History of Science and Science Fiction (Victorian Reading Project)

This was the third theme on my Great Nineteenth-Century Reading Project list, which I started in 2023. As with the other themes, there was a mix of poetry, fiction and non-fiction in this list.

Reading plan (chronological)

Erewhon, Samuel Butler (1872)
Vril: Power of the Coming Race, Edward Bulwer-Lytton (first published anonymously) (1871)
The Eagle’s Nest. Ten Lectures on the relation of Art to the Sciences of Organic Form, John Ruskin (1872)
Heart and Science, Wilkie Collins (1883)
“The Child of the Phalanstery”, Strange Stories, Grant Allen (1884)
St Bernard’s: the romance of a medical student, Edward Berdoe (first published pseudonymously) (1887)
The Difference Engine, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling (1990)

Between starting the Great Victorian Reading Project of 2023 and now, I discovered that I had ADHD, and this explains a lot about how the project is still going after a full 24 months, and not even halfway through. But now that I have diagnosed and medicated ADHD, I hope I might manage to finish this by the end of 2026, so about the length of a typical UK BA degree….

I chose to begin not with the early-nineteenth-century science fiction pioneers like Mary Shelley or even mid-century Jules Verne, but instead with the 1870s. I was particularly interested in starting with some of the fiction that longed for scientifically enabled utopias, in the way that many of our twenty-first-century techbros still do, while placing these as satires of their current social milieu, which many of our twenty-first-century techbros do not. (And it’s their inability to engage with satire or irony that is the tell that they are profoundly unserious people.)

Butler’s Erewhon plays with Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), written in Latin, with the name of the island republic derived from the Greek for no (“ou-”) place (“topos”). Erewhon: or, Over the Range takes us not to an island but a secret valley in an almost-inaccessible region of New Zealand, influenced by Butler’s own sheep-farming there. In Erewhon, illness is criminalised, as one might say it is in some parts of the world today, from the US’ criminal healthcare costs, to the Covid pandemic, to the treatment of disabled people in the UK, both in and outside the workplace. This novel earns its place on this list, however, rather than the disability list, because of its “Book of the Machines”, which explores the idea of AI by combining the concerns (and opportunities) afforded by the Industrial Revolution with Darwin’s ideas in On the Origin of Species (1859). The idea that machines might develop consciousness via natural selection is a troubling one, and although Butler’s contemporary critics initially responded to it as a form of satire of Darwinism via abstraction to absurdity, Butler meant the philosophical question as a genuine one, and this is a probing question for us today as AI develops, featuring evolution of the machines in science-fiction blockbusters like Deus Ex Machina and I, Robot.

As in Erewhon, in Bulwer-Lytton’s Vril there is a love affair between the male adventure and one of the higher-ups’ daughters, but in Vril there is a stark power imbalance. The titular power available to the superior subterranean race that the narrator encounters (the Vril-ya) is a sort of latent, quasi-electrical energy that (spiritually) trained Vril-ya can deploy to heal, destroy, and transmute, both building and destroying cities, and powering mechanical constructions. In their society, women are more sensitive to Vril and stronger and more powerful, making them the pursuers in romantic relationships. Through studying the narrator’s language and customs, Zee becomes romantically attached to him, but her father refuses the request and threatens to destroy the narrator to maintain racial purity. Zee flies him to safety via the mineshaft route that initially brought him to their below-ground home. Back home, towards the end of his life, the narrator begins to worry that in time the Vril-ya will run out of space below ground and will emerge and destroy humanity in the process of colonising the surface. Bulwark-Lytton’s writings about Vril and other forms of latent energy were so compelling that a number of occultists, including the theosophists, took it as a description of a real magical force, as in Helena Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine (1888).

We mostly associate John Ruskin with art and aestheticism, but he had a strong interest in the natural sciences, in part for the improvements that scientific study could bring to artistic representations. For example, he encouraged artists to study topics like botany and optics to more accurately depict natural scenes. Like many of his publications, The Eagle’s Nest reproduces a set of lectures given at Oxford, and he attaches a large chunk of his argumentation to Ancient Greek thought and artistic practices. It is Lecture 3 that begins to explore in detail the titular promise of relating to art and science, under the auspices of wisdom, although here Ruskin uses “the term ‘science’, merely as the equivalent of ‘knowledge’” (Helpful, John! Helpful!), but he does address topics like the natural sciences and optics, for example in Lecture 6. He takes a rather tragic position that pure mathematics has nothing to do with art—which I would dispute!—but raises some interesting philosophical questions about what we see, person to person, but also compared to animals with different ocular powers. Although perhaps not the most thrilling read from start to finish, this collection of essays/lectures illustrates one of the main concerns of the Victorian age, and indeed our own: what is the purpose of science?

Unlike the earlier fiction on this list, Heart and Science and The Child of the Phalanstery are situated more fixedly within Victorian Britain but continue to play with the questions of individual and social strength and virility.

Heart and Science has as the dark secret of its Sensation Fiction the vivisection work of Dr Benjulia. It features a number of characters who are medically frail in some fashion, including the protagonist doctor, Ovid Vere, and his love interest, Carmina Graywell. I’m afraid I can’t experience characters with names like Carmina without thinking of Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), but there is a medical, not supernatural, reason for the fainting fits of Carmina. On his travels in Canada, Ovid becomes acquainted with anti-vivisection treatises that he begins to find compelling, and when he returns home to help save Carmina (neither Dr Benjulia nor the family doctor, Dr Null, being especially effective), he brings this tract with him and attacks Dr Benjulia’s projects as doomed to failure, prompting him to destroy his laboratory and commit suicide.

“The Child of the Phalanstery”, a short story within Strange Stories, draws heavily on Grant Allen’s journalistic writing about poor London communities and explores the ethical quandaries of eugenics and the wider ethical questions of parenthood. Is it morally right to have children, full stop? Children with challenging health conditions? But, as the narrator of the story says in the second prefatory paragraph, how would managing that work in practice, as “I’m not so sure, after all, that we should be altogether the better or the happier” if decisions were taken about who reproduces or lives based on these ‘health’ questions. Set in a phalanstère (a self-contained utopian community working for mutual benefit, developed by Charles Fourier), the social good is much debated and takes precedence over the personal will. Olive, the beloved of Clarence, asks herself these questions and follows her heart, as many frail women of Victorian fiction do, with the inevitable consequence (death in childbirth that also kills her child). In a few pages, Allen draws neatly the emotional dilemma that motivates ‘irrational’ choices and the difficulty of imposing ‘rational’ thought on a population at an individual level.

St Bernard’s is an unusual novel, printed first under the pseudonym Aesculapis Scalpel, and concerning the medical student Harrowby Elsworth, studying an St Bernard’s hospital. Large chunks of it are simply descriptions of the unpleasantness of the medical profession, both its methods (including vivisection) and its people (who use patients as curiosities and test cases for the benefit and interest of the medics). Many of these criticisms will resonate still 130 years on with people across the political spectrum, from vaccine sceptics to disability and patient advocates. I have some complex health conditions, and I’ve certainly found myself declining procedures that weren’t likely to produce any benefit for me but would have been ever-so-interesting and educational for the medics involved.

As engines for complaints about the medical training and motivations of Victorian doctors, the cast list of doctors themselves do nicely, drawn in brief but emphatic sketches that allow Berdoe to slip in the hypothetical, some of which chimes with how Ruskin writes about the (combative) relation between science and art: “He has got hold of the notion that there can be nothing at all the matter with you if you have no ‘physical signs.’ For your true scientist rejects the imagination. He wants facts he can handle and see. At heart he is a mere mechanic; he must open the frog’s thorax, and actually see the heart beating; must see with his own eyes the way carbonic acid acts on the living blood corpuscle. When completely imbued with this spirit, as the human mind can only entertain one great idea at a time, he acquires a sovereign contempt for the men who imagine merely, and do not see, taste, handle, and feel.”

I would have rather preferred this novel to use Mr Malthus Crowe (a murderous physiologist) as its focaliser, rather than the medical student Elsworth, but there was plenty to enjoy in the story of Elsworth and Sister Agnes undertaking their noble quests to improve healthcare!

Finally, for this theme I tested out the neo-Victorian too (with more recommendations below). The Difference Engine focuses on a Victorian London where technologists have seized power, under the leadership of Lord Byron. Charles Babbage’s hypothetical computers have been implemented on a grand scale, and a number of shadowy political figures believe in the prospect of full political control if only a machine can built that was large and subtle enough (or maybe they’d simply use that machine to win every gamble). Several of our narrative focalisers are scientists or technologists, and unusually an archaeologist largely takes centre stage. Here we see the personal damage of industrialisation, political intrigue, social uprisings both resisting and manipulating new media, and a North America riven by internal strife. So much, so recognisable!

History of Science and Science Fiction (Victorian Reading Project)

Reading plan (chronological)

Other possible readings

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