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

Alice Jenkins's Space and the 'March of Mind' provocatively suggests that "a new spatial imagination" emerged in Britain during the early decades of the nineteenth century (1). Unlike scholars interested in more literal understandings of space—the spaces of the domestic interior, say, or of imperial expansion—Jenkins turns inward to the often more complex spaces of the human mind: "the immaterial, conceptual space that contains and informs those other [physical] kinds of space" (4). In so doing, her book shows how seemingly obscure intellectual debates (about whether geometrical knowledge is learned or innate, for example) might be read as part of a larger constellation of political and cultural concerns and how such matters came ultimately to inflect the literature of the period.

Jenkins focuses on a period, 1815 to 1850, in which scientific and mathematical ideas of space were in active formation. Setting aside traditional demarcations between the Romantics and the Victorians (one of her book's many virtues), Jenkins teases out the difficulties of spatial thinking at a time of extreme scientific and political instability. One especially fine example of this approach comes in chapter 4, "Space and the Languages of Science," when Jenkins looks to an 1834 exchange between William Whewell and Michael Faraday, who had just invented a technique for electroplating (the process that was soon to bring affordable silverware to the Victorian middle classes). Faraday asked Whewell to help name what would eventually be called the "anode" and "cathode," the parts from which and to which electricity flows during the process of electrolysis. "At stake," Jenkins tells us, "was the highly spatial question of whether electricity really flowed," whether it was "a kind of fluid" (127). Faraday believed in a more figurative sense of electric "flow," one that "allow[ed] for the possibility that the space, and the movement of electricity through it, were conceptual rather than physical" (131). Electricity, in other words, should be thought of as moving not like water through a pipe, but as a sequence of potential exchanges across space. Faraday insisted that the terms for electrolysis represent this "new understanding of the difference between space and matter" (132).

Jenkins makes clear why questions of abstract versus literal space were politically relevant in the early nineteenth century. "Geometry," she writes, "signified for many . . . the fact that abstract space was independent of sensory experience" (166). Whewell, for example, followed Kant in believing geometry to be "inherent in the human mind," an a priori understanding that helped structure thought and experience (174). Without recourse to bodily sensation (and therefore outside the domain of empirical knowledge), geometry was understood as a model for "pure reasoning" that helped to "clarif[y] and edif[y] the mind" (167); it was also thought to possess "moral as well as intellectual qualities" (158). As early-nineteenth-century sciences and technologies pushed geometry toward increasingly practical uses (mapping, hydraulics, electrodynamics), a set of conservatively minded "patrician Romantics" wished to retain a more abstract form of geometry for educational purposes, specifically for the education of the lower classes (174). This helps explain why lecturers at Mechanics' Institutes across Britain in the 1820s and 1830s—part of the "march of mind" toward which Jenkins's title refers—emphasized the value of "abstract and unpractical knowledge," such as Euclidean definitions for geometrical shapes, at a time when knowledge of mapping, for example, might have had more immediate benefits (168). To insist on abstract knowledge for the working classes was to underscore the "moral" and "clarif[ying]" influences of geometry, a proposition no doubt reassuring to the privileged classes in the era of the Great Reform.

How this all plays out in nineteenth-century literature is a more complicated matter, and one this book might have done more to elaborate. Jenkins is best while explicating the rhetorical complexities of scientific texts—Whewell's History of...