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A new collection of essays by Gillian Beer, George Levine and other scholars, exploring the interaction between Darwin, Tennyson, Huxley and many major figures of Victorian literature and science.

‘Darwin, Tennyson and Their Readers: Explorations in Victorian Literature and Science’ is an edited collection of essays from leading authorities in the field of Victorian literature and science, including Gillian Beer and George Levine. Darwin, Tennyson, Huxley, Ruskin, Richard Owen, Meredith, Wilde and other major writers are discussed, as established scholars in this area explore the interaction between Victorian literary and scientific figures which helped build the intellectual climate of twenty-first century debates.

Introduction – Valerie Purton; Chapter 1: Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall’: Progress and Destitution –Roger Ebbatson; Chapter 2: ‘Tennyson’s Drift’: Evolution in ‘The Princess’ – Rebecca Stott; Chapter 3: History, Materiality and Type in Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’ – Matthew Rowlinson; Chapter 4: Darwin, Tennyson and the Writing of ‘The Holy Grail’ – Valerie Purton; Chapter 5: ‘An Undue Simplification’: Tennyson’s Evolutionary Afterlife – Michiel Nys; Chapter 6: ‘Like a Megatherium Smoking a Cigar’: Darwin’s Beagle Fossils in Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture – Gowan Dawson; Chapter 7: ‘No Such Thing as a Flower […] No Such Thing as a Man’: John Ruskin’s Response to Darwin – Clive Wilmer; Chapter 8: Darwin and the Art of Paradox – George Levine; Chapter 9: Systems and Extravagance: Darwin, Meredith, Tennyson – Gillian Beer; Chapter 10: T. H. Huxley, Science and Cultural Agency – Jeff Wallace; Notes on Contributors

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Publié par	Anthem Press
Date de parution	15 septembre 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780857280824
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0050€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Darwin, Tennyson and Their Readers

Explorations in Victorian Literature and Science

Edited by Valerie Purton

Anthem Press An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2013 by ANTHEM PRESS 75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK and 244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library CataloguinginPublication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data Darwin, Tennyson and their readers : explorations in Victorian literature and science / edited by Valerie Purton. pages cm Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 9780857280763 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. English literature–19th century–History and criticism. 2. Literature and science–Great Britain–History–19th century. 3. Darwin, Charles, 1809–1882. 4. Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Baron, 1809–1892. 5. Huxley, Aldous, 1894–1963. 6. Wilde, Oscar, 1854–1900. I. Purton, Valerie, editor of compilation. PR468.S34D37 2013 820.9’356–dc23 2013029740

ISBN13: 978 0 85728 076 3 (Hbk) ISBN10: 085728 076 7 (Hbk)

Cover image by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, from a plate published inJohnson’s Natural History, 1871.

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Introduction Valerie Purton

TEN

vii

Chapter 1 Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall’: Progress and Destitution 1 Roger Ebbatson Chapter 2 ‘Tennyson’s Drift’: Evolution inThe Princess 13Rebecca Stott Chapter 3 History, Materiality and Type in Tennyson’sIn Memoriam 35Matthew Rowlinson Chapter 4 Darwin, Tennyson and the Writing of ‘The Holy Grail’ 49 Valerie Purton Chapter 5 ‘An Undue Simplification’: Tennyson’s Evolutionary Afterlife 65 Michiel Nys Chapter 6 ‘Like a Megatherium Smoking a Cigar’: Darwin’s Beagle81Fossils in NineteenthCentury Popular Culture Gowan Dawson Chapter 7 ‘No Such Thing as a Flower […] No Such Thing as a Man’: John Ruskin’s Response to Darwin 97 Clive Wilmer Chapter 8 Darwin and the Art of Paradox 109 George Levine Chapter 9 Systems and Extravagance: Darwin, Meredith, Tennyson 135 Gillian Beer Chapter 10 T. H. Huxley, Science and Cultural Agency 153 Jeff Wallace

Notes on Contributors

167

INTRODUCTION

Valerie Purton

‘I have sometimes found in a song of Tennyson the most fitting garment of a thought engendered by a generalisation of Science.’ 1 —Richard Owen, 1859

‘[T]here is a community establishing itself between literature and science, and I rejoice in that community […] for the highest aim of science and literature, is the same; it is to diffuse, to reveal and to embody truth.’ 2 —Thomas Henry Huxley, 1860

