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

Abstract

DESPITE THE WELL-ESTABLISHED CONNECTIONSbetween Dickens's 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 Dickens's fiction. Work on Dickens and science has proliferated since George Levine's work inDarwin and the Novelists, but its central problem has been the fact that, as Francis O’Gorman described it, Dickens's 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). Levine's 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 Dickens's work and evolutionary science, almost all subsequent studies have focused on Dickens's 1860s novels, written after the publication of theOrigin of Species(1859) (Morris 179–93; Fulweiler 50–74; Morgentaler 707–21). There has not been a study that explores Dickens's acquaintance with natural history at different points in his career, or through the visual and material cultures with which he was so familiar.

Introduction: Dickens, Science and the Victorian Literary Imagination

“…Her own work, however, focuses on 'the importance of material and visual cultures', another previously neglected area, where she demonstrates that Dickens and his contemporaries not only learnt about science by reading; they also attended, in huge numbers, popular shows -panoramas, dioramas, and exhibitions, as new museums opened through the century -which presented different and competing versions. 7 When Dickens describes his visit to Vesuvius in Pictures from Italy (1846), it is not to academic work on volcanoes that he turns, but to the vivid images of popular shows of catastrophe -'A Rapid Diorama'. Indeed, much scientific literature was accessible to ordinary readers with little or no specialist knowledge and the most important discoveries and developments were popularised and widely disseminated.…”