Book contents
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1850s
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1850s
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Pictures of Nature
- Chapter 2 ‘When I Came Back, It Was … to the Love of a New Generation’
- Chapter 3 George Eliot, the Westminster Circle, and Karl Ernst von Baer’s Embryological Germ Theory
- Chapter 4 The 1850s Sustainability Novel
- Chapter 5 Serialising London in ‘Twice Round the Clock’
- Chapter 6 Theatre in the 1850s
- Chapter 7 Beyond the Art of Conversation
- Chapter 8 Making Soldiers Count
- Chapter 9 Finding the Lost
- Chapter 10 British India in the 1850s
- Chapter 11 Christian Heroism
- Chapter 12 Horsepower in the Railway Age
- Chapter 13 Trauma, Gender, and Resistance
- Chapter 14 The Poetry of Married Life
- Chapter 15 George Eliot, Henry James, Realism, and Europe
- Index
Chapter 3 - George Eliot, the Westminster Circle, and Karl Ernst von Baer’s Embryological Germ Theory
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 January 2025
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1850s
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1850s
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Pictures of Nature
- Chapter 2 ‘When I Came Back, It Was … to the Love of a New Generation’
- Chapter 3 George Eliot, the Westminster Circle, and Karl Ernst von Baer’s Embryological Germ Theory
- Chapter 4 The 1850s Sustainability Novel
- Chapter 5 Serialising London in ‘Twice Round the Clock’
- Chapter 6 Theatre in the 1850s
- Chapter 7 Beyond the Art of Conversation
- Chapter 8 Making Soldiers Count
- Chapter 9 Finding the Lost
- Chapter 10 British India in the 1850s
- Chapter 11 Christian Heroism
- Chapter 12 Horsepower in the Railway Age
- Chapter 13 Trauma, Gender, and Resistance
- Chapter 14 The Poetry of Married Life
- Chapter 15 George Eliot, Henry James, Realism, and Europe
- Index
Summary
Andrew Mangham analyses the importance of narrative for the German embryologist Karl Ernst von Baer, and its influence on George Eliot’s early fiction. This chapter evidences the way in which knowledge from Europe was acquired, debated, and adopted in London soirées. Van Baer’s work was welcomed by the circle of radicals, including Thomas Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and Marian Evans, who congregated around John Chapman’s Westminster Review. Newly available in a partial translation by Huxley and the botanist Arthur Henfrey, von Baer’s Uber Entwickelungsgeschichte der Thiere (1828) specifies a theory of growth based on early differentiation of individuals, which seemed to chime with the period’s investment in industry, but also insisted on the importance of narrative. The early work of George Eliot, specifically Scenes of Clerical Life (1857) and Adam Bede (1859), bears the imprint of von Baer’s models of individuation in the secularism that we find in her work.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1850s , pp. 69 - 89Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025