Adelene Buckland

Novel Science:Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology

Novel Science is the first in-depth study of the shocking, groundbreaking, and sometimes beautiful writings of the gentlemen of the “heroic age” of geology and of the contribution these men made to the literary culture of their day. For these men, literature was an essential part of the practice of science itself, as important to their efforts as mapmaking, fieldwork, and observation. The reading and writing of imaginative literatures helped them to discover, imagine, debate, and give shape and meaning to millions of years of previously undiscovered earth history. Borrowing from the historical fictions of Walter Scott and the poetry of Lord Byron, they invented geology as a science, discovered many of the creatures we now call the dinosaurs, and were the first to unravel and map the sequence and structure of stratified rock. As Adelene Buckland shows, they did this by rejecting the grand narratives of older theories of the earth or of biblical cosmogony: theirs would be a humble science, faithfully recording minute details and leaving the big picture for future generations to paint. Buckland also reveals how these scientists—just as they had drawn inspiration from their literary predecessors—gave Victorian realist novelists such as George Eliot, Charles Kingsley, and Charles Dickens a powerful language with which to create dark and disturbing ruptures in the too-seductive sweep of story.

The Poetry of Science: Charles Dickens, Geology, and Visual and Material Culture in Victorian London

DESPITE THE WELL-ESTABLISHED CONNECTIONS between Dickenss novels and Victorian popular entertainment, and between Victorian show business and the display and dissemination of science, critics have not yet explored the possible links between scientific shows and Dickenss fiction. Work on Dickens and science has proliferated since George Levines work in Darwin and the Novelists, but its central problem has been the fact that, as Francis O’Gorman described it, Dickenss scientific reading was “nugatory” (252). The most well-represented branch of science on his bookshelves was natural history; in even this, Dickens displayed only the “intelligent interest that would be expected of a man of the world” (Hill 203). Levines influential “one culture” model surmounted the problem by pointing out the similar structural patterns implicit in the worlds described by Dickens and Darwin, but in an attempt to develop more direct links between Dickenss work and evolutionary science, almost all subsequent studies have focused on Dickenss 1860s novels, written after the publication of the Origin of Species (1859) (Morris 179–93; Fulweiler 50–74; Morgentaler 707–21). There has not been a study that explores Dickenss acquaintance with natural history at different points in his career, or through the visual and material cultures with which he was so familiar.