History of Science and Science Fiction (2023 Victorian Reading Project)

This was the third theme on my Great Nineteenth-Century Reading Project list, but I got a little out of order with my reading in the end, and a little sidetracked with finishing it in the year I’d planned! As with the other themes, there was a mix of fiction and non-fiction in this list, but no poetry.

Reading plan (chronological)

1. Vril: Power of the Coming Race, Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1870)
2. Erewhon, Samuel Butler (1872)
3. “Relation of Art to the Sciences of Organic Form”, in The Eagle’s Nest, John Ruskin (1872)
4. Heart and Science, Wilkie Collins (1883)
5. The Child of the Phalanstery, Grant Allen (1884)
6. St Bernard’s: the romance of a medical student, Edward Berdoe (1887)
7. Mizora: A Prophecy, Mary E. Bradley (1889)
8. The Difference Engine, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling (1990)

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Surprisingly few of this theme’s readings are re-readings (just Heart and Science), as I wanted to try to focus on broader reading rather than covering old favourites, some of which are in the Other Readings list below.

Several of these novels relate to utopian fiction, particularly Vril, Erewhon, and Mizora, which tell the tales of hidden civilisations on earth that have both different mores and scientific advances than our own. These novels sit in a tradition with Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), from which the genre gets its title, Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666), and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). The association of utopias with both eugenics and female empowerment unimagined in “real life” make them fraught texts, and this is particularly true in Vril and Mizora (while Erewhon bears a little more of Swift’s moral exploration into social mores and customs). (On the topic of utopias, we might also look back at Sultana’s Dream from Theme 1.)

The ethics of scientific endeavour (rather than the use of its outcomes, like the Vril force) is a particular theme in Heart and Science, a somewhat odd anti-vivisection novel. It threatens, early on, to be a Sensational novel akin to The Woman in White (1850), with an inheritance causing the ill-treatment or murder of a hapless young woman, but takes a turn with its focus on medical science of the time and the intellectual contest between those who thought vivisection could and could not advance the field. It features a great villain in Benjulia, but I do rather think he could have been better placed in another novel!

Ruskin’s lecture/essay on the relation of science to organic form is one of the ten lectures published as The Eagle’s Nest, first delivered at Oxford. Many of these refer to Ancient Greek virtues, connecting Ruskin’s interest in science with his primary theme of art and classical tradition. (Ruskin’s Queen of the Air lectures on Greek mythology were part of Theme 3.)

I am a big fan of Grant Allen’s work generally, his detective stories (Hilda Wade and Lois Cayley) but also his standalone novels and journalistic writings. ‘The Child of the Phalanstery’ is a short story often read in his collection, Strange Stories, which offers a range of stories on scientific themes (including vivisection, which crops up in “Pausodyne” and “Scientific Observations on a Ghost”), as well as pseudoscientific ones (particularly around race — it has an odd preoccupation with miscegenation that feels distasteful to modern readers). “Child” reflects on a eugenicist community that “releases” children with disabilities through chloroform smothering (not dissimilar to Lois Lowry’s The Giver.)

In St Bernard’s, we have again a story driven by anti-vivisectionist moralising (in this case from Edward Berdoe under the superb pseudonym Aesculapius Scalpel), reflecting on the cruelty of medical experimentation on both humans and animals in the name of advancement. Berdoe was a pharmacist and GP in my neck of the woods in East London, but also a lover of Robert Browning (what person of quality isn’t? I found his Browning Cyclopedia very interesting reading when I was writing my MA dissertation). His own medical practice brought him into contact with poor Londoners who were used for experimentation in hospitals, out of which comes St Bernard’s as a sort of campaigning rally.

Finally, I included the late-C20 Difference Engine because, while I love our current passion for detailed and researched historical fiction, alternative history still feels foundational in some way, perhaps because it illustrates how close we really are still to the nineteenth century through presenting us with difference (pun intended here!). In Gibson and Sterling’s collaboration, enter stage left Byron, finally succeeding in a political career, and Charles Babbage so victorious in his engineering that he reshapes a nation. A cautionary tale about Tech Bros muscling their way into the political sphere, it reflects on the interrelationship not only of technology and power but also how empire is shaped by one and shapes the other. Russia and Britain dominate North America, for example (and perhaps we may one day soon see again a Russian America!). 35 years later, we are both very close to and very far away from the world that Babbage might have built.

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Other possible readings

There are innumerable of other pieces of writing from the period that touch on similar themes. Other suggestions are very welcome in comments, but these are a few:

• The Beth Book, Sarah Grand (1897)
• Various H.G. Wells novels, e.g. The Time Machine (1895)
• Various Jules Verne novels, e.g. Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864/7)
• Gloriana, Or the Revolution of 1900, Lady Florence Dixie (1890) (available online)
• Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1915)