Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology by Adelene Buckland (review)

Adelene Buckland’s Novel Science adds a fascinating new perspective on interactions between nineteenth-century geology and literature. Exploring how geologists used literature to attract public support, this text also emphasises ways in which geological methods created suspicion of literary forms, and especially of the existence of plots that might offer ‘a single explanatory mechanism, by which all events could be understood and related, such as evolution or progressive development’. In this vein, perhaps Buckland’s most surprising revelation, to which she returns in several of her chapters, is her insistence that the two schools of geologists forming the uniformitarian/catastrophist debate never existed. Renowned critical studies, such as Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots (1983) and George Levine’s Darwin and the Novelists (1988), endorsed these conventional understandings of uniformitarian/catastrophist divisions within Victorian-era geology. However, scholars of science in literature now may wish to exercise more caution in navigating these geological theories that Buckland finds to be more in cooperation than opposition with one another. Novel Science treats scientific texts as literature for investigation alongside more traditionally imaginative works, and is comprised of two main sections; its first half primarily addresses the thoughts and experiences of nineteenth-century geologists themselves, while the book’s second half places more emphasis on ways in which geology manifests in individual novels.

Chapter 1 focuses on the masculine culture of geological societies, with its drinking games and collegiate identity. Sir Walter Scott had been part of this social scene, influencing his works, as when the protagonist of his Guy Mannering (1815) is introduced to James Hutton, the author of a Theory of the Earth (1788). As Buckland makes clear, excelling in writing increased naturalists’ potential for success in science, demonstrated, for instance, by the geologist who reinterpreted Hutton’s theory, John Playfair. Scott himself became the President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and paradoxically viewed his lack of scientific knowledge as aiding him in this position. He based much of his fiction on antiquarianism, a field of study that carried prominent associations with geology. While Playfair gained acclaim through his skillful pen, chapter 2 examines the trials faced by another great geological thinker, Adam Sedgwick, who deemed his aversion to writing as consonant with his devotion to geology and thus never published a book. Although Sedgwick liked Scott’s novels, he mistrusted sensationalism in science and reviewed the anonymous and controversial Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), which opened the door for theories of evolution, as ‘a novel masquerading as a work of science’, fearing its effects on ‘susceptible’ young readers, especially women. Other geologists, such as Charles Lapworth, borrowed from Scott’s mythic terms of poetry and prose, illustrating the novelist’s influence on this science.

Examining poetry’s relationship to geology, chapter 3 explores Charles Lyell’s early attempts at writing verse and, indeed, his ‘Lines on Staffa’ forms an appendix to Buckland’s work. Lyell sometimes imitated Byron’s Spenserian stanzas and had been a student at Oxford under William Buckland, who famously employed poetry as part of his scientific agenda, associating geology with classical and Christian epic. Analysing Lyell’s monumental Principles of Geology (1830), Buckland critiques conceptions of his argument that have led scholars such as Beer and Levine to view literary plots as reflecting the shapes and structures of the evolutionary world. In contrast with these earlier critics, she states, ‘[t]here was no “catastrophism” and no school of catastrophists antagonistic to Lyell’s work’. According to her, Lyell’s Principles constitutes a Byronic ‘anti-narrative’, and only on average could the earth be considered uniform. Rather than something new, Lyell’s geological ideas represented a safe and effective consensus among his colleagues. In chapter 4, Buckland shifts focus from poetry to novels while recounting how William Smith created the first geological map of an entire country (England and Wales). She...