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Microscopy and Literature Endeavour 43 (2019) 100695 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Endeavour journa l homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ende 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 © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 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 2 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 2 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. 3 Brian J. Ford, The Leeuwenhoek Legacy (Bristol: Biopress, 1991). 4 E-mail address: [email protected] (P.J.F. Harris). R. Hooke, Micrographia, Or, Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies 1 Henry Power, “In Commendation of ye Microscope” (1661), as quoted by Made by Magnifying Glasses (London: The Royal Society, 1665). 5 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 0160-9327/© 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 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 8 Stella. The influence of microscopy on Gulliver’s Travels, published in 1726 (Fig. 4), has been discussed by a number of authors, notably 9 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 10 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 11 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 7 he realised that the central character was based on him. 8 Leo Damrosch, Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); Keith Crook, A Preface to Swift (London: Routledge, 1998). 9 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). © National Portrait Gallery, London. 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 12 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 13 To smart and agonize at ev’ry pore? news in the fields of microscopes and microscopy,” while Brian 15 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.
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