George Eliot and George Lewes in Justus von Liebig’s laboratory: realism, chemistry, and agriculture in the mid-nineteenth century

Abstract

ABSTRACT In Spring 1858, George Eliot and George Lewes visited Munich, where they became friends with the chemist Justus von Liebig, famous for his pioneering work on chemistry in its applications to agriculture. I consider their friendship as the basis for an examination of realism in literary and scientific writing on the agricultural environment. I show that Eliot’s literary realism of rural life responded to Liebig’s chemistry, broadly diverging from his ideas regarding science’s applications to agriculture. I also demonstrate that Liebig’s scientific method evolved by drawing on Eliot’s and Lewes’s theories of realism. Shared representations of the agricultural environment can be discerned across their writing, suggesting a representationalism co-constructed by the period’s foremost agricultural chemist and most important proponents of realism in literature. As my conclusion identifies, this understanding of links between mid-nineteenth-century literature and science has material consequences for the representation of agriculture in a time of ecological crisis.