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  • Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era: Bodies of Knowledge
  • Margaret C. Jacob
Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era: Bodies of Knowledge. By Tim Fulford, Debbie Lee, and Peter J. Kitson (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2004) 324 pp. $90.00

The authors want literature, science, and overseas exploration to be linked largely by the bitter fruits of the labor of their practitioners, who "often precipitated the subordination, removal or death of the native inhabitants on whom they lavished such minute attention." Even when poets, travelers, or experimenters displayed empathy toward the native people under discussion, or cast a cold, condemning eye on the imperial mission, "they nevertheless for this reason served the purposes of the men who held power at the imperial centres of Europe" (13, italics added). In short, just about everyone found in this book craves power of some sort, and achieves it by virtue of being linked together through what the authors call "networks," centers of calculation possessed by the imperial power that privilege only their intellectual representatives. The idea comes from Latour, well-known in history of science circles for a raffish relativism that occasionally he repents.1 The authors carry his theoretical [End Page 96] baggage onto the field so that their method of linking all three topics under discussion will hold together. Yet it would hardly be news that anyone investigating the period from the 1770s to the 1830s in Britain would see mutual influences and inspirations at work at the interface of literature, science, and exploration. Why do we need this complex language to describe the fact that people traveled, wrote, and experimented in ways that were often profoundly interconnected and that aided the advance of empire?

The complexity is needed to bolster the case for the destructive power exercised by a few major players in the period. In this account, Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society, sits like a queen bee at the heart of vast power centers of calculation that he alone controlled and that enabled British imperialism to flourish. Captain James Cook gets a bad press for his imperial exploits, but in this account, Banks was just as bad and far more powerful; he was one of "the causes of Romanticism's retreat from the language and politics of revolution" (179). Even Romantics like Humphrey Davy gave into his power and trooped to London to gain fame and fortune under his sway. "Without an audience to support their researches, young experimentalists dropped their association with radicalism and strove for a rapprochement with Banks and access to the metropolitan and European contexts that he influenced" (15). The insight into his power, we are told, is possible only because of Latour's framework, and he is even credited with having made possible the superb writing of Gascoigne on Banks (Gascoigne makes no reference to the work of Latour).2

If people are like Thomas Hobbes' belligerent and exploitive creatures, and their networks are webs that entrap, then their changing beliefs, values, and attitudes do not merit much attention. When the poet William Cowper tried to enter into meditation on what Omai, the Tahitian visitor, might have felt, the whole exercise, we are told, amounts to Cowper suggesting "that in capitalism globalisation functions as a fall from self-sufficiency" (65).

This book contains some helpful discussions, to be sure: electricity and its radical associations in the 1790s, the struggle of Edward Jenner to promote vaccination, Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford)'s work on heat and its impact on the desperate lives of chimney sweeps, the racialist investigations of Johann Blumenbach, and expeditions to the Poles and the Romantic concern with polarities, among others. But in almost every chapter, the vision of power and its conceits as the driving force of human endeavor makes the picture grim and unrelenting.

Margaret C. Jacob
University of California, Los Angeles

Footnotes

1. For repentance, see Bruno Latour, "Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern," Critical Inquiry, XXX (2004), 225-248.

2. John Gascoigne, Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment (New York, 1994).

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