Science, Form, and the Problem of Induction in British Romanticism by Dahlia Porter (review)

This book shows how textual form, in works by Erasmus Darwin, Robert Southey, Maria Edgeworth, Charlotte Smith, and S. T. Coleridge, registers the epistemological legacy of early modern science by taking up the problem of induction—that is, by negotiating the divide between observations or facts and laws or principles. This constellation of authors shows that Porter's conception of their compositional method is a historically specific one, but her conceptual framework stretches back over two centuries. Porter not only offers her own rigorous readings of Francis Bacon's Novum Organum and of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Baconians who "internalized the inductive method" but also traces substantive engagements with these primary sources in each of the Romantic-era authors considered in the book (48). The "science" in the book's title therefore carries the full complexity of the early modern humanist milieu in which "scientific method" originated, Porter argues, as a "model for textual production" (34).

This longue durée approach demands broad erudition and sets Porter's approach apart from many more strictly historical studies of Romanticism. Most of the primary works under study were produced over just a few decades, but Porter uses this period to focalize much longer trends in intellectual history. At the same time, her expertise in the history of book production guarantees the historical, material specificity of the argument, which draws substantial evidence from the typographical relationships among texts, notes, and quotes on the printed pages of individual works by these authors. These methodological components enable Porter to show how deeply traditional approaches to composition could be employed to address the new problem of print saturation that presented itself so forcibly to the Romantics, working at a time of rapidly advancing print technologies. The comparison to our own moment of media saturation is made explicit, but delicately so, both at the beginning and at the end of this study. Porter acknowledges that the practice of "splicing" together pieces of text as a way of coping with "textual excess" has a special relevance in our moment of digital media saturation—indeed, several of her major texts are mainly available online—but her focus is squarely on the historical practice made newly salient by our present moment (3 and passim).

Perhaps more than digital composites, texts in the inductive tradition that Porter uncovers "draw attention to how they were made," and her introduction identifies strong parallels in seemingly unlike works by Robert Boyle, Samuel Johnson, and William Wordsworth to show how consistently authors writing in different disciplines employed this strategy of medial reflexivity (6). The introduction provides a helpful overview of the specific kinds of composites Porter has in view—heavily annotated poems, on the one hand, and pedagogical prose replete with verse quotations, on the other—and it positions her own contribution very cogently between Jon Klancher's Transfiguring the Arts and Sciences: Knowledge and Cultural Institutions in the Romantic Age (2013) and two important books on Romantic organicism by David Fairer and Denise Gigante (respectively, Organizing Poetry: The Coleridge Circle, 1790–1798 and Life: Organic Form and Romanticism, both 2009). Porter's overview of Romantic composite form is greatly enriched by the long conceptual and historical chapter that follows, which both outlines the gradual transformation of Bacon's inductive method into a strategy of psychological and literary self-reflection and extends the project's critical lineage.

The critical project of re-establishing Romanticism's profound debt to the Enlightenment, as Porter rightly notes, began with M. H. Abrams's The Mirror and the Lamp, but the rise of empiricism has a distinct importance as a method independent of the content or "desired outcome" of synthesis that fundamentally distinguished Romanticism in Abrams's organicist account (24). Porter makes a clear and bold contribution to the recovery of this method, and hence presents a Romanticism more deeply entangled with empiricism than the era is often understood to be...