THE SOCIETY OF MAD SCIENTISTS: SCIENTISTS AND SOCIAL NETWORKING IN THE VICTORIAN NOVEL by Park Shawn Robert Parkison A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of Purdue University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English West Lafayette, Indiana August 2020 THE PURDUE UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL STATEMENT OF COMMITTEE APPROVAL Dr. Emily Allen, Chair Department of English Dr. Manushag Powell Department of English Dr. Dino Felluga Department of English Dr. Adam E. Watkins Honors College Approved by: Dr. Manushag Powell 2 To Jackie, my partner and traveling companion. 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My unfathomable gratitude to Emily Allen, without whom this work would not exist. I am indebted to Manushag Powell for her sharpness and kindness and to Dino Felluga, who always has good and difficult writing advice. Thank you also to Adam Watkins for his insights. I am indebted to Diane Hoeveler, who opened up Dracula to me. My deep appreciation to my undergraduate mentor, Kosta Hadavas. I owe so much my family, to my parents, Tony and Debbie Parkison, and grandmother, Florence Delores Parkison, who passed away during the writing of this dissertation. I could not have done any of this work without the love and support of my partner, Jackie May Parkison. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................................ 7 INTRODUCTION—WHAT WE THINK ABOUT WHEN WE THINK ABOUT MAD SCIENTISTS .................................................................................................................................. 8 What Can We Learn from the Mad Scientist? ............................................................................. 9 Mad Science: A Critical Review ................................................................................................ 12 Chapter Outline .......................................................................................................................... 17 CHAPTER ONE—THE GOLDEN AGE OF MAD SCIENCE NOVELS .................................. 19 The Rise of Materialism and Professionalism: Science as a Power .......................................... 21 The Scientification of Medicine................................................................................................. 25 Scientific Controversies of the Nineteenth Century .................................................................. 28 The Hazardous Persona: Brilliant, Abnormal, Monomaniacal, and Amoral ............................. 34 Pilot Study: Dr. Benjulia ............................................................................................................ 40 CHAPTER TWO—BONDS OF COMMON INTEREST: JEKYLL AND HYDE ..................... 45 Dr. Jekyll, the Philosophical Scientist ....................................................................................... 49 Jekyll and the Failed Symposium .............................................................................................. 52 Hyde: A Side, Not an Opposite.................................................................................................. 55 Hastie Lanyon, the Doctor Left Behind ..................................................................................... 60 Utterson: The Utter Gentleman, the Flexible Flâneur, and Mr. Trumpet .................................. 63 CHAPTER THREE—NO SCIENTIST IS AN ISLAND: DR. MOREAU .................................. 67 Science Island ............................................................................................................................ 68 The Other Island of Dr. Moreau ................................................................................................ 70 It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Island ............................................................................................ 72 Howl Now, Brown Dog ............................................................................................................. 78 Like Lanyon and Utterson but Worse ........................................................................................ 79 Like Jekyll but Worse, Like London but Worse ........................................................................ 83 CHAPTER FOUR—HAVE CACKLE, WILL TRAVEL: PROF. ABRAHAM VAN HELSING ....................................................................................................................................................... 85 The Doctor Is In ......................................................................................................................... 87 Abraham Van Helsing, Hazardous Scientist .............................................................................. 88 5 Van Helsing the Networker ....................................................................................................... 92 The Accented Hero .................................................................................................................... 96 Head Scientist for the London Preservation Society ................................................................. 99 CHAPTER FIVE—THE BAKER STREET IRREGULAR: SHERLOCK HOLMES .............. 101 Holmes the Scientist, Learned and Dangerous ........................................................................ 104 Holmesian Networking ............................................................................................................ 107 Holmesian London ................................................................................................................... 113 Holmes and Watson ................................................................................................................. 118 The Benefits of Collaboration .................................................................................................. 120 CODA: UNCLE SCIENCE OFFICER AND THE SISTER SCIENTIST ................................. 122 Uncle Science Officer, the Avuncular Scientist ...................................................................... 124 The Heroic Scientist ................................................................................................................. 126 The Materteral and the Heroic Woman Scientist ..................................................................... 127 The Sister Scientist .................................................................................................................. 130 WORKS CITED ......................................................................................................................... 132 6 LIST OF FIGURES Fig. 1 ............................................................................................................................................. 30 Fig. 2 ............................................................................................................................................. 30 Fig. 3 ............................................................................................................................................. 36 Fig. 4 ........................................................................................................................................... 105 7 INTRODUCTION—WHAT WE THINK ABOUT WHEN WE THINK ABOUT MAD SCIENTISTS Imagine a figure in a lab coat, wide eyed and wiry haired, potentially wearing goggles, quite likely surrounded by some rather improbably complicated laboratory glassware and holding up a beaker bubbling with unknown potential. If you asked a child to draw a picture of a scientist or of a mad scientist, you will likely get very similar pictures. There seems to be a sense that interesting science has a tinge of mad science to it, a whiff of the radical and the unorthodox. And that sense does not evaporate with adolescence. The image of the scientist as a dangerous figure continues to preoccupy us as adults. We can make this observation historically as well: if the figure of the mad scientist first emerged in the nineteenth century, it continues to fascinate us, well into the twenty-first. Jekyll and Hyde still pop up in discussions of mental health, and references to other mad scientists from literature and other popular culture are common in discussions of science. GMOs are Frankenfoods. Geneticists are likened to Dr. Moreau. These references occur frequently in anti-science or anti-intellectual discourse, but they are not limited to those areas or even neutral arenas. The science positive and even scientists themselves remain enamored of the mad scientist. 8 The preeminent scientist Freeman Dyson was well into his eighties when he compiled The Scientist as Rebel (2006), a collection of essays mostly from The New York Review of Books. In his preface and the first essay, from which the book takes its title, Dyson holds up rebelliousness as a key characteristic of science and of scientists and considers rebelliousness in relation to society as a whole and to children in particular. Dyson defines science as “an alliance of free spirits in all cultures rebelling against the local tyranny that each culture imposes on its children” (4). Rebellion is important to Dyson, but so is creating order. He notes the beauty in reductivism but prefers “constructivist” science. Dyson holds up Benjamin Franklin as a premier example of a rebel as scientist precisely because Franklin was not interested in tearing down but in building a society and even preserving when possible (x-xii).