Microscopy and Literature

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Microscopy and literature

Peter J.F. Harris

Electron Microscopy Laboratory, J. J. Thomson Building, University of Reading, Whiteknights, Reading, United Kingdom

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Article history: This article draws attention to literary works which have been inﬂuenced by microscopy, or in which

microscopy has played a signiﬁcant role. The work of writers including Jonathan Swift, Voltaire, George

Eliot, H. G. Wells and D. H. Lawrence is discussed. In many cases these authors had direct experience of

Keywords: operating microscopes and viewing the wonders of the microscopic world. However, with the increasing

Microscopy

separation of the two cultures, recent examples of microscopy in literature are rare.

Science and literature

Jonathan swift

George Eliot

H.G. Wells

D.H. Lawrence

Robert Hooke

Of all th’ Inuentions none there is Surpasses reﬂecting increasing separation of the “two cultures” in the late

twentieth century.

Ye noble Florentine’s Dioptrick Glasses

It seems that the ﬁrst use of the word “microscope” can be

ﬁ

For what a better, ﬁtter guift Could bee identi ed very precisely: it was coined by Giovanni Faber, a

German doctor, botanist, and art collector, on April 13,1625. A few

In this world’s Aged Luciosity.

years earlier, Galileo had developed a compound microscope

“ ” ’

To help our Blindnesse so as to deuize which he named an occhiolino ( little eye ), but it was Faber s

name that stuck. The most important ﬁgure in the early history of

A paire of new & Artiﬁciall eyes

microscopy was the Dutch businessman and scientist Antonie van

By whose augmenting power wee now see more Leeuwenhoek, whose amazing work using single-lensed micro-

1 3

Than all the world Has euer donn Before scopes has been described in detail by Brian J. Ford. However, it

was the publication of Hooke’s Micrographia in January 1665 that

On the face of it “Microscopy and literature” would seem an

brought microscopy to the attention of the wider public (Fig. 1).

unpromising subject for an article. It would certainly be misleading

This beautiful book, the ﬁrst to be published by the Royal Society,

to suggest that microscopes and microscopy have played a major

contained many stunning illustrations, such as the one shown in

role in English or European literature. However, when one begins 4

Fig. 2, and the ﬁrst detailed drawings of a ﬂy’s eye and a plant cell.

to research the subject, many examples of microscopy in literature

By the standards of the day, the book was a bestseller. One of the

can be found. There is little doubt, for example, that Robert Hooke’s

ﬁrst to purchase it was Samuel Pepys. His diary entry for January

landmark Micrographia (1665) prompted eighteenth century

21, 1665 concludes, “Before I went to bed I sat up till two o’clock in

writers like Jonathan Swift and Voltaire to employ changes of

my chamber reading of Mr. Hooke’s Microscopical Observations,

scale as a literary device. In the following century, George Eliot 5

the most ingenious book that ever I read in my life.”

used microscopy as a metaphor in Middlemarch, and early

It is a measure of the popularity of microscopy in the late-

twentieth century novels by both H. G. Wells and D. H. Lawrence

seventeenth century that it became a target for satire. Thomas

feature microscopy in key scenes. More recent examples of

microscopy in literature have been harder to ﬁnd, perhaps

Theodore George Rochow and Eugene George Rochow, Introduction to

Microscopy by Means of Light, Electrons, X Rays, or Ultrasound (New York: Plenum

Press, 1994), Chapter 1.

Brian J. Ford, The Leeuwenhoek Legacy (Bristol: Biopress, 1991).

E-mail address: [email protected] (P.J.F. Harris). R. Hooke, Micrographia, Or, Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies

Henry Power, “In Commendation of ye Microscope” (1661), as quoted by Made by Magnifying Glasses (London: The Royal Society, 1665).

Thomas Cowles, “Dr. Henry Power’s Poem on the Microscope,” Isis 21 (1934): 71–80, Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William

on p. 71. Matthews (London: Bell and Hyman, 1983), VI: 18.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2019.100695

2 P.J.F. Harris / Endeavour 43 (2019) 100695

Fig. 1. Robert Hooke (1635–1703), in an oil painting on board by Rita Greer, history painter, 2004, digitized and available in Wikimedia Commons (in public domain); and title

page of Micrographia (1665).

