Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines

Science Fiction and the Cultures of Science in the Nineteenth Century

Martin Willis

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781612774664
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik in Science-Fiction

A cultural history of science and science fiction

Using key canonical science fiction narratives, Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines examines the intersection of the literary and scientific cultures of the nineteenth century. In this original and refreshing approach to the study of early science fiction, author Martin Willis maintains that science fiction was just as important in defining the culture of the nineteenth century as other critics maintain it was in shaping the twentieth century.

Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines interrogates the cultural implications of scientific development as articulated, challenged, and reformulated by science fiction. Each chapter demonstrates that both science and fiction were vital parts of a culture of imaginative and empirical practices that were continually reacting to, arguing with, and influencing one another throughout the nineteenth century. In an engrossing narrative that cites classic science fiction texts, Willis establishes a timeline for the reader so that the cultural significance of science fiction is understood and its complexity and relevance to the nineteenth century is demonstrated.

Those interested in nineteenth-century history and literature, cultural studies, the history of science, and science fiction will welcome this addition to the scholarship.

CHAPTER 1

Literature, Science, and Science Fiction

IT MAY SEEM PECULIAR, BUT IT IS nevertheless true that extended readings of the use of science in science fiction texts are extremely rare. They are even rarer if we limit the science fiction texts to those written in the nineteenth century, as this book does. Why might this be? Several explanations can be offered: the lack of attention paid to nineteenth-century science fiction, the motivation of science fiction scholarship, and the difficulty of gaining expertise in more than one discipline. Whatever the reason, there is a significant lack of interdisciplinary work on science fiction and science, a lack that is not apparent in other areas of literary study. The interaction of science with literature has been widely explored in Renaissance drama, the Victorian novel, and the modernist poem. In genre fiction too—if we would like to characterize science fiction as a genre—there has been a broad consideration of the impact of science on the literary imagination. In studies of gothic or crime fiction, scientific developments are accepted as having some influence on the shaping of the text. Yet in science fiction criticism there is only infrequent study of science—the kind of detailed and sustained study that characterizes the best in interdisciplinarity.

This book attempts to show how readings of science fiction texts benefit from extended exposure to the specific scientific histories that were so important in their making. The focus is the nineteenth century: from E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” (1816) to H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896). In that eighty-year period between publications, science and science fiction changed dramatically. Science fiction emerged from the gothic romances of science made so influential by Hoffmann and Mary Shelley into a fully fledged genre of fiction under the directorship of, first, Jules Verne and, thereafter, H. G. Wells. Science, too, was expanding and finding new definition. Romantic science gave way to Newtonian methodologies of theory and experiment; scientific disciplines began to rise from the more general category of natural philosophy; and professionalization and institutionalization marked the end of uncoordinated amateurism. The vitality and continual impetus for change that characterizes nineteenth-century science and science fiction make it an exciting and challenging period in which to bring the two together.

The challenges this book sets for itself are not entirely the result of the texts and contexts it aims to consider. First, by considering the relationship between cultures of science and science fiction literature, I hope to show that the genre of science fiction is as intellectually complex, as socially significant, and as historically revealing as any other form of fiction the nineteenth century produced. Turn to any number of critical books on nineteenth-century literature and culture and you are unlikely to discover many references to science fiction. In comparison, gothic, sensation, and crime fictions have all gained some critical currency in the last two decades. By drawing on similar methods of analysis used by critics of these genres or of nineteenth-century literature broadly—by writing as a “nineteenth-century scholar” rather than as a “science fiction critic”—I hope to promote the genre of science fiction as an area of literary production that deserves greater attention.

Second, this book aims to illuminate for the science fiction critic the energizing influence of a more focused contextual eye. Analyses of science fiction texts have lost sight of the varied histories of science that are such important touchstones for the genre. George Eliot and Bram Stoker have received more detailed investigations of their use of science than have Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. Interdisciplinary readings of nineteenth-century literary texts and their scientific contexts have become the forte of the Victorian scholar rather than of the science fiction critic. The academic science fiction community has been ever more greatly interested in the extrapolation of the science fiction text and increasingly less interested in its foundations. Yet these foundations, almost always grounded in scientific theory and development, offer a great deal more to the science fiction critic than has been assumed. I would hope that the new contexts and fresh analyses that I detail in the following chapters will go some way toward reminding the science fiction critic that the genre is science fiction as well as science fiction.

