The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature Between the Darwins by Devin Griffiths (review)

Devin Griffiths’s wide-ranging, deeply interdisciplinary study The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature Between the Darwins does not lend itself to neat categorization or summary. Griffiths describes the book as a “comparative literary history” (22) concerned with how different literary forms enable different modes of historical understanding. This description is serviceable, but if The Age of Analogy is a comparative literary history, it is one that explicitly puts the concepts of comparison, the literary, and history under interrogation, and the book’s central thesis is that all three of these concepts changed in fundamental, mutually interacting ways across the nineteenth-century—or, to use the title’s more elegant demarcation, between the Darwins. As such, the book seems to be something far more original and ambitious in nature, with many moving parts and several potential points of entry.

Taking the Darwins as a point of entry, The Age of Analogy might be described as an intellectual history that measures the distance between Erasmus and Charles Darwin’s respective theories of evolution and finds them separated by a fundamental shift in the “modes of historical engagement” pursued within scientific and literary writing. Griffiths characterizes this shift as a turn toward “comparative historicism,” which he defines, in a more inclusive sense, as a “broadly shared habit” of thinking and writing about the past that “placed imaginative comparison at the center of historical understanding” (24) and, in a more exclusive sense, as a “strong critical procedure” and “new literary mode” characterized by “the rapprochement of historical accounts through explicit instances of analogy and comparison” (14). For Griffiths, the application of this new comparative mode of historical inquiry cultivates a newly pluralistic, dynamic theory of historical process which displaces a more static, hierarchical theory emerging out of the Enlightenment. In this sense, The Age of Analogy may be described as an attempt to historicize the modern comparative method as well as the new understanding of history it enables. Under the sign of comparative historicism, Griffiths argues, history is newly articulated as “a tense composite rather than an organic whole” (15), as “an interplay between stories, incidents, and actors” in which “things could be otherwise” (15) and “new patterns … emerge” (16) rather than a universal History which progresses according to a preestablished, transcendental order. If the older conception of history ultimately constricts Erasmus Darwin’s early speculations on evolution, then the newer conception of history undergirds Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

This description captures the broader narrative arc of the book, but it also easily risks misrepresenting the centrality of the Darwins within Griffiths’s study. The Darwins serve to bookend the study and exemplify the contrasting models of history at play, but Griffiths is primarily interested in the Darwins as mutual collaborators within the nineteenth-century project of comparative historicism sustained collectively across a broader network of scientific, historical, and literary authors. The Age of Analogy in effect surveys this project in case studies of five influential, representative nineteenth-century authors: Erasmus Darwin; Walter Scott; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; George Eliot; and Charles Darwin. Each author is treated in a separate chapter, and each chapter approaches the author’s writings through the lens of comparative historicism (often with a few relevant author- or text-specific controversies in focus) and, in turn, uses the author’s writings as a lens for viewing comparative historicism (often with a few relevant historical discourses or debates in focus). Collectively, the case studies offer a panoramic, if also somewhat impressionistic, view of comparative historicism.

While comparative historicism is the principal object of analysis, as the study proceeds its focus increasingly tightens around what Griffiths describes as comparative historicism’s “primary formal constituent” (27): analogy. Indeed, Griffiths attributes the rise of comparative historicism foremost to a new appreciation of analogy as a powerful mode of historical analysis which could detect and formalize meaningful patterns. In a prelude on analogy, Griffiths sketches the conditions that enabled...