‘Presented rightly to the mind, the discoveries and generalisations of modern science constitute a poem more sublime than has ever yet addressed the human imagination. The natural philosopher today may dwell amid conceptions which beggar those of Milton.’ 3 —John Tyndall, 1863

Charles Darwin and Alfred, Lord Tennyson were exact contemporaries, born in 1809, who came to have emblematic roles as representatives, respectively, of science and literature in the Victorian age. Their juxtaposition in this volume of essays is indicative of the easy commerce between literature and science during that period and provides a salutary reminder that the two categories need to be understood within their historical context rather than assumed to be transhistorical absolutes. Readers of Darwin and Tennyson included all the significant thinkers of the day, in every field. Two – John Ruskin and Thomas Henry Huxley – are given special attention in this collection, in which a range of twentyfirstcentury critics from various literary disciplines address issues raised by the interaction of Victorian literature and science. A brief overview of the historical context suggests that the interpenetration of literature and science in the Victorian period was

viii

DARWIN, TENNYSON AND THEIR READERS

everywhere observable. Men of science were fascinated by literature; literary authors were equally drawn to science. At the beginning of Victoria’s reign, science was dominated by the ‘gentlemen of science’, usually Oxbridgeeducated members of the Church of England – men such as Charles Babbage, John Herschel, William Whewell and William Buckland. These men were not in rebellion against William Paley’s natural theology, which saw the natural world as full of evidence of God’s grand design. Their foundation in 1831 of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which first gave what might be called a ‘public image’ to science, was in no way intended as a revolutionary act. Between 1830 and 1833, however, Buckland’s student Charles Lyell published his threevolumeGeologyPrinciples of (in which, as a welleducated nineteenth century intellectual, he felt it perfectly appropriate to quote liberally from Byron), and in so doing he gave impetus to ideas which were to revolutionize the imaginations of both Darwin and Tennyson. Darwin took Lyell’s first volume with him when he left England on theBeaglein 1831; he had the second sent out to him at Montevideo in 1832; and the third he collected in Valparaiso in July 1834. (He also took with him Milton’sParadise Lost.) Tennyson had certainly read Lyell by 1836 when, in a letter to Richard 4 Monckton Milnes, he paraphrased a section from book II, chapter 18. In 1844 Darwin and Tennyson both read Robert Chambers’sVestiges of the Natural History of Creation, Darwin with disdain, Tennyson initially with a great deal of enthusiasm: he sent his publisher Edward Moxon out to buy a copy as soon as it appeared, declaring, ‘it seems to contain many speculations with which I have been familiar for years, and on which I have 5 written more than one poem.’ It is these speculations in Tennyson’s poetry that the first four essays of the present volume examine. In 1859 the first edition ofOn theSpeciesOrigin of lay in a bookshop window alongside the first edition of the first batch ofIdylls of the King(‘Guinevere’, ‘Elaine’, ‘Vivien’, and ‘Edith’). The laterIdyllsare shot through with evolutionary ideas: like the postDarwinian novels, they too provide evidence of ‘Darwin’s plots’.Definitions of ‘literature’ and ‘science’ in the discourse of Victorian Britain, as the foregoing would imply, were notoriously fluid, and there was little agreement about their usage. To the Royal Literary Fund in the midcentury, ‘science’ was still a branch of literature – since ‘literature’ retained its generous eighteenthcentury usage, in which it included virtually all forms of writing. When Charles Darwin in theOriginenvisions evolutionary change, he does so in explicitly literary terms:

I look at the natural geological record, as a history of the world imperfectly kept and written in a changing dialect; of this history we possess the last volume

INTRODUCTION

alone, relating to one, two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved: and of each page, only here and there a few lines. Each word of the slowly changing language, in which the history is supposed to have been written, being more or less different in the interrupted succession of chapters, may represent the apparently abruptly changed forms of 6 life, entombed in our consecutive, but widely separated formations.

