At the Intersection of Victorian Science and Fiction: Andrew Lang's "Romance of the First Radical"

At the Intersection of Victorian Science and Fiction: Andrew Lang's "Romance of the First Radical" Julie Sparks San José State University EVER SINCE C. P. Snow's famous Rede Lecture of 1959, wherein the scientist-novelist lamented the schism between the sciences and the humanities, the intellectual divergence and mutual hostility between the "two cultures" has been seen as not only inevitable, but also fated to increase. It is easy to overlook the fact that as recently as the last century the two realms were, if not quite united, at least closely intertwined . In his study of this interconnection, Science and Literature in the Nineteenth Century, J. A. V. Chappie points out that in the early part of the century, scientists considered themselves "natural philosophers" while many artists demonstrated a lively interest in the latest scientific discoveries.1 Coleridge, for example, took an active part in the third meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which may have also attracted the young Tennyson.2 Furthermore, the extremely prolific and popular periodicals of the day, including Macmillan 's Magazine, Household Words, the Fortnightly Review, Cornhill Magazine, and the Nineteenth Century, published both serious scientific articles and works of literature and criticism. Often these journals provided the original forum for the writings of scientific luminaries. The generally educated reader "could turn from J. W. Croker's merciless assault on Poems by Alfred Tennyson in the April 1833 number of the Quarterly Review to Whewell's urbane assessment of Mary Somerville's Connexion ('her profound mathematical work on the "Mechanism of the Heavens" has already been treated of in this Journal'), without any feel125 ELT 42 : 2 1999 ing that, tone apart, they were moving to a different kind of discourse."3 In many respects they were not. Many historians of science and new historicist literary critics have investigated the impact of science on literature, and a newer, equally fertile line of inquiry reverses this trend to examine the scientific literature of the period for traces of fictional devices and habits of mind. A third possibility, one I would like to employ here, is to combine the two methods by examining the work of a Victorian interdisciplinarian, Andrew Lang—a writer of fiction and of original anthropological works—to see how scientific data and paradigms invade the science writer's fiction, and how fictional devices and artistic speculation make their way into his scientific treatises. Because no scientific discovery occupied a position of political neutrality in those turbulent times (any more than it does in our own), this third rhetorical dimension—political commentary —is important and will be considered also. Through this tri-part investigation of Lang's anthropology and two of his short stories on anthropological themes, we will see that, despite their separate cultural niches, the sciences and the humanities continue to bear evidence of a common epistemologieal ancestor. Andrew Lang (1844-1912) is remembered today primarily as an extremely versatile man of letters. He wrote poetry, plays, and stories for adults; original fairy tales for children, a book about Joan of Arc, The Maid of France (1908), biographies of Sir Stafford Northcote (1890) and J. G. Lockhart (1896); and a history of Scotland in four volumes (1900-1907). He translated Homer, and collaborated with H. Rider Haggard on a novel about Odysseus's later adventures, The World's Desire (1890). He also wrote He (1887), a parody of Haggard's She, with W. H. Pollock. As a journalist, he wrote essays, reviews, and polemical pieces on literary controversies of the day. However, Lang is best remembered now for his collections of fairy tales, beginning in 1889 with the Blue Fairy Book and continuing for 26 volumes (some posthumous). Lang's life-long interest in fairy tales and folklore carried him into the realm of scientific inquiry, for like many newly forming scientific disciplines in the nineteenth century, anthropology was broadly defined to encompass related disciplines, including comparative mythology, ethnology, and philology. Lang studied all three disciplines and wrote five books on these subjects: Custom and Myth (1883), Myth, Ritual and Religion (1887), The Making of Religion (1898), Social Origins (1903), and The Secret of the Totem...