Transformations of Electricity in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science

Stella Pratt-Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317007807
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Throughout the nineteenth century, practitioners of science, writers of fiction and journalists wrote about electricity in ways that defied epistemological and disciplinary boundaries. Revealing electricity as a site for intense and imaginative Victorian speculation, Stella Pratt-Smith traces the synthesis of nineteenth-century electricity made possible by the powerful combination of science, literature and the popular imagination. With electricity resisting clear description, even by those such as Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell who knew it best, Pratt-Smith argues that electricity was both metaphorically suggestive and open to imaginative speculation. Her book engages with Victorian scientific texts, popular and specialist periodicals and the work of leading midcentury novelists, including Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, William Makepeace Thackeray and Wilkie Collins. Examining the work of William Harrison Ainsworth and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Pratt-Smith explores how Victorian novelists attributed magical qualities to electricity, imbuing it with both the romance of the past and the thrill of the future. She concludes with a case study of Benjamin Lumley's Another World, which presents an enticing fantasy of electricity's potential based on contemporary developments. Ultimately, her book contends that writing and reading about electricity appropriated and expanded its imaginative scope, transformed its factual origins and applications and contravened the bounds of literary genres and disciplinary constraints.

Chapter 1
Creative Sparks

‘There is perhaps no branch of experimental philosophy, which is received by persons of all ages with greater pleasure than Electricity’, declared Henry Minchin Noad in 1844.¹ The phenomenon was, he suggested, ‘calculated to arrest the attention’ and had the capacity to become more powerfully ‘fixed on the mind’ than any other. By the time he wrote, electricity had emerged as a distinct focus of study but, far from demystifying the phenomenon, scientific investigation continued to enhance electricity’s widespread and gripping appeal. As Noad also points out, electricity was perceived to have ‘secret and hidden influence’ connected to ‘the most sublime and awful’ agencies of nature. In this and a variety of other ways discussed here, writers of all kinds revealed electricity’s troubling allure and its fundamentally problematic nature.

How electricity was written about shaped not just public perceptions of the phenomenon, but also the development of scientific understandings about it and its potential applications. Literary responses to electricity were amalgamations of scientific, literary and cultural concerns that related directly to the phenomenon and its study. Of course, many nineteenth-century sciences, such as biology, geology, botany and anthropology, also sought to elucidate the historical and material basis of the natural world and its relationship to human existence. Investigations of electricity were different though, because they also confronted a phenomenon that appeared to be essentially intangible. Writing about electricity was especially problematic, for it meant describing something that had never been visualised or depicted before and, rather than being classified neatly as ‘scientific’, it was open to speculation by all. At the same time, while electricity could be approached by empirical means, actually understanding its properties and representing them meant embracing previously inconceivable levels of abstraction and complexity. In that sense, examining electricity was simultaneously a part of and beyond the dominant visual culture of the nineteenth century that has become so widely recognised by scholars in recent years.² Even as electricity was explored in terms of physical matter by scientists, just as frequently, it was perceived to distance man from the otherwise ‘natural’ world of direct, known experience. Investigations of electricity were closely affiliated to contemporary technological applications, developments that referred primarily to imagined futures and an essentially transient present, rather than a documentable past. The combination of these features made electricity a rich and varied imaginative resource but, as the writings I consider indicate, it also made literary responses to the phenomenon inherently unstable.

Electricity in the Nineteenth Century

The period investigated here begins in 1831 with Michael Faraday’s discovery of electromagnetism and concludes with the first public supply of electricity in 1881, a time when electricity gained entirely new and, arguably, unprecedented significance in the public consciousness.³ Of course, people had long been aware of electricity, in witnessing the natural phenomena of lightning or static shocks. What made electricity distinct in the nineteenth century was its emergence as a unified scientific concept, with uses, meanings and implications never previously anticipated. The way in which electricity and experimentation with it was represented involved confronting a range of obstacles, and not just scientific ones. Neither did nineteenth-century understandings of electricity develop in a straightforward or linear fashion. While narrative connections between writings often arose, a more marked tendency overall was the lack of teleological and epistemological progression between texts, readings and authorships in the period. Despite attempts in the 1840s and 1850s by the likes of Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, William Sturgeon and Arthur Smee, to dispel common myths about electricity, the latter continued to re-emerge 30 and even 40 years later, in such fictions as Benjamin Lumley’s Another World (1873) or anonymous short stories like ‘Doctor Beroni’s Secret’ (1884), both of which are examined later in this book. Parallels and progressions did exist between types of authorship, genres and content; however, just as many divergences emerged. It was the combination of the two that shaped the period’s understandings and beliefs about electricity.

