Virginia Richter
According to his biographer, Charles Darwin “was born into Jane Austen’s England” (Browne 1995: 3). While the Industrial Revolution, of which his grandfather Josiah Wedgwood was one of the main protagonists, had been in full swing for several decades by the beginning of the nineteenth century, life in small rural towns such as Darwin’s native Shrewsbury was largely unaffected by industrial development. By the end of Darwin’s life, however, English society as a whole, as well as the daily life of individuals, had been drastically changed by the impact of industrialization. By then,
Britain possessed two-thirds of the world’s capacity for cotton factory production and accounted for half the world’s output of coal and iron, an unmatched degree of industrial pre-eminence. The length of railway track snaking across the countryside doubled from 1850 to 1868. Lawnmowers, water-closets, gas lights, iron girders, encaustic tiles, and much, much more were available to those who could afford them.
(Browne 2002: 3)
From home-based craft to large factories, from water mills to steam engines, from horses and carriages to the railway: no area of life, including domestic arrangements, fashion, and leisure as well as production, trade, and transport, remained untouched by the dramatic technological changes introduced between 1712 – the first steam engine built by Thomas Newton – and, say, the switch from gaslight to electric light around 1900.
Another development during Charles Darwin’s lifetime concerned his own profession. Whereas Darwin started out as, and in many respects remained, a gentleman who pursued “natural history” for the sake of his own gratification, without ever being affiliated with a research institution, by the end of the century not only had his field become “science,” subdivided into separate disciplines such as biology, botany, geology, and so on, but it had also become nearly impossible to work as a scientist without being appointed to a position at a university, laboratory, or other institution recognized by the scientific community. This institutional reconfiguration of science went hand in hand with a shift within its epistemological framework, in the terms of Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, from “truth to nature” to “mechanical objectivity.” The individual personality of the researcher was henceforth to be separated from the object of science, a divide best ensured by the use of mechanical devices of observation and recording: “To be objective is to aspire to knowledge that bears no trace of the knower – knowledge unmarked by prejudice or skill, fantasy or judgement, wishing or striving. Objectivity is blind sight, seeing without inference, interpretation, or intelligence” (Daston and Galison 2007: 17). How incompletely this ideal was realized is shown best by Darwin’s own example. Although the success of his On the Origin of Species of 1859 depended in part on “his earlier work [that] had confirmed his status as a trustworthy ‘gentleman of science’ capable of treating even his own ideas and hypotheses with scepticism, detachment, and critical distance” (Smith 2006: 17), in other words, on a form of scientific objectivity, it was also helped by Darwin’s strikingly idiosyncratic voice, his “presence” in the text.
Besides the pure science pursued at research institutions, there is another branch of science which is often overlooked, perhaps because it precisely does not confirm to the ideals of a pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, mechanical objectivity, and intellectual (and economic) independence. This is the applied science carried out in the workshops and laboratories of privately owned factories. Its goals are pragmatic, and result in the discovery, and finally mass production, of technological innovations such as James Watt’s improved steam engine (1763–75), James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny (1764), and the steam locomotive built by George Stephenson (1829). While industrial experimentation followed the usual precepts of good scientific practice (such as recording every step of an experiment), and, in the early stages, the dividing line between manufacturer and scientist was far from clear, it is distinguished by the fact that personal “wishing or striving”–for gain, success, or simply for getting working results – was an openly acknowledged part of the process.
Since so many of these innovations originated on British soil and, even more importantly, their large-scale industrial production and modern marketing were most vigorously introduced in Great Britain, the Industrial Revolution is widely perceived as an English phenomenon, and perhaps it is not by chance that the great critiques of industrial capitalism and its consequences – Friedrich Engels’s 1845 The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (translated in 1887), Henry Mayhew’s 1851 London Labour and the London Poor, Karl Marx’s theoretical writings – were written in England. However, in the present age of globalization it is useful to remind ourselves that the wave of innovations associated with this period is neither the first nor the last one in human history, nor can it be seen in national isolation. The entrenchment of agriculture between 12,000 and 2000 BCE, and the invention of fired pottery and of technologies for working metal around 6000 BCE, were, in their way, similarly “dramatic,” resulting in an explosion in food production and population that was of at least equal importance in human history as the bio-political changes wrought by nineteenth-century industrialism. But obviously, there are crucial differences between earlier technological upheavals and the one taking place in the nineteenth century, not least the acceleration of information transmission which gave modern industrialism indeed the urgency of a revolution (see Keep 2002).