The word ‘scientist’ itself, in something approaching its twentyfirstcentury sense, was only coined in the 1830s by William Whewell, Alfred Tennyson’s tutor at Trinity College, Cambridge. Much scientific writing, notably that of John Tyndall, was assumed to possess an imaginative dimension and was subsumed into midVictorian literary culture. Intellectuals such as George Henry Lewes maintained the tradition of the Romantic poets, especially Shelley, in assuming it was possible to preserve a manysidedness: Lewes wrote novels, plays and literary reviews, but he also conducted scientific experiments exploring the physiological basis of the mind, and published five volumes ofLife and MindProblems of ‘Mr Darwin’s (1874–79). His four reviews of Hypothesis’ (1868) had, after all, been praised by Darwin himself, and it was 7 Darwin who had encouraged him to work them into a book. Darwin and Tennyson had both encountered William Paley’sNatural Theology(1802) as students at Cambridge. Later in their careers, they were to be painfully caught up in the eventual and inevitable rupture between science and literature. Tennyson’s agonized ‘evolutionary stanzas’ inIn Memoriamthe phrase ‘by the Creator’54–6 and Darwin’s uneasy inclusion of in the famous last sentence of thesecond edition of the Origin,are merely the two bestknown of many examples of the authors’ involvement.The ‘evolutionary naturalists’ who formed the second generation of scientific practitioners no longer imagined the natural world as being contained within a religious framework. Men such as Thomas Huxley, Herbert Spencer, Francis Galton and George Henry Lewes, as well as Darwin himself, aimed to build a professional discipline of science that was essentially secular in its underpinning. At the same time, they went on drawing on what, in Matthew Arnold’s terms, were the moral and spiritual resources of literature to 8 communicate their discoveries. On the other side, contemporary scientists, particularly Huxley, quickly recognized Tennyson for his ability to synthesise the new ideas of science into lines of poetry which could be understood by a worldwide readership. The lifelong friendship between Tennyson and Huxley is particularly instructive. The two men came to know each other in London in the 1860s, where they were part of a circle including Tyndall, Herschel and Norman Lockyer. Nominated by Huxley in 1864 for a fellowship of the Royal Society,

DARWIN, TENNYSON AND THEIR READERS

Tennyson declined, but when the invitation was repeated the following year, he accepted and was introduced to the society on 7 December 1865. Though he rarely attended subsequent meetings, his membership remained culturally significant. Edmund Lushington wrote to Emily Tennyson on 6 April 1866, quoting a recent conversation with Thomas Huxley: Huxley had talked of his ‘unbounded admiration’ for Tennyson and commented that, ‘We scientific 9 men claim him as having quite the mind of a man of science.’ In his turn, when he wrote about David Hume in theLettersEnglish Men of series (1879), Huxley was described by thePall Mall Gazette(1886) as being ‘hardly less 10 distinguished for culture than for science’. At this point, significantly, it is ‘culture’ rather than ‘literature’ which is being constructed as ‘not science’. Huxley’s public reputation was greater, apparently, than the complementary role implied in the appellation ‘Darwin’s bulldog’. In conversation with James Addington Symonds in 1865, it was to Huxley rather than to Darwin, that Tennyson attributed the notion of man’s descent from apes: ‘Huxley says we may have come from monkeys. That makes no difference to me. If it is God’s 11 way of creation, He sees the whole, past, present and future, as one.’ There is no record of Tennyson’s response in 1870 to Darwin’sManDescent of ,although Tennyson’s is the only contemporary poetry Darwin quotes in the book. On 17 March 1873, both Huxley and Tyndall called on Tennyson at Farringford on the Isle of Wight. Emily Tennyson’s journal comments that ‘Mr Huxley seemed to be universal in his interest and to have a keen enjoyment of life.12 He spoke ofIn Memoriamthe 1880s, Matthew Arnold’s attacks on Huxley.’ By over what should be included in a liberal education were read as evidence of the beginning of a complete rupture between science and literature – a rupture which culminated in the familiar ‘two cultures’ formulation ofC. P. Snow in the 1960s. It is important to note, however, that Huxley was not himself advocating a move away from literature towards science, but rather a move from the classics to modernity: it was both modern literature and science that he proposed to add to the educational curriculum, at the expense of what he took to be too exclusive a focus on classical languages and literature. Huxley’s wellknown tribute to Tennyson (discussed by Rebecca Stott in Chapter 2) suggested his optimism about a future community of literature and science: Tennyson was, he said, ‘thefirstpoet since Lucretius who has 13 understood the drift of science’. Immediately after Tennyson’s death in 1892, Huxley wrote a subtly different and much more pessimistic version of the tribute: ‘He was theonlymodern poet, in fact the only poet since the time of Lucretius, who hastaken the trouble tounderstandthe work and 14 tendency of the men of science’. Huxley also crafted his own fourstanza subTennysonian poem, beginning, ‘Bring me my dead!’, including lines redolent of its subject such as ‘With thoughts that cannot die’ and ‘Into the