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Published in the United States of America by the University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America c Printed on acid- free paper 2020 2019 2018 2017 4 3 2 1 A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging- in-Publication Data Names: Karpenko, Lara Pauline, editor. | Claggett, Shalyn R., editor. Title: Strange science : investigating the limits of knowledge in the Victorian Age / Lara Karpenko and Shalyn Claggett, editors. Description: Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016035928| ISBN 9780472130177 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780472122455 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Science— Social aspects—Great Britain—History— 19th century. | Science—Great Britain—History— 19th century. | Great Britain— History— Victoria, 1837–1901. | Parapsychology—Great Britain—History— 19th century. Classification: LCC Q127.G5 S77 2017 | DDC 509.41/09034—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016035928 Foreword Dame Gillian Beer ••• In this volume, Strange Science , the editors Lara Karpenko and Shalyn Claggett emphasize the borders of investigation in their subtitle, Investigat- ing the Limits of Knowledge in the Victorian Age . “Limits” here are subjects for fresh investigation rather than clamping containers. Beyond the current limits are thriving new territories, or delusive dream countries. This pow- erful collection gathers examples of both. But a number of the essays also make it clear that even work that fails or where the procedures are chaotic and the assumptions doubtful may eventually find some presence in later discoveries. Work that challenges dominant assumptions may provoke dif- ferent kinds of insight from more orthodox workers over time. Science is preoccupied with discovery and with justification. To that degree, all science seeks the strange. When found, the aim is to find a place for the discovery within the known system or, more radically and more rarely, to change the system. The struggle between novelty and affirmation of the known gives the zest to much scientific work. It demands cautious procedures and audacious guesses at the same time. Innovation and repetition are both essential. That much can be said of scientific work across fields and across time. But there are major dif- ferences between the practices of knowledge- seekers in the nineteenth century and the present day. One difference is the emphasis then on individual investigation rather than teamwork and the somewhat belat- vi • Foreword ed arrival later in the century of university laboratories with an array of instrumentation. The essays here are concentrated in Britain so that the research cultures described are those of people in Victoria’s reign, living with- in arguments and assumptions about empire, gender, and class that may—or may not—be unfamiliar now. Most of the people discussed in this book could assume a postal system that in London made deliveries at least ten times a day; they took for granted prodigious letter writ- ing and intricate face-to-face contacts within social groups. Even within this kingdom diverse methods and enquiries were being pursued. The sheer variety of research cultures in different parts of the British Isles during the nineteenth century has been explored in the collection of essays edited by David N. Livingstone and W. J. Withers, Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science 1 Empire produced some hierarchical delusions but it also propelled British people across the world and gave many an intimate familiar- ity with places remote from these islands. The passion for collecting, whether birds’ eggs or butterflies, stones or big game, seems to have been unhampered by qualms about its effects. It ravaged some species; it also allowed an exquisite awareness of minute differences from exam- ple to example. It fueled taxonomic sophistication and it gratified the urge to possess, which is always a tempered or intemperate element in knowledge-gathering. The rich array of general journals, many of which discussed scientific matters alongside political, literary, and local issues, meant that the sciences were present in ordinary conversation among the educated. Geoffrey Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth demonstrated that in their edited collection Science Serialized: Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals and in their website Science in the Nineteenth- Century Periodical . Shuttleworth is now leading a major investigation, “Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the Nineteenth and Twenty-first Centuries,” which is producing fresh knowledge about the contribution of amateurs to scientific projects in the Victorian era as well as in our own. 2 There is room for much more work on the contribu- tions of Victorian working people to scientific knowledge-gathering. How, then, to distinguish between scientific work familiar and strange, orthodox and odd? As the collection of essays makes clear, some enquiries that may now seem strange were, for a time at least, accepted as potentially mainstream