Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-20T09:37:40.371Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“THE POETRY OF SCIENCE”: CHARLES DICKENS, GEOLOGY, AND VISUAL AND MATERIAL CULTURE IN VICTORIAN LONDON

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 June 2007

Adelene Buckland
Adelene Buckland
Affiliation:
St. Hughs Oxford University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

DESPITE THE WELL-ESTABLISHED CONNECTIONS between Dickens's novels and Victorian popular entertainment, and between Victorian show business and the display and dissemination of science, critics have not yet explored the possible links between scientific shows and Dickens's fiction. Work on Dickens and science has proliferated since George Levine's work in Darwin and the Novelists, but its central problem has been the fact that, as Francis O’Gorman described it, Dickens's scientific reading was “nugatory” (252). The most well-represented branch of science on his bookshelves was natural history; in even this, Dickens displayed only the “intelligent interest that would be expected of a man of the world” (Hill 203). Levine's influential “one culture” model surmounted the problem by pointing out the similar structural patterns implicit in the worlds described by Dickens and Darwin, but in an attempt to develop more direct links between Dickens's work and evolutionary science, almost all subsequent studies have focused on Dickens's 1860s novels, written after the publication of the Origin of Species (1859) (Morris 179–93; Fulweiler 50–74; Morgentaler 707–21). There has not been a study that explores Dickens's acquaintance with natural history at different points in his career, or through the visual and material cultures with which he was so familiar.

Type
EDITORS' TOPIC: VICTORIAN NATURAL HISTORY
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , September 2007 , pp. 679 - 694
Copyright
© 2007 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Altick Richard D. 1978. The Shows of London: A Panoramic History of Exhibitions, 1600–1862. Cambridge: Belknap
Beer Gillian. 2000. Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP
Buckland Francis Trevelyan. “Old Bones.” Household Words (23 September 1854): 83– 84.
Cotsell Michael. 1986. The Companion to Our Mutual Friend. London: Allen & Unwin
Cruchley George Frederick. Cruchley's London in 1865: A Handbook for Strangers. London: Cruchley, 1865
Darwin Charles. 1859. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. London: Murray
Desmond Adrian. 1982. Archetypes and Ancestors: Palaeontology in Victorian London, 1850–1875. Chicago: Chicago UP
Desmond Adrian. 1990. The Hot-Blooded Dinosaurs. London: Hutchinson
Dickens Charles. 1996. Bleak House. ed. Stephen Gill. Oxford: Oxford UP
Dickens Charles. 1999. Dombey & Son. ed. Alan Horsman. Introduction and Notes by Dennis Walder. Oxford: Oxford UP
Dickens Charles. ed. “England Long and Long Ago.” All the Year Round (7 April 1860): 562.
Dickens Charles. The Letters of Charles Dickens: 1820–1870. Ed. Madeline House, Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson. 12 vols. Pilgrim ed. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965–2002.
Dickens Charles. 1998 Our Mutual Friend. Ed. Michael Cotsell. Oxford: Oxford UP
Dickens Charles. 1846. Pictures from Italy. London: Bradbury & Evans
Dickens Charles. 1937: “Poetry of Science.” The Nonesuch Papers: Collected Papers I. London: Bloomsbury, 178– 80
Dickens Charles. “Some Account of an Extraordinary Traveller.” Household Words (20 April 1850): 73– 77.
Dulton. “Up Vesuvius.” Household Words (22 May 1852): 234– 36.
Ermarth Elizabeth Deeds. 1998. Realism and Consensus in the English Novel: Time, Space and Narrative. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP
Essays and Reviews. 1860. London: Parker
Fielding K. J. 1996: “Dickens and Science?” Dickens Quarterly 13 200– 16.Google Scholar
Fontana Ernest. 2005: “Darwinian Sexual Selection and Dickens's Our Mutual Friend.”Dickens Quarterly 22 36– 42.Google Scholar
Frank Lawrence. 2003. Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence: The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Freeman Michael. 2004. Victorians and the Prehistoric: Tracks to a Lost World. New Haven: Yale UP
Fulweiler Howard W. 1994: “‘A Dismal Swamp’: Darwin, Design, and Evolution in Our Mutual Friend.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 49 50– 74.Google Scholar
Hart Ernest Abraham. “Nature's Greatness in Small Things.” Household Words (28 November 1857): 511– 13.
Hill T. W. 1949: “Books that Dickens Read.” The Dickensian 45 201– 07.Google Scholar
Hunt Frederick Knight. “The Hunterian Museum.” Household Words (14 Dec.1850): 277– 82.
Levine George, ed. 1988. Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard UP
Levine George, ed. 1987. One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature. Wisconsin: U of Wisconsin P
Linton Eliza Lynn. “The First Idea of Everything.” Household Words (8 May 1858): 481– 84.
Lyell Sir Charles. 1863 The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man. London: Murray
Lyell Sir Charles. 1830. Principles of Geology, being an attempt to explain the former changes of the earth's surface, by references to causes now in operation. Vol. I London: Murray
Mann Christopher Warton. “Everything After its Kind.” Household Words (24 April 1858): 451– 53.
Morgentaler Goldie. 2000. Dickens and Heredity, When Like Begets Like. Basingstoke: Macmillan
Morgentaler Goldie. 1998: “Meditating on the low: A Darwinian reading of Great Expectations.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 38 707– 21.Google Scholar
Morley Henry. “Our Phantom Ship on an Antediluvian Cruise.” Household Words (16 August 1851): 492– 96.
Morris Pam. 2000. “A Taste for Change in Our Mutual Friend: Cultivation or Education?.” Rethinking Victorian Culture. Ed. Juliet John, Alice Jenkins, & John Sutherland, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 179– 94.
O'Gorman Francis. 2002. The Victorian Novel. Oxford: Blackwell
Ostry Elaine. 2001: “‘Social Wonders’: Fancy, Science, and Technology in Dickens's Periodicals.” Victorian Periodicals Review 34 54– 74.Google Scholar
Rupke Nicholas A. 1994. Richard Owen: Victorian Naturalist. New Haven: Yale UP
Schlicke Paul. 1985. Dickens and Popular Entertainment. London: Allen & Unwin
Shatto Susan, 1988. The Companion to Bleak House. London: Unwin
Stonehouse J. H., ed. 1935. Reprints of the Catalogues of the Libraries of Charles Dickens and W. M. Thackeray, Etc. London
Turner Martha A. 1993. Mechanism and the Novel: Science in the Narrative Process. Cambridge: Cambridge UP
Wilkinson Ann Y. 1967: “Bleak House: From Faraday to Judgment Day.” ELH 34 225– 47.Google Scholar
Wills W. H., and George Sala, “Fairyland in Fifty Four.” Household Words (3 Dec. 1853): 313– 17.
Wreford Henry G. “Earthquake Experiences.” Household Words (29 May 1858): 553– 58.
Wreford Henry G. “Vesuvius in Eruption.” Household Words (9 June 1855): 435– 39.
Yapp George Wagstaff. Official Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of the Works of SIndustry of All Nations. 3rd ed. London. 1 August 1851