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Chapter 14 - George Eliot among the Machines

from Part IV - Interactions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 March 2024

Suzy Anger
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia, Vancouver
Thomas Vranken
Affiliation:
University of the South Pacific
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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 Automata
Mechanism and Agency in the Nineteenth Century
, pp. 289 - 313
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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