Victorianism MA

Intellectual Background Science

• Thomas Arnold: „the atmosphere of paradox hanging around many of our ablest young men of the present day” (1838)

Academic/scientific life• 1826: University of London• 1854/1856: University Acts• Royal Institution• the British Association for the Advancement of

Science (BAAS – 1831)• Natural History Museum (Kensington, 1881-86)• Magazines, industrial centres• Humphrey Davy – Michael Faraday• Scientific societies

Science

• David Friedrich Strauss: Das Leben Jesu (1835—tr. George Eliot 1864)

• Mary Somerville: On The Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1834)

• Charles Lyell: Principles of Geology (1830-33)

• (Philip Gosse: Omphalos [1857])

Charles Darwin (1809-82)

• Darwin: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859)

• Darwin: The Descent of Man (1871)

Evolution• Preceding notions:

– Divine Creation– Carl Lynnaeus: taxonomy– Transmutation (Lamarck: will/habit/consciousness/intention→

change), transformation, metamorphosis

• Mankind put back to nature; ecological interdependence• Against fixity of species• Foundational notions: hyperproductivity, variability,

natural/sexual selection, struggle for life• Emphasis on individual differences (vs. type) – not normative• Competition (basis for social Darwinism)• Adaptation/interaction (a web of complex relations – bw.

species, individuals within species, the environment)

George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

• “Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. Even Science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe unit, and must fix on a point in the stars’ unceasing journey.”

Darwin and literature• Narrativity, metaphoricity• Bildungsroman, condition of England novel,

social novel– part and whole– George Eliot: Adam Bede, Daniel Deronda, Mill on

the Floss, Middlemarch• Naturalism (Zola, Maupassant, Hardy)

– Determinism– Environment– „blood”