"Scientific Wooing": Constance Naden's Marriage of Science and Poetry

WITH THE REEXAMINATION OF POETRY AND VERSE BY LATE-VICTORIAN WOMEN writers, new aspects of the dialogue between Victorian poetry and the sciences are emerging. Constance Naden and other contemporary poets frequently grappled in a lively fashion with topical, sometimes transient, cultural debates, and their work often engaged with scientific themes. Naden's "Scientific Wooing" is emblematic of this phenomenon with its witty amalgamation of the discourses of the love lyric and the sciences in the form of a narrator who is determined to seduce his lover through the tropes of science. ¹ I look specifically at Constance Naden in this essay because she was, unusually among her female contemporaries, publishing papers in scientific journals as well as producing books of poetry. In her work, then, there is the possibility of observing true dialogue and reciprocity between the disciplines. Naden was also geographically located at the center of one well-known Victorian exchange about literature and science, and her body of poetic and scientific work can be used as a case study around which to focus that debate.

The relation between poetry and the sciences in the Victorian period has been presented as uncomfortable and antagonistic by some critics, but as reciprocal and mutually regarding by others. ² John Christie and Sally Shuttleworth note

the impossibility of structuring an account of literature and science relations which exclusively mobilises Romantic anti-scientism and the confrontation between Arnold and Huxley. For whatever particular moment is taken as an element of the paradigm of opposition, a dialectical, recuperative moment can also be instanced to display the inadequacy of the oppositional paradigm. ³

In this essay, I examine one such moment of confrontation and simultaneous recuperation between poetry and science, a moment existing within a very particular local context: that of Birmingham's Mason Science College.

The "confrontation" between Matthew Arnold and Thomas Huxley referred to above, which became a national, and international dialogue, was rooted in the creation of Birmingham's Mason Science College, at whose opening ceremony Huxley gave his famous address on October 1, 1880—the year before Constance Naden enrolled as a student there. Naden, living in Birmingham and eager to study at the college, would have been only too aware of Josiah Mason's explicit instructions that the college should make no provision for "mere literary instruction and education," and of Huxley's inaugural speech on this theme. ⁴ In this lecture, Huxley goes on to reinforce the importance of a scientific education, and describes with metaphors of war the combat between the champions of ancient literature and modern literature against "a third army, ranged under the banner of Physical Science" (p. 11). It was in light of, and in the very geographical location of, the proclamation of this agenda—and Matthew Arnold's well-known reply in favor of an education in the humanities—that Naden was formulating her own relation to science and poetry.

I will suggest that other rifts in Naden's intellectual persona—particularly her use of a pseudonym for her scientific publications—complicate our analysis of the relation between science and poetry in her work. We have to recognize not only her humorous engagement, in the poetry she published under her own name, with the debate about the tensions between literature and science, but also the more subtle, but complete, reconciliation of the disciplines which is an important part of her philosophical world-view, and which was propagated under a pseudonym. After an introduction to the life, work, and thought of Naden, I will deal with each of these in turn.

Constance C. W. Naden and "C. Arden"

Constance Naden was born to the wife of a Birmingham architect in 1858, and was educated in the city. She moved to London for the last year of her short life and the final struggle against ovarian cysts, from which she died in 1889. During her thirty-one years she became a scientist...