Space and the 'March of Mind': Literature and the Physical Sciences in Britain 1815–1850 (review)

A little over a decade ago the conjoint study of literature and science still offered something like an open field, as was indicated by the title – alluding, of course, to Darwin's famous prognostications for psychology at the end of On the Origin of Species – of Gillian Beer's landmark essay collection Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (1996). In the ten years that followed, this interdisciplinary area of scholarship has burgeoned to such an extent that instead of a pristine open field it now more resembles the situation of the mid-nineteenth-century periodical market, when, as the publisher William Tinsley exclaimed, there were 'more magazines in the wretched field than there were blades of grass to support them'. Alice Jenkins's Space and the 'March of Mind': Literature and the Physical Sciences in Britain 1815–1850 is acutely aware of the tendency to employ overdetermined metaphors to 'divide up intellectual activity by reference to the kinds of spaces we understand in the physical world', not only in the familiar refrains of contemporary academic discourse ('my research is in the field of ...'), but also, as the very different examples of Darwin and Tinsley suggest, in various forms of nineteenth-century writing (81). Jenkins' book, to extend suchagricultural metaphors just a little further, endeavours to plough anew furrow in the crowded field of literature and science studies by eschewing the dominant emphasis on 'literature and the earth and life sciences in the later Victorian period' inaugurated by Beer's hugely influential analysis of the shared concerns of Darwinian evolution and the realist novel and instead focusing on the conspicuously less well-known but nonetheless equally fertile interconnections of literature, and poetry in particular, and physics, chemistry and mathematics earlier in the nineteenth century (141).

Throughout Space and the 'March of Mind', moreover, Jenkins, Chair of the recently founded British Society for Literature and Science, remains alert to the wider agenda of literature and science scholarship and the lacunae and overshadowing dominances that have shapedits development. She contends, for instance, that the relative lack of attention to the 'older matrix of cultural references' that permeate scientific rhetoric in favour of examining only newness and innovation, as well as the marginalization of mid-nineteenth-century field theory in comparison with the virtually industrial scale of research on evolution, are a 'measure of the distance that studies of Victorian literature and science have yet to go' (24–5). As such, Space and the 'March of Mind' affords an extremely stimulating and challenging new outlook that will be of interest to those engaged in all areas of this evidently teeming but still unequally cultivated and spatially constrained patch of scholarly ground. In particular, I found the exhortation, drawing on Beer aswell as Roland Barthes and again with a slight metaphorical nod to the tilling of fields, to be alert to the 'uncontrollable nature of the processes of cultural borrowing, appropriating, half-digesting, and half-comprehending, processes that respect no boundary of disciplinary dignity ... and turn literature into science, science into literature, and all intothe fertile culture of a society with widespread literacy and access to publishing', a potentially very suggestive way of thinking about themessily creative interconnectedness so often exhibited by Victorian culture more generally (142).

Building on theoretical work coming out of the 'geographic turn' of literary scholarship since the mid-1980s, as well as the contemporaneous concern in studies of Victorian culture with representations of particularized spaces like urban streets or domestic parlours, Space and the 'March of Mind' charts a 'new spatial imagination' that, according to Jenkins, emerged at the intersection of scientific and literary writingin the famously tumultuous period between Waterloo and the Great Exhibition, which witnessed huge changes in both the content ofintellectual activity as well as its accessibility to new and much broader audiences (1). However, the type of spaces...