Endeavour 43 (2019) 100695

Microscopy and literature

Peter J.F. HarrisElectron Microscopy Laboratory, J. J. Thomson Building, University of Reading, Whiteknights, Reading, United Kingdom

A R T I C L E I N F O

Article history:

Keywords:MicroscopyScience and literatureJonathan swiftGeorge EliotH.G. WellsD.H. LawrenceRobert Hooke

A B S T R A C T

This article draws attention to literary works which have been influenced by microscopy, or in whichmicroscopy has played a significant role. The work of writers including Jonathan Swift, Voltaire, GeorgeEliot, H. G. Wells and D. H. Lawrence is discussed. In many cases these authors had direct experience ofoperating microscopes and viewing the wonders of the microscopic world. However, with the increasingseparation of the two cultures, recent examples of microscopy in literature are rare.

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journa l home page : www.e l sev ier .com/ loca te /ende

Of all th’ Inuentions none there is Surpasses

Ye noble Florentine’s Dioptrick Glasses

For what a better, fitter guift Could bee

In this world’s Aged Luciosity.

To help our Blindnesse so as to deuize

A paire of new & Artificiall eyes

By whose augmenting power wee now see moreThan all the world Has euer donn Before1

On the face of it “Microscopy and literature” would seem anunpromising subject for an article. It would certainly be misleadingto suggest that microscopes and microscopy have played a majorrole in English or European literature. However, when one beginsto research the subject, many examples of microscopy in literaturecan be found. There is little doubt, for example, that Robert Hooke’slandmark Micrographia (1665) prompted eighteenth centurywriters like Jonathan Swift and Voltaire to employ changes ofscale as a literary device. In the following century, George Eliotused microscopy as a metaphor in Middlemarch, and earlytwentieth century novels by both H. G. Wells and D. H. Lawrencefeature microscopy in key scenes. More recent examples ofmicroscopy in literature have been harder to find, perhaps

E-mail address: p.j.f.harris@reading.ac.uk (P.J.F. Harris).1 Henry Power, “In Commendation of ye Microscope” (1661), as quoted by

Thomas Cowles, “Dr. Henry Power’s Poem on the Microscope,” Isis 21 (1934): 71–80,on p. 71.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2019.1006950160-9327/© 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

reflecting increasing separation of the “two cultures” in the latetwentieth century.

It seems that the first use of the word “microscope” can beidentified very precisely: it was coined by Giovanni Faber, aGerman doctor, botanist, and art collector, on April 13,1625.2 A fewyears earlier, Galileo had developed a compound microscopewhich he named an occhiolino (“little eye”), but it was Faber’sname that stuck. The most important figure in the early history ofmicroscopy was the Dutch businessman and scientist Antonie vanLeeuwenhoek, whose amazing work using single-lensed micro-scopes has been described in detail by Brian J. Ford.3 However, itwas the publication of Hooke’s Micrographia in January 1665 thatbrought microscopy to the attention of the wider public (Fig. 1).This beautiful book, the first to be published by the Royal Society,contained many stunning illustrations, such as the one shown inFig. 2, and the first detailed drawings of a fly’s eye and a plant cell.4

By the standards of the day, the book was a bestseller. One of thefirst to purchase it was Samuel Pepys. His diary entry for January21, 1665 concludes, “Before I went to bed I sat up till two o’clock inmy chamber reading of Mr. Hooke’s Microscopical Observations,the most ingenious book that ever I read in my life.”5

It is a measure of the popularity of microscopy in the late-seventeenth century that it became a target for satire. Thomas

2 Theodore George Rochow and Eugene George Rochow, Introduction toMicroscopy by Means of Light, Electrons, X Rays, or Ultrasound (New York: PlenumPress, 1994), Chapter 1.

3 Brian J. Ford, The Leeuwenhoek Legacy (Bristol: Biopress, 1991).4 R. Hooke, Micrographia, Or, Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies

Made by Magnifying Glasses (London: The Royal Society, 1665).5 Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William

Matthews (London: Bell and Hyman, 1983), VI: 18.

Fig. 1. Robert Hooke (1635–1703), in an oil painting on board by Rita Greer, history painter, 2004, digitized and available in Wikimedia Commons (in public domain); and titlepage of Micrographia (1665).

Fig. 2. Hooke’s drawing of a flea, from Micrographia (1665), scheme xxxiv.

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Shadwell’s play The Virtuoso (1676) ridicules modern science andthe Royal Society, whose fellows are portrayed as spending theirlives performing experiments of no practical use. The virtuoso ofthe title is Sir Nicholas Gimcrack, “a sot that has spent twothousand pounds on microscopes to find out the nature of eels invinegar and mites in cheese has broken his brains about the natureof maggots . . . and never cares for understanding mankind.”6

Hooke attended a performance of the play and was mortified whenhe realised that the central character was based on him.7

6 Thomas Shadwell, The Virtuoso, ed. Marjorie Hope Nicolson and David StuartRodes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press), p. 22.

7 Stephen Inwood, The Man Who Knew Too Much: The Strange and Inventive Life ofRobert Hooke, 1635–1703 (London: Pan, 2003).

Another satirist who was undoubtedly influenced by micros-copy was Jonathan Swift (Fig. 3). We know that Swift was familiarwith Micrographia, and that he bought a microscope for his wifeStella.8 The influence of microscopy on Gulliver’s Travels, publishedin 1726 (Fig. 4), has been discussed by a number of authors, notablyMarjorie Hope Nicolson.9 As Nicolson points out, rather thanseeing the microscope as an exciting new window on nature, Swiftseems to have been horrified by what the new instrumentrevealed. In “A Voyage to Brobdingnag,” Gulliver finds himself in aland of giants. He thus becomes a becomes a kind of “humanmicroscope,” able to discern with his naked eye the spots, pimplesand freckles on the skin of the Brobdingnagians, and the licecrawling on their clothes in appalling detail.10 He reflects on “ . . .the fair Skins of our English Ladies, who appear so beautiful to us,only because they are of our own Size, and their Defects not tobe seen but through a magnifying Glass; where we find byExperiment that the smoothest and whitest Skins look rough, andcoarse, and ill-coloured.”11 Swift’s revulsion at what the magnify-ing glass or microscope revealed is seemingly of a piece with hisscepticism about the kind of experimental science promoted bythe Royal Society, something he shared with Thomas Shadwell.(Elsewhere in his Travels, Gulliver encounters a scientist who hasspent eight years unsuccessfully trying to extract sunbeams fromcucumbers.)

Swift was not alone in feeling uneasy about the heightenedsensitivity which the microscope represented. Ann Jessie van Sant

8 Leo Damrosch, Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 2013); Keith Crook, A Preface to Swift (London: Routledge, 1998).

9 Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Science and Imagination (Connecticut: Archon, 1956).10 Ibid., pp. 193-199; Greg Lynall, “In Retrospect: Gulliver’s Travels,” Nature 549, no.7673 (2017): 454–456, https://doi.org/10.1038/549454a.11 Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008), p. 83(emphasis in the original).

Fig. 4. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726), cover of Oxford World’s Classicsedition showing cartoon by James Gillray. Reproduced by permission of OxfordPublishing Limited.

Fig. 3. Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), in a portrait by Charles Jervas (1675–1739).© National Portrait Gallery, London.

14 Marc Oliver, “Binding the Book of Nature: Microscopy as Literature,” History of

P.J.F. Harris / Endeavour 43 (2019) 100695 3

has pointed out that in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755), theillustrative quotation for “microscope” (from a sermon by RichardBentley) was as follows: “If the eye were so acute as to rival thefinest microscopes, and to discern the smallest hair upon the leg ofa gnat, it would be a curse and not a blessing to us.”12 AlexanderPope’s well-known lines from The Essay on Man (1733) also expressa horror of micro-sensation, as well as a scepticism about studyingever-smaller structures while missing the bigger picture:

Why has not Man a microscopic eye?

For this plain reason, Man is not a Fly.

Say what the use, were finer optics giv’n,

T’ inspect a mite, not comprehend the heav’n?

Or touch, if tremblingly alive all o’er,To smart and agonize at ev’ry pore?13

Less well-known than Gulliver’s Travels, at least in the English-speaking world, is Voltaire’s 1752 novella Micromégas (Fig. 5).Considered one of the first true science fiction stories, this featuresa 450-year-old, 37 km tall alien with 1000 senses from a planet thatorbits Sirius. He writes a scientific book examining the insects onhis planet, which at 30 m in size are too small to be detected byordinary microscopes. Micromégas’s book is considered heresy,and he is banished from his home planet for 800 years. Eventually,with another giant from Saturn, he arrives on Earth. When heencounters the microscopic humans he initially assumes that theyare too small to be intelligent, but eventually realises that humanscience and philosophy are the equal of his own. As Marc Olivierpoints out “ . . . despite his physical advantages, he is subject toerror, arrogance, and all other human shortcomings. This played

12 Anne Jessie van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses inSocial Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 102.13 Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016),p. 20.

well into the suspicion that new or augmented sense perceptioncould not make us superior beings, despite the enthusiasm of somemicroscopists.”14

Some authors have argued that microscopy as a science wentinto a decline following the early enthusiasm. In a 1956 history ofmicroscopy, Maria Rooseboom said: “After the great discoveriesof the pioneers, the eighteenth century brought little sensationalnews in the fields of microscopes and microscopy,” while BrianFord has called the 1700s a “Lost Century” for the microscope.15

Marc Ratcliff, in his The Quest for the Invisible, argues that this viewis too simplistic, and that much important work involvingmicroscopes was carried out during the Enlightenment era.16

What is indisputable is that major advances in microscopy had toawait a solution to the twin issues of spherical and chromaticaberration, which limited the resolving power of early micro-scopes. By the nineteenth century, however, the problems ofaberration were largely solved and microscopy entered a newgolden era. As well as improved microscopes, the development ofhistological dyes enabled cellular structures to be observed in

European Ideas 31 (2005): 173–191, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.histeuroi-deas.2003.11.005.15 Maria Rooseboom, Microscopium (Leden: Rijksmuseum voor de Geschiedenisder Natuurwetenschappen, 1956); Brian J. Ford, The Revealing Lens: Mankind and theMicroscope (London: Harrap, 1973), p. 68.16 Marc J. Racliff, The Quest for the Invisible: Microscopy in the Enlightenment(London: Routledge, 2009).

Fig. 5. Voltaire (1694–1778), in an oil painting by Nicolas de Largillière,1724/25, digitized and available in Wikimedia Commons (in public domain), and cover of Micromégas,reproduced by permission of Flammarion.

4 P.J.F. Harris / Endeavour 43 (2019) 100695

more detail than ever before, and this led to huge advances in cellbiology.17 However the achievements of microscopists in thenineteenth century were not limited to biology. The invention ofthe polarizing microscope by William Nicol in 1828, and itsapplication to rocks by Henry Clifton Sorby and others were ofmajor importance in geology, while the discovery of Brownianmotion by Robert Brown in 1827 had huge implications forphysics.18

One nineteenth century novelist who was very much alive todevelopments in microscopy was George Eliot (Fig. 6). The specificrole of microscopy in Eliot’s life, and in Middlemarch (1872), whichis widely regarded as her finest work, has been discussed in detailby Mark Wormald.19 For many years, Eliot was in a relationshipwith George Henry Lewes, a polymath who counted microscopyamong his many interests. Wormald believes that Eliot obtained an“intimate knowledge” of microscopy from Lewes, and that thisexplains the many microscopy references in Middlemarch. In thefirst of these references Eliot uses microscopy as a metaphor:

Even with a microscope directed on a water-drop we findourselves making interpretations which turn out to be rathercoarse; for whereas under a weak lens you may seem to see acreature exhibiting an active voracity into which other smaller

17 Savile Bradbury, The Evolution of the Microscope (Oxford: Pergamon, 1967).18 Hugh Chisholm, ed., “Nicol, William,” in Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edn.(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), XIX: 661; Norman Higham, A VeryScientific Gentleman: The Major Achievements of Henry Clifton Sorby (Oxford:Pergamon, 1963); Richard P. Feynman, “The Brownian Movement,” in The FeynmanLectures on Physics (New York: Basic Books, 2011), I: 41–45.19 Mark Wormald, “Microscopy and Semiotic in Middlemarch,” Nineteenth CenturyLiterature 50 (1996): 501–524, https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.1996.50.4.99p0191f.

creatures actively play as if they were so many animatedtax-pennies, a stronger lens reveals to you certain tiniesthairlets which make vortices for these victims while theswallower waits passively at his receipt of custom. In this way,metaphorically speaking, a strong lens applied to MrsCadwallader’s matchmaking will show a play of minute causesproducing what may be called thought and speech vortices tobring her the sort of food she needed.20

The Mrs. Cadwallader referred to is a gossipy, interferingwoman. What Eliot seems to be saying here is that it would bea mistake to take a simplistic/reductive view of this woman’sbehaviour, using “a weak lens.” The “strong lens” of themicroscope, however, reveals the complex sources of her motiva-tion, exposing the minute intricacy of her manipulative games.

Later in the novel we are introduced to Tertius Lydgate, a doctorwho uses a microscope to conduct medical research. He may havebeen partly based on Lewes.21 At one point Lydgate gifts a copy of“Robert Brown’s new thing” (the paper which described Brownianmotion) to fellow microscopist Camden Farebrother, and, in apassage which echoes the metaphor quoted above, Lydgate lendsFarebrother his superior microscope to examine some ‘pond-products,’ enabling him to see what he would miss were he usinghis own, “weaker lens.”22 The influence of biology on Eliot’s fictionis not limited to her discussions of microscopy. J. Hillis Miller haspointed out other examples which illustrate the “parallelism

20 George Eliot, Middlemarch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 49.21 Wormald, “Microscopy and Semiotic” (ref. 19), p. 518.22 The British Library, The Companion to the Microscope, https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-companion-to-the-microscope, accessed November 12, 2018.

Fig. 7. Cover of The Diamond Lens by Fitz-James O’Brien (1826–1862). Reproducedby permission of Hesperus Press.

Fig. 6. George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans, 1819–1880), portrait by Alexandre-Louis-François d'Albert-Durade (1804–1886). © National Portrait Gallery, London.

P.J.F. Harris / Endeavour 43 (2019) 100695 5

between Eliot’s aim as a sociologist of provincial life and the aimsof contemporary biologists.”23

The Victorian era was a time when “the interpenetration ofliterature and science . . . was everywhere observable.”24 GeorgeEliot was far from the only great writer to display a deep interest inscience: Tennyson and Dickens, to name just two, followedscientific developments closely.25 The nineteenth century wasalso the great age of the amateur scientist. With the increasingaffordability of basic instruments, microscopy became a popularpastime, promoted by such guides as Evenings at the Microscope,by Philip Henry Gosse (1859), and by societies such as theMicroscopical Society of London (now the Royal MicroscopicalSociety) and the Quekett Microscopical Club.26 Microscopy seepedinto popular culture in surprising ways. In her essay, “Nature’sInvisibilia: The Victorian Microscope and the Miniature Fairy,”Laura Forsberg draws attention to the links between “the invisibleworld of microscopic life” and “the invisible world of fairyland.”She suggests that, for many Victorian microscopists, “The act ofgazing through the lens becomes an exercise in imaginativeassociation,” quoting Charles Kingsley’s essay on How to StudyNatural History (1893), in which he describes how the microscopist“ . . . in one pinch of green scum, in one spoonful of water,” may

23 J. Hillis Miller, “Optic and Semiotic in Middlemarch,” in Jerome H. Buckley, ed.,The Worlds of Victorian Fiction (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 125–145, on p. 131.24 Valerie Purton, ed., Darwin, Tennyson and Their Readers: Explorations in VictorianLiterature and Science (London: Anthem Press, 2014).25 Ibid., pp. 1–80; Simon Ings, “How Charles Dickens Became a Man of Science,”New Scientist, June 13, 2018, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23831820-800-how-charles-dickens-became-a-man-of-science/, accessed August 13, 2019.26 Philip Henry Gosse, Evenings at the Microscope, or Researches Among the MinuterOrgans and Forms of Animal Life (London: Society for Promoting ChristianKnowledge, 1884); J. A. Bennett, “The Social History of the Microscope,” Journalof Microscopy 155, no. 3 (1989): 267–280, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2818.1989.tb02890.x.

“behold a whole ‘Divina Commedia’ of living forms, more fantastica thousand times than those with which Dante peopled his unseenworld.”27 The starting point for her essay is Fitz-James O’Brien’sshort story The Diamond Lens (1858), which provides one of thefirst examples of the associations between microscopy and fairy-like creatures (Fig. 7).28 In this fantastical tale a scientist, Linley,summons up the the spirit of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, whoinforms him that by subjecting “a diamond of one hundred andforty carats” to “electro-magnetic currents for a long period,” a lenscould be produced “whose magnifying power should be limitedonly by the resolvability of the object.”29 In this way Linleyconstructs a super-powerful microscope and discovers a beautifulfemale, whom he calls Animula, in a microscopic world inside adrop of water. This minuscule woman has all the attributes ofa fairy, although O’Brien never uses the term. Linley becomesobsessed with her, to the exclusion of the full-sized world, but thestory ends tragically when he accidentally allows the water on hismicroscope slide to dry up, condemning Animula to an agonisingdeath.

H. G. Wells is probably best known today for his pioneeringscience fiction novels such as The War of the Worlds (1898), but he

27 Laura Forsberg, “Nature’s Invisibilia: The Victorian Microscope and theMiniature Fairy,” Victorian Studies 57 (2015): 638–666, on p. 654; Charles Kingsley,How to Study Natural History (South Carolina: CreateSpace Publishing, 2014), p. 22.28 Fitz James O'Brien, The Diamond Lens and Other Stories (London: Hesperus Press,2012).29 Ibid., p. 15.

Fig. 8. H. G. Wells (1866–1946), in a photograph by George Charles Beresford, 1920.© National Portrait Gallery, London.

33 Ibid., p. 47.34 H. G. Wells, Ann Veronica (London: Everyman, 1995).

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was a prolific writer who worked in a number of different genres(Fig. 8).30 Even his “non-science fiction” writing often involvedscience and scientists. The short story, A Slip Under the Microscope(1896), concerns the rivalry between two biology undergraduatescalled Hill and Wedderburn.31 They are competing for the highestmarks in the final exam, as well as for the affections of fellowundergraduate Miss Haysman. The day of the exam arrives andinvolves a practical test in microscopy. The demonstrator hasplaced a botanical section in the microscope, mounted on a glassslide (which Wells calls a slip), and positioned the specimen so thatonly part of it can be seen. Moving the specimen even slightlywould reveal its identity. When it is Hill’s turn, disaster strikes.

Hill came to this, flushed from a contest with staining reagents,sat down on the little stool before the microscope, turned themirror to get the best light, and then, out of sheer habit, shiftedthe slip. At once he remembered the prohibition, and, with analmost continuous motion of his hands, moved it back, and satparalysed with astonishment at his action.32

By shifting the specimen, Hill sees clearly that is a lenticel (akind of porous tissue found in the bark of woody stems), but whatto do?

His mind was full of this grotesque puzzle in ethics that hadsuddenly been sprung upon him. Should he identify it? orshould he leave this question unanswered? In that caseWedderburn would probably come out first . . . . . . .. Howcould he tell now whether he might not have identified thething without shifting it? It was possible that Wedderburn had

30 H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2017).31 H. G. Wells, A Slip Under the Microscope (London: Penguin Classics, 2015).32 Ibid., pp. 46–47.

failed to recognize it, of course. Suppose Wedderburn too hadshifted the slide?33

Hill swallows his scruples and earns top marks in the exam. Buthis conscience troubles him and eventually he makes a clean breastof it with his professor. The unfortunate Hill ends up sent downfrom his college and greatly diminished in the eyes of MissHaysman. We are left wondering whether he did the right thing inowning up.

Wells’s highly enjoyable novel Ann Veronica (1909), describeshow Ann Veronica Stanley, “a young lady of nearly two-and-twenty,” struggles with the restrictions of a patriarchal society. Shewas “wildly discontented and eager for freedom and life.”34 After arow with her father she leaves home and, with the help of a loanfrom a rich neighbour, Mr. Ramage, enrols on a course in biology atthe fictional “Central Imperial College” in London. Here she fallsunder the spell of the “exceptionally fair” demonstrator, Mr. Capes.In a key passage, she moves from examining the specimen in hermicroscope to gazing yearningly at her tutor:

Then one day a little thing happened that clothed itself insignificance.She had been working upon a ribbon of microtome sections ofthe developing salamander, and he came to see what she hadmade of them. She stood up and he sat down at the microscope,and for a time he was busy scrutinizing one section afteranother. She looked down at him and saw that the sunlight wasgleaming from his cheeks, and that all over his cheeks was a finegolden down of delicate hairs. And at the sight somethingleaped within her.35

Here Ann Veronica’s gaze seems to have become sensitised bymicroscopy (in a way that would have filled Swift with horror), sothat she becomes acutely aware of the fine detail of Capes’s face.

Unfortunately, it turns out that Capes is married. To makematters worse, Ramage tries to take advantage of Ann Veronica,and she returns the money he lent her. With her prospectsseemingly thwarted, Ann Veronica throws herself into theSuffragette struggle, and is sent to prison. She is appalled bythe filthy conditions: “Horrible memories of things seen beneaththe microscope of the baser forms of life crawled across her mindand set her shuddering with imagined irritations.”36 Chastened,Ann Veronica returns to her father’s home and agrees to getengaged to the hopeless Mr. Manning, but soon realises she cannotlive without Capes. So the pair, first brought together over amicroscope, are finally united.

Another novel, in which a female character experiences a kindof epiphany while operating a microscope, is D. H. Lawrence’s TheRainbow (1915).37 We know that Lawrence had read Ann Veronica,and the similarities between Wells’s heroine and Ursula Brangwenin The Rainbow are striking (Fig. 9).38 Both are “New Women,”looking for an independent path in life, and both study science atuniversity.39 However, the consequence of Ursula’s encounter withmicroscopy is rather different to that of Ann Veronica.

The Rainbow tells the story of three generations of the Brangwenfamily, farmers, and craftsmen who live in Nottinghamshire. Ursulais a member of the third generation of Brangwens and comes of age

35 Ibid., p. 130.36 Ibid., p. 173.37 D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008).38 Margaret Buckley and Brian Buckley, Challenge and Continuity: Aspects of theThematic Novel, 1830-1950 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004).39 Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997).

Fig. 9. D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) in his passport photograph. Courtesy of theBeinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Fig. 10. James Thurber’s professor was enraged by his student’s inability to use amicroscope; cartoon from My Life and Hard Times (1933), p. 66. Reproduced bypermission of Cartoon Collections, www.CartoonCollections.com.

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in the early 1900s. While she is still at school, she embarks on a loveaffair with Anton Skrebensky, a British soldier of Polish ancestry.After school she becomes a teacher, but she struggles with a largeclass on unruly children. She goes on to university, but quicklybecomes disillusioned with an institution which she sees asnothing more than a factory preparing students for industry. She isalso at odds with the purely scientific, materialist view of life, putforward by her teacher, Dr. Frankstone. How can she find meaningin her life? Then, while she is she examining a unicellular organismmoving around under her microscope she has a revelation.

It intended to be itself. But what self? Suddenly in her mind theworld gleamed strangely, with an intense light, like the nucleusof the creature under the microscope. Suddenly she had passedaway into an intensely gleaming light of knowledge. She couldnot understand what it all was. She only knew that it was notlimited mechanical energy, nor mere purpose of self-preserva-tion and self-assertion. It was a consummation, a being infinite.Self was a oneness with the infinite. To be oneself was asupreme, gleaming triumph of infinity.40

Viewing this tiny organism in the microscope, she becomesconscious of a universe beyond the humdrum everyday world ofhuman society and convention. To be herself, with completefreedom, should be her aim in life. At the same time, she realisesthat there is more to life than the materialist view proposed byFrankstone. There is a mystical aspect to existence, in which theindividual is united with the infinite. In her new, independentstate, she rejects Skrebensky’s proposal of marriage, and at thevery end of the novel the appearance of a rainbow after a stormrepresents an archway “through which Ursula may step to herunknown, open future.”41 Ursula Brangwen’s story is taken up in

40 Lawrence, The Rainbow (ref. 37), p. 439.41 Kate Flint, “Introduction,” in D. H Lawrence, The Rainbow (Oxford: OxfordWorld’s Classics, 1997), pp. vii–xxiii, on p. xxi.

Women in Love (1920), but this later novel is regrettably free of anymicroscopy references.42

A writer who had little success with microscopy was theAmerican humourist James Thurber (1894–1961). His hilariousautobiography My Life and Hard Times (1933) includes a chapter“University Days” which describes his struggles. Thurber had pooreyesight, due to a childhood injury, and as a result could not seeplant cells though his microscope. This enraged his professor: “‘AsGod is my witness, I’ll arrange this glass so that you see cellsthrough it or I’ll give up teaching. In twenty-two years of botany, I—.’ He cut off abruptly for he was beginning to quiver all over . . . ”

(Fig. 10). Eventually Thurber adjusts the microscope so that he cansee what he believes is a plant cell, but when the professor looks athis drawing he explodes: “‘That’s your eye!’ he shouted. ‘You’vefixed the lens so that it reflects! You’ve drawn your eye!’”43

Thurber never did pass his botany course.

42 D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008).43 James Thurber, My Life and Hard Times (New York: Perennial Classics, 1999), pp.65, 67.

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To summarise then, we have seen how microscopy and thepublication of Micrographia inspired the great eighteenth centurywriters Swift and Voltaire to play with changes of scale in theirfiction, although Gulliver’s experiences in Brobdingnag seem toreflect a widely-held revulsion at what the microscope mightreveal. The microscopy references in George Eliot’s Middlemarchexemplify the “interpenetration of literature and science” in thenineteenth century, an interpenetration which even extended intothe world of fairy fiction. In the early twentieth century, H. G.Wells’s Ann Veronica and D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow both featurefemale microscopists. However, as noted above, there appear to befewer recent examples of microscopy in literature. Possibly thisreflects the professionalisation of today’s science and the greaterseparation of the “two cultures.”44 In the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries it seems that artists and scientists interactedmuch more closely than they do today, and science was practisedas much by amateurs as by professionals. Thus, a writer like GeorgeEliot could take time out from writing Middlemarch by looking atbiological specimens in George Lewes’s microscope. By contrast,few contemporary writers can have experienced at first hand thewonders of modern microscopy. Nevertheless there are a fewhopeful signs. John Holmes has pointed out that poets in particularhave been taking a “more and more lively interest” in the work andworking methods of scientists over the last 25 years.45 Two of thepoets he mentions, the Czech Miroslav Holub (1923–1998) and theAustralian Judith Wright (1915–2000) have both written aboutmicroscopy. Holub’s poem Evening in a Lab beautifully captures theagony and ecstasy of scientific research:

The white horse will not emerge from the lake

(of methyl green),

the flaming sheet will not appear in the dark field condenser.Pinned down by nine pounds of failure, pinned down by half aninch of hope46

Judith Wright’s poem Alive describes how the experience ofviewing a live biological sample under a microscope produces asudden flash of insight which recalls that of Ursula Brangwen:

Locked in the focussed stare

of the lens, my sight

flinches: a tiny kick.

The life in me replies

signalling back

“You there: I here.”What matters isn’t size.47

The microscopist and the specimen are united, she seems to besaying, in being alive.

44 C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2012).45 J. Holmes, Science in Modern Poetry: New Directions (Liverpool: LiverpoolUniversity Press, 2012), p. 3.46 Miroslav Holub, Sagittal Section: Poems, New and Selected (Oberlin, OH: OberlinCollege Press, 1980), pp. 83–84.47 Judith Wright, Alive: Poems 1971-72 (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1973), p. 28.

To finish, I reproduce in full a charming 1984 poem, calledsimply “The Microscope” by Maxine Kumin (1925–2014). Writtenfor children, it takes us back to where we began:

Anton Leeuwenhoek was Dutch.

He sold pincushions, cloth, and such.

The waiting townsfolk fumed and fussed

As Anton’s dry goods gathered dust.

He worked, instead of tending store,

At grinding special lenses for

A microscope. Some of the things

He looked at were: mosquitoes’ wings,

the hairs of sheep, the legs of lice,

the skin of people, dogs, and mice;

ox eyes, spiders’ spinning gear,

fishes’ scales, a little smear

of his own blood, and best of all,

the unknown, busy, very small

bugs that swim and bump and hop

inside a simple water drop.

Impossible! Most Dutchmen said.

This Anton’s crazy in the head!

We ought to ship him off to Spain!

He says he’s seen a housefly’s brain!

He says the water that we drink

Is full of bugs! He’s mad, we think!

They called him dumkopf, which means dope.That’s how we got the microscope.48

Acknowledgments

I thank Professor Steven Matthews for alerting me to themicroscopy reference in The Rainbow, and thus giving me the ideafor this article. In preparing the article I benefitted from listening toan episode of the BBC Radio 3 programme “Words and Music,”entitled “Under the Microscope,” broadcast on August 5, 2018. I amalso grateful to Laura Harris for critically reading the manuscript.

48 Maxine Kumin, The Microscope (New York: HarperCollins, 1984).