Deep Time in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel: Temporality, Science, and Literary Form
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Deep Time in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel: Temporality, Science, and Literary Form Kja Isaacson A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctorate in Philosophy degree in English Department of English Faculty of Arts University of Ottawa © Kja Isaacson, Ottawa, Canada, 2017 ii Table of Contents Abstract .................................................................................................................................... iii Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................... v Introduction – Deep Time in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel ................................... 1 “Deep Time” from Carlyle to Wells ...................................................................................... 2 Methodology and Area of Study ............................................................................................ 8 Chronometry and Temporality in the Nineteenth Century................................................... 14 Nineteenth-Century Scientific Developments ...................................................................... 22 Deep Time: Critical Context ................................................................................................ 33 Deep Time in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel .......................................................... 42 Dissertation Overview .......................................................................................................... 47 Chapter 1 – “In Medias Res”: Spiritual and Scientific Deep Time in Dickens and Eliot . 53 “Lord, how that clock would go!”: Memory and Chronometry in Dombey and Son .......... 64 “As old as the hills”: The Antediluvian World of Bleak House .......................................... 78 “Its geological formation was Dust”: Accumulation and Inheritance in Our Mutual Friend ............................................................................................................... 98 “Under the varying experiments of Time”: Uniformitarianism in Middlemarch .............. 113 “An intense life in an invisible past and future”: Religious Public Time in Daniel Deronda .................................................................................................................. 123 Chapter 2 – “Time closed up like a fan”: Deep Time in Thomas Hardy’s Novels ......... 148 “Between this creature’s epoch and his own”: Folding Time in A Pair of Blue Eyes ....... 164 Egdon Heath’s Geological Landscape in The Return of the Native ................................... 173 “They burn out like candles”: Dying Stars and Cosmic Time in Two on a Tower ............ 177 “The great web of human doings”: The Woodlanders’ Darwinian Ecosystem ................. 188 Chapter 3 – “Into Futurity”: Time Travel and the New Romance .................................. 208 Bulwer’s “Solemn Quiz on Darwin”: Post-Human Evolution in The Coming Race ......... 222 “As Ye Reckon Time”: Materialist Time in Haggard’s She .............................................. 243 “Thirty Million Years Hence”: Deep Time in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine .............. 269 Victorian Realism, the New Romance, and Modernism .................................................... 291 “The blackness of unborn time”: Anticipating Anthropocene Studies ............................. 293 Conclusion – Looking Forward: Conrad, Modernism, and the Anthropocene .............. 295 “Travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world” in Heart of Darkness ............... 296 “The Curse of Decay”: Greenwich and Deep Time in The Secret Agent .......................... 307 Deep Time and the Anthropocene ..................................................................................... 321 Appendix A ............................................................................................................................ 325 Bibliography ......................................................................................................................... 326 iii Abstract This dissertation examines representations of deep time in nineteenth-century British novels in order to argue that these texts help carve a path for our contemporary definitions of deep time and the Anthropocene. Examining fiction by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, H. Rider Haggard, H. G. Wells, and Joseph Conrad, I suggest that these novels participate in the secularization of deep time by transforming the concept of vast spiritual time that had been in use earlier in the nineteenth century into a scientifically-informed model that anticipates our current understandings of deep time. While the concept of geological time emerged in the late-eighteenth century and became widely recognized in the nineteenth, the phrase “deep time” originates in nineteenth-century literature when Thomas Carlyle first used it in a non-scientific context. By studying a wide range of fiction, I demonstrate how nineteenth- century authors employed innovative narrative strategies to convey these potentially inconceivable timescales in non-numerical terms, and thereby make them more accessible to human comprehension. I also challenge conventional distinctions between literary realism and popular romance in the period by analyzing the complementary ways in which both genres of fiction engage with vast temporal scales in their narratives. I develop my argument by examining how these novels use a model of what I call “folding time” to incorporate remote time periods into their texts. Departing from the novel’s linear narrative structure to bring distant historical moments into direct contact with one another, folding time situates human activity in relation to vast pre-and-post-human periods and in doing so acknowledges an age of humans within deep time; in this sense, these novels articulate an early concept of the Anthropocene. By including deep time in the novel’s traditionally individual and familial framework, these authors simultaneously expand the novel’s temporal scope and humanize vast scientific timescales. iv Further, as these novels illustrate characters’ psychological responses to overwhelming scientific timescales, they reposition deep time in relation to private temporal experience. This study employs an interdisciplinary approach to acknowledge the mutually reciprocal relationship between science and literature in the nineteenth century, and draws on temporality studies, history of science theory, and literary criticism to situate its argument in relation to current critical discussions. I also consider the work of scientists such as Charles Lyell, Charles Darwin, and William Thomson in order to contextualize my novels’ scientific references. By studying nineteenth-century British novels in relation to scientific temporalities, this dissertation recovers an overlooked component of the history of deep time that has had significant and lasting cultural influence given the enduring popularity and wide readership of these texts. v Acknowledgements I wish to thank the University of Ottawa and the Department of English for providing me with the opportunity and resources to pursue my PhD. I am grateful for the funding I received as a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholar through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Additionally, I thank the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Arts, the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies, the Graduate Students’ Association, and the Association of Part-Time Professors for funding in support of my research and conference attendance. I particularly wish to thank Dr. Lauren Gillingham for being an outstanding supervisor. Lauren, thank you for your advice, guidance, and encouragement; it has been an honour to work with you and I have learnt so much in the process. I am grateful to Dr. Tom Allen for being on my dissertation committee and helping in so many capacities throughout my degree. Tom, your advice has been invaluable and I greatly admire your principled approach to academia. I am also thankful to Dr. Craig Gordon for his work on my dissertation committee and generous help. I am grateful to Dr. Tina Young Choi, Dr. Tom Allen, Dr. David Rampton, and Dr. Keith Wilson for agreeing to act as examiners for my defence. I also wish to thank Keith for reading my proposal and providing critical recommendations. Your counsel in the early stages of this project formed the basis of my work on Hardy. In general the Department of English faculty and staff have provided invaluable instruction and assistance for which I am very appreciative. I would also like to thank Aaron Donachuk and Erin Kean for their help with my dissertation research and submission. Thank you to my parents, Steve and Vivian, and my brothers, Dylan and Quin, for their love and support during this process. Finally, I would like to dedicate this dissertation with love and appreciation to Paul, who helped me every step of the way. 1 INTRODUCTION Deep Time in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel It is highly important for us to gain some notion, however imperfect, of the lapse of years. During each of these years, over the whole world, the land and the water has been peopled by hosts of living forms. What an infinite number of generations, which the mind cannot grasp, must have succeeded each other in the long roll of years! —Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species Deep time is so alien that we can really only comprehend it as metaphor. —Stephen Jay Gould,