Anne DeWitt, Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel.

Jones, Anna Maria

Anne DeWitt, Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013), 287 pp., $95.00 cloth.

Anne DeWitt's Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel joins a well-established field of Victorian science and literature studies. Countering the truism that the "two culture" division between the sciences and humanities, which C.P. Snow famously described in his 1959 essay, "The Two Cultures," is a post-Victorian phenomenon, and that the Victorians experienced their science and literature as "one culture," DeWitt argues that agents in both scientific and literary fields sought to acquire moral authority and to professionalize and that these concomitant efforts often put men of science at odds with literary men (and women). One of the book's major interventions is to complicate the assumptions of many Victorianist scholars about professionalization in both scientific and literary fields. She usefully reminds us, first, that the two fields did not professionalize in the same way and, second, that what we even mean by "professionalization" is up for debate: "The process of professionalization is itself invariably complicated, slow, and irregular, and historians give different, even conflicting, accounts of how, when, and why it occurred in literature and science" (9). To circumvent the difficulties posed by these conflicting accounts, DeWitt follows Jan Golinski in rejecting a focus on professionalization in favor of attention to the "process of 'identity formation"' (10), a formulation that Golinski attributes to Mario Biagioli, who, in turn, draws on Pierre Bourdieu's notion of "fields." DeWitt does not herself explicitly track back to Biagioli's or Bourdieu's thinking about the formation of scientific fields and the strategic movements of agents therein, and it would, perhaps, have added some theoretical depth to her analysis if she had. Nevertheless, DeWitt's attention to "how scientific practitioners and novelists thought about who they were and what they did" provides a fruitful framework for the book (11).

While acknowledging her debts to "one culture" studies, Gillian Beer's Darwin's Plots and George Levine's Darwin and the Novelists among them, DeWitt suggests that the intersections of Victorian science and literature entailed much more agonistic policing of boundaries than symbiotic intermingling. DeWitt takes her cue from Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best who call for scholars to dispense with the "symptomatic reading" that characterizes many Foucauldian studies of Victorian literature: analyses that read literature within larger social discourses and that seek to uncover the hidden "symptoms" of its ideological investments. Marcus and Best's description of "surface reading" sets the parameters for DeWitt's method, which "attend's] to the science that appears on the surface of the novel--characters who practice or study science, fictional conversations about science, narrative comments on or references to science" (6). She likewise finds Caroline Levine's notion of "strategic formalism" useful for considering not just how scientific and literary practitioners defined themselves but how these definitions so frequently depended on binary oppositions and exclusions, particularly those that pitted the feminine realms of romance and domesticity, the bailiwick of the novel, against (masculine) intellectual labor and professional ambition in scientific fields. Just as women were increasingly excluded from scientific pursuits as those pursuits became more professionalized, so novelists increasingly represented men of science as deficient in moral and ethical matters, the foundations upon which the novelists based their own professional expertise.

Drawing on a wide range of textual examples, from novels to essays, reviews, personal journals, and letters, DeWitt traces intersections (or, more accurately, collisions) between scientific and literary pursuits through five chapters. The chapters are arranged chronologically, so the relationship between the two pursuits is presented as a progressively agonistic one. Chapter One offers a survey of prominent men of science who attempted to "establish science as an authority capable of transcending spheres, an authority relevant to the private life of the individual" (15). In Chapter Two DeWitt examines George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell, arguing that scientific pursuits are much more closely tied to interpersonal relationships and moral and aesthetic pursuits in their works than they will eventually become for later novelists. As she claims, "Eliot and Gaskell's exposure to a preprofessional natural history leads to their belief in science as a moral endeavor and their integration of science and the novel" (15); yet, Eliot's later fiction, especially Middlemarch, shows the wider divide between scientific pursuits and the romance plot that feature in late-Victorian novels. These later, more vexed relationships between science and romance are the subject of her remaining three chapters. Chapter Three looks at Thomas Hardy's fiction, particularly Far from the Madding Crowd and his lesser-known Two on a Tower. She argues that the split between the feminine, which is aligned with moral and interpersonal concerns, and the masculine, which is tied to cold rationality and scientific ambitions--the same binary that begins to develop in Eliot's later fiction--finds its fuller expression in Hardy: "[Hardy's] novels develop the pessimistic implications of the universe's vastness and its entropie doom. [...] For Hardy, imagining the larger universe leads to a conviction of humanity's insignificance and is therefore morally injurious," an effect "especially acute in the case of professional science, which pursues knowledge for its own sake" (16).