science. The most famous of these is spiritual- ism, with the careful, even skeptical, evidence-gathering of the British Society for Psychical Research drawing in important scientists such as Foreword • vii the distinguished chemist and physicist Sir William Crookes. The Soci- ety’s Phantasms of the Living , as L. Anne Delgado comments, shows “the unsteady nature of both human perception and the knowledge that per- ception itself produces.” Nevertheless, their use of witness statements chimes with current interest in individual accounts of phenomena, and their concern with perceptual bias even connects forward to some of the preoccupations of neuroscience now. And mesmerism, as Karpenko’s essay suggests, has never gone away. Strange science has a way of leaving traces for later workers to pur- sue. As Barri Gold points out, the continuity between traditional and more exotic theories relies on “the principle . . . that what we learn or hypothesize about the natural world must be consistent with what we already know,” which “constrains and shapes any paradigm shift within the sciences.” Yet what we know about the natural world is itself shift- ing; indeed, exploring and opening up those shifts is a fundamental and central concern of scientific enquiry. It becomes clear that no easy and permanent boundaries exist between the sober known and the extreme imagination. W. K. Clifford, whose geometric Clifford algebras now underpin many advances in physics and computing (though they were beyond the capacity of most of his contemporaries), asked his contem- poraries in the 1870s to question even the uniformity of nature and to be skeptical of induction since there may always be another case not yet known or encompassed by the definitive current laws. Clifford was mar- ried to the novelist Lucy Lane Clifford and himself enjoyed writing fairy stories. His central demand was for the constant testing of belief by evi- dence. This demand does not exclude imagination. Like John Tyndall, another foresighted thinker whose work is alluded to in a number of the essays here, Clifford emphasizes the uses of imagining. He writes: “The scientific discovery appears first as the hypothesis of an analogy; and sci- ence tends to become independent of the hypothesis.” 3 Before science can detach itself from the hypothetical, it must work through guesses and analogy. Though hypothesis may be superseded, analogy persists as a tool for understanding similarities, and for measuring differences. So in Victorian scientific writing, as the contributors to this collec- tion often brilliantly show, disciplines, systems, boundaries, fields, and the constraints of gatekeeping lie alongside overlaps, leakages, struggles, analogies, and fault lines. All these terms appear in the current collec- tion, and together they aptly suggest the degree of reciprocity between way-out and conventional thinking in the period. The editors have orga- nized the volume under the topics of plants, bodies, and energies, and viii • Foreword the three parts address different subjects of scientific enquiry. Their con- cerns are coherent with each other. One of the most fascinating outcomes of collecting together these essays by diverse hands is that certain works emerge strongly in different essays and begin to suggest fresh patterns for understanding scientific controversies of the period. One such work is Balfour Stewart and Peter Guthrie Tait’s The Unseen Universe, or Physical Speculations on a Future State (1875) This popular and notorious work (denounced by materialists such as Tyndall and Clifford) was authored by well-respected physicists. Indeed, Tait was the close friend and major correspondent of the great mathematical physicist James Clerk Maxwell. Their argument attempts to recuperate energy and to point beyond entropy. They use rhetoric and evidence and analogies between systems of very different scale to argue for an eventually Christian universe. Strange science, it’s clear, was produced by orthodox scientists as well as by intelligent and trained out- siders such as Annie Besant, who repudiated many of the methods of sci- entific proof, and whose insights fueled thinking well past her lifetime, as Sumangala Bhattacharya here argues. The relatively slight presence of women workers among the topics of essays here (Marianne North and Annie Besant being honorable excep- tions) is of course symptomatic of the exclusion of women from universi- ties, societies, and public scientific laboratories in the Victorian period. When the British Association for the Advancement of Science decided not to admit women as full members, they nevertheless did open their lectures to both sexes, and women were an important part of their audi- ences. Popularizing was considered suitable for women writers, and perhaps partly for that reason their work would not figure in the outer reaches of enquiry but would stay close to orthodox science. Recent investigation has reminded us of women whose research was both cen- tral and innovative, such as the mathematician and electrical scientist Hertha Ayrton, even if their social position in relation to other scientists was peripheral. A particular