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This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Intensive Materialism Matter, minds and bodies in Victorian science and literature Golding, Samuel Michael Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 29. Sep. 2021 Intensive Materialism: matter, minds and bodies in Victorian science and literature by Sam Golding Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy King’s College London Department of English September 2015 1 DECLARATION I declare that this work contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference has been made in the text. SAM GOLDING September 2015 2 ABSTRACT In nineteenth-century Britain, Victorians began to make strange new discoveries about matter. As it was cracked open and broken into smaller pieces, scientists found a world previously hidden from view: a world populated by interconnected ‘fields’, atomic vortices, fluctuating energy and organic morphogenesis. The more these bizarre phenomena were scrutinised, the more they resisted quantification. Saddled with explanatory paradigms unable to describe this new ‘intensive’ realm, scientists and writers delved deep into the imagination, experimented with their bodies and pushed language to its conceptual limits. Peering beyond sense and logic, they realised that neat distinctions between mind and matter, order and chaos, the reasonable and the absurd, were no longer viable. This world of recalcitrant matter and energy could not simply be uncovered—it had to be made too. As matter, minds and bodies intermeshed in dynamic, sometimes frightening ways, the very foundations of thought began to shift. This thesis focuses on a number of literary and scientific texts that responded to and participated in the creation of this nineteenth-century turn to intensive materialism. Reading texts by authors and scientists such as John Tyndall, Robert Browning, Henry James, P. G. Tait, Frederic Harrison and James Clerk Maxwell, it argues that writing began to function autonomously and elusively. Sometimes it generated unexpected information in excess of its constituent terms; other times it exposed unresolvable ontological tensions. Offering a new way to think about materialism, this thesis considers bodily, mental and literary thought as partially morphogenetic and nonhuman. By analysing texts and their wider cultural reception, it suggests that we can trace the interrelated turns that created Victorian Britain’s intensive worldview. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Declaration 2 Abstract 3 Table of contents 4 Acknowledgements 6 Introduction: intensive materialism in Victorian Britain 8 Newtonian order 12 Pondering the imponderable 14 Empirical epistemologies 19 Matter over mind 23 Deleuze’s intensive ontology 31 Critical turns 38 Materialism for non-materialists 49 1. John Tyndall, intensive materialist: embodied Alpine encounters and the limits of the scientific imagination 51 1.1 Critical conflicts 57 1.2 Tyndall among the Alps 61 1.3 Poetic duality 73 1.4 Embodied duality / embodied duelity 80 1.5 From vertical to horizontal; from moments to the momentous 93 1.6 Conclusion: Tyndall’s intensive materialism 104 2. Entropy, information and analogies part I: eternal universes and degraded texts 107 2.1 The structure of analogies 113 2.2 Stewart and Lockyer’s delicately constructed cosmos 117 2.3 Entropic eschatology in The Unseen Universe 125 2.4 Eternal energy in Heat a Mode of Motion 132 2.5 Conclusion: thermodynamic fantasies 155 4 3. Entropy, information and analogies part II: poetic negentropy and the chaotic instability of scientific law 157 3.1 Analogies, models and black boxes 160 3.2 Poetic instability and analogical transformation in ‘A Vision’ 165 3.3 ‘Psychophysik’, and the problem of ontological continuity 176 3.4 Barry and Galton’s entropic information 182 3.5 Chaotic free will in Maxwell’s demonic science 189 3.6 Conclusion: Maxwell’s negentropic analogies 204 4. ‘The infinite passion of finite hearts’: the paradoxes of disjunctive love in Robert Browning’s ‘Two in the Campagna’ 207 4.1 Multiplicities and disjunctive love 213 4.2 “Putting the infinite in the finite” 216 4.3 Organic multiplicity and the dissolution of the self 224 4.4 Touching the flesh; touching the soul 234 4.5 Conclusion: Browning’s disjunctive realism 241 5. Haunted objects and objectile hauntings: possessed and possessive things in the works of Frederic Harrison and Henry James 245 5.1 (Not) written in stone 250 5.2 Dead matter / living time 265 5.3 Objectified subjects and subjectified objects 271 5.4 (Re)turn of the screw 283 5.5 Conclusion: haunted objects / objectile hauntings 296 Epilogue: the onset of a new worldview 299 Works cited: Primary sources 305 Works cited: Secondary sources 313 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis owes its existence to the help, support and contributions of numerous people. I’m extremely grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding this project; to the English Department (King’s College London) for the various forms of support I have received over the last few years; and to University College Dublin for their generous overseas conference bursary. I’m also indebted to the archivists at the Royal Institution and various members of the John Tyndall Correspondence Project for their tireless efforts in helping me locate, discover and decipher some of Tyndall’s private writings. Thanks to Mark Turner and Adelene Buckland for giving shape to this thesis at a time when it seemed formless; Sarah Cooper for her inspiring seminars on contemporary film theory and ethical philosophy; Mark Betz for that unforgettable session on exploitation cinema; Markos Hadjioannou for first introducing me to Deleuze and preparing me for those bouts of crippling self-doubt; and fellow PhD candidates George Legg and Carl Kears for doing what graduate students do best: drinking. The encouragement, humour and distractions provided by friends over these last few years will never be forgotten. I would like to thank Seb for a friendship that can’t be summarised in one sentence; Chal, for always challenging me; Galia, Faye and Amy Alice for providing feedback on various chunks of this work; Matt, Martin, Claire and Susie for the Wood Green era; Ben, for being the only other person to know by heart the words to Joseph; Wes J, for sharing my obsession with fantasy football and whose bouts of rage when it all goes wrong are a constant source of humour; Sim, Sarah and Philly for the fun we always have; Harry and Wes F, for putting in the hard work of friendship; and Stephen and Jane for their approachability, generosity and for always treating me like family. 6 Without my supervisor Clare Pettitt’s support and knowledge, I would have given up a long time ago. Her academic brilliance, friendship and tireless patience over the years have all been invaluable. I cannot thank her enough. I could not have completed this project without the help, love and belief of my parents Lois and Trevor and sister Jo. My mum deserves a medal for trawling through hundreds of pages of this thesis and weeding out errors. Lastly, I owe an immeasurable debt to El, for living with this project as long as I have and for always making our precious few moments of downtime together intensely fun and thoroughly disjunctive. 7 INTRODUCTION Intensive materialism in Victorian Britain A tiny man alone in a wilderness of white running and running. Or, perhaps not— perhaps he is dancing. No matter, what is important is that the man is moving. His motion is continuous yet rhythmic and predictable, each step part of a simple pattern. I know the man’s precise movements because I have complete control over him: when he moves, how he moves, the speed at which he moves. I know because I made him. We started with a strip of paper. On it I drew a dozen versions of the man each slightly different from the one before. My dad, an engineer by trade, took on the more difficult task of putting together the moving components of the zoetrope. He attached the reel of paper to the circumference of an old CD and enveloped it with a cylinder of dark cardboard, punctured by carefully spaced viewing slits. After some trial and error, he mounted this makeshift drum to a Lego base with a working gear mechanism and crank. I cannot remember any more of the mechanical details of our homemade zoetrope or the exact scene it depicted. What I do recall with absolute clarity is the feeling it inspired. Our version of this popular Victorian toy was made uniquely ours through a combination of my passable drawing skills and my dad’s superior engineering ability.1 It gave him a chance to explain how a series of static drawings could transform into a continuous moving image.