Another satirist who was undoubtedly inﬂuenced by micros-

copy was Jonathan Swift (Fig. 3). We know that Swift was familiar

with Micrographia, and that he bought a microscope for his wife

Stella. The inﬂuence of microscopy on Gulliver’s Travels, published

in 1726 (Fig. 4), has been discussed by a number of authors, notably

Marjorie Hope Nicolson. As Nicolson points out, rather than

seeing the microscope as an exciting new window on nature, Swift

seems to have been horriﬁed by what the new instrument

revealed. In “A Voyage to Brobdingnag,” Gulliver ﬁnds himself in a

land of giants. He thus becomes a becomes a kind of “human

microscope,” able to discern with his naked eye the spots, pimples

and freckles on the skin of the Brobdingnagians, and the lice

crawling on their clothes in appalling detail. He reﬂects on “ . . .

the fair Skins of our English Ladies, who appear so beautiful to us,

only because they are of our own Size, and their Defects not to

be seen but through a magnifying Glass; where we ﬁnd by

Experiment that the smoothest and whitest Skins look rough, and

coarse, and ill-coloured.” Swift’s revulsion at what the magnify-

Fig. 2. Hooke’s drawing of a ﬂea, from Micrographia (1665), scheme xxxiv.

ing glass or microscope revealed is seemingly of a piece with his

scepticism about the kind of experimental science promoted by

Shadwell’s play The Virtuoso (1676) ridicules modern science and

the Royal Society, something he shared with Thomas Shadwell.

the Royal Society, whose fellows are portrayed as spending their

(Elsewhere in his Travels, Gulliver encounters a scientist who has

lives performing experiments of no practical use. The virtuoso of

spent eight years unsuccessfully trying to extract sunbeams from

the title is Sir Nicholas Gimcrack, “a sot that has spent two

cucumbers.)

thousand pounds on microscopes to ﬁnd out the nature of eels in

Swift was not alone in feeling uneasy about the heightened

vinegar and mites in cheese has broken his brains about the nature

6 sensitivity which the microscope represented. Ann Jessie van Sant

of maggots . . . and never cares for understanding mankind.”

Hooke attended a performance of the play and was mortiﬁed when

he realised that the central character was based on him.

Leo Damrosch, Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 2013); Keith Crook, A Preface to Swift (London: Routledge, 1998).

Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Science and Imagination (Connecticut: Archon, 1956).

6 10

Thomas Shadwell, The Virtuoso, ed. Marjorie Hope Nicolson and David Stuart Ibid., pp. 193-199; Greg Lynall, “In Retrospect: Gulliver’s Travels,” Nature 549, no.

Rodes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press), p. 22. 7673 (2017): 454–456, https://doi.org/10.1038/549454a.

7 11

Stephen Inwood, The Man Who Knew Too Much: The Strange and Inventive Life of Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008), p. 83

Robert Hooke, 1635–1703 (London: Pan, 2003). (emphasis in the original).

P.J.F. Harris / Endeavour 43 (2019) 100695 3

Fig. 3. Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), in a portrait by Charles Jervas (1675–1739).

has pointed out that in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755), the

illustrative quotation for “microscope” (from a sermon by Richard

Bentley) was as follows: “If the eye were so acute as to rival the

ﬁnest microscopes, and to discern the smallest hair upon the leg of

a gnat, it would be a curse and not a blessing to us.” Alexander

Fig. 4. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726), cover of Oxford World’s Classics

’

Pope s well-known lines from The Essay on Man (1733) also express edition showing cartoon by James Gillray. Reproduced by permission of Oxford

a horror of micro-sensation, as well as a scepticism about studying Publishing Limited.

ever-smaller structures while missing the bigger picture:

Why has not Man a microscopic eye?

well into the suspicion that new or augmented sense perception

could not make us superior beings, despite the enthusiasm of some

For this plain reason, Man is not a Fly.

microscopists.”14

Say what the use, were ﬁner optics giv’n,

Some authors have argued that microscopy as a science went

into a decline following the early enthusiasm. In a 1956 history of

T’ inspect a mite, not comprehend the heav’n?

microscopy, Maria Rooseboom said: “After the great discoveries

Or touch, if tremblingly alive all o’er,

of the pioneers, the eighteenth century brought little sensational

To smart and agonize at ev’ry pore?

news in the ﬁelds of microscopes and microscopy,” while Brian

Ford has called the 1700s a “Lost Century” for the microscope.

