Nineteenth-Century Energies: Literature, technology, culture ed. by Lynn Voskuil (review)

Nineteenth-Century Energies: Literature, technology, culture, edited by Lynn Voskuil, ranges promiscuously across topics and texts that are seen to bear a relation to modern principles of energy. There are considerations of telegraphy in nineteenth-century Latin America (Mayra Bottaro); economies of capital and energy in Henry Mayhew, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Carlyle (Elizabeth Coggin Womack) and in Henry David Thoreau (Lynn Badia); foundational stories of Peugeot automobiles (Anne O'Neil-Henry); photography (Tom Gunning and Lucy Traverse); bodily physicality in speech and listening (Ashley Miller) and in sex work and insomnia in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "Jenny" (1870) (Adrian Versteegh); and discussions of the vast thermodynamics of meteorology (Jen Hill) and other such huge systems conceived of as "Hyperobjects" (Timothy Morton) (101). All are interesting in their own ways, which is to say that relations between them tend to be contingent rather than coherent. This may be due in part to the book's origin as a group of conference papers, which were then published as a special issue of Nineteenth-Century Contexts, reprinted here. The book is composed of journal submissions rather than book commissions. It accordingly falls to the editor to articulate their relations and help draw them together.

The introduction opens: "To identify and analyze 'nineteenth-century energies' is to attempt a nearly impossible task because the scientific and cultural meanings of this phrase are grounded in the very process of conversion" (1). "[N]early impossible" is a melodramatic and evasive way of saying possible. The problem of flux has been discussed formally in the West since the pre-Socratics, and energy specified conceptually and mathematically since the 1840s. There is also a large literature that defines and contextualizes such principles as they emerge and are extended culturally. While the introduction gives useful orientations to particular articles, it could provide a better overview in historicizing and conceptualizing the term energy, so as to ground and justify its various uses and applications in the essays that follow. Some mention of Aristotle's energeia would not be out of place here, along with the distinction between what came to be known as the energy principle and the Newtonian concept of force (and perhaps also Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's vis-viva). Especially given the concern with literature and culture announced by the title, and the references made to vitalism by several of the essays, some mention of the prepossession that Romantic metaphysics—for example, the conception of the "one life within us and abroad" from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 1796 poem "The Eolian Harp"—gives to the simultaneous discovery of the energy concept would also have been helpful here (Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by E. H. Coleridge [Clarendon Press, 1912], line 26). Rather than relying exclusively upon quotations from P. M. Harman and others, an engagement with primary sources on the energy concept and field theory in the author's "brief account of these very complex issues" could have allowed readers a more vivid and sure understanding of energy physics' ontology of matter in motion (14). The introduction's particular species of typographical errors would seem to highlight some diffidence in dealing with concepts and historical specificity. We have three references to the astronomer and first editor of Nature, Norman Lockyer, as "Lockyear," and others to "Emmanuel Kant" and to "Swendenborg" (3, 5, 20). The lack of historical and conceptual specificity permits some rather tenuous uses of the term energy in the collection. O'Neil-Henry's comparison of two histories of early models of Peugeot automobiles, one steam and the other internal combustion, is interesting historically, but only circumstantially related to the energy concept. Similarly tangential relations can be found by degrees in a number of essays, including the allusive "urban energetics" of Verteegh's essay on Rossetti's "Jenny" and insomnia, and also Womack's essay on Miser Texts, which focuses upon economic, and to a lesser extent biological, exchange, and culminates in a very...