowing. As a group, the essays also suggest why it may be problematic (or beside the point) to characterize such cross-fertilization as interdisciplinarity.

In the most general sense, there is nothing novel about the presence of scientific topics in literary scholarship. Such themes have long figured in studies of writers like Alexander Pope, Mary Shelley, and Alfred Tennyson, whose work incorporated ideas derived from contemporary physics and biology. The distinctive contribution of the last several decades of criticism has been to include within the primary focus of interpretation those books and articles where canonical poets and novelists found the food for their scientific thought. In her pioneering Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1982), Gillian Beer claimed (in her title and the ordering of her chapters as well as in her argument) that the critical reading of scientific texts could offer rewards as compelling as those culled from literary texts—and then offered a brilliant interpretation of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) in support of her claim. Many other literary scholars have subsequently exploited the rich stock of Victorian science and natural history, with results that are now evident in graduate and undergraduate syllabi, as well as in conference programs, scholarly periodicals, and library catalogs.

In her essay, Amy M. King applies Beer's method to a very different subject. Philip Henry Gosse was a naturalist with a special interest in aquatic life and a flair for popularization. He was a close contemporary of Darwin, but his experience could hardly have been less similar, both as an intellectual and in many other ways. Their interests sometimes overlapped: Darwin engaged in meticulous research as well as in ambitious theorizing, and Gosse disastrously attempted to confront the geological record in Omphalos (1857), for which he was ridiculed retroactively by his son Edmund as well as at the time by colleagues. In addition, Gosse and Darwin were both skillful and evocative writers, but they wrote for divergent audiences. The nature of Gosse's intended readership emerges clearly from King's account. Focusing particularly on works that Gosse obviously designed to appeal to the amateur naturalist—he signalled this intention with titles featuring such terms as "rambles," "wonders," and "romance"—she appreciatively conveys both his pleasure in the minute details of (mostly) seashore life and his sense of the broader theological significance of...