Several factors contributed to the rapid implementation of industrialism: the increased supply of raw materials (coke, replacing charcoal; iron; cotton), the mass production of goods and machinery, better transport, ready access to capital and labor, modern marketing, and the opening up of new markets. Britain’s rise to the world’s leading industrial nation would not have been possible without access to global trade routes developed during the colonial expansion, and without the colonies as suppliers of cheap raw materials and as outlet markets. However, technological innovation too was a constitutive feature of modern industrialism; not only better machinery as such, but the “improving mindset” of manufacturers, which led to a constant striving for innovation through experiments, and the corresponding willingness to invest – and take risks – in industrial production. The places of production were often places of experimentation; the pioneers of industrialism and their skilled workmen usually had some scientific training, and a wider interest in questions of science. Candice Goucher and Linda Walton stress the close connection between the scientific and the industrial revolutions: “the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led to a new habit of mind: a new way of analyzing practical problems to solve them. Technological innovations took place in spheres far removed from the rarefied and well-educated arenas of abstract scientific philosophy and theory, but they also relied on the research and reasoning skills of science” (Goucher and Walton 2008: 37). In fact, not a few practical inventors – potters, machinists, engineers – were members of scientific societies, as well as employees or owners of factories.
A prime example for the combination of the scientific “habit of mind” with business acumen is Josiah Wedgwood, who was not only the founder of the most successful English pottery works – supplying a clientele from Queen Charlotte to Catherine the Great – but also a member of the Lunar Society, an informal learned society meeting regularly in Birmingham and including Joseph Priestley, Erasmus Darwin, Benjamin Franklin, and James Watt among its members. Wedgwood was thus part of an intellectual network in which Enlightenment philosophers, poets, scientists, manufacturers, and practical inventors exchanged ideas and prepared the ground for the industrial and social transformation of Britain. Not a university-trained scientist, but a skilled craftsman, Wedgwood conducted the development of new products along the lines of controlled experimentation, close observation, and careful recording, forming the basis of good scientific practice. His most important innovation, the invention of jasper – the durable, colored stoneware the classicist design of which is to this day associated with Wedgwood – was the result of infinite labor and patience: “He spent month after month systematically experimenting with new kinds and proportions of clay, mixing them with chemicals, and test-firing the materials at different temperatures, using small, swatchlike samples. As always, he meticulously recorded each step in secret code in his experiment books” (Dolan 2004: 246). Where the procedure is concerned, this practice is indistinguishable from the search for basic principles conducted, for example, in chemistry at that period, but it is coupled with the desire for practical implementation, reliable production, and, obviously, commercial success. In moments such as this, science, industrialism, and capitalism form an intricately linked trinity.
This close connection with scientific practice apart, Wedgwood’s pottery works at Etruria, Staffordshire (founded in 1769), marked the transition from a traditional, pre-industrial family business to a modern industrial enterprise in other ways as well. Josiah Wedgwood’s partnership with a man outside his own family, Thomas Bentley, their incessant introduction of new designs and products, their attention to marketing and branding – a circle mark bearing the names “Wedgwood & Bentley” was one of the first industrial logos, stamped on each piece leaving the works at Etruria – and their search for new, middle-class and international, markets constituted hallmarks of industrialism, together with the “distinctive institution of the capitalist Industrial Revolution,” namely “the factory system of production, whereby workers were herded together in buildings for fixed hours of labour at power-driven machines” (Goucher and Walton 2008: 156). Sociologically speaking, the separation between a domestic sphere (of family life and leisure) and a public sphere (of productive work) was the most important change wrought by industrialism, with far-reaching consequences for gendered and generational practices. Women’s labor and child labor, for example, a matter of course on farms and in small family workshops, were perceived as increasingly problematic after the productive sphere had been designated as “male.”
Although the transition from a pre-industrial economy, where the weaver sat at his handloom in his own cottage, to the industrial factory system was much less homogeneous and teleological than has been suggested in this short sketch, and in some areas pre-industrial practices continued well into the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution was widely perceived precisely as such: as a social upheaval affecting not only the world of commerce, but the whole of British society. The problems resulting from this revolution, often connected to the fact that a corresponding political change was slow to materialize, offered rich food for literary engagements with industrialism.
