Book contents
- Victorian Automata
- Victorian Automata
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Introduction
- An Afterthought on Victorian Automata as Afterthought (and Signifier)
- Part I Mechanical Automata
- Part II Automatism
- Part III Literary Genre and Popular Fiction
- Part IV Interactions
- Chapter 12 Sublime Puppets versus Uncanny Automata
- Chapter 13 The Strange Career of Topsy
- Chapter 14 George Eliot among the Machines
- Chapter 15 A Disembodied Voice, Yet the Voice of a Human Soul
- Index
Chapter 14 - George Eliot among the Machines
from Part IV - Interactions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 March 2024
- Victorian Automata
- Victorian Automata
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Introduction
- An Afterthought on Victorian Automata as Afterthought (and Signifier)
- Part I Mechanical Automata
- Part II Automatism
- Part III Literary Genre and Popular Fiction
- Part IV Interactions
- Chapter 12 Sublime Puppets versus Uncanny Automata
- Chapter 13 The Strange Career of Topsy
- Chapter 14 George Eliot among the Machines
- Chapter 15 A Disembodied Voice, Yet the Voice of a Human Soul
- Index
Summary
In her final work, Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), George Eliot includes an essay, “Shadows of the Coming Race,” in which the fictionalized narrator speaks of his concerns regarding the growing power of machines. This chapter explores Eliot’s responses to actual machines of her time, and the impact they had on her conceptions of human consciousness and the animal/human/machine divide. It argues that the machine she had in mind for drawing the right conclusion was William Jevons’s “Logical Piano.” The chapter examines this connection, but also, more broadly, the various machines Eliot viewed when visiting laboratories. This was the great age for the development of experimental physiology and of the creation of “self-recording” machines that could measure every aspect of human physiological life and also, it was believed, the flows of thought and emotion. Starting with Lewes’s own work on “Animal Automatism,” the chapter explores how these new conceptions of mind, body, and machine enter into Eliot’s thinking.
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- Victorian AutomataMechanism and Agency in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 289 - 313Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024