Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence: The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence: The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle Kenneth Thompson (bio) Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence: The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle, by Lawrence Frank; pp. x + 249. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, £47.50, $90.00. This study of nineteenth-century detective fiction draws on Lawrence Frank's wide reading in the history of science. Applying methods of close reading to both scientific and literary texts, Frank argues that Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Dickens, and Arthur Conan Doyle "promoted a new, emerging worldview that was secular and naturalistic." Rejecting "nineteenth-century scriptural literalism, Natural Theology, and the vestiges of Enlightenment Deism," they "responded explicitly and implicitly to the scientific controversies of the day" (3). Like Gillian Beer in Darwin's Plots (1983) and George Levine in Darwin and the Novelists (1988), Frank pays close attention to the literary qualities of scientific writing as well as the place of scientific ideas in literature. His study is distinguished from their work, however, because he devotes at least as much attention to practitioners of what he calls "the historical disciplines" in astronomy, philology, and natural history as he does to Darwin. Frank posits shared ways of knowing that cut across disciplinary boundaries. Using such methods, investigators—whether in science or in literature—seek to reconstruct "contingent events" from the past using "fragmentary evidence" that has survived into the present (4, 44). [End Page 609] Frank also concentrates on a less-well-established literary genre than Beer and Levine. Rosemary Jann's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Detecting Social Order (1995) has argued for a close connection between science and detective fiction. But Jann sees Doyle as a popularizer of "a general ideal of scientific observation and reasoning" that made the scientist into a "hero" who provided "reassurance" (4, 6, and 46). Frank rejects such ideological readings. Writing of Ronald Thomas's Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science (1999), he questions the "hegemonic coherence" characteristic of Foucauldian studies and argues that they reduce human subjects to machines without "the complex mental life that Romantic literature offered as a model of human consciousness" (5). For Frank, "Detective fiction did not...simply reinforce a prevailing orthodoxy or ideology; nor did it reductively police consciousness." Its role was more positive and creative, introducing men and women of the nineteenth century to a new way of "imagining themselves in a universe radically altered by the historical disciplines" (25–26). This kind of recuperative strategy often overlaps with Frank's commitment to romantic textualism and is one reason why he often sees moments of transcendence—as well as conflict and accommodation—in literary and scientific writing. Although many of the figures Frank writes about are well known in the history of science, his careful and nuanced readings of texts by Pierre Laplace, John Pringle Nichol, John Tyndall, Robert Chambers, and Winwood Reade will introduce them to a wider scholarly audience. Further, by juxtaposing such writers with Poe, Dickens, and Doyle, we gain a new appreciation of the open-ended quality of natural inquiry in the period. Frank allows us to see that science in our sense—with its professionalization, disciplinary boundaries, and distinct methodologies—was only beginning to emerge at mid-century and scientific ideas circulated with much less disciplinary resistance. Unfortunately, Frank's exclusive commitment to close reading leads him to ignore the institutional side of these issues. Like James Secord in Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' (2000), Frank writes about popularizers of the Nebular Hypothesis such as Nichol and Chambers. Unlike Secord, however, Frank pays little attention to institutions and practices of reading in his account of these figures. While we have much to gain from seeing the widespread but often subterranean circulation of images and ideas in the period, we also need to remember that these writers often had differing social locations, career paths, and purposes. While Secord's analysis of the distinction between gentlemanly and commercial science in Victorian England demonstrates in great detail the impact of social position on scientific debate and...