Periodical Partners: A Context for Teaching Victorian Literature and Science

The interdisciplinary turn refocused research and teaching in the arts and humanities perhaps 20 years ago now. But since most of us academics continue to receive our training through specific and singular disciplines, what are we teaching when we claim an interdisciplinary approach? Is this the new historicism or cultural studies, or, increasingly in English Departments, what we might label "literary studies" with a broader scope? Have the so-called "culture wars" empowered us to teach not only beyond the traditional borders of the literary canon, but also across disciplinary lines? It is most often the case that we teach from within a specific discipline, with a nod to adjacent areas of studies, as these seem pertinent for the theories or subjects they cover, whether history, sociology, anthropology, art history, philosophy, or history of science, among others.

For courses on nineteenth-century British literature, the study of periodical culture offers a rewarding context for teaching the intertwining of fields of knowledge and styles of intellectual engagement. Examining Victorian print culture illuminates how literature and science occupied neighboring and even the same pages of magazine issues. Especially in the Victorian era, the relative classifications of "literature" and "science" as discourses and forms of knowledge were shifting.¹ While "literature" as a term had a more diffused and general meaning earlier in the century, periodical contents manifest the narrowing of this term as science became professionalized and valorized.² As Robert Young has argued, the periodical print industry generated the rise in the mid-Victorian decades of the specialized journal, part of a process over the century that witnessed the loss of a common intellectual context that had been informed by natural theology.³ Young asks, "Who was left to interpret science to the layman and to discuss the large issues raised by science" once scientists spoke only among themselves and in a specialized discourse (156). According to Young's argument, popularizers now handled scientific topics in the magazines, while more serious or professional articles proliferated in narrowly-tooled journals.

With this hypothesis in mind, one can productively explore this imbricated intellectual dialogue between science and literature by opening up the pages of many Victorian periodicals. Do the tables of contents of general magazines from the late 1850s to century's end demonstrate this increasing bifurcation of what C. P. Snow famously termed "the two cultures"? A quick perusal of the contents of several 1894 issues of Cosmopolitan clarifies this division; along with many diverse titles, there are just four categories, with each one including many items: "Fiction," "In the World of Art and Letters," "Poems," "The Progress of Science."⁴ Three decades earlier in several numbers of Cornhill Magazine a column ran titled, "Our survey of literature, science, and art." After three issues employing this combined heading, the survey dropped "art" for four months when the column appeared as "Our survey of literature and science" and then as "Notes on science," all this in less than a calendar year.⁵ Another example is The Athenaeum, launched in 1828 as a journal devoted to "literature, science, and the fine arts," but not until 1870 are literature and science divided into separate categories in the table of contents. Even more intriguing, a magazine begun in 1869, The Academy: A Monthly Record of Literature, Learning, Science, and Arts, included "Contents of the Journals" within each of its subheadings including "General Literature and Art" and "Science and Philosophy."⁶ In the 1893 contents of volume 53, "Science" was dropped from the categories covering only literature, art, and drama.⁷ Crucial to a reading of these categories in nineteenth-century periodicals is the etymology of "science," given its multiplied meanings from general knowledge to a specialized discourse.⁸

What constituted "literature" and "science" in these columns and more widely in these magazines, and did the contours of these designations alter over the last decades of the century? How frequent were these braidings and unbraidings of literature and science in the contents of Victorian periodicals? I offer a course that speculates on the public understanding of the relative uses in...