Late Victorian Science Research Articles

Ciência e moralidade vitorianas em o Médico e o monstro, de Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)

ABSTRACT This article analyzes how Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) depicts the relationship between science and morality (secular or religious) in his 1886 novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. For this purpose, I analyze the setting choice (London) and some characteristics of late Victorian Gothic fiction that constitute the negative aesthetics of which Stevenson’s characters are formed. Then, I analyze how the negative aesthetic juxtaposes with an order that is both scientific and moralist in a cultural context in which the reading public is obsessed with crime. Eventually, I discuss the theories of 19th-century philosophers and scientists, such as Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909), and Francis Galton (1822-1911), in an attempt to understand Stevenson’s novella from an allegedly scientific point of view. I conclude that Hyde/Jekyll was “destined” to fail since both late Victorian science and morality were prone to condemn the “unfit”.

“An End to Our Iron and Coal”: Resource Anxiety in Late Victorian Science Fiction

As global social and environmental conditions deteriorate, growing ranks of scientists, environmentalists, and writers have pointed toward population growth and resource scarcity as primary conditions of ecological catastrophe. Studying the “Future War” subgenre of Late Victorian science fiction, I search for the origins of this contemporary concern with so-called “overpopulation” and resource scarcity. By examining George Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking (1871) and H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1889), this paper explores how late Victorian anxieties about the relative decline of the British Empire, constellated around scarcity, continue to frame contemporary understandings of social and environmental crisis today.

Popular culture and the “new human condition”: Catastrophe narratives and climate change

Striking popular culture images of burnt landscapes, tidal waves and ice-bound cities have the potential to dramatically and emotively convey the dangers of climate change. Given that a significant number of people derive a substantial proportion of their information on the threat of climate change, or the “new human condition”, from popular culture works such as catastrophe movies, it is important that an investigation into the nature of the representations produced be embedded in the attempt to address the issue. What climate change-related messages may be encoded in popular films, television and novels, how are they being received, and what effects may they have? This article adopts the cultural studies perspective that popular culture gives us an important means by which to access the “structures of feeling” that characterise a society at a particular historic juncture: the views held and emotional states experienced by significant amounts of people as evident in disparate forms of cultural production. It further adopts the related viewpoint that popular culture has an effect upon the society in which it is consumed, as well as reflecting that society's desires and concerns – although the nature of the effect may be difficult to quantify. From this position, the article puts forward a theory on the role of ecological catastrophe narratives in current popular culture, before going on to review existing critical work on ecologically-charged popular films and novels which attempts to assess their effects on their audiences. It also suggests areas for future research, such as the prevalent but little studied theme of natural and environmental disaster in late-Victorian science fiction writing. This latter area is of interest because it reveals the emergence of an ecological awareness or structure of feeling as early as the late-nineteenth century, and allows the relationship of this development to environmental policy making to be investigated because of the historical timeframe. Effectively communicating the threat of climate change and the need to address it, reframing the perspective from a detached and scientifically-articulated problem to one of a human condition – immediate and personal – is on one level a task of narrative, or story-telling, and cultural studies has an important role to play in this and in elucidating the challenges involved. In line with the remit of the special issue in which this article appears, it is written as a review article specifically addressing the question of what cultural studies can contribute to helping to articulate the ‘new human condition’ of existence under climate change. As such, it offers some initial preliminary readings of popular culture trends, outlines a potential methodology, briefly summarises some effective work already done in the area and suggests further potential avenues of enquiry.

Classical codes: biogeographical assessments of environment in Victorian Canada

This paper offers a case study of the historical role of ideas in changing perceptions of place during the nineteenth century. It focuses upon Rupert's Land in British North America, highlighting Victorian scientific assessments of landscape and environment. In addition to Humboldtian influences that shaped geographical sciences, the persistence of a more deeply rooted context warrants scrutiny. Adherents of Victorian culture greatly valued its Graeco-Roman heritage, whose tripartite impact upon the history of Rupert's Land is explored here. This classical tradition transmitted crucial practical lessons: through Euclidean geometry, in defining new physical spaces; through dualistic Hyperborean myths, in formulating (sometimes contradictory) expectations of these lands; and, through a Lucretian revival, in confronting some increasing uncertainties in late Victorian science. The evidence suggests that aspects of these classical influences held similar sway in Victorian cultures elsewhere, warranting closer examinations of their details in different historical/geographical contexts.

Nature, Racism, and Late Victorian Science

Nature, Racism, and Late Victorian Science

The nature of woman and the development of American folklore

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the connection between women and folklore in America on ideological, social, metaphoric, and disciplinary levels. Initial observations tie women into American folklore studies in three major ways: as a study of women, a study by women, and a womanly study. It goes on to investigate the intellectual climate of the late 19th century, with its focus on sex and gender, and the scientific doctrines, which prescribed social and organizational behavior, which brought this into being. Through analogies and ‘congruities,’ the methodology of late Victorian science, women became connected with others on the lower end of the evolutionary scale: plants, animals, children—and the folk. This resonance between women and the folk explains the numbers of women drawn to the American Folklore Society; it also proposes a feminized identity for the study of Folklore itself. Implications of these connections at the formative stage of the Society are explored.

Amateurs versus Professionals: The Controversy over Telescope Size in Late Victorian Science

Amateurs versus Professionals: The Controversy over Telescope Size in Late Victorian Science

The X-Club a social network of science in late-Victorian England.

AMONG the more significant features of nineteenth-century British science was the emergence of social and professional networks which helped to shape or influence the course of scientific activity. By and large, the most conspicuous arbiters of scientific values were the learned societies, the British Association and the universities. These formal bodies, however, almost always reflected the attitudes and assumptions of small, informal, often obscure and sometimes anonymous, clusters or networks of individuals. Until recently, most of these groups have been overlooked or neglected (i), but growing interest in the social history of science has stimulated fresh research into the history of scientific societies generally, and into scientific élites in particular. The ‘X-Club’, recalled by the contemporary American historian, John Fiske, as ‘the most powerful and influential scientific coterie in England’ (2), was one of the most important and instructive of these groups. The following pages will inquire into the origins, the development, and the probable significance of this ‘coterie’ in the social climate of late-Victorian science.