Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel

Anne DeWitt examines how Victorian novelists challenged the claims of men of science to align scientific practice with moral excellence.

Anne DeWitt (Author)

9781316600948, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 21 January 2016

290 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.4 kg

'… an interdisciplinary and ambitious study that delivers a collection of chapters covering such scientific topics as astronomy, medicine, scientific naturalism and vivisection. … Every chapter exhibits an array of fascinating primary evidence that demonstrates her own commitment to investigating the 'surface' as to the opposed hidden meaning of Victorian texts. … In doing so, the study presents a compelling, persuasive and confident study that offers sharp and intelligent readings of the nineteenth-century novel and its relationship to experimental science. … insightful and provocative. Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel proposes an important assembly of questions and provides some robust and intriguing answers of its own. Ann Loveridge, British Society for Literature and Science Reviews (www.bsls.ac.uk)

Nineteenth-century men of science aligned scientific practice with moral excellence as part of an endeavor to secure cultural authority for their discipline. Anne DeWitt examines how novelists from Elizabeth Gaskell to H. G. Wells responded to this alignment. Revising the widespread assumption that Victorian science and literature were part of one culture, she argues that the professionalization of science prompted novelists to deny that science offered widely accessible moral benefits. Instead, they represented the narrow aspirations of the professional as morally detrimental while they asserted that moral concerns were the novel's own domain of professional expertise. This book draws on works of natural theology, popular lectures, and debates from the pages of periodicals to delineate changes in the status of science and to show how both familiar and neglected works of Victorian fiction sought to redefine the relationship between science and the novel.

Introduction
1. The religion of science from natural theology to scientific naturalism
2. Moral uses, narrative effects: natural history in the novels of George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell
3. 'The actual sky is a horror': Thomas Hardy and the problems of scientific thinking
4. 'The moral influence of those cruelties': the vivisection debate, antivivisection fiction, and the status of Victorian science
5. Science, aestheticism, and the literary career of H. G. Wells
Epilogue.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]