Literature and Science under the Microscope

In July 1874 the literary gossip column of the Athenæum carried a droll anecdote concerning the classificatory fastidiousness of German booksellers. The 'learned Teuton', it reported, 'sometimes carries his zealfor classifying too far. In a recent Catalogue, under the heading "Microscopy and Technic of Microscope", after enumerating theworks of Frey, Schact, and other authorities, the compiler has inserted "Swinburne (A.C.), Under the Microscope; London, 1873"'. ¹ The waggish humour of this journalistic titbit derived not merely from jingoistic stereotypes of Teutonic officiousness, but also from the sheer incongruity of including Swinburne's impertinent literary pamphlet in a catalogue of dryly technical scientific publications. Under the Microscope had been written in response to various critical attacks on Swinburne's sensuous and republican poetry, and in it he posed as a student of'the science of comparative entomology', castigating his numerous detractors as perfidious insects and 'parasites' whose unjust censure would be exposed beneath the unerring lens of the microscope. ² The pamphlet's inadvertent inclusion in a continental catalogue of recent publications in the field of microscopy seems, at first sight, to confirm the incessant mutability of scientific and literary vocabularies that has become such a commonplace of recent scholarship on nineteenth-century culture. The mordant response of the Athenæum nevertheless serves as a reminder that such linguistic interchanges were just as likely to be regarded as absurd and comic transgressions of established taxonomic norms as creatively empowering instances of a unified predisciplinary culture. Practitioners of what Stefan Collini has termed the 'sub-field or "interdiscipline"' of 'science and literature' scholarship, and especially those working on the Victorian period, have generally exhibited as much zeal as Teutonic cataloguers in establishing creative connections between literary and scientific works. ³ The more problematic aspects of the relationship hinted at in the Athenæum's satirical stance, meanwhile, have tended to be quietly eschewed. In the light of such potential discordances, the founding of a new British Society for Literature and Science (BSLS) at the beginning of 2006, marked by an excellent inaugural conference at the University of Glasgow, affords an appropriate opportunity to reflect on the development and future prospects of this burgeoning area of scholarly enquiry; to place, in Swinburne's self-consciously borrowed terminology, the conjoint study of literature and science under the microscope.

It was, of course, the publication of Gillian Beer's groundbreak-ing Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1983; 2nd edn, 2000) more than two decades ago that did most to prompt literary and cultural historians to examine the role of science within literature, as well as the cultural embeddedness of science itself, and the writers and scientific practitioners of the Victorian period, and Darwin in particular, have remained central to the interdisciplinary branch of scholarship whose growing size and significance is heralded by the establishment of BSLS (Beer, appropriately, is the Society's Honorary President). While a successful North American Society for Literature, Science and the Arts (SLSA) has been in existence since the mid-1980s, publishing the journal Configurations with Johns Hopkins University Press, it has generally adopted an overtly theoretical approach to the subject that can sometimes seem remote from the more historicist concerns of most British academics. As the pages of Configurations attest, moreover, the emphasis of SLSA has largely been on science's position in contemporary culture ratherthan that of earlier periods, with articles on, say, cybernetics or object-orientation far outnumbering those on nineteenth-century topics. Instead of representing merely a subsidiary outpost of the SLSA, the BSLS, I will argue, offers an opportunity to foster a distinctively historicist or contextual approach to the study of science and literature, and one in which the Victorian period, while not necessarily overwhelming other eras or cultures, will continue to occupy a pivotal position. New opportunities are inevitably fraught with various difficulties and challenges and in these personal reflections, occasioned by the Glasgow conference, I want to focus particularly on two contentious issues: firstly, the often ambivalent relation between literature and science studies and recent approaches to the history...