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1 results

  • Chapter 14 - George Eliot among the Machines

  • from Part IV - Interactions
  • Edited by Suzy Anger, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Thomas Vranken, University of the South Pacific
  • Book:
    Victorian Automata
    Published online:
    15 March 2024
    Print publication:
    28 March 2024, pp 289-313

  • 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.