Critical Survey

This special issue of Critical Survey explores the reciprocal relationships between Victorian literature and Victorian science – both the representation of science in literature, and the appearance of the literary within scientific discourse. Recent trends in historicism inspire this collection to contextualise Victorian literature and culture through Victorian understandings of bodies. These critics rightfully begin from the assumption that only once we understand Victorian bodies as Victorians might have understood them can we theorise historical bodies as sites integral to the legitimisation of flows of cultural power: capitalism, imperialism, heteronormativity, and beyond.

Interdisciplinary scholars, stressing the lack of firm disciplinary boundaries for British science in much of the nineteenth century, have pointed to evidence of mutual influence between the discourses of 'mental science', or psychology, and imaginative literature. This article treats Chapters on Mental Physiology (1852) by the English physician Henry Holland as a case study of heightened concern over the competing cultural authority implied by such mutual influence, and specifically over the inclusion of references to dramatic and lyrical works in early Victorian mental theory. It examines the medical author's self-conscious attempts to separate the developing profession of psychology from a tradition in philosophical discourse of enlisting imaginative writing for illustration and support. It further explores the way Holland strives to marginalise his text's occasional, paradoxical slips back into citing poetry by relegating this material to subordinate paratexts. How to safely deploy literature in service of science thus emerges as a key epistemological and rhetorical issue that Henry Holland, representing the consolidating field of British psychology at large, grapples with in his mid-century study of the mind.

This article reveals how Edward Berdoe's St. Bernard's: The Romance of a Medical Student (1887) critiques the evolution of medical science at the fin de siècle. Berdoe deploys the discourse of degeneracy to challenge the culture of medical education that produces monstrous medical students. St. Bernard's reflects not only the ambiguity towards scientific materialism and knowledge, which entails learning how to prolong life by encountering death, but also critiques the foundations of late Victorian medical education by articulating how the middle class was complicit in the horrors that the novel would expose, ultimately suggesting that middle-class health was built on the bodies of the poor. The text's ethical imperative to reform the medical establishment, however, derives its rhetorical power from provoking anxieties of corrupting middle-class health with working-class and pauper bodies. This reveals the novel's problematic use of degeneracy, as St. Bernard's reinscribes some of the very tenets about class that it aims to critique.

The tension between specialised and commonsensical notions of microbes in the last decades of the nineteenth century resulted in ‘ bacillophobia'; a marked anxiety amongst the public concerning the threat posed to the individual by germs. This article investigates how the conceptual impact of bacillophobia challenged the cohesion of late Victorian society. It focuses on the role played by bacteria in the negotiation between interiority and exteriority in three novels, all published in 1897: Bram Stoker's Dracula, H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds and Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the “Narcissus”. The analyses of the works emphasise the varying functions of bacteria in them – as allegory in Dracula, as plot device in The War of the Worlds, and as theme in The Nigger of the “Narcissus” – and the varying degrees of ambiguity they are represented with. Bacteriology participated in what the German sociologist Max Weber referred to as the ‘ disenchantment' of the world, which is characteristic of modernity, but the three works all testify to a re-enchanted fear of the possibility that nature might not, after all, be controllable.

In a cross-disciplinary investigation of lighting technology and sleep science, I strive to illuminate the ways in which Victorians under the seductive influence and increasing availability of bright city light saw night as a useful space and time. Stoker's Dracula (1897) is a crucial text for examining change in late Victorian nightlife because one of the key determinants of power and powerlessness in Dracula is in the way the body rejects or succumbs to the instincts of sleep. First, I analyse the late nineteenth-century social and medical opinions surrounding technological advances in artificial lighting in order to ascertain the significance of light's apparent effect on Victorians' sleep patterns and sleep quality. Second, I liken the descent from wakefulness into sleep, a state called 'hypnagogia' in sleep science, to the vampiric state of the undead. Dracula holds his victims within the hypnagogic trance to assert his power over them in their weakened and liminal consciousness. My study concludes that Stoker writes men as both strong and weak in their resistance to sleep, and the women as reliant upon the sleep deprivation of men for health and life.

This article links the rise of non-Euclidean geometry with the ascent of theories of evolution in the second half of the nineteenth century, and argues that the upsurge of speculations on higher dimensional space figures as a corollary of the pre-eminence of Darwinian ideas in the late Victorian imaginary. It first provides a short sketch of the development of thinking in higher dimensions from Plato's 'allegory of the cave' to the late Victorian popularisation of the subject in the works of Charles Hinton and H.G. Wells. On this basis, it goes on to examine two literary texts from the 1880s, Edwin A. Abbott's novel Flatland and May Kendall's poem 'A Pure Hypothesis'. Both texts are premised on the assumption that there are different versions of the world with different numbers of spatial dimensions, and that through the faculty of dreaming it is possible to transcend the boundaries between these worlds. This article shows how both texts use this central conceit to pose serious questions about contemporary class hierarchies as well as the ethical implications of scientific progress.

This article explores late Victorian fictions of natural catastrophe and their relationship to contemporary developments in the natural sciences. During this era, popular culture had become saturated with an 'apocalyptic imaginary' – a myriad of images of degeneration, total war and the fall of civilisation. While the majority of popular catastrophe texts turn on disasters of a man-made, military nature, including global wars, nationalist uprisings, and domestic revolutions, a significant subset employ natural disaster as the means of catastrophe – some dramatising the astronomical theories of cometary collision or the heat death of the sun, and others postulating meteorological and geological disasters such as volcanic eruption, earthquake, fog, ice, flood, and even climate change. These include H.G. Wells and George Griffith's tales of comet strike, M.P. Shiel and Grant Allen's volcano tales, and William Delisle Hay, Robert Barr and Fred M. White's accounts of deadly fog. This article relates this little-known body of texts to developing Victorian concerns about the sustainability of human life on earth, arguing that by focusing on determining the causes of the catastrophes depicted it is possible to see links emerging between 'natural' catastrophe and human activity in Victorian thinking and hence the development of an ecological awareness.