Less well-known than Gulliver’s Travels, at least in the English-

Marc Ratcliff, in his The Quest for the Invisible, argues that this view

speaking world, is Voltaire’s 1752 novella Micromégas (Fig. 5).

is too simplistic, and that much important work involving

Considered one of the ﬁrst true science ﬁction stories, this features

microscopes was carried out during the Enlightenment era.

a 450-year-old, 37 km tall alien with 1000 senses from a planet that

What is indisputable is that major advances in microscopy had to

orbits Sirius. He writes a scientiﬁc book examining the insects on

await a solution to the twin issues of spherical and chromatic

his planet, which at 30 m in size are too small to be detected by

aberration, which limited the resolving power of early micro-

ordinary microscopes. Micromégas’s book is considered heresy,

scopes. By the nineteenth century, however, the problems of

and he is banished from his home planet for 800 years. Eventually,

aberration were largely solved and microscopy entered a new

with another giant from Saturn, he arrives on Earth. When he

golden era. As well as improved microscopes, the development of

encounters the microscopic humans he initially assumes that they

histological dyes enabled cellular structures to be observed in

are too small to be intelligent, but eventually realises that human

science and philosophy are the equal of his own. As Marc Olivier

points out “ . . . despite his physical advantages, he is subject to

error, arrogance, and all other human shortcomings. This played 14

Marc Oliver, “Binding the Book of Nature: Microscopy as Literature,” History of

European Ideas 31 (2005): 173–191, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.histeuroi- deas.2003.11.005.

Maria Rooseboom, Microscopium (Leden: Rijksmuseum voor de Geschiedenis

Anne Jessie van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in der Natuurwetenschappen, 1956); Brian J. Ford, The Revealing Lens: Mankind and the

Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 102. Microscope (London: Harrap, 1973), p. 68.

13 16

Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), Marc J. Racliff, The Quest for the Invisible: Microscopy in the Enlightenment

p. 20. (London: Routledge, 2009).

4 P.J.F. Harris / Endeavour 43 (2019) 100695

Fig. 5. Voltaire (1694–1778), in an oil painting by Nicolas de Largillière,1724/25, digitized and available in Wikimedia Commons (in public domain), and cover of Micromégas,

reproduced by permission of Flammarion.

more detail than ever before, and this led to huge advances in cell creatures actively play as if they were so many animated

biology. However the achievements of microscopists in the tax-pennies, a stronger lens reveals to you certain tiniest

nineteenth century were not limited to biology. The invention of hairlets which make vortices for these victims while the

the polarizing microscope by William Nicol in 1828, and its swallower waits passively at his receipt of custom. In this way,

application to rocks by Henry Clifton Sorby and others were of metaphorically speaking, a strong lens applied to Mrs

major importance in geology, while the discovery of Brownian Cadwallader’s matchmaking will show a play of minute causes

motion by Robert Brown in 1827 had huge implications for producing what may be called thought and speech vortices to

18 20

physics. bring her the sort of food she needed.

One nineteenth century novelist who was very much alive to

The Mrs. Cadwallader referred to is a gossipy, interfering

developments in microscopy was George Eliot (Fig. 6). The speciﬁc

woman. What Eliot seems to be saying here is that it would be

role of microscopy in Eliot’s life, and in Middlemarch (1872), which

a mistake to take a simplistic/reductive view of this woman’s

is widely regarded as her ﬁnest work, has been discussed in detail

19 behaviour, using “a weak lens.” The “strong lens” of the

by Mark Wormald. For many years, Eliot was in a relationship

microscope, however, reveals the complex sources of her motiva-

with George Henry Lewes, a polymath who counted microscopy

tion, exposing the minute intricacy of her manipulative games.

among his many interests. Wormald believes that Eliot obtained an

Later in the novel we are introduced to Tertius Lydgate, a doctor

“intimate knowledge” of microscopy from Lewes, and that this

who uses a microscope to conduct medical research. He may have

explains the many microscopy references in Middlemarch. In the 21

been partly based on Lewes. At one point Lydgate gifts a copy of

ﬁrst of these references Eliot uses microscopy as a metaphor:

“Robert Brown’s new thing” (the paper which described Brownian

Even with a microscope directed on a water-drop we ﬁnd

motion) to fellow microscopist Camden Farebrother, and, in a

ourselves making interpretations which turn out to be rather

passage which echoes the metaphor quoted above, Lydgate lends

coarse; for whereas under a weak lens you may seem to see a

Farebrother his superior microscope to examine some ‘pond-

creature exhibiting an active voracity into which other smaller

products,’ enabling him to see what he would miss were he using

his own, “weaker lens.” The inﬂuence of biology on Eliot’s ﬁction

is not limited to her discussions of microscopy. J. Hillis Miller has

17 pointed out other examples which illustrate the “parallelism

Savile Bradbury, The Evolution of the Microscope (Oxford: Pergamon, 1967).