gain of the collection is the emphasis on forgotten aspects of well-known scientists’ work. Francis Galton, famous as statis- tician and eugenicist, here emerges in Danielle Coriale’s essay as a pio- neer in the study of deafness and “the auditory imagination.” The Bell family, well before the phonograph and the systemization of phonet- ics, were involved in extraordinary demonstrations of “Visible Speech.” James Emmott’s essay describes in lucid detail “how the fields of physi- ology, phonetics, and phonography are mutually determined in the Foreword • ix 1860s and 1870s, and how each draws on a shared understanding of articulatory performance.” Read the essay to discover why this is such a thrilling insight. Respect for unexpected or unconsidered sources of experience and intelligence fuels the volume. This is very striking in the first part, on plant life and Victorian excitement about the senses and the erotic life of plants. Plant intelligence is the special theme of these essays, and as Eliz- abeth Chang observes: “To imagine how the organic world imagines the human is also to confront the limits of the possibilities of imagination.” Lying behind that fascination, and that tonic realization of human limits, is the work of Erasmus Darwin in his poem The Loves of the Plants (1790) and his scholarly prose work Zoonomia (1794–96), which developed the theory of a common ancestor behind all living things and emphasized variability and evolution as a precursor to his grandson Charles Darwin. Even more, Erasmus Darwin developed an understanding of the sense- life of plants and its capacity to cast light on human senses. He was much mocked among his contemporaries. His work now stands as an example of strange science become familiar, and yet still with the capacity to sur- prise. That resilience is shared by a number of the figures discussed in this stimulating volume. Failure is not shameful when the work has been ardently pursued and the whole collection reminds us that enquiries that run askance the current norm may yet open unforeseen pathways for future workers. Notes 1. David N. Livingstone and W. J. Withers, eds., Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). See also David N. Livingstone, Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 2. Geoffrey Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth, Science Serialized: Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004); Geoffrey Can- tor and Sally Shuttleworth, Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical , December 18, 2007, http://www.sciper.org/index.html; Sally Shuttleworth, Citizen Science in the 19th and 21st Centuries , http://conscicom.org. 3. William Kingdon Clifford, “Conditions of Mental Development,” Lectures and Essays , vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1901), 92. Acknowledgments ••• We would like to begin by thanking our wonderful contributors for their exceptional scholarship, intellectual generosity, and unfailing good humor. They have all made this process a true pleasure throughout. We are also grateful to the editorial staff at the University of Michigan Press and the anonymous external readers for their helpful and detailed com- ments. Their insight and assistance has been instrumental in helping us revise the collection. Sincere thanks are due to Molly Walsh and Brit- tany Larson, who helped us to prepare the manuscript for publication. We would also be remiss if we did not thank Aaron McCollough for his enthusiastic support of the project in its early stages. We would finally like to thank our families and friends for their encouragement throughout this process. Lara Karpenko thanks her departmental chair, Deirdre Keenan, for her tireless support of her col- leagues and for her boundless enthusiasm. Her mentorship and friend- ship is deeply appreciated. Lara would also like to thank her mother, Christine Karpenko, for instilling an early love of Victorian literature, her father, Leonard Karpenko, for showing her the wonders of science through a telescope, and her husband, William Phelps, for his unfailing love and support. Shalyn Claggett thanks her parents, Sam and Sherrie Claggett; her husband, Matt Lavine; and her best friend, Lucy Canessa. She sincerely appreciates their continual encouragement and moral sup- port in this and all things. Contents ••• Foreword v Dame Gillian Beer Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 Lara Karpenko and Shalyn Claggett Part I. Strange Plants: New Frontiers in the Natural World 1 Victorian Orchids and the Forms of Ecological Society 19 Lynn Voskuil 2 Discriminating the “Minuter Beauties of Nature”: Botany as Natural Theology in a Victorian Medical School 40 Meegan Kennedy 3 “A Perfect World of Wonders”: Marianne North and the Pleasures and Pursuits of Botany 62 Narin Hassan 4 Killer Plants of the Late Nineteenth Century 81 Elizabeth Chang Part II. Strange Bodies: Rethinking Physiology 5 Reading through Deafness: Francis Galton and the Strange Science of Psychophysics 105 Danielle Coriale xiv • Contents 6 Performing Phonographic Physiology 125 James Emmott 7 “So Extraordinary a Bond”: Mesmerism and Sympathetic Identification