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Popularizing Science and Literary Realism in The ESCAPING THE REAL: POPULARIZING SCIENCE AND LITERARY REALISM IN THE VICTORIAN MARKETPLACE By ANDREW BANGHART Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY August, 2016 1 CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES We hereby approve the thesis/dissertation of Andrew Banghart candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy*. Committee Chair Kurt Koenigsberger Committee Member Athena Vrettos Committee Member Todd Oakley Committee Member Alan Rocke Date of Defense 5/9/2016 *We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained therein. 2 Table of Contents Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………….3 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………..5 “Wrapt and lost”: The Popularizing Language of Wonder in Victorian Natural History and Dickens’ Literary Realism……………………………………………...……39 The Aesthetics of Surprise in Victorian Natural History and Eliot’s Mill on the Floss and “The Lifted Veil” …………………………………………………………………..…...71 "A more lonely, loneliness”: Space Travel in Victorian Popular Science and the Novels of Thomas Hardy…………………………………………………………….…...…100 “Specialism popularized”: The Move Away from Popularization in George Gissing’s Late Fiction………………………………………………………………………………...….135 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………..157 3 Escaping the Real: Popularizing Science and Literary Realism in the Victorian Marketplace Abstract By ANDREW BANGHART This dissertation examines the literary strategies that Victorian realist novelists and popular science writers shared to draw readers into imaginary worlds. Just as realist novelists convinced readers that their fictional worlds were real, popular science writers took readers on textual journeys to the edges of galaxies or through the geological history of the planet. Novelists and popularizers tried to make these experiences both real and engaging. They also hoped to expand the readers’ sense of what could be represented. Realist novels and popular science conveyed sometimes challenging content – whether technical and specialized science or difficult social and psychological insights – and, in order to make their work approachable and commercially viable, these works adopted similar literary techniques. These techniques created reading experiences that made audiences more receptive to difficult content. I argue that novelists popularized realism by using the same wonder, mystery, surprise, or absorption that popularizers used to make disciplinary science understandable and marketable. Literary critics have long acknowledged that Victorian realism borrowed theories or methods from then contemporary science, but little work has been done to compare the experience of reading 4 Victorian science and realism. Popularization stressed the entertaining experience that readers could have through science, but tended to minimize the controversial aspects of new theories or the technicality of professional science. Therefore, the science that permeated Victorian culture began to assume a different appearance from that being pursued in laboratories or specialized journals. This dissertation illuminates Victorian realism by comparing it with overlooked aspects of popular science. My dissertation takes four authors – Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and George Gissing – as examples of the many ways popularization strategies emerged in Victorian realism. These authors represent a broad chronological survey of Victorian realism, including the rise of social realism with Dickens, the move into psychological realism with Eliot and Hardy, and finally naturalism with Gissing. 5 Introduction In The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot has her fashionable, well-to-do set discuss texts for an up-coming book club. Though published in the 1860s, the novel is set in what is probably the 1830s, so the characters consider two recent publications – Robert Southey’s Life of Cowper (1836) and William Buckland’s Bridgewater Treatise (1836) on geology. Even though Southey’s work is more obviously literary, Stephen chooses to wax more poetically on the geological tract. Soon the whole room is swept into the grand story of the Earth’s formation: Stephen became quite brilliant in an account of Buckland’s Treatise, which he had just been reading. He was rewarded by seeing Maggie let her work fall, and gradually get so absorbed in his wonderful geological story … with an entire absence of self-consciousness. (384) Literary critics have viewed this passage as a connection between Eliot’s novel and specific geological theories or methodologies. Sally Shuttleworth and Jonathan Smith argue that The Mill on the Floss engaged in the debate between geologists about uniformitarianism and catastrophism – two theories about the way geological change occurs over time. More recently, Adelene Buckland has contended that the passage exposes how Eliot’s “primary interest lay in a methodological dispute about the nature of scientific evidence” (228). While these readings have shown how deeply The Mill on the Floss is indebted to Victorian science, they tend to overlook Maggie’s and Stephen’s absorption in the non- technical aspects of Buckland’s work. Maggie is lost in his “wonderful geological story” 6 and Stephen goes on to tell Maggie “There are many illustrations in it that you will like to see” (228). It is not theory or methodology that absorbs Maggie’s attention, but the entertainment of being lost in wonder and transported through time. Buckland’s Bridgewater Treatise brought readers in contact with exotic places in stretches of deep time. While Buckland was undoubtedly a participant in disputes between uniformitarians and catastrophists, to the general public he was more often known for the striking way he was able to conjure up the Earth’s past. In speeches, articles, and books, Buckland built a reputation as an entertainer as well as a scientist. When the Quarterly Review took up Buckland’s Treatise, the reviewer gushed about “the powerful interest with which he has endowed his subject” (“Dr. Buckland’s Bridgewater Treatise” 43). For the reviewer, Buckland’s writing and speech are designed to create the absorption that Maggie feels: Those who have listened spell-bound to that conversational eloquence with which the Professor is so peculiarly gifted – an eloquence which, when dilating on such subjects, absolutely calls up before his audience ‘the monstrous shapes that one time walk’d the earth, Of which ours is the wreck,’ will, however, imagine the vivid and fascinating manner in which he brings out the abundant stores of his favourite Paleontology illustrations. (43) Maggie’s rapt attention is not idiosyncratic. It was a feeling that Buckland consistently encouraged in his audience. Historian Ralph O’Connor has shown how popular Victorian geology – including that of Buckland’s – created an experience that he calls 7 “virtual tourism” (10). Audiences lost themselves “spell-bound” in imaginary travels through distant geological epochs. Buckland’s Treatise was a popularization of Victorian geology, and it appealed to lay readers because it could move them. Many reviewers found the actual science wanting in the Treatise. The Magazine of Popular Science found that Buckland had “humored an idle taste for what was especially amusing” (341), instead of elevating readers into soberer scientific study. Charles Darwin concluded that Buckland was “incited more by a craving for notoriety, which sometimes made him act like a buffoon, than by a love of science” (129). But it was precisely this entertaining aspect of Buckland’s work that allowed Victorian geology to break out of professional societies and specialist journals – moving into wider appreciation, and eventually into the novels of George Eliot. Nor was Buckland alone in popularizing geology. A wide range of geologists from Charles Lyell to Gideon Mantell and Hugh Miller published commercially success popularizations that sold thousands of copies. These works attempted to transcend the narrow disciplinary discussions in which geology was embroiled, and instead create wonderful pictures of past geological ages. Maggie’s reaction to Buckland, then, mirrors a larger reception of Victorian science, and was one that Eliot herself shared. Eliot’s correspondence shows that she often read science for pleasure, as much as education. She remarks of Lyell and Buckland: “I have read Buckland’s Treatise on geology with much pleasure, and I believe Lyell’s is good though it differs in Theory” (8). Enjoyment hinges less on matters of theory or methodology, but more on the experience one has reading. She read John Nichol’s Architecture of the Heavens as exactly the kind of virtual tourism 8 described by O’Connor: “I have been reveling in Nichol’s ‘Architecture of the Heavens and Phenomena of the Solar System,’ and have been in imagination winging my flight from system to system” (69). Meanwhile, she criticized more disciplinary science for its poverty of entertainment and style. In William Whewell’s Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences – which taught readers the correct methodology of rigorous science – Eliot found only “dreary dryness” (Selections 151). She considered Darwin’s Origin of Species “ill-written, and sadly wanting in illustrative facts” – concluding “This will prevent the work from becoming popular…, but it will have a great effect in the scientific world” (179). Eliot was aware that a gulf was opening up between what
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