18 th

Hugh Chisholm, ed., “Nicol, William,” in Encyclopædia Britannica, 11 edn.

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), XIX: 661; Norman Higham, A Very

Scientiﬁc Gentleman: The Major Achievements of Henry Clifton Sorby (Oxford:

Pergamon, 1963); Richard P. Feynman, “The Brownian Movement,” in The Feynman George Eliot, Middlemarch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 49.

Lectures on Physics (New York: Basic Books, 2011), I: 41–45. Wormald, “Microscopy and Semiotic” (ref. 19), p. 518.

19 22

Mark Wormald, “Microscopy and Semiotic in Middlemarch,” Nineteenth Century The British Library, The Companion to the Microscope, https://www.bl.uk/

Literature 50 (1996): 501–524, https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.1996.50.4.99p0191f. collection-items/the-companion-to-the-microscope, accessed November 12, 2018.

P.J.F. Harris / Endeavour 43 (2019) 100695 5

Fig. 6. George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans, 1819–1880), portrait by Alexandre-Louis-

François d'Albert-Durade (1804–1886). © National Portrait Gallery, London.

between Eliot’s aim as a sociologist of provincial life and the aims

of contemporary biologists.”

The Victorian era was a time when “the interpenetration of

Fig. 7. Cover of The Diamond Lens by Fitz-James O’Brien (1826–1862). Reproduced

literature and science . . . was everywhere observable.” George

by permission of Hesperus Press.

Eliot was far from the only great writer to display a deep interest in

science: Tennyson and Dickens, to name just two, followed

scientiﬁc developments closely. The nineteenth century was

“behold a whole ‘Divina Commedia’ of living forms, more fantastic

also the great age of the amateur scientist. With the increasing

a thousand times than those with which Dante peopled his unseen

affordability of basic instruments, microscopy became a popular

world.” The starting point for her essay is Fitz-James O’Brien’s

pastime, promoted by such guides as Evenings at the Microscope,

short story The Diamond Lens (1858), which provides one of the

by Philip Henry Gosse (1859), and by societies such as the

ﬁrst examples of the associations between microscopy and fairy-

Microscopical Society of London (now the Royal Microscopical

26 like creatures (Fig. 7). In this fantastical tale a scientist, Linley,

Society) and the Quekett Microscopical Club. Microscopy seeped

summons up the the spirit of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who

into popular culture in surprising ways. In her essay, “Nature’s

informs him that by subjecting “a diamond of one hundred and

Invisibilia: The Victorian Microscope and the Miniature Fairy,”

forty carats” to “electro-magnetic currents for a long period,” a lens

Laura Forsberg draws attention to the links between “the invisible

could be produced “whose magnifying power should be limited

world of microscopic life” and “the invisible world of fairyland.”

only by the resolvability of the object.” In this way Linley

She suggests that, for many Victorian microscopists, “The act of

constructs a super-powerful microscope and discovers a beautiful

gazing through the lens becomes an exercise in imaginative

female, whom he calls Animula, in a microscopic world inside a

association,” quoting Charles Kingsley’s essay on How to Study

drop of water. This minuscule woman has all the attributes of

Natural History (1893), in which he describes how the microscopist

a fairy, although O’Brien never uses the term. Linley becomes

“ . . . in one pinch of green scum, in one spoonful of water,” may

obsessed with her, to the exclusion of the full-sized world, but the

story ends tragically when he accidentally allows the water on his

microscope slide to dry up, condemning Animula to an agonising

J. Hillis Miller, “Optic and Semiotic in Middlemarch,” in Jerome H. Buckley, ed., death.

The Worlds of Victorian Fiction (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 125–

H. G. Wells is probably best known today for his pioneering

145, on p. 131.

24 science ﬁction novels such as The War of the Worlds (1898), but he

Valerie Purton, ed., Darwin, Tennyson and Their Readers: Explorations in Victorian

Literature and Science (London: Anthem Press, 2014).