Chapter Four covers a dozen anti-vivisection novels, with particular focus on four by Leonard Graham, Wilkie Collins, Edward Berdoe, and Florence Marryat. The figure of the sinister male vivisector in these novels stands in opposition to the morally superior, and often imperiled, heroine. But, DeWitt claims, anti-vivisection activists opposed on moral grounds not just the practice of vivisection but science more broadly. Chapter Five is a discussion of H.G. Wells, who was himself tom between scientific and literary pursuits. She argues that Wells treats artistic aestheticism as an analog for professional scientific detachment from real-world, ethical concerns; ultimately, Wells finds value in "true science and true art," which "lies in their ability to provide widely useful ways of thinking" (200), as opposed to the narrowly solipsistic art of the aesthete or selfishly isolated work of the professional man of science. An epilogue extends DeWitt's discussion of her topic into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, beginning with Snow's landmark "Two Cultures" essay. This brief summary will perhaps suggest some of the strengths, and also shortcomings, of DeWitt's work.

It is refreshing to see some lesser-known authors and works--the anti-vivisection novelists, Gaskell's Wives and Daughters, and Hardy's Two on a Tower, for example--alongside the "usual suspects," such as Eliot's Middlemarch (in relation to G.H. Lewes' natural history work). Although she does discuss Darwin at length, especially in Chapter One, the focus throughout is on how Darwin's reviewers and biographers constructed his persona as moral paragon, thus "putting Darwin into a widespread convention of the morally outstanding man of science" (64). This is a useful addition to the already-rich discussion of his evolutionary theoretical works and their influences in Victorian culture. In fact, although DeWitt doesn't really draw attention to this aspect of her research in her introduction, her analyses of the representations of science and its practitioners in the periodical press is one of the book's real strengths. She provides numerous examples from familiar periodicals, such as G.H. Lewes' "Sea-Side Studies," which ran in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, and T.H. Huxley's article on Darwin in Macmillan's Magazine, and more esoteric journals such as the The Zoophilist, the publication of the Society for the Protection of Animals Liable to Vivisection. These juxtapositions of texts create vivid snapshots of the various ways that agents in literary and scientific fields staked their claims. Likewise, her discussion of the public and professional interest in the 1874 and 1884 transits of Venus provides crucial background for Hardy's astronomical novel, Two on a Tower.

Given how wide-ranging DeWitt's analysis is, and how meticulously she tracks the personal and public statements of her scientific and literary authors as they worked to establish themselves and their works within their various intersecting fields, it seems a bit unfair to complain about what is not in the book; however, the analysis does feel a bit uneven in places. Narrow focus on one or two authors in some chapters (e.g. Chapter Three and Chapter Live) allows for much closer attention to textual details; broader surveys in others (e.g. Chapter Two and Chapter Lour) mean that individual texts get a somewhat cursory treatment. For example, all of the anti-vivisection novels in Chapter Four are treated in the final twenty-two pages of the thirty-eight-page chapter, while the first sixteen pages provide a discussion of vivisection debates in the periodical press. In light of the book's commitment to "surface reading" as a critical mode, finer-grained analysis of the individual novels would have been welcome, though the coverage of the speeches and periodical literature is, as already noted, one of its strengths.

There were also some important figures conspicuous in their absence from Moral Authority. For instance, although DeWitt mentions briefly Huxley's negative review of Lewes' Comte's Philosophy of the Sciences, she does not venture into a discussion of that philosophy itself, which held such sway over so many prominent Victorian thinkers during the period that she discusses. Given that Comtean Positivism sought to establish science as a moral authority, this seems an odd elision. One wonders how Harriet Martineau, as a woman intellectual, a Positivist, a proponent of minute social-scientific observation, and a sometime-novelist, would fit into the schema that DeWitt provides. Likewise, DeWitt's decision to exclude the Gothic, which she explains in the Introduction, is understandable, given the broad scope she undertakes; nevertheless, I am not altogether persuaded by her claims that "Gothic fiction is [not] directly engaged with the claims that men of science were making about science and moral character" or that "the science in Gothic fiction is not science at all" (19-20). Finally, while there are many different kinds of science practiced by the real and fictional figures DeWitt discusses--natural history, physiology, physics, astronomy, medicine, etc.--she tends to use "science" as a catch-all term that elides distinctions among these different disciplinary branches, including their various antecedents, philosophical bents, investments in practical outcomes, and rates of professionalization. Is the vivisectionist's callousness more egregious than the natural historian's myopia or the astronomer's farsightedness because his discoveries have more immediate medical and social ramifications? And would more attention to disciplinary specificity challenge the progressive narrative that the book tells of the development of agonistic relationship between the "two cultures"?

Still, one of the marks of fruitful scholarship is its ability to elicit questions and desires for more discussion from its readers, so these queries may be taken as evidence of its thought-provoking and suggestive argument rather than as serious flaws. Readers will find much to value in Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel.

Anna Maria Jones

University of Central Florida