As Igor Webb has claimed, “any novel written between, say, 1780 and the 1850s bears the impress of and is at its core a response to that transformation of society somewhat inaccurately called the Industrial Revolution” (Webb 1981: 16). He goes on to prove his point by including as avowedly “non-industrial” novels as Jane Austen’s in his study. In a general way, it is of course true that fiction as a cultural practice cannot remain isolated from social processes; therefore, novels written in the industrial age cannot fail to reflect its social impact, and be it by denial – such as Austen’s critical but oblique view of “unrest” disrupting the life of the landed gentry, resolved at the end of her novels in favor of an uneasy social harmony. However, if one looks more specifically at the thematic representation of industrialism in connection with science, it is striking how selective this representation turns out to be, and into what kinds of generic divisions it falls. Industrialism and science are, as I have argued above, closely linked. But in nineteenth-century fiction the two are represented as completely separate entities, and neatly distributed into two different, not to say antagonistic, genres. By and large, industrialism constitutes the setting, and sometimes the explicit main theme, of realist fiction, including the “industrial novel” written by Harriet Martineau, Benjamin Disraeli, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and other authors interested in social and political reform (see Childers 2000; Gallagher 1985; Simmons 2002). Science, on the other hand, belongs to the more spectacular and fantastic realm of Gothic novels and scientific romances, genres characterized precisely by their repudiation of realist aesthetics. The heroics of invention and investment, intimately connected in the social practices of industrialism, apparently could not be represented as a unity in fiction.
The epitome of science in early nineteenth-century fiction, Victor Frankenstein, does not differ so much in his practice from a scientist like Charles Darwin or an inventor like Josiah Wedgwood: he also gathers material, tries it out, varies the components, observes, and records the results. However, the embodiment of this practice by the Gothic scientist is dramatically different, changing the whole epistemological foundation of his endeavors:
I collected bones from charnel-houses; and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame. In a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house, and separated from all the other apartments by a gallery and staircase, I kept my workshop of filthy creation: my eye-balls were starting from their sockets in attending to the details of my employment. The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials; and often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation, whilst, still urged on by an eagerness which perpetually increased, I brought my work near to a conclusion.
(Shelley 1992: 54f.)
Frankenstein represents a perversion of “normal science” in several respects. In the first place, he fails to maintain the objective detachment from the object of his research which is established as one of the prerequisites of science in the course of the nineteenth century. While he isolates himself not only from his fellows, but also from the institution in which scientific experimentation should legitimately be carried out – the University of Ingolstadt, to which he belongs – the description of his bodily reactions shows his too close, too personal involvement with his research. Obviously, his aspiration, the desire to overcome the boundary between life and death and become a “new Prometheus,” producing a “new species [who] would bless me as its creator and source” (Shelley 1992: 54), contravenes the modesty and self-effacement expected from the scientist, in real life ideally represented by Darwin – who depicts himself in his Autobiography as “a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard of intellect” (Darwin 2005: 27), before circumstances and systematic application rather than “genius” transform him into an eminent scientist – but rarely found in fiction. From the point of view of industrialism, possibly the most interesting aspect of Shelley’s novel is the sterility of Frankenstein’s experiment. His creature is a one-off, never-to-be-repeated invention. Even at the creature’s insistent pleading, Frankenstein refuses to create a mate allowing reproduction; in other words, he rejects the “distribution” of his new “product” that would be the rationale of scientific practice within industrialism.
The features found in Frankenstein – the scientist’s self-aggrandizement, his lack of detachment, the ultimate sterility of his experiments, and the antisocial, individualist stance of his undertaking which necessitates secrecy and a withdrawal from society – are typical of representations of science in nineteenth-century fiction, such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde of 1886 and H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau of 1896. Perhaps it is this romantic view – carried over into Victorian literature – of the scientist as a heroic overreacher, pursuing his thirst for knowledge outside of if not against society, that has called forth the generic separation between novels about science and novels about industrialism. The latter are precisely constituted by their commitment to social questions; they are almost by definition condition-of-England novels observing, and experimenting upon, the collective social body (Simmons 2002). However, science does play a crucial role in realist narratives, even if it does not constitute a text’s explicit theme:
Victorian realism was the first aesthetic form in literary history to have systematically incorporated the methods, procedures, and analytical goals of science. It was also the first literary aesthetic to make epistemological methods drawn from science the basis for the formal principle of order within literary works.
(Kucich 2002: 123)
In other words, scientific principles appear on the level of discourse and determine a text’s narrative structure (cf. Levine 2002).