Ibid., pp. 1–80; Simon Ings, “How Charles Dickens Became a Man of Science,”

New Scientist, June 13, 2018, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23831820-

800-how-charles-dickens-became-a-man-of-science/, accessed August 13, 2019. Laura Forsberg, “Nature’s Invisibilia: The Victorian Microscope and the

Philip Henry Gosse, Evenings at the Microscope, or Researches Among the Minuter Miniature Fairy,” Victorian Studies 57 (2015): 638–666, on p. 654; Charles Kingsley,

Organs and Forms of Animal Life (London: Society for Promoting Christian How to Study Natural History (South Carolina: CreateSpace Publishing, 2014), p. 22.

Knowledge, 1884); J. A. Bennett, “The Social History of the Microscope,” Journal Fitz James O'Brien, The Diamond Lens and Other Stories (London: Hesperus Press,

of Microscopy 155, no. 3 (1989): 267–280, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2818.1989. 2012).

29 tb02890.x. Ibid., p. 15.

6 P.J.F. Harris / Endeavour 43 (2019) 100695

failed to recognize it, of course. Suppose Wedderburn too had

shifted the slide?

Hill swallows his scruples and earns top marks in the exam. But

his conscience troubles him and eventually he makes a clean breast

of it with his professor. The unfortunate Hill ends up sent down

from his college and greatly diminished in the eyes of Miss

Haysman. We are left wondering whether he did the right thing in

owning up.

Wells’s highly enjoyable novel Ann Veronica (1909), describes

how Ann Veronica Stanley, “a young lady of nearly two-and-

twenty,” struggles with the restrictions of a patriarchal society. She

was “wildly discontented and eager for freedom and life.” After a

row with her father she leaves home and, with the help of a loan

from a rich neighbour, Mr. Ramage, enrols on a course in biology at

the ﬁctional “Central Imperial College” in London. Here she falls

under the spell of the “exceptionally fair” demonstrator, Mr. Capes.

In a key passage, she moves from examining the specimen in her

microscope to gazing yearningly at her tutor:

Then one day a little thing happened that clothed itself in

signiﬁcance.

She had been working upon a ribbon of microtome sections of

the developing salamander, and he came to see what she had

made of them. She stood up and he sat down at the microscope,

and for a time he was busy scrutinizing one section after

another. She looked down at him and saw that the sunlight was

gleaming from his cheeks, and that all over his cheeks was a ﬁne

golden down of delicate hairs. And at the sight something

leaped within her.

Here Ann Veronica’s gaze seems to have become sensitised by

Fig. 8. H. G. Wells (1866–1946), in a photograph by George Charles Beresford, 1920.

microscopy (in a way that would have ﬁlled Swift with horror), so

that she becomes acutely aware of the ﬁne detail of Capes’s face.

Unfortunately, it turns out that Capes is married. To make

was a proliﬁc writer who worked in a number of different genres

30 matters worse, Ramage tries to take advantage of Ann Veronica,

(Fig. 8). Even his “non-science ﬁction” writing often involved

and she returns the money he lent her. With her prospects

science and scientists. The short story, A Slip Under the Microscope

seemingly thwarted, Ann Veronica throws herself into the

(1896), concerns the rivalry between two biology undergraduates

31 Suffragette struggle, and is sent to prison. She is appalled by

called Hill and Wedderburn. They are competing for the highest

the ﬁlthy conditions: “Horrible memories of things seen beneath

marks in the ﬁnal exam, as well as for the affections of fellow

the microscope of the baser forms of life crawled across her mind

undergraduate Miss Haysman. The day of the exam arrives and

and set her shuddering with imagined irritations.” Chastened,

involves a practical test in microscopy. The demonstrator has

Ann Veronica returns to her father’s home and agrees to get

placed a botanical section in the microscope, mounted on a glass

engaged to the hopeless Mr. Manning, but soon realises she cannot

slide (which Wells calls a slip), and positioned the specimen so that

live without Capes. So the pair, ﬁrst brought together over a

only part of it can be seen. Moving the specimen even slightly

microscope, are ﬁnally united.

would reveal its identity. When it is Hill’s turn, disaster strikes.

