Science and Literature

book Reviews Orientals" moving into the "empty" Dominions and lauded the white racist and anti-Asian views of the Australian newspaper magnate, Sir Keith Murdoch (the father of the present owner of The Times, Rupert Murdoch). During the last few years of his life (he died on 14 May 1925), Haggard became ever more reactionary and obsessed with the idea that The great ultimate war... will be that between the white and coloured races" of the world. Haggard's life and work were not, as he lamented at the time of his death, an utter wasteland. Pocock points out that some of Haggard's ideas on immigration to the Dominions were imbued in the Empire Settlement Act of 1922 and subsequent emigration projects; some of his ideas on agricultural reform were also reflected in the legislation to promote and protect British agriculture enacted since 1931, and especially in the Agricultural Act of 1947. Tom Pocock's well-written and objective study of Rider Haggard certainly contributes to a more complete understanding of his career and particularly the last three decades of his life. He is especially strong and straightforward in dealing with Haggard's imperialist and racist views and offers a plausible alternative to Wendy Katz's keen, astringent account of Haggard's imperialism and racism. J. O. Baylen, Emeritus Eastbourne, England Science and Literature Earl G. IngersoU. Representations of Science and Technology in British Literature Since 1880. New York: Peter Lang, 1992. xii + 320 pp. $54.95 IN THE INTRODUCTION to this study, Earl G. IngersoU attempts to define and justify the chronological framework and thematic emphasis stated so didactically in the title. Those preliminary comments also provide a relevant overview of works by other critics in this area, as IngersoU tries to locate himself within a recent continuum consisting of Leo Marx, Cecilia Tichi, Herbert Sussman, Wylie Sypher, Martin Wiener, and Corelli Barnett. But amid such understandable desire to claim adequate precedent for his selective-survey approach, there is a revealing note of defensiveness. Indeed, IngersoU never sufficiently explains why he wrote a book with an encompassing, ambitious title that is connected to a limited, almost arbitrary table of contents. In this regard IngersoU disingenuously argues that his goal is generally suggestive rather than comprehensive, as his purpose is "to 591 ELT 37 :4 1994 explore representative works of British literature of the past 100 years as expressions of attitudes toward science and technology." His major focus in this project, not surprisingly, is D. H. Lawrence, a writer about whom IngersoU has written productively for many years; IngersoU correctly maintains that Lawrence must occupy center stage because critics have persistently associated his writings with an animus toward the "machine" and toward various elements of scientific and technological progress. He discusses four major novels by Lawrence, an emphasis that creates a distracting imbalance next to the analyses of only a single work by Hardy, Conrad, Shaw, Forster, Woolf, Huxley, Orwell, Burgess, Golding, Sillitoe, Shaffer, and Lodge. IngersoU organizes his four chapters under the categories of Early Modern Views, The Voice of the Prophet, Lawrence's Heirs, and Growing Up in a Post-Industrial World. Such headings further suggest my serious concerns about his proportion and subjectivity, for his book never adequately addresses the inherent problems in selecting only one book by major writers, ignoring a variety of pertinent works by other writers, and attempting to use Lawrence to resolve issues that emerge within his selection of Lawrence's "heirs" and contemporaries. Similarly, Ingersoll's major reason for starting with 1880 is his strangely casual belief that the date appears to inaugurate a second industrial revolution in England, and thus it provides him with a convenient date and cultural climate to anticipate the themes, symbols, and aversions of the famous modernists three decades later. Yet he devotes insufficient space to defining the economic and scientific crisis of late nineteenth-century England, and his starting point seems capricious at best; he is ill-advised to summarize this period only through The Mayor of Casterbridge, for he needs a coordinated concern with other later Hardy novels (particularly Jude the Obscure) to enhance his limited discussion ofthat crucial period of transition from late...