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Science and Omniscience in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Jonathan Taylor
Jonathan Taylor is lecturer in English at Loughborough University, with specialisms in nineteenth-century literature and creative writing. He is the author of Mastery and Slavery in Victorian Writing (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2003), and is co-editor of Figures of Heresy (Sussex Academic Press, 2005). He is the author of various essays and journal articles. He also writes for radio, and is currently writing a novel–memoir about his father.

“Taylor challenges the conventional view that science evolved steadily from the determinism of the 19th century to the uncertainty and chaos of the 20th. He shows how some of the most now-lampooned scientists of the Victorian era in fact admitted that the human mind highly influenced the understanding of the universe, and how artists widely portrayed science as malleable to desire and prejudice.” Reference & Research Book News

This book takes as its starting point Pierre-Simon Laplace’s much-cited dream in 1812 of ‘a vast intelligence’ which can ‘embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom’ and for which the future and the past are equally calculable. Laplace sets out the echt-Enlightenment ideal of scientific omniscience and the classic statement of a deterministic universe. The author investigates some of the ways in which Laplacian and, indeed, Newtonian models of observation and the universe are at once assimilated and complicated by Romantic and Victorian writers such as Carlyle, Burke, Abbott, Poe and Wordsworth. In particular, it aims to retrace some of the ways in which Laplacian–Newtonian models of scientific ‘intelligence’ come to inform nineteenth-century writers’views of themselves and their own modes of observation.

The author also explains how some of these literary reimaginings look forward to more modern conceptions of science in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, such as Chaos Theory and Einsteinian Cosmology. Oddly enough, contemporary science would seem to realise Carlyle’s vision of a ‘Natural-Supernaturalism,’ fusing Laplace’s mechanical vision with Romanticism. This book covers a vast array of topics, including Philosophy, Wagner’s music and music in general, Jungian analysis, and ends with the “omniscient” narrator in Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop, as an example of what came to be the dominant mode of narration in later Victorian fiction.

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