Another novel, in which a female character experiences a kind

Hill came to this, ﬂushed from a contest with staining reagents,

of epiphany while operating a microscope, is D. H. Lawrence’s The

sat down on the little stool before the microscope, turned the

Rainbow (1915). We know that Lawrence had read Ann Veronica,

mirror to get the best light, and then, out of sheer habit, shifted

and the similarities between Wells’s heroine and Ursula Brangwen

the slip. At once he remembered the prohibition, and, with an

in The Rainbow are striking (Fig. 9). Both are “New Women,”

almost continuous motion of his hands, moved it back, and sat

32 looking for an independent path in life, and both study science at

paralysed with astonishment at his action.

university. However, the consequence of Ursula’s encounter with

By shifting the specimen, Hill sees clearly that is a lenticel (a

microscopy is rather different to that of Ann Veronica.

kind of porous tissue found in the bark of woody stems), but what

The Rainbow tells the story of three generations of the Brangwen

to do?

family, farmers, and craftsmen who live in Nottinghamshire. Ursula

His mind was full of this grotesque puzzle in ethics that had

is a member of the third generation of Brangwens and comes of age

suddenly been sprung upon him. Should he identify it? or

should he leave this question unanswered? In that case

Wedderburn would probably come out ﬁrst ...... How

ﬁ

could he tell now whether he might not have identi ed the Ibid., p. 47.

thing without shifting it? It was possible that Wedderburn had H. G. Wells, Ann Veronica (London: Everyman, 1995).

Ibid., p. 130.

Ibid., p. 173.

D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008).

Margaret Buckley and Brian Buckley, Challenge and Continuity: Aspects of the

H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2017). Thematic Novel, 1830-1950 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004).

31 39

H. G. Wells, A Slip Under the Microscope (London: Penguin Classics, 2015). Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle

Ibid., pp. 46–47. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997).

P.J.F. Harris / Endeavour 43 (2019) 100695 7

Fig. 9. D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) in his passport photograph. Courtesy of the

Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University.

in the early 1900s. While she is still at school, she embarks on a love

affair with Anton Skrebensky, a British soldier of Polish ancestry.

After school she becomes a teacher, but she struggles with a large

class on unruly children. She goes on to university, but quickly

becomes disillusioned with an institution which she sees as

nothing more than a factory preparing students for industry. She is

also at odds with the purely scientiﬁc, materialist view of life, put

forward by her teacher, Dr. Frankstone. How can she ﬁnd meaning

in her life? Then, while she is she examining a unicellular organism

moving around under her microscope she has a revelation.

It intended to be itself. But what self? Suddenly in her mind the

’ ’

world gleamed strangely, with an intense light, like the nucleus Fig. 10. James Thurber s professor was enraged by his student s inability to use a

microscope; cartoon from My Life and Hard Times (1933), p. 66. Reproduced by

of the creature under the microscope. Suddenly she had passed

permission of Cartoon Collections, www.CartoonCollections.com.

away into an intensely gleaming light of knowledge. She could

not understand what it all was. She only knew that it was not

Women in Love (1920), but this later novel is regrettably free of any

limited mechanical energy, nor mere purpose of self-preserva- 42

microscopy references.

tion and self-assertion. It was a consummation, a being inﬁnite.

A writer who had little success with microscopy was the

Self was a oneness with the inﬁnite. To be oneself was a

40 American humourist James Thurber (1894–1961). His hilarious

supreme, gleaming triumph of inﬁnity.

autobiography My Life and Hard Times (1933) includes a chapter

“ ”

Viewing this tiny organism in the microscope, she becomes University Days which describes his struggles. Thurber had poor

conscious of a universe beyond the humdrum everyday world of eyesight, due to a childhood injury, and as a result could not see

“‘

human society and convention. To be herself, with complete plant cells though his microscope. This enraged his professor: As

’

freedom, should be her aim in life. At the same time, she realises God is my witness, I ll arrange this glass so that you see cells

’ —

that there is more to life than the materialist view proposed by through it or I ll give up teaching. In twenty-two years of botany, I

’ ”

Frankstone. There is a mystical aspect to existence, in which the . He cut off abruptly for he was beginning to quiver all over . . .

individual is united with the inﬁnite. In her new, independent (Fig. 10). Eventually Thurber adjusts the microscope so that he can

state, she rejects Skrebensky’s proposal of marriage, and at the see what he believes is a plant cell, but when the professor looks at

“‘ ’ ’ ‘ ’ very end of the novel the appearance of a rainbow after a storm his drawing he explodes: That s your eye! he shouted. You ve

ﬁ ﬂ ’ ’” represents an archway “through which Ursula may step to her xed the lens so that it re ects! You ve drawn your eye!

unknown, open future.” Ursula Brangwen’s story is taken up in Thurber never did pass his botany course.

40 42

Lawrence, The Rainbow (ref. 37), p. 439. D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008).

