Victorian(ist) Epistemographies: Response

I recruited these three NAVSA papers for Victorian Studies because I admired each of them and thought their conjunction in these pages would pay a dividend in synergy—an opinion that hasn’t changed on better acquaintance. But now i realize something more: the papers appealed to me in pasadena because their common topic, deeply shared if diversely pursued, was just the sort of intellectual surveillance to which my mission of conference espionage had committed me. The process, that is, of gathering and generalizing about them entails the same operations of pattern-finding and analytic reconnaissance that all three papers discuss in Victorian instances and, in conducting their discussion, practice. Andrea Henderson, Deanna Kreisel, and Jules Law all set out to know (and show) something new about a range of techniques that Victorian thinkers deployed when they set out to know (and show) something new about a range of matters, from evolution and physics to public health, the topology of domestic interiors, and the optical-cultural reflexivity of the poetic image. Analytic historians of intellectual technology, our three contributors come together in representing nondiscursive displays of information—often visual but never merely that, and sometimes stubbornly invisible—as, in effect, working theories of knowledge. Henderson’s recourse to the analogy, Kreisel’s to the exponent, and Law’s to the algorithm and the virtual-imaginary represent those mathematical operations as not just expository conveniences but also essential tools of discovery. If I dub thisjoint pursuit “epistemography,” let the coinage serve as a minor act of toolmaking that manifests the continuity of my activity with theirs.¹ Whether or not I can successfully know (and show) something new about how contemporary Victorianist ways of knowing work, the next paragraphs must disclose. In any case, my standing here as a generalist of methods, seeking some abstract leverage or overview on the papers that follow, inevitably assumes with respect to them the vantage they assume on their Victorian forebears, who are thus my forebears too. We are evidencers all, and how we exhibit our findings is intrinsically involved with what we find.

Andrea Henderson poises her elegant argument on an analogy between analogies. A physicist like James Clerk Maxwell and a poet like Algernon Charles Swinburne—and how uncanny that each should have written a surviving undergraduate essay on analogy!—both relied on analogy as a means of imagining truths that lie beyond or beneath the empirical sensorium. The one used mathematical equations, the other poetic lines, as modes of articulating supersensible reality and giving shape to its principles of constitution. They did so, moreover, in the conviction that the reality described by their algebraic and verbal derivatives comprised not discrete things but networked and nested relations, “a concatenation of patterns and structures” (Henderson 389). Analogically extrapolated or interpolated, reality was relational already, all the way up and all the way down. Maxwell declared as much outright, Swinburne not in so many words, but by performance. Students of this poet of so notoriously many words learn an indispensable lesson once they grasp that he did what he did with a view to undoing the illusory stability of things, fostering instead a perception of things’ dynamic relationality. As a rule this perception was not visual, but the mind might apprehend it precisely as a rule (an analogical inference) through what the poet at twenty precociously saw were “the subordinate analogies of metaphor and rhythm” (qtd. in Henderson 392).

What Maxwell could prove with algebra, the less-mathematical Faraday worked toward by laboratory means. Likewise, to pursue the physics-poetry analogy into a wider field of instances, Swinburne’s searching way with analogy had many a Victorian counterpart. All metaphors may be explicated or spelled out into the analogies they ordinarily condense and partially hide: even where a mere two-term resemblance is given, readers grasp, or solve for, a third term that completes the thought—or a fourth term, and so on.² When the ship plows the waves, the ship is to the sea as a plow is to the (undeclared but implied) earth: each invention visually breasts the medium that resists...