Between 1830 and 1880, such genres as the novel and the short story were still very much in the process of becoming established, so writings of the period can only ever be loosely assigned to such specific categories. Writings about electricity particularly defied epistemological and disciplinary boundaries, employing features that belonged to a range of literary forms, with continual and not always logical exchanges of technical, literary and cultural precepts. Scientific research on electricity drew on fictional concepts and emerging principles of physics were brought into poetic responses, just as non-fiction incorporated narrative or anecdotal techniques, and real scientific developments were integrated and explored in fictional works. Rather than understanding these different forms of literature on the basis of a singular ‘genre-level meaning’, I suggest that interchangeability was an integral and even characteristic aspect of the writings.⁴

Electricity’s emergence as a simultaneously literary and scientific phenomenon implicitly contests the opposition of the two spheres and supports, instead, the ‘one culture’ model.⁵ This was even more so between 1830 and 1880, when logical, empirical and consistent understandings about electricity were still being established. The precarious status of knowledge about electricity’s properties and processes disrupted, in itself, any possibility of conventional scientific and literary distinctions. Definitions of the term ‘literary’ frequently rely on relatively vague notions of creativity and artistic merit, considerations that writings about science tend, just as often, to subvert. Assumptions about epistemological characteristics are misleading here, too, not least because they construct stereotyped portrayals of scientific and literary practices, as well as their subsequent development. As Laura Otis notes, ‘to understand how nineteenth-century people thought about communications, it is essential to read the works of scientists and novelists in parallel. Although they lived and worked quite differently, they faced the same challenge to communicate and answered it with cultural knowledge and creativity’.⁶ My approach to writings about electricity treats them as frequently dissimilar in purpose but, nonetheless, similarly motivated by their authors’ equal desires to investigate, to communicate and to explore creative possibilities. As interdisciplinary research, the present work welcomes the pluralism of nineteenth-century readerships and seeks out literatures beyond the established canon, to interrogate conceptions of literature and extend our understandings beyond just ‘the best which has been thought and said in the world’⁷ Recognising literature’s culturally and socially constructed nature has created a broader appreciation of ‘non-literary’ language.⁸ Yet the goal of learning how stories and poems make meaning is still described as ‘literary’ by historians of literature and science.⁹ Analysing writings about electricity requires being vigilant yet embracing, too, the slippery and extendable nature of the term ‘literary’, exploring not just how texts make meaning but also the kinds of meaning they make, and remaining keenly aware throughout of how those meanings are influenced by different authorial perspectives, forms of writing and intentions.

My research does not suggest the existence of a hierarchy of knowledge, whereby scientific understandings of electricity might be considered innately more or less valuable than their depiction by popular or fiction writers. In the nineteenth century as much as now, narrative and fictional elements existed in a variety of writings, specialist or not, so that as Ralph O’Connor suggests, ‘rhetorical tropes and aesthetic forms did not merely decorate the science presented, but helped to construct it’.¹⁰ Fictionality was a core feature of scientific conceptualising and representational techniques were understood as vital aspects of scientific progress, albeit sometimes awkward ones. Explanations of electricity were forms of literary response crucially shaped by a symbiotic relationship between content, purpose and reading practices. In both fiction and non-fiction, writers interpreted, transformed and created new associations with electricity and, in that sense, the conceptualisation and representation of electricity was inseparable from literary, social and material contexts. Exchanges between literature, science and society were relatively fluid for, as Patricia Fara points out, ‘both literature and science are mutually shaped by each other and by the communities which generate them’.¹¹ To emphasise this inseparability is not to ‘reduce the technical content of the sciences to a nexus of social interests’, for which sociologists of scientific knowledge have been criticised in the past.¹² It does reveal, however, the unique combination of technical content and social interests upon which writings about electricity relied. As Gillian Beer suggests, ‘most major scientific theories rebuff common sense. They call on evidence beyond the reach of the senses and overturn the observable world. They disturb assumed relationships and shift what has been substantial into metaphor’.¹³ Many of the writings considered in my research reveal exactly this amalgamation of the substantial, the fictional and the metaphorical. Scientific discoveries and theoretical understandings informed some writing...