The Poetry of Victorian Scientists: Style, Science and Nonsense by Daniel Brown, and: Novel science: Fiction and the invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology by Adelene Buckland, and: Moral Authority, Men of science, and the victorian Novel by Anne DeWitt, and: Uncommon Contexts: Encounters Between Science and Literature, 1800–1914 ed. by Ben Marsden, Hazel Hutchison, and Ralph O’Connor (review)

The area of literature and science studies is now well established along the “one-culture” model developed in the 1980s by Gillian Beer and George Levine. The premise for this fertile research agenda is that a mutual literacy and productive exchange existed between the arts and the sciences at a time before professional divisions between the disciplines had fully formed. The one-culture framework continues to have fresh life, as in Elaine Freedgood and Cannon Schmitt’s January 2014 issue of Representations, which explores the deep archive implied by denotative references in literature. While presumably the idea of denotative reading could refresh historicism in many fields, the density of scientific references in Victorian novels constitutes ground zero for their practice, thanks in part to the continued prominence of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Joseph Conrad. In contrast, the works under review here strive to move beyond the one-culture model. Without contesting the premise that literary and scientific discourses sometimes shared concepts or considered the same debates, these studies counter it with the idea of a genuine two-way flow of concepts, frameworks, and information that could allow the Victorian novel to absorb or contest scientific methods or theories.

Their critique of current critical practice takes two forms. First, each of these studies attends to the many forms of what Ralph O’Connor in Uncommon Contexts calls “ideological brinkmanship” and the ways it affected the shifting prestige of different fields of knowledge production, both within the sciences and among rival discourses (73). Second, the majority of these books reverse the critical tendency to focus on the ways in which canonical literary figures responded to developments in the sciences: instead, they offer close readings of the work of many of these scientists themselves. In fact, they redouble this expansive move by turning away from the biological sciences, which have attracted most attention from critics working on the Victorian period. In an essay on “Victorian Mathematics and the Study of Literature and Science” in Uncommon Contexts, Alice Jenkins poses a useful question: “Is it necessary for a body of scientific knowledge to be shown to have possible affinities with the theme of change over time in order for it to be acknowledged as having had a substantial role in the culture of Victorian science? Is this picture too dominated by realist fiction, with its habits and preferences?” (122). In the studies assembled here, mathematics and geology are often the scientific fields in question, while nonfiction prose, mock-epic, and forms of nonsense predominate over fiction. As in Gowan Dawson’s Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability (2007), most of these studies demonstrate the degree to which literary production (like the circulation of verse and parody within learned societies) played a role in the social networks of working scientists. Moreover, these studies compellingly show that the choice of forms is not accidental: in their writing, as Adelene Buckland and Daniel Brown take particular care to demonstrate, scientists sought forms that best suited their theories of the earth, of matter, and of mathematical reality.

The selections in Uncommon Contexts include essays that...