Charles Dickens, Man of Science

Abstract

Though there is now a vast body of work detailing Dickens's extensive interests in contemporary science, technology, and medicine, still there is an overriding sense that Dickens was in energetic contact with scientific knowledge but had no precise role in its constitution, creation, or contestation. In this essay, I argue instead that Dickens was one of the most powerful communicators of scientific knowledge in the mid-Victorian period. Drawing on James A. Secord's model of “knowledge in transit,” the idea that the content of scientific knowledge is arrived at at the same time as audiences for knowledge are constituted or imagined, I also argue that Dickens had a significant role to play in shaping the practices, objects, and values of scientific work. If we have lost sight of this Dickens, I argue, it is because the kinds of science he advocated and the power he wielded threatened other literary-scientific practitioners—including G. H. Lewes—who reshaped Dickens's reception in ways that suited their own aims and agendas. Dickens—a vocal exponent of mesmerists, spontaneous combustionists, sanitary campaigners, early-development hypothesizers, and fantastical engineers—had a far more direct and central role in scientific culture than has yet been understood.

Analyzing the Influences on Women’s Upbringing and Their Educational Significance Using the Case of Estella, the Heroine of Great Expectations

“…Estella, who has matured and developed a sense of self, is still worrying about such trivialities as men and children even after her self-awakening. Although she has thrown off the shackles of the others, she is still trapped in that time, in the judgment of the male gaze [12] . This is a problem that male writers tend to encounter when portraying women; being male, they may not face the same issues that women have faced in their lifetime, so they do not have the means to empathize with those sufferings, nor do they have the means to put them into words.…”