Initiated by Gillian Beer's magisterial Darwin's Plots (1983), a rising tide of discontent with C.P. Snow's 1959 division of literature and science into two cultures has crested in the last two decades into a wave of studies of literature and science as part of one culture. Bringing together historians of science and literary scholars, Uncommon Contexts adds new dimensions to historicist considerations of the ‘two-way traffic’ between literature and science in nineteenth-century Britain.
In contrast to American theoretical approaches, British studies of literature and science have been staunchly historicist. But the field has been divided along disciplinary lines: historians of science and literary scholars have discussed literature and science in different forums and with different methodologies and assumptions. Uncommon Contexts challenges this tradition by bringing together work by historians and literary critics. It also goes further by forging an interdisciplinary methodology which combines literary-critical practice with the practices of the cultural history of science. From history, it borrows a commitment to the language and categories of historical actors and to maintaining the agency of readers and writers. From literary studies, it borrows careful attention to genre and form. Indeed, Ben Marsden claims in his introduction that all of the essayists, no matter their background or current disciplinary commitments, are both historians and literary scholars.
This interdisciplinarity is one of the collection's goals, but it also enables its other project of opening the study of nineteenth-century literature and science to authors, texts, genres and contexts that have been excluded by all too narrow a focus on evolutionary theory. Breaking free of the Darwin vortex, this collection accomplishes its goals by discussing a huge range of scientific modalities between the 1820s and 1890s, from geology to telegraphy and from natural history to navigation, and by drawing on a huge variety of literatures, including mariner's manuals, novels, occasional verses, engineering treatises, personal journals, philosophical meditations, geometry primers, biographies and laboratory handbooks.
An excellent place to start for historians unfamiliar with the field, Marsden's introduction places the collection within studies of literature and science, identifies its objectives, and discusses four themes that emerge from the collected essays: ‘exploring uncommon contexts; the varieties of literature, genre and audience; constructing and critiquing knowledge-making while policing the boundary of fact and fiction; and finally “characters”, their fabrication and their occasional responses to reading’ (p. 8).
The collection is then divided into three sections. Part I, ‘Literary genres of science writing’, contains three excellent essays which together highlight the generic variety of literary practices in nineteenth-century science. Paul White surveys the ‘literature of physiology’ from the 1850s to the 1880s and explores its increasingly antagonistic relationship with non-textual, experimental laboratory practices, an antagonism he suggests is reflected in Wilkie Collins's novelistic intervention in the late-century vivisection debates in Heart and Science (1883). Narrowing in on the work of one person, Melanie Keene argues that Robert Hunt wrote in a variety of genres including poetic philosophy, educational romance and introductory guidebook – all unified by his belief in the ‘active forces of nature’ – as he joined the search for the most interest-inspiring form of science writing for new audiences at mid-century. Turning to the 1820s, Ralph O'Connor attributes an anonymous, parodic occasional verse to geologist William Buckland and reads it as a satiric participation in debates over the religious safety of geology.
While the essays in the first part apply a literary-critical lens to science writing, Part II, ‘Pushing the boundaries of “literature and science”’, explores whole areas of science that have hitherto been ignored in studies of literature and science: engineering and mathematics. Introducing a neglected ‘engineering literature’, Marsden gives a ‘literary biography’ (p. 84) of Isambard Kingdom Brunel as a perceptive reader, practised writer and astute manipulator of texts. With Euclid's Elements as a test case, Alice Jenkins explores why mathematics has been neglected by students of literature and science and investigates the specific methodological challenges it poses to historicist scholars, concluding that they must move beyond their inherent attraction to the historical sciences and parallel literary realism to consider other sciences and other literatures, and other models of their relationship.
The essays in the collection's final section deploy overlapping literary and historical methodologies to examine ‘Science and technology in fiction’. Anne Secord examines the role of Job Legh, an artisan naturalist, in the methodology and moral system of Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton. She argues that Job, the reasonable mediator between rich and poor, represents the kind of natural-historical epistemology which Gaskell herself assumes in the novel, hoping that realistic – indeed, natural-historical – description of the plight of Manchester's poor would produce sympathy in her readers. Focusing on Joseph Conrad's Typhoon, Crosbie Smith reads Captain MacWhirr's behaviour in the face of a typhoon against contemporary professional mariners' manuals to argue that MacWhirr embodies the Calvinist epistemological prioritization of first-hand experience (over book-derived authority) pervasive in the Scottish seafaring cultures within which Conrad himself sailed as a young man. Finally, Hazel Hutchison shows how Henry James's In the Cage and Karl Pearson's The Grammar of Science independently used similar metaphors of the telegraph or telephone clerk to represent consciousness and its simultaneous connection and disconnection from the outside world to argue for the emergence of new attitudes toward reading and ‘ordinary’ readers at the end of the nineteenth century.
Individually, the micro-historical essays in this collection contribute to specific historical discussions about an array of nineteenth-century topics from vivisection to occasional verse. Together, they succeed in incorporating new contexts, authors and texts into the study of literature and science. But they also challenge all cultural historians of science to consider the literary practices of scientific and technological practitioners from a literary-critical perspective, while providing a model of how to do so. With breathtaking attention to detail and sensitivity to variety, the essayists and editors nevertheless do not lose sight of the broader historical and methodological significance of their work, making this collection a simultaneously challenging, enjoyable and inspiring read.