How science affects narrative is best exemplified by a brief look at three realist texts dealing more or less explicitly with industrialism, and featuring the scientific practices of observation and experiment, albeit in widely different ways: Charles Dickens’s Hard Times of 1854, Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South of 1854–55, and George Eliot’s Middlemarch of 1871–72. In Dickens’s novel about the fictional industrial town of Coketown, these features are deployed on the level of characters and events. The chief experiment in the story is Mr. Gradgrind’s new method of education, famously based on positive factual knowledge to the detriment of emotional and ethical qualities. The primary objects of his didactic experiment are the pupils at his model school as well as his own children, while the ultimate goal is a transformation of society in the service of industrial production. His experiment is bound to fail because it is deficient in the primary virtue that should accompany it, detached accurate observation. Despite his commitment to a fact-based utilitarianism, Mr. Gradgrind is not objective enough. He is so wrapped up in his “principle”– “Facts alone are wanted in life. [ … ] This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children” (Dickens 2003: 9), i.e., the pupils at his school – that he quite overlooks the growing misery of his eldest children, Louisa and Tom, resulting in the son’s utter and the daughter’s near ruin.
In the crucial scene in which Louisa has to decide whether to marry the execrable Mr. Bounderby, her father “might have seen one wavering moment in her” (99), but he is blinded by his preconceived theory: “to see it, he must have overleaped at a bound the artificial barriers he had for many years been erecting, between himself and all those subtle essences of humanity which will elude the utmost cunning of algebra” (99). This social experimenter is a bad empiricist: because his concept of life is too mechanical and mathematical, he fails to see the more “subtle essences” detectable only through an organic approach to the living social body. In consequence, the process of discovery is flawed as well: all the disclosures made in the course of the narrative – Louisa’s wretchedness, almost pushing her into adultery, Bounderby’s fraud, Tom’s criminality – come to light not as the results of regulated observation, but through contingent external events. While Mr. Gradgrind is stupefied by the various revelations, they are rather predictable for the reader, in consequence of the narrator’s overt dissociation from Gradgrind’s educational experiment. The narrative voice does not participate in the scientific stance which is confined to the characters’ limited perception of the world, and in fact is a cause of their limitation.
By contrast, the social experiment in Gaskell’s North and South is located in the story as well as in the organization of its narrative structure. On the structural level, the opposition between the industrial North and the agricultural South is seemingly clear cut at the beginning, but, as in a chemical experiment in which two elements are brought together and begin not only to amalgamate but to be transformed in their very substance, binary oppositions – between North and South, but also between factory hands and manufacturers – disintegrate and are replaced by a new state of aggregation. While this structural shift occurs on the level of the narration, within the story it is manifested in a transformation of the characters’ worldview and even their language (Margaret picks up some technical terms, much to the disgust of her London friends, who find industrial vocabulary “vulgar”). The two main characters, Margaret Hale (South) and John Thornton (North), begin by staunchly clinging to their respective semantic poles but soon learn to perceive society as less fixed, as something that can be forged into a holistic organism through growing mutual knowledge. While Dickens’s Gradgrind is cured of his aspirations to experiment with the social body, the manufacturer Thornton, by contrast, progressively adopts the stance of an experimental scientist, careful not to theorize before he has his data.
Following his bankruptcy, caused by strikes, lack of capital, but also his insufficient understanding of the “human factor,” Thornton determines to seek employment as a factory manager, while pursuing a social experiment which is based not on an abstract “principle” and on deduction –“I can depend upon myself for having no go-ahead theories that I would rashly bring into practice” (Gaskell 2008: 431) – but on observation and induction, namely on “cultivating some intercourse with the hands” (431). In contrast to the methods employed by fictional scientists such as Frankenstein and Dr. Moreau, Thornton’s practice is diffident, fumbling, collective, and driven by modest goals:
I am not sure of the consequences that may result from [these experiments]. But I am sure they ought to be tried. I have arrived at the conviction that no mere institutions, however wise, and however much thought may have been required to organise and arrange them, can attach class to class as they should be attached, unless the working out of such institutions bring the individuals of the different classes into personal contact. … A complete plan emerges like a piece of machinery, apparently fitted for every emergency. But the hands accept it as they do machinery, without understanding the intense mental labour and forethought required to bring it to such perfection. But I would take an idea, the working out of which would necessitate personal intercourse; it might not go well at first, but at every hitch interest would be felt by an increasing number of men, and at last its success in working come to be desired by all, as all had borne a part in the formation of the plan.
(Gaskell 2008: 431f.)
The result is not an efficient social machine in the service of industrialism, as in Gradgrind’s vision. Rather, industrialism is harnessed to social welfare, and the intercourse between manufacturers and workers is transformed from the impersonal to the personal. Thornton no longer perceives society as “machinery,” but as an organism whose living parts have to “grow” together.
