Abstract
In this introduction to the Dickens and Science issue of <strong>19</strong>, Holly Furneaux and Ben Winyard consider the relationship between Dickens’s writing, science and the Victorian literary imagination. Dickens’s response to scientific ideas was very often at the heart of his cherished ideal that literature should show ‘the romantic side of familiar things’, illuminating the wonder, even magic, of everyday phenomena for people of all classes, and affectively uniting them by relieving a shared thirst for imaginative succour.
Highlights
Gowan Dawson has explored the significance of the connection between Dickens and Richard Owen, an especially good friend, an avid Dickens reader and the century’s leading palaeontologist, who ran the Hunterian and Natural History Museums.[5]
In this issue Owen is represented through his likely manifestation in Dickens’s taxidermist character in Our Mutual Friend (1864–65), Mr Venus, a relationship between life and work discussed by Nicola Bown
As a means of extending the enquiry and doing fuller justice to the range of Dickens’s scientific engagements beyond evolutionary science, Buckland suggests attention to other connections, of a type undertaken by Picker and Dawson
Summary
Ben Winyard and Holly Furneaux, Dickens, Science and the Victorian Literary Imagination 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 10 (2010) www.19.bbk.ac.uk knowledge than a series of overlapping and mutually constitutive discourses.
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