41 43

Kate Flint, “Introduction,” in D. H Lawrence, The Rainbow (Oxford: Oxford James Thurber, My Life and Hard Times (New York: Perennial Classics, 1999), pp.

World’s Classics, 1997), pp. vii–xxiii, on p. xxi. 65, 67.

8 P.J.F. Harris / Endeavour 43 (2019) 100695

To summarise then, we have seen how microscopy and the To ﬁnish, I reproduce in full a charming 1984 poem, called

publication of Micrographia inspired the great eighteenth century simply “The Microscope” by Maxine Kumin (1925–2014). Written

writers Swift and Voltaire to play with changes of scale in their for children, it takes us back to where we began:

ﬁction, although Gulliver’s experiences in Brobdingnag seem to

Anton Leeuwenhoek was Dutch.

reﬂect a widely-held revulsion at what the microscope might

’

reveal. The microscopy references in George Eliot s Middlemarch He sold pincushions, cloth, and such.

exemplify the “interpenetration of literature and science” in the

The waiting townsfolk fumed and fussed

nineteenth century, an interpenetration which even extended into

ﬁ

the world of fairy ction. In the early twentieth century, H. G. As Anton’s dry goods gathered dust.

Wells’s Ann Veronica and D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow both feature

He worked, instead of tending store,

female microscopists. However, as noted above, there appear to be

fewer recent examples of microscopy in literature. Possibly this At grinding special lenses for

reﬂects the professionalisation of today’s science and the greater

44 A microscope. Some of the things

separation of the “two cultures.” In the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries it seems that artists and scientists interacted

He looked at were: mosquitoes’ wings,

much more closely than they do today, and science was practised

the hairs of sheep, the legs of lice,

as much by amateurs as by professionals. Thus, a writer like George

Eliot could take time out from writing Middlemarch by looking at

the skin of people, dogs, and mice;

biological specimens in George Lewes’s microscope. By contrast,

ox eyes, spiders’ spinning gear,

few contemporary writers can have experienced at ﬁrst hand the

wonders of modern microscopy. Nevertheless there are a few

ﬁshes’ scales, a little smear

hopeful signs. John Holmes has pointed out that poets in particular

of his own blood, and best of all, have been taking a “more and more lively interest” in the work and

working methods of scientists over the last 25 years. Two of the

the unknown, busy, very small

poets he mentions, the Czech Miroslav Holub (1923–1998) and the

Australian Judith Wright (1915–2000) have both written about bugs that swim and bump and hop

microscopy. Holub’s poem Evening in a Lab beautifully captures the

inside a simple water drop.

agony and ecstasy of scientiﬁc research:

Impossible! Most Dutchmen said.

The white horse will not emerge from the lake

This Anton’s crazy in the head!

(of methyl green),

We ought to ship him off to Spain!

the ﬂaming sheet will not appear in the dark ﬁeld condenser.

’ ﬂ ’

Pinned down by nine pounds of failure, pinned down by half an He says he s seen a house y s brain!

inch of hope

He says the water that we drink

Judith Wright’s poem Alive describes how the experience of

Is full of bugs! He’s mad, we think!

viewing a live biological sample under a microscope produces a

sudden ﬂash of insight which recalls that of Ursula Brangwen: They called him dumkopf, which means dope.

That’s how we got the microscope.

Locked in the focussed stare

of the lens, my sight

Acknowledgments

ﬂinches: a tiny kick.

I thank Professor Steven Matthews for alerting me to the

The life in me replies

microscopy reference in The Rainbow, and thus giving me the idea

ﬁ

signalling back for this article. In preparing the article I bene tted from listening to

an episode of the BBC Radio 3 programme “Words and Music,”

“You there: I here.”

entitled “Under the Microscope,” broadcast on August 5, 2018. I am

What matters isn’t size.

also grateful to Laura Harris for critically reading the manuscript.

The microscopist and the specimen are united, she seems to be

saying, in being alive.

C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2012).

J. Holmes, Science in Modern Poetry: New Directions (Liverpool: Liverpool

University Press, 2012), p. 3.

Miroslav Holub, Sagittal Section: Poems, New and Selected (Oberlin, OH: Oberlin

College Press, 1980), pp. 83–84.

47 48

Judith Wright, Alive: Poems 1971-72 (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1973), p. 28. Maxine Kumin, The Microscope (New York: HarperCollins, 1984).