Review of Fact and Feeling: Baconian Science and the Nineteenth-Century Literary

One of the latest developments in the history of ideas is the history and philosophy of science, and its increasing relevance to readers of Victorian literature is evinced by this work There is now a school of thought within George Eliot scholarship devoted to the scientific elements in her work, established by U. C. Knoepflmacher and consolidated by Gillian Beer and Sally Shuttleworth. The use of the philosophy of science as a tool to examine literary texts entails the meeting of two not antithetical disciplines, and offers a new viewpoint on Eliot that is peculiarly appropriate to a writer who was so well versed in the scientific revolutions of her era. Smith examines science as part of cultural discourse rather than as in an antagonistic relation with literature. It is evident that the Leweses were not party to such a dualism, Eliot and Lewes being equally concerned with finding a legitimate basis for knowledge, which involved them in the Victorian debate over scientific method. Smith sees this debate in terms of a revision of Bacon\u27s careful inductive method to fit the needs of an era of expanding knowledge. Now we can recognize that the characterization of nineteenth-century \u27scientific method\u27 as one of objectivity is incomplete. Lewes and Eliot sought to legitimize the workings of the imagination in the formation of knowledge. Lewes wrote about hypothesis and the scientific imagination: \u27the experiments by which the problem may be solved have to be imagined; and to imagine a good experiment is as difficult as to invent a good fable\u27. This might be compared with Eliot\u27s description of the scientific imagination in Middlemarch Chapter 16 as \u27the inward light which is the last refinement of Energy\u27 . As literature sought to reach the authority of science, scientists moved closer to claiming the use of the speculative imagination. According to Smith, the Victorians regarded science as characterized by its distance from sense impressions. However, the increasing awareness of the subjectivity, and consequently the partiality of the observer transformed forever the paradigms of scientific methodology. Whewell\u27 s criticism of Baconian empiricism that observations are necessarily inaccurate is illustrated in Eliot\u27s concrete metaphor of the pier-glass

University of Adelaide, Seventeenth Australasian Victorlian Studies Conference Report

The seventeenth conference of the Australasian Victorian Studies Association was held at the University of Adelaide in February 1996. The conference theme \u27The Victorians and Science\u27 inspired several papers on George Eliot\u27s relation to matters scientific. Barbara Garlick (Senior Tutor, University of Queensland) examined passages from Daniel Deronda in her paper \u27George Eliot\u27s Optics and the Solidity of Objects\u27“. Dr. Garlick premissed her account of Eliot\u27s optics on Lewes\u27s theory of vision as a psychological act which interiorizes the external world according to intuitions and ideas. Vision was used to demonstrate how ways of seeing structure the narrative as they do the self, and how, according to Eliot, the role of the novelist is to \u27make ideas incarnate\u27. The world of Daniel Deronda seems predicated on right seeing, and it is dominated by visual metaphors. Chapter 54 alone contains more repetitions of the word \u27image\u27 than anywhere else in the novel. What Dr. Garlick called Eliot\u27s \u27highly developed pattern of techniques of seeing\u27 is especially vivid in the metaphors used in Chapter 23, where Gwendolen is \u27undeceived\u27 in her ambitions to take to the stage by Klesmer, who brings together Gwendolen\u27s surroundings which she thinks she is master of, and her inward chaos. At the chapter\u27s end the physiological condition of Gwendolen\u27s eyes allows her to see mnemonic aspects of her being as if they were objects, part of a \u27departing fair’. In \u27The Message of a Magic Touch: Middlemarch and the Ether\u27 Thomas Hoy (PhD Candidate at La Trobe University) explored the epistemology of Middlemarch. The characters all fail in their attempts to find unitary theories of knowledge, yet the narrator wants to attain a suffusive sense of interconnection. Hoy reads Eliot\u27s \u27troublous, fitfully embroiled medium\u27 in terms of nineteenth-century ether theory, which satisfied the Victorians\u27 desire for monisms. It was an imaginative construct which allowed continuity between material and non-material order. It is an arduous invention like Lydgate\u27s. Like the scientific theory of ether, Eliot\u27s web is an imaginative fiction, a working theory uniting the psychological and physical structure of the world

Sites of Consciousness in George Eliot's Early Novels

In my thesis George Eliot's Natural History of Common Life I examine Eliot's working method for viewing human nature, a method which evolved out of her interests in contemporary developments in philosophy and science. Eliot's method attempts to identify a moral sense as the product of specifically human intellect and feeling. For Eliot, the development of a moral sense is the ideal end of human and individual development. However, the possibility of regress is inextricably linked to the inevitability of progress, and she imbues the landscape with this conflict at several points in her early novels

The Critical Response to George Eliot

The appearance of a new anthology of George Eliot criticism would need to justify its place on the shelf beside the indispensable collections of essays assembled by Gordon S. Haight, D.R. Carroll, William Baker, Barbara Hardy and K.M. Newton. However, so much valuable and interesting Eliot criticism has been published in the past two decades that there is still room for a critical revaluation of this work. Karen Pangallo\u27s George Eliot: A Reference Guide, 1972-1987 (Boston: G .K. Hall, 1990), is evidence of her knowledge in this area. However, the gap for a good selection of recent Eliot criticism is not filled by her new compilation. The volume\u27s title suggests that it is a comprehensive reference work; instead it contains mostly undistinguished recent essays on some of George Eliot\u27s best known novels (the book does not cover Scenes of Clerical Life, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, or any of the poetry), complemented by a selection of extracts taken from contemporary reviews and The George Eliot Letters. The only quotations from George Eliot are minor excerpts from the letters, and some background about the correspondents would be useful to those readers who are unfamiliar with Eliot\u27s life. The exclusion of Eliot\u27s own essays, reviews and translations is also to be regretted. In her introduction, Pangallo explains that her book attempts to demonstrate how Eliot\u27s contemporaries and critics of the 1970s to the 1990s all respond to the same theme, \u27the self within society and its interconnections\u27 (1). This is so general a theme as to cover more or less everything; Eliot\u27s readers find her novels interesting for more specific reasons than this. Pangallo\u27s justification for the principle on which her book is organized is that her theme \u27speaks to Eliot\u27s readers then and today\u27 (7). This is limp beside the vitality of the books themselves