in Charles Adams’s Notting Hill Mystery 145 Lara Karpenko 8 Immoral Science in The Picture of Dorian Gray 164 Suzanne Raitt Part III. Strange Energies: Reconceptualizing the Physical Universe 9 Chaotic Fictions: Nonlinear Effects in Victorian Science and Literature 181 Barri J. Gold 10 The Victorian Occult Atom: Annie Besant and Clairvoyant Atomic Research 197 Sumangala Bhattacharya 11 Inductive Science, Literary Theory, and the Occult in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s “Suggestive” System 215 Anna Maria Jones 12 Psychical Research and the Fantastic Science of Spirits 236 L. Anne Delgado 13 The Energy of Belief: The Unseen Universe , and the Spirit of Thermodynamics 254 Tamara Ketabgian Contributors 279 Index 285 Strange Science Introduction Lara Karpenko and Shalyn Claggett ••• In an 1872 letter to the London Times , Henry Dircks, renowned engineer and self- described “worker in the sciences,” gently chastises the editor for suggesting “that the time has arrived when scientific men should examine . . . Spiritualism.” 1 Confidently proclaiming that “ no really sci- entific man believes in spiritualism,” Dircks derides the practice as a mere “pseudo-science” and seems to exclude almost any experimental or innovative practice from valid scientific endeavor. 2 But by the end of this letter that began with so much bravado, Dircks surprisingly speculates that one-tenth of spiritualist séances may, in fact, reveal scientific truths and rhapsodizes that “science is beset with . . . great wonders.” 3 Far from drawing hard disciplinary boundaries around scientific practice, Dircks ultimately advances a notion of science that may be consistent and fac- tual but is also aesthetic, poetic, and as magical as it is mathematical. To some extent, Dircks’s career showcases the same disciplinary fluid- ity as his letter to the Times . Though his name may now be forgotten, Dircks’s scientific work can still be seen today at places like Disneyland’s “Haunted Mansion Ride,” which features the translucent stage appari- tion popularly known as “Pepper’s Ghost.” 4 Created through manipula- tions of lighting and mirrored surfaces, “Pepper’s Ghost” was at once the product of scientific advancement and the subject of popular spectacle. Though Dircks proudly defined himself as a “worker in the sciences,” 2 • strange science the very fact that he dedicated his talents to creating a ghostly mirage suggests he was little interested in a scientific career narrowly conceived. Dircks’s stage career and his letter to the Times both indicate that for Vic- torian audiences, thinkers, and scientists, the category of the scientific— even for those who claimed otherwise—was remarkably if not jubilantly unstable and existed in a disorderly space marked by heterodox meth- ods of inquiry. It is within this disorderly space that we situate this volume. The essays in Strange Science investigate the epistemological and aesthetic imagin- ings that occurred in the hazy region between what we would now term “legitimate” and “illegitimate” scientific practice in nineteenth-century Britain. By examining these strange subjects and modes of inquiry, taking them not as foolhardy moments epitomizing the ignorance of a bygone era, but as serious investigations at the limits of knowledge, these essays offer fresh and inventive readings of sciences, texts, and practices that have often been overlooked or forgotten. Strange Science reveals, to use Mary Poovey’s phrase, a “messy history” of scientific prac- tice more fluidly defined, and the volume builds on Poovey’s examina- tion of what she terms the “modern fact.” 5 As Poovey traces the origins of this abstract yet everyday “epistemological unit,” her work puts pressure on the notion that “numbers . . . guarantee value-free description,” sug- gesting instead that even our “most commonplace ideas” have a history (xxv, xiv). The essays in this volume similarly complicate the notion that objectivity, falsifiability, numerical analysis, and scientific endeavor are somehow natural partners. Poovey ends her study in the 1830s when, as she argues, facts effectively came to signal “theory-free representation” (xxv). This volume explores the chronological moment immediately following that of The History of the Modern Fact , investigating an elastic cultural moment: one in which the “fact” existed as a “value neutral and context-independent” concept, but also one in which the “fact” so con- ceived did not necessarily define scientific pursuits. 6 While the essays provide a posthistory to Poovey’s study, they also provide a prehistory to Mel Y. Chen’s twentieth- and twenty-first- century-focused investigation of what she intriguingly refers to as “animacy”—or the “richly affective territory of mediation between life and death, positivity and negativ- ity, impulse and substance.” 7 For Chen, animacy is a “rangy, somewhat unruly construct” that “trouble[s] and undo[es] stubborn binary systems of difference, including dynamism/stasis, life/death, subject/object, speech/nonspeech, human/animal, natural body/cyborg.” 8 The essays in Strange Science offer explorations of similarly “rangy” and “unruly” sub-