Noah Heringman
The most famous Romantic scientist, Victor Frankenstein, set out to reject the old practice of natural philosophy for the new practice of chemistry. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Victor refers to each of these practices as a “science,” but the meaning of that word changed radically during what is now called the Romantic period (roughly 1780–1830). Young Victor’s fascination with sixteenth-century works on alchemy, cosmology, and medicine merely increases when his father rejects these antiquated writings as “sad trash” (Shelley 1818: 67). Only his professor, M. Waldman, manages to persuade Victor that “modern chemistry” is more powerful than the occult science of the Renaissance (76). Equipped with Waldman’s inspiring lectures and two years of intensive training, Frankenstein embarks on a project that nevertheless harks back to the pagan and magical elements of early modern natural philosophy: creating human life. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s preface to his wife’s novel already registers what has proved to be a long-standing concern with the plausibility of Victor’s undertaking in the context of modern science. The preface cites Erasmus Darwin and other authorities to support the idea that Victor’s discovery of a means of “bestowing animation upon lifeless matter” (80) could be an “event … not of impossible occurrence” (47).
The practice of galvanism, as Shelley suggests in her own introduction to the novel in 1831, might also be seen as corroborating Frankenstein’s ability to endow his Creature with the “spark of being” (84) – memorably imagined as a jolt of electricity in various film adaptations. The popularizer of galvanism, Giovanni Aldini, made a murderer’s corpse twitch violently by subjecting it to electrical shocks in a celebrated public experiment in London in 1802, when Shelley was five. Despite these and many other traces of the novel’s engagement with issues belonging to the history of modern science, the fact remains that Shelley provocatively collapses the boundary between pre-modern and modern science. Professor Waldman and his real-life counterpart, the chemist Humphry Davy, distinguish carefully between modern chemistry and the mystical practices of the alchemists who came before them. Nonetheless, Frankenstein fails to make that distinction, or loses sight of it, when he conceives his overweening, metaphysically tinged experiment.
Frankenstein remained a powerful figure in the Hollywood era because the novel and the Romantic literary culture associated with it were recognizably poised on the brink of an understanding of science that remained familiar to twentieth-century readers. Romantic science was pre-disciplinary. By the time James Whale made Frankenstein in 1931, Davy had been firmly canonized as one of the “distinguished discoverers” (76) who founded modern chemistry. Natural philosophy had been largely consigned to a prescientific past. But Waldman still refers to chemistry as only the most developed “branch of natural philosophy” (77), and Davy, known by chemists today for his pioneering discovery of sodium and potassium, presented himself as a philosopher in his writings and his popular public lectures.
Though later used to describe him, the word “scientist” was coined only in 1833, four years after Davy’s death. On one hand, then, the self-understanding of modern science was underway by the time the novel was written; two prominent historians have argued that that self-understanding was consolidated by the “second scientific revolution,” occurring around 1800, in which Davy played an important role (Cunningham and Jardine 1990: xix–xx). On the other hand, Romanticism – not just in Great Britain, but in Germany and other countries – was still a culture of science (meaning simply “knowledge”) that was driven by competing literary and philosophical models of nature. Mary Shelley questioned the narrative of revolutionary progress by pointing out that modern chemists, like the alchemists, still pursued knowledge as power. For Davy, even though he was a champion of scientific progress, the continuity between natural philosophy and chemistry was just as important as the rupture between modern and pre-modern practices.
Davy’s philosophical chemistry, Shelley’s imagined laboratory, the evolution of the encyclopedia, German Naturphilosophie, geological explanations of the sublime, the advent of scientific voyaging, the craze for natural history – all these Romantic-era developments can be fruitfully understood in terms of pre-disciplinarity. This is not to dismiss the period’s burgeoning network of methods for producing natural knowledge as crude or incomplete by comparison to our current, seemingly orderly, landscape of university disciplines. Though the case can be made for their objects of study, there is nothing natural or inevitable about biology, anthropology, and the other disciplines themselves. Unlike the term “chemistry,” the term “biology” was not yet in general use when Mary Shelley was writing her novel (Lawrence 1819: 42), “geology” was still controversial (Rudwick 2005: 448), and “sociology” would not appear in English until 1842 (OED). The disciplines that preceded them understood themselves equally as disciplines: the precursor disciplines still active in the Romantic period, such as natural history and anti-quarianism, were all the more complex and diverse because they operated outside the university, through informal networks and learned societies.
