Imagination and Science in Romanticism by Richard C. Sha (review)

With this learned and rather intense book, Richard C. Sha joins the roster of scholars who have worked to dispel the notion that Romanticism as a literary movement was hostile to the sciences. While historians of science—including Nicholas Jardine, Trevor Levere, John Tresch, and David Knight—have thrown lines across to the literary domain, a group of literary scholars—including Alan Bewell, Robert Mitchell, Alan Richardson, and Richard Holmes—has been building the bridge from the other side. The two parties have converged on the finding that leading figures of British Romanticism, such as Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Percy and Mary Shelley, were deeply interested in the scientific thought of their time. Notwithstanding the convergence, however, differences of approach between historians and literary scholars—and within each group—have remained evident. For this reason, it is still not exactly clear what kind of shared discursive space is being uncovered. Coleridge’s oft-quoted remark that he attended the chemical lectures of Humphry Davy to renew his stock of metaphors suggests a semantic exchange between established fields of chemistry and poetry. On the other hand, Jon Klancher has argued that the very territories of science and literature were being fundamentally reconfigured in this period, in the context of crucial institutional reforms and innovations in publishing.

Sha’s approach is very different from Klancher’s, focusing on semantic transfers and the traffic in metaphors rather than institutions or the market for publications. For Sha, the concept of imagination is the key to unlocking relations between science and literature, since the faculty was viewed as central to scientific inquiry and literary creativity alike. Its importance was signaled by William Blake’s dictum: “What is now proved was once, only imagin’d” (quoted, 23). Sha demonstrates that scientific thinkers, far from being antipathetic to the imagination, repeatedly indulged it and then tested its results experimentally. As he notes in his introduction, this went along with a stance of phenomenalism, a willingness to relinquish access to things in themselves as beyond the limits of possible sensory experience. At the same time, unharnessing the imagination allowed for sensory experience to be synthesized into more abstract constructs of forms, laws, affinities, and relationships. Sha mentions the work of Goethe, Humboldt, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and Ørsted, who developed a wide range of abstract and integrative concepts in the sciences. He also stresses, however, that the imagination was not supposed to roam entirely unleashed. It was accepted that underlying physiological and epistemological laws constrained its working, whether in scientific reasoning or poetic composition. The operations of the mind were thus assimilated to natural processes that were also thought to unfold in a goal-directed way. In this respect, as Sha notes, “the boundary between materiality and immateriality was porous” (14), though materialism as such was generally regarded with deep suspicion for its atheistic implications.

Having made his case for rehabilitating the imagination in the scientific thought of the period, Sha turns to an analysis of texts conventionally classified as literary. Each of the four main chapters of his book focuses on one such text, which he reads as reflecting scientific and philosophical doctrines of the imagination: Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820), Blake’s The Four Zoas (a manuscript begun in 1797), Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817), and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Sha tells us nothing about the circumstances in which these books were composed or published, and his commentaries range well beyond their immediate historical contexts. In the first case, for example, he reaches back to the previous century to examine the development of dynamic theories of matter in the writings of Roger Boscovich and Joseph Priestley. The concept of matter being composed of forces and affinities, lacking any solid corpuscular core, can be traced through the work of Percy Shelley’s contemporaries, Davy and Michael Faraday, both of whom allowed a role for the imagination in generating scientific theory. It seems entirely plausible that Shelley made metaphorical use of these ideas...