The concerns of George Eliot’s Middlemarch are not far removed from Gaskell’s, but the scientific disposition – embodied in the story by Lydgate – is deployed even more strongly on the level of narration. While industrialism is not the central theme of Middlemarch, the action unfolds against the backdrop of industrial change and social unrest. The provincial town of Middlemarch, with its textile industry and its agricultural hinterland, constitutes a microcosm closely observed by the narrator:
Even with a microscope directed on a water-drop we find ourselves making interpretations which turn out to be rather coarse; for whereas under a weak lens you may seem to see a creature exhibiting an active voracity into which other smaller creatures actively play as if they were so many animated tax-pennies, a stronger lens reveals to you certain tiniest hairlets which make vortices for these victims while the swallower waits passively at his receipt of custom.
(Eliot 1987: 83)
The narrator appears here as a detached observer, seemingly fulfilling the requirements of “mechanical objectivity” posited by Daston and Galison: it is the quality of the apparatus rather than the scientist’s personality that yields accurate results. However, objectivity understood as “blind sight, seeing without inference, interpretation, or intelligence” (Daston and Galison 2007: 17) would, according to Eliot’s narrator, “be rather coarse”–inference, interpretation, and intelligence are precisely what is needed to make sense of the “vortices” animating, and disrupting, the biotope under observation. As Sally Shuttleworth has argued, in Eliot’s mature works the scientifically minded narrator is more than a passive transcriber of an objectively perceived reality: “The scientist does not merely record; he actively constructs a schema within which his observations are placed. Such an act of ‘make-believe,’ or heuristic construction, threatens the comforting conception of science as the unquestionable transcription of the unchanging external world” (Shuttleworth 1984: 1). The complex narrative of Middlemarch thus functions as a vast experiment in which the focus does not lie, as in Hard Times and North and South, on the development of individual characters, but on their interconnectedness, on the social structure as such – to the point where individual autonomy, a concept otherwise dear to nineteenth-century fiction, is challenged and the individual strands of the story are totally subordinated to the narrative experiment: “each part of Middlemarch life is related to every other part; individual identity is not only influenced by the larger social organism, it is actively defined by it” (Shuttleworth 1984: 143).
In Eliot’s description of the animated water-drop, society is imagined not as one organism – implying a hierarchical albeit malleable structure – but as a fluid medium in which tiny paramecia move and interact without a predetermined direction. In contrast to Dickens’s and Gaskell’s view, Eliot’s metaphor suggests that the social “body” is not a unified – or potentially unifiable – organism but an unsettled biotope, churned up by the contingent movement of its inhabitants. In fact, this image is close to Darwin’s view of a population modified by the collective and relational effects of natural selection, not necessarily resulting in perfect adaptation and stability:
As natural selection acts by competition, it adapts the inhabitants of each country only in relation to the degree of perfection of their associates; so that we need feel no surprise at the inhabitants of any one country, although on the ordinary view supposed to have been specially created and adapted for that country, being beaten and supplanted by the naturalised productions from another land.
(Darwin 1859: 472)
This phrase is strikingly echoed in the narrator’s comment on the gradual transformation of Middlemarch under the auspices of industrialism:
Old provincial society had its share of this subtle movement: had not only its striking downfalls … but also those less marked vicissitudes which are constantly shifting the boundaries of social intercourse, and begetting new consciousness of interdependence. Some slipped a little downward, some got higher footing: people denied aspirates, gained wealth, and fastidious gentlemen stood for boroughs; some were caught in political currents, some in ecclesiastical, and perhaps found themselves surprisingly grouped in consequence; while a few personages or families stood with rock firmness amid all this fluctuation, were slowly presenting new aspects in spite of solidity, and altering with the double change of self and beholder. … Settlers, too, came from distant counties, some with an alarming novelty of skill, others with an offensive advantage in cunning.
(Eliot 1987: 122)
While some of the old inhabitants are “beaten and supplanted by the naturalized productions from another land,” others, such as Dorothea Brooke, find that their personal development has limits imposed by “the degree of perfection of their associates,” that is, by collective imperfection. A specifically Darwinian outlook thus constitutes the matrix for the novel’s action, while the narrator, in the role of the active but simultaneously detached experimenter and commentator, adheres to a more general scientific epistemology that could be called “critical objectivity,” in modification of Daston and Galison’s “mechanical objectivity.” Of the three realist novels discussed here, Middlemarch is the one most deeply steeped in the scientific epistemology of its time, allowing it to unfold on the levels of characterization, story, and narration (see also Beer 2009). As a general conclusion, it can be stated that despite the generic partitioning observed initially, science, industrialism, and narrative forge a close link in nineteenth-century British literature – put differently, that there is an essential connection between narration and epistemology even if this is not explicitly broached on a thematic level.
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