Field studies: novels as Darwinian niches, poetry for physicists and mathematicians

This brief forum contribution reflects upon some historical factors in the formation of nineteenth century science and of the literature and science discipline that has since arisen to study its literary receptions. Noting the preponderance of studies focusing upon forms of scientific developmentalism, principally Darwinian biology, and of novels and other prose, and more broadly, on literary figures, rather than the writings of scientists, the paper introduces some poetry on science by scientists. It concentrates principally on those working and writing in the fields of physics and mathematics, areas that have been neglected in literature and science studies.

specimen.Indeed, that the principal character of early novels is singled out as one amongst many apt examples, as a syntype rather than the holotype, draws it closer to the descriptions that natural history and its successors in zoology and biology restlessly make of our species.Suggestively paralleling natural history in the broad empirical and illustrative approaches it took to understanding its phenomena, the new genre of the novel readied itself for its more scientifically informed and self-conscious Victorian practitioners such as George Eliot, who famously declares in 1876 that her 'writing is simply a set of experiments'. 2sofar as it establishes itself as an exercise in the natural history of human character and behaviour, usually focused upon social and material relations, the novel can be seen as an adjunct to Enlightenment naturalism, which was finally shaped and sanctified by Darwin's principle of natural selection.It is accordingly not surprising that during the Victorian period the genre, which often took the form of the bildungsroman, readily assimilated developmentalist doctrines, and in many instances greeted Darwinism with a curiosity and tolerant consideration that contrasts dramatically with the responses it received from such canonical poets of the time as Alfred Tennyson and Matthew Arnold, whose forms and ideologies, drawing more directly upon Romanticism, sustain a Wordsworthian suspicion of positivist science.In his early poem 'The Tables Turned' William Wordsworth famously describes the vivisecting 'meddling intellect' of such science that 'Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things,' while in 'The Excursion' he allows that science could be admitted to the realm of poetry and the imagination, but only in a chastened form and on a strictly temporary, probationary and subordinate basis, as 'a precious visitant', 'a support / Not treacherous, to the mind's excursive power'. 3ile studies in nineteenth-century science and literature have flourished over the past quarter century, since the advent of Gillian Beer's Darwin's Plots in 1983, the field remains in some important respects lop-sided.It has long had a preponderant concern with geology and biology over the other sciences, while its disciplinary origin and abiding affiliation with English literature has understandably led it to privilege the perspectives of its literary figures.While Beer is the main culprit responsible for the current prevalence of studies in Darwinism and Victorian prose she evades conviction on this charge with a series of audacious and convincing alibis in Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (1996), the second and third sections of which include important discussions of poetry and Maxwell and the mathematician James Joseph Sylvester, amongst others. 4Much of my own work has been in these further fields that Gillian Beer has also opened.A study of Hopkins' use of energy physics I published in 1997, and another I completed in 2009 on poetry by Victorian scientists, have allowed me to reflect upon the categories of science and literature as they were shaped over the course of the nineteenth century, as well as the subsequent formation of the field of study that is devoted to exploring their relations to one another. 5oking back to his youth in the 1820s, William Rowan Hamilton writes to his friend and fellow astronomer, mathematician and poet John Herschel in 1847 that 'it would really seem to have been at one time a toss-up, whether I should turn out a rhymer or an analyst [i.e., mathematician]'. 6His close friend Wordsworth, whom he had met in 1827 when he was twenty-two and the romantic poet fifty-seven, pushed him to choose between the two, although not, it should be added, in favour of poetry.Wordsworth was able to make a living from poetry, and throughout his discussions of Hamilton's verses he stresses the need for what is effectively a professional commitment to the art, which he assumes that 'the path of Science' similarly requires.Wordsworth came to Ireland to stay with Hamilton and his sisters in August 1829, during which time the two conducted a series of impassioned discussions about the relations of poetry and science.The main consequence of this visit was that Wordsworth's host abandoned his poetic ambitions (Graves, 312-13; 314-15).Indeed he formally renounced them in verse form.In 'To Poetry', which dates from October 1829, Hamilton refers nostalgically to an original prelapsarian unity of poetry and science, the 'joint abode' of the 'Spirit of Beauty' and her 'sister Truth,' but must advise the former that 'my life be now / Bound to thy sister Truth by solemn vow' (Graves, 317).
Hamilton's friendship with Wordsworth, and the parity he gave to his practices of poetry and science in the 1820s, are telling of, and indeed emblematic for, an historical moment of transition in British culture, in which poetry, beginning its gradual decline in power and prestige with the waning of romanticism, meets with ascendant science.