The pre-disciplinarity of Romanticism as a culture of science is a vital context for the formation of current (twenty-first-century) disciplines. The critic Clifford Siskin has described a movement of “dedisciplinarity,”“a shift in the ways of knowing from the older organization, in which every kind was a branch of philosophy, into our present system [of] narrow but deep disciplines” (Siskin 1998: 20). By attending to pre-disciplinarity we can see that there were in fact multiple “ways of knowing” and that the shift to modern disciplinarity was neither sudden nor uniform, nor (even now) complete. “Natural philosophy” as used by Shelley and Davy remained a valid synonym for the physical sciences through 1900, but most of those who practiced natural history and antiquarian research in the field recognized no affiliation with philosophy, following instead the seventeenth-century empirical tradition of Francis Bacon.
The relationship between Romanticism and science has gained renewed visibility from the cultural turn in the history of science. As historians develop narratives of science pursued in “particular social locations” (Secord 1986: 318), their work becomes increasingly valuable for students of literature seeking to understand cultural production in broad terms. Inspired by theorists including Bruno Latour and Lorraine Daston, literary scholars have increasingly contributed to the cultural history of science as well. Historians began rejecting “Whiggish” histories of science – that is, histories favoring the theories or methods that most closely resemble current scientific practice, while discounting others – as early as the 1960s (Jardine 2003), but the flourishing interdisciplinary scholarship of recent years has shown even more decisively that no modern discipline can dictate the terms for understanding the discipline that preceded it.
Romanticism has a long history as an “extrascientific” term (Kuhn 1970: 4) used to describe a culture of science. Recently there has been more consensus that Romanticism is not “extrascientific” at all, but rather designates cultural and political inspirations that acted on all aspects of intellectual life. In Germany, where the term “Romanticism” was current from the late 1790s, and motivated new philosophies of nature (e.g., Schelling 1797) that set out to unify the arts and sciences, the “Romantic” and “scientific” ideas of nature were linked from the start. In the anglophone context, where “Romanticism” was only applied retrospectively to poets of the French Revolutionary era, the presupposition of a conflict between Romanticism and science was much stronger. The distinguished literary critic and historian of ideas Marjorie Hope Nicolson challenged this presupposition and spent her career arguing that scientific discovery inspired many of the poems of Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, and their predecessors. Nonetheless, the many studies of these poets (along with Blake, Coleridge, and Shelley) that defined the field of British Romanticism until the 1990s rarely touched on science, and this omission was reflected as well in classroom anthologies and syllabi.
Recent contributions to Romantic studies have directed attention back to the other forms of natural knowledge – including those now understood as scientific – that coexisted with Romantic poetry and fiction. The competition over nature has been situated more firmly in its broad European and colonial context (Bewell 2004) as well as in a social framework that understood “literature” as referring to all forms of writing (Siskin 1998). This picture is emerging in studies of the encyclopedia and encyclopedism; in the recovery of neglected writers such as Jane Marcet and Charlotte Smith, and of boundary-crossing figures such as Darwin and Davy; and in studies of colonialism and exploration. The rich multidisciplinary scholarship on exploration, especially on the perennially fascinating career of Captain Cook, has created a new focus for the study of Romantic subjectivity.
George Forster and Alexander von Humboldt were two of several naturalist-explorers who achieved scientific fame by means of Romantic first-person voyage narratives. The new global natural history cultivated by these explorers has been of particular interest for students of Romanticism, who have traditionally focused on representations of nature associated with the cosmopolitan and increasingly secular literary culture of the period. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, long considered the “father of Romanticism” (Barzun 1975: 18), promoted the practice of botany along with the interrelated ideas of the “noble savage” and a return to nature in the setting of a sublime, untainted natural landscape. Forster, Humboldt, and the others who cultivated botany, zoology, and mineralogy (the three traditional branches of natural history), had Rousseau’s ideas among their equipment; they integrated a colonial ethnography of noble and ignoble savages into the practice of natural history.
The large body of writers and readers who voyaged with them in reading their narratives helped fuel the popularity that led Robert Ramsay to exclaim: “Natural History is, at present, the favourite science over all Europe, and the progress which has been made in it will distinguish and characterise the 18th century in the annals of literature” (Ramsay 1772: 174). Natural history belonged equally to literature and to science: some readers might have seen a contradiction here by the end of the Romantic period, if only because the sheer volume of data gathered in the intervening decades by collectors worldwide had forced the kinds of specialization that led to such distinctions and, eventually, to the formation of new disciplines. Many of the collectors, including Thomas Pennant, of whom Ramsay is speaking here, were followers of Carolus Linnaeus, whose System of Nature (1735) introduced the system of classification that motivated the collecting enterprise. A century later, on the Beagle, Charles Darwin was still collecting distant fauna, flora, and minerals in the Linnaean tradition; and though his Origin of Species (1859) is a theoretical work drawing its examples mainly from zoology, he refers to his scientific practice as “natural history” throughout that work.
Darwin’s “romantic materialism” (Beer 1983: 42) is the legacy of the global zoology of Pennant and Johann Reinhold Forster; the botany of Sir Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander; and the earth science contributions of collectors ranging from Banks to Mary Anning. According to Foucault’sinfluential history of ideas (1970), the dynamic study of organisms – biology – began to supersede the taxonomic enterprise of natural history when Georges Cuvier systematically compared fossilized skeletons, supplied by collectors like Mary Anning, with the skeletons of living animals. Cuvier, the celebrated genius of Revolutionary and Napoleonic Paris, gave a course of public lectures on “geology” in 1805, using his knowledge of fossils to fuel controversy about this newly named and still contested science (Rudwick 2005: 447). Humphry Davy also gave a course of public lectures on geology in London the same year. It was the first such course in English.
The resurgence of interest in natural history among students of Romanticism, solidified by an important classroom anthology (Nichols 2004), makes it tempting to think of natural history as the quintessential Romantic science. However, chemistry may have an equally strong claim. Humphry Davy appears in retrospect as the quintessential Romantic scientist – or philosopher, as he would have said – an appearance surely reinforced by his association with Frankenstein’s professor, M. Waldman. Like Cuvier, he was a lionized celebrity as well as an official in institutions closely linked to the power of the state, such as the Royal Society, of which he became president in 1820. Davy’s name was always known to students of Romantic poetry because of his friendship with Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Robert Southey: the latter two participated in his experiments with nitrous oxide at the utopian Pneumatic Institution run by Dr. Thomas Beddoes, where he began his laboratory career. He proofread Lyrical Ballads (1800) for Wordsworth and Coleridge, as he remained in Bristol (where the book was published) after they moved north to the Lake District.
Davy also wrote poems on such Romantic themes as “The Sons of Genius,” and later, Mont Blanc; at one point he planned to publish a volume of these poems, and Southey included a selection in the Annual Anthology for 1799. Some of Davy’s writing in his lectures, given when he was Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution (1801–12), is even more vivid and powerful than these early poems. In one lecture that (in published form) attracted the ambivalent fascination of Mary Shelley, he wrote of his ambition to “interrogate nature with power, not simply as a scholar … but rather as a master, active with his own instruments” (Davy 1839: 2.319). Jan Golinski’s Science as Public Culture illuminates the political currents of revolution and reaction at work as Davy’s interests shifted from ameliorating social conditions through medical chemistry, to consolidating the influence and prestige of science as a profession (Golinski 1992: 176–203).
Davy was a standard-bearer for the new chemistry, for genius and the sublime in nature, and for the reaction that swept up many intellectuals formerly caught up in the utopian energy surrounding the French Revolution. He was also a natural philosopher for whom the history and methodology of a science were crucial to its practice; his ten lectures on geology, for example, include three that trace the history of the science from Pythagoras through James Hutton (Davy 1805: 24–57). This emphasis on auto-historiography, sometimes called “Romantic reflexivity,” has long been noticed by students of Romanticism, and links Davy more strongly with the German Naturphilosophen (such as Schelling and Lorenz Oken) than is generally recognized. At the same time, Davy’s strong and continuing identification with chemistry illustrates the break-up of natural philosophy into specialized modern disciplines. Davy’s science, then, like Cuvier’s, is recognizably pre-disciplinary, and the comparison illustrates the way in which the conflict between natural history and natural philosophy was gradually resolved.
Sir Joseph Banks, who collected with Cook in the South Pacific, was also the president of the Royal Society whom Davy succeeded in 1820. Banks’s celebrated achievements in the field of natural history, as well as his social position, accounted for his early rise to power in the Royal Society and, eventually, within the government of George III as well. In the early years of his presidency he had many detractors who charged him with ignorance of natural philosophy, in their view a more rigorous discipline that conserved the legacy of Sir Isaac Newton, who had also been president of the Royal Society (Heringman 2009). Outside the walls of the learned society, natural history was a truly popular practice by this time, for reasons ranging from the economic motives of self-taught rural fossil hunters to the sociality of “artisan botanists” (A. Secord 1996) and to the lavish display cultivated by the Duchess of Portland, whose famous collection included some of Banks’s South Pacific specimens. Charlotte Smith defended natural history, as a literary and socially inclusive practice, against the encroachment of new “theories” in her long “local poem” Beachy Head (1807). Nature poets, including Smith and John Clare (proponents of natural history), Erasmus Darwin (a natural philosopher), and Wordsworth (who claimed neither affiliation), all participated in the pre-disciplinary ferment surrounding the project of natural knowledge.
Though Davy and Banks now appear as Romantic scientists, public response at the time, before the word “scientist” was available, was varied and complex. Davy, Banks, and many other public intellectuals were polymaths who made substantial contributions across the arts and sciences, extending the old network of European learning known as the “republic of letters.” To look for a quintessential Romantic science is thus to miss the point: Romanticism, in the process of re-emerging as a culture of science, has been associated with a wide variety of disciplines and disciplinary changes, including emerging disciplines such as ethnography and meteorology, disciplines in flux such as medicine and natural history, and disciplines that have since disappeared, such as physiognomy and phrenology. The period’s polymathic intellectuals were understood and claimed in different ways by different constituencies.
The poetry of Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743–1825), always attuned to scientific questions because of her upbringing at the Warrington Academy, provides a valuable record of imaginative engagement with figures and issues now absorbed into the history of science. A closer look at works from two different phases of her career will help establish the contours of one broad constituency within the public culture of Romantic science. Surveying the intellectual scene in 1811, Barbauld cited Davy for eloquence first and discovery second. In the future, she imagined, the Royal Institution would be remembered as a “site” of “glory,” “where mute crowds on Davy’s lips reposed, / And Nature’s coyest secrets were disclosed” (Barbauld 1994: 157–58). She takes the same occasion to redeem Joseph “Priestley’s injured name,” a name that would have been familiar to some of her readers from her own much earlier poetry, published in 1773, in which she celebrated Priestley’s genius (now primarily associated, like Davy’s, with chemistry).
Priestley was, like Barbauld’s father, John Aikin, a tutor at Warrington Academy, and by 1773 was well on his way to becoming one of the most distinguished experimental natural philosophers of the generation that preceded Davy’s. He was also, like Barbauld’s father, a dissenting minister (that is, of a sect that did not conform to the Church of England). Aikin was Presbyterian, Priestley a Unitarian, and the academy or college where they taught, located between Liverpool and Manchester, provided an advanced secondary education to young men who were barred from attending Oxford or Cambridge because they too were Presbyterians, Unitarians, or Quakers. The institution prided itself on emphasizing “the most useful branches of Science and Literature” in its curriculum (Enfield 1774: iii), which covered not only ancient Greek and Latin literature, the staple of public school education, but also chemistry, anatomy, and English literature. The Speaker (1774), an elocution textbook written for the students at Warrington by William Enfield, another one of the tutors, went on to become a classroom standard and stayed in print for the better part of a century. The Speaker sets out to teach “reading and speaking” by substituting “classics” of English literature for the ornamental knowledge of classical antiquity often associated with upper-class education. By including Barbauld’s poem “The Invitation” (retitled “Warrington Academy”), Enfield’s anthology also gave readers an overview of the other forms of useful knowledge that defined the academy’s middle-class curriculum.
“The Invitation” (1773) is one of several early poems by Barbauld to insist on the proximity of arts and sciences, an association developed in several of her prose works and echoed in her later reference to Davy’s eloquence. These poems regularly refer to Priestley, who joined the Warrington faculty in 1761 as a lecturer in languages and belles-lettres. In her serio-comic “Inventory of the Furniture in Dr. Priestley’s Study,” Barbauld describes the many manuscripts that testify to Priestley’s prolific writing career, as well as the instruments he used in his experiments on electricity, published in 1767 as The History and Present State of Electricity. Priestley’s own teaching was mainly literary, but in 1767 the Academy appointed a new tutor in modern languages and natural history: Johann Reinhold Forster, who later sailed with Captain Cook. “The Invitation,” which apostrophizes the academy as a “nursery of men for future years” (Barbauld 1994: 11, l.82), places significant emphasis on natural history and natural philosophy as part of the curriculum.
Barbauld depicts Warrington students who “rove” among the willows by the river Mersey, unfolding the secrets of nature, and with them the “eagle wings” of “science,”“too long” restrained by the “bigot rage” of conservative institutions (ll. 95–100). Here Barbauld allies exploration and discovery with poetry and literature against superstition: “Where science smiles, the Muses join the train” (108–9). The poem joins an Enlightenment view of scientific progress with the academy’s educational program, which empowers middle-class students as it symbolically elevates the humble Mersey, which now “dares to emulate a classic tide” (90). Barbauld ends her catalogue of the students’ future careers (133–82) with the conventional choices of politics, poetry, and divinity, but first dwells, significantly, on exploration and discovery. In the nationalist and masculinist context of the poem, the specimens and commodities gathered by voyagers appear as colonial “spoil” (150), while the study of botany, entomology, and nature’s “various laws” is figured as a predatory pursuit in which naturalists “disrobe” and “hunt” a feminized nature (155–62). This early poem articulates the social importance gradually assumed by scientific education, distinct but not divorced from literature, during the Romantic period. It also betrays the strong association between scientific progress and the exploitation of nature, an association closely linked to the ideology that Mary Shelley critiques in Frankenstein.
Barbauld’s numerous poems addressed to Priestley and natural philosophy cultivate a different set of associations, a connection between experimentation and liberty – both intellectual and political – that also belonged to the Enlightenment and was reinforced by Romantic enthusiasm for the French Revolution. In this light, the pursuit of natural knowledge appears progressive and undercuts the dualistic construction of exploitative vs. holistic views of nature. In “The Mouse’s Petition,” she speaks for an animal she “found in a trap where he had been confined all night by Dr. Priestley, for the sake of making experiments with different kinds of air [gas].” The mouse presents his petition as one of “nature’s commoners” resisting “oppressive force,” suggesting in mock-heroic terms the progressive politics she sees as an obligation of experimental research. A related poem replaces feudal “arms and conquest” with “Liberty” as a more appropriate symbol for “the sons of science and the Muse” (Barbauld 1994: 36).
Barbauld anticipates the connection between electric “lightning” and liberty that became associated with the career of Benjamin Franklin, who provided valuable encouragement when Priestley met him in London in 1766. By 1791, when the government was encouraging patriotic protests against the French Revolution, liberty had become so dangerous that this association nearly cost Priestley his life. Barbauld stood by him, however, in a new poem advising him that the “hooting crowds” that burned his house in Birmingham were not worthy even of his scorn (Barbauld 1994: 125). Barbauld’s continued defiance of the government’s war on France and repressive measures at home in Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (which again redeems “Priestley’s injured name”) provoked savage and insulting reviews. Barbauld’s participation in the culture of science was by no means limited to her association with Priestley, though these poems provide a convenient index to the changing political status of natural philosophy. “A Summer Evening’s Meditation,” for example, develops an independent and challenging vocabulary concerning the “embryo systems and unkindled suns” of astronomy (Barbauld 1994: 83).
Barbauld’s poetry, as well as her prose, helped to refocus the term “science” and thus contributed to a major shift in its meaning. As a woman writer participating in the culture of science – albeit in specific ways defined more or less by her gender – Barbauld also contributed to the expanding field of possibility for women writers, occupied by Mary Shelley later in the period. In her prose, Barbauld helped establish didactic science writing as a scientific practice that was permissible for women, a larger development explained by Barbara Gates and Ann Shteir (1997: 7). Her influential essays of this kind include “The Hill of Science” (1773) and a number of pieces on natural history in the collection Evenings at Home (1792), which she co-authored with her brother, John Aikin, “for the instruction and amusement of young persons.”
Since the 1980s, literary history has increasingly been reorganized around the “domestic ideology” of separate spheres for men and women, and many critics have grappled with the implications of what seem at times to be two distinct, gendered literary cultures. Two cultures separated in a different way are the subject of C.P. Snow’s The Two Cultures of 1959, which describes a deep rift between science and literature as they were practiced in academic circles in the mid-twentieth century. Gates and Shteir’s historical model dovetails these two cultures with two cultures of gender, aligning nineteenth-century scientific women with natural history and didactic writing, and male “scientists,” as they came to be called, with modern science. Barbauld and Charlotte Smith are among the Romantic poets who anticipate this division; Smith wrote didactic works on natural history but also asserted herself, in Beachy Head, as a serious practitioner of that discipline. In her poetry, Barbauld depicts herself as a commentator rather than a practitioner. In “A Summer Evening’s Meditation,” in particular, she embarks on an imaginary cosmic voyage of the kind made popular by early eighteenth-century poets such as James Thomson, who launched his career with “A Poem Sacred to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton” (1727).
Mark Greenberg (1990) has cited the example of Thomson to argue that the “two-cultures” model of literature and science was well established long before the Romantic period. The opposing “one-culture” model promoted by scholars such as Gillian Beer (1983) and George Levine (1987) designates, in part, the survival of a common humanistic culture that defines the work and the reception of Romantic natural history and natural philosophy. There is also a sense, however, in which the “one-culture” concept was reformulated, if not constructed, during the Romantic period. The professional expertise that seemed to define the “emerging institution” of science (Greenberg) in Newton’s time became a contested commodity, as we have seen, during Banks’s and Davy’s terms as presidents of the Royal Society. The pre-disciplinary organization of natural history and natural philosophy collapsed under this pressure, and the terms “science” (redefined) and “scientist” (new) gradually came into play as the terrain of natural knowledge was reconfigured. Barbauld’s realignment of “science” with the Muses and with liberty constitutes a significant early intervention in this process; Charlotte Smith’s declaration, “very vain is Science’s proudest boast,” marks another, later kind of intervention (Smith 1807: 233). Greenberg, in an earlier essay on the poetry of William Blake, observed that “‘Science’ becomes for Blake a kind of demonic synecdoche – the whole word symbolizing only a part of its former meaning” (Greenberg 1983: 125).
Blake had fewer readers at the time than either Barbauld or Smith, but his massive influence in the twentieth century may well have contributed to the impasse described by Snow’s The Two Cultures. The hostility to science that, according to Snow, characterizes modern “literary intellectuals” is often linked with Romanticism by way of a famous line from Wordsworth’s poem “The Tables Turned”: “we murder to dissect.” Those using the line in this way tend to forget that this poem also declares, “Enough of science and of art,” a sentiment that captures something of our post-disciplinary discourse concerning a “third culture.” Snow’s paradigm of two cultures has long been superseded by more complex ideas in science studies, but its specter continues to haunt the antinomian controversy often referred to as the “science wars.” Neither Wordsworth nor any other Romantic went so far as to deny the transhistorical validity of scientific knowledge, nor did any apologist at that time propose to absorb the humanities into science. These two extreme views are both end-products of the pre-disciplinary flux that flourished as Romanticism, in which the concepts of science and the scientist were the subjects of a generative public discussion that was in some ways both more subtle and more accessible than our own.
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