Trying to speak to two audiences at one time may engender some moments of schizophrenia as this book develops. This would be a common problem in any work that aims to be interdisciplinary but is perhaps more so here in a work that tries to persuade two critical communities of two different things. The six chapters that follow this introduction attempt to show that E. T. A. Hoffmann, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, and H. G. Wells all contributed immeasurably to our understanding of scientific culture in the nineteenth century. They also aim to reveal the powerful influence that mesmerism, mechanics, electricity, natural history, spiritualism, laboratory science, and animal experimentation had on the creation of science fiction literature. To examine the interrelationship of science and science fiction by using particular examples of science fiction texts and scientific disciplines raises questions of coverage and status. Why these texts and not others? Are they regarded as canonical science fiction texts? Are these sciences indicative of the spread of science into separate disciplines in the nineteenth century? Can mesmerism even be called a science? In writing to more than one audience, the answers to such questions become vital. One cannot simply nod toward the critical consensus of which one community knows well but that the other remains ignorant of. Science fiction critics know full well the position of Shelley and Wells within the SF canon, but do cultural historians of science? Equally, cultural historians may be able to articulate the debates surrounding mesmerism’s status within the scientific community of the 1830s, but would science fiction critics be aware of them? To allay these concerns, and to offer an imaginative map of the territory this book will cover, the remainder of this introduction deals in turn with three key contexts for the interdisciplinary readings that follow: first, the progress of nineteenth-century science from amateur tradition to professionalized disciplines; second, the politics of science fiction history and scholarship; and third, the practice of interdisciplinarity in analyses of literature and science.

NINETEENTH-CENTURY SCIENCE

Nineteenth-century science is characterized by its conflicts. These, in the broadest terms, can be split into three discrete areas: natural versus preternatural (or magical) knowledge, amateur versus professional practice, and orthodox versus heterodox disciplines, sometimes viewed as science against pseudoscience. Traditional histories of science would see these conflicts as part of the progress of science, from its beginnings as an amateur form of natural philosophy that drew on occultist and alchemical teachings to its zenith as a professional, discipline based, experimental practice with clear theories and methodologies. However, recent investigations of nineteenth-century science have challenged this progressivist view, arguing that there is no simple replacement of the old with the new but rather a continual struggle for the central ground from which power could be wielded. It would, therefore, be too simple to suggest that science fiction at the end of the nineteenth century merely reflected the dominance of professional science and denied the existence of the amateur or the marginalized scientific discipline. On the contrary, science fiction texts themselves became involved in the negotiation for power that was at the heart of the many scientific communities of the later nineteenth century.

The nineteenth century also witnessed the continual rise to prominence of the applied sciences, or technology. The makers of technological objects—from James Watt to Thomas Edison—were key members of the scientific community and popularly regarded as scientists in the same way as those working in more abstract disciplines, such as astronomy. It is important to remember that the rigorous boundaries that came into existence in the twentieth century, say, between the “inventor” and the “scientist,” were not in place at all in the nineteenth century. Indeed, such differentiations would have been entirely alien to a community that did not even use the word “scientist” until the 1830s. The technological object—commonly a machine—came to represent, especially for the Victorians, the material value of science. The machine was an embodiment of the scientific ideal of nature tamed by human knowledge, physical evidence of the power of scientific discovery.

What forms of discovery science appeared to be making was still very much a subject of controversy at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Many scientific communities were riven by methodological and philosophical opposition. One group of scientists, wedded to traditional understandings of the workings of the natural world drawn up by alchemists and occult scientists, believed in a set of cosmic rules that were as magical as they were scientific. This Romantic science was at odds with the newly emerging scientific theories first proposed by Francis Bacon in the late seventeenth century. New science, as this was called, based its understandings of the natural world on inductive reasoning borne out of observation rather than on teachings derived from ancient and venerated sources. As the nineteenth century began, then, science was tied to the many traces of magic and alchemy that were “reflected among the activities of the membership of the Royal Society.”¹ Science was still an esoteric hobby undertaken by those with access to preternatural knowledge, and the scientist was as much a magus as a natural philosopher.

By the 1830s, many forms of Romantic culture had begun to give way to Victorian pragmatism, and science was no exception. New science gained in authority while magic and the occult became increasingly marginalized. For half a century, many forms of science enjoyed unprecedented success and public support. The machine became an icon of scientific discovery across Europe and North America. Science was discussed in the pages of the most prominent newspapers and periodicals, and the scientist was perceived less as a Faustian figure and more as a heroic investigator of the secrets of the natural world.

As the public embraced science in the media and in the modern world around them, so too did they embrace the practices of science. The popularity and apparent accessibility of scientific investigations led many men and women to take up the sciences as a leisurely pursuit. In doing this, of course, they were only following the great tradition of scientific amateurism that still held sway, especially in Britain and North America. Crossing boundaries of class, gender, and education, science became a common pastime for nonworking hours. Working-class women combed the beaches of Devon for fossils while educated Englishmen trawled in rock pools for rare molluscs. Collecting and cataloging became a popular entertainment, and the shelves of lending libraries and bookshops were replete with books on popular science for the amateur enthusiast.

While those involved in science in a more professional capacity often looked askance at the ignorant peddling of science by a significant portion of the population, they too were guilty of such transgressions. With science not yet entirely defined according to discipline, and with so many new forms of scientific inquiry available to the professional scientist, it is unusual, even in the midcentury, not to find scientists involved in the investigation of phenomena beyond their immediate area of expertise. University of London clinician John Elliotson, for example, led several investigations into mesmerism while playing a central role in hospital doctoring.² Similarly, the biologist Edwin Ray Lankester became, with some ease, an important figure in the developing science of paleontology. The peripatetic careers of many scientists reflect the continual change and development of the sciences throughout the early to mid-nineteenth century. It also highlights the difficulty in attributing status to different areas of scientific research. If a respected doctor found mesmerism of interest, does this suggest its equivalence to medical science or not?

Such questions of authority and position were a defining feature of mid-nineteenth-century science, in which there was such a complex negotiation between different forms of scientific knowledge. It was impossible simply to disregard mesmeric phenomena as “semioccult” or to banish phrenology as a “pseudoscience” when the claims made for them often came from reliable and scientifically respected sources.³ Of course numerous attempts were made to marginalize many of the new branches of investigative practice that arose in the nineteenth century. In response, proponents of newer areas of research tried to undermine the power of the central scientific orthodoxy and those who spoke on its behalf. Indeed, from approximately 1830 to the end of the century, there was continued conflict over the high ground of scientific authority from sciences that, in the twentieth century, seem much more stably pigeonholed as either orthodox or heterodox, science or pseudoscience.

Equally, these debates cannot be sidelined as the internal squabbles of a small, if important, community. The discourse of science was still the discourse of the educated public rather than the specialized language more recognizable in the twentieth century. In fact, scientific language (in both the written treatise and the lecture) was the language of literary culture: ideas were expressed through metaphor and simile, with poets and dramatists cited as sources of authority alongside scientific predecessors. While Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) is the most obvious example of science writing’s literary qualities, any number of others can be found in the pages of nineteenth-century periodicals, from Nature and Scientific American to Harper’s Weekly or the Cornhill Magazine. Science, therefore, was firmly in the public domain and “particularly close to the shared stories” of nineteenth-century society.⁴

Science, however, was not merely using literary language as a simple tool of expression. By the mid-nineteenth century, scientific methodology gave much more credence to a hypothetical analysis of the natural world than it had when Bacon’s inductive method was in the ascendancy. As the stress shifted from what could be “seen” to what could be “thought,” so the imagination of the scientist became much more important.⁵ The language of literature, therefore, was a vital part of the scientist’s armory in imagining the principles of the natural world and articulating that imaginative understanding to others. This is not to suggest that literary language had become science’s handmaiden. Rather, it played a vital role in giving the scientist the tools with which to understand the workings of nature; science and literature were cooperating in determining the principles by which nineteenth-century society functioned.

This close relationship between science, literary language, and the educated public did not last long. By the 1870s the scientific community had begun a process of professionalization that would, by the end of the century, make it less accessible to a general audience. The instigation of state funding (although far from systematic), the rise of the laboratory, and the placement of career scientists at the head of important institutions all contributed to a shift in scientific culture from the amateur to the professional.⁶ With this shift came a number of important changes in the relationship between the scientific communities and the general public. No longer was science as accessible as it had been: the sciences quickly became more discipline based and therefore more specialized; a set of specific scientific vocabularies emerged that were alien to a general audience, and publication of scientific theories and discoveries became the responsibility of journals dedicated to the scientific community rather than the general public. All of this transformed the ostensibly open scientific community into one that was closed off from both an interested lay audience and the enthusiastic amateurs who practiced science in their hours of leisure. Of course part of the professionalizing project had been to do exactly that: to take science out of the hands of amateurs and pseudoscientists and place it much more firmly within the central scientific disciplines. This, certain parts of the scientific community believed, would give the sciences a stronger position at the center of nineteenth-century life from which to promote their interests. However, professionalization did not only have this effect. It also led to a perceived insularity on the part of the scientific community (or what were now multiple communities) that detracted from its attempts to speak with a more powerful voice.

As the sciences began to specialize, so too did they begin to withdraw from public life. No longer obliged to offer their theories to a general audience, scientific research and ...