Wordsworth represents a confident romantic ideology that sees poetry and the poet to have a unique access to truth, and with it great cultural and social authority.This was an epistemological efficacy that as the century progressed would largely come to be monopolised by professional science and its practitioner, the scientist, a term coined in Whewell, in reply to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's criticism of the term philosopher as 'too wide and too lofty' for contemporary needs. 7As Whewell's coinage serves to highlight, Hamilton's choice of science over poetry came on the eve of the decade in which British science strove forthrightly to become professional, primarily through the efforts of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), which was established in 1831 at a meeting at York called by the Scots natural philosopher Sir David Brewster.While Brewster's observation of a 'scientific and literary' decline in Britain informed his push for a new scientific association, and while, as Morrell and Thackray note, British provincial scientific societies in the 1830s treated literature as integral to their concerns with moral and natural philosophy, the BAAS chose not to include it amongst its disciplinary sections. 8This exclusion at the very inception of modern British professional science mirrors the opposition between literature and science that Wordsworth also makes, which similarly became institutional with the growth of his reputation amongst the Victorians as the greatest and definitive romantic poet, 9 and the consequent consolidation of his thought within a British romantic ideology that shaped the emergent discipline of English literature, first as it was taught in working men's institutes, then in schools, and from the early twentieth-century in universities.The adoption of a basically Wordsworthian and Coleridgean romantic ideology by English literature was also facilitated by the BAAS's blanket rejection of metaphysics, despite Hamilton's advocacy of it at the early meetings, as 'merely ideal' 10 Taking Newtonian physics as its model, the BAAS's new professional science repudiated romantic science and its harmonious, indeed integral, relations with metaphysics and poetry.In the early 1850s the young James Clerk Maxwell, having completed a degree at Edinburgh University that had strong elements of both physical science and metaphysics, was frustrated to find that his subsequent Mathematical Tripos studies at Cambridge, a pillar of the new professional science, offered little scope for metaphysical inquiry.Well read in the romantics, Maxwell accordingly turned to writing poetry as the private medium in which he developed the epistemological grounds for his scientific practice and, through a critique of the Tripos Emerging from within this discipline, science and literature studies were accordingly bequeathed this institutional bias.Tending to favour canonical Victorian poets such as Tennyson, Arnold and Robert Browning who critique science, and usually overlooking their lack of scientific credentials, the field conversely ignored the reciprocal case of those scientists who wrote poetry, for whose often amateur versifying some leniency could be similarly extended.While writing bad verse may, as Wordsworth suggests to Hamilton, be an occupational hazard for nineteenth-century scientist-poets, so too are incomplete understandings of science for their peers amongst the canonical poets (not to mention nonscientists, such as myself, trying to write about them both).The careful demarcation of professional literary figures from professional scientists was a foundational assumption of the dedicated field of literature and science studies, another factor that has worked against the recognition of the hybrid form of the scientist-poet and tended to relegate scientists to the historical 'background' or 'milieu', where they furnish ideological contexts, or indeed to the role of agent provocateurs.The scientists' function in such studies often seems to be to spur and inflect the production of canonical works of literature, like the irritant matter that the oyster forms into a pearl.For much of its history, science and literature studies appear to have been predicated upon a rather proprietorial and anachronistic 'Two Cultures' model of interdisciplinarity, in which neighbours chat over fences that clearly mark out their respective territories, so that all such talk accordingly serves to further reify such disciplines, rather than reveal them as originally interfused and in process.premise of a transcendent ontological unity, Coleridge's 'one life within us and abroad', 12 belongs also to romantic science, which provided the prepossession for the energy concept.A paradigmatic instance of simultaneous discovery, 13 like the natural selection mechanism in biology, energy describes an indestructible quantity, conceived the power to do work, that is translatable into such forms as heat, light, sound, chemical activity, magnetism and electricity.By establishing the profound unity and dynamism of the known universe, from the processes of plant photosynthesis and animal digestion to light from astronomical bodies telling of their chemical composition, the energy concept offered many Victorians an assurance of an original First Principle that was more radical and hence metaphysically satisfying than the Anglican natural theology that Tennyson and his peers found affronted by various evolutionary doctrines.As the epigraph to this paper indicates, a further canonical Victorian poet, Hopkins, found little threat in Darwinism, as in a letter to his friend Robert Bridges he happily acknowledges its ubiquitous applications, whilst naming the most apt of these as maritime engineering. 14Opposed to forms of positivism, developmentalism and materialism that he saw it to encourage, Hopkins was not otherwise concerned by Darwinism, as energy physics furnished him, like many contemporary physicists, with the means of sustaining a monistic Christian cosmology and metaphysic, which crystallises through his 1868 reading of Parmenides in his doctrine of inscape, instress and stress. 15etry written by Victorian scientists not only offers unique insights into the metaphysical premises that underpin their creative scientific practice and the larger cultures of Victorian science, but conversely also furnishes progressive and playful perspectives on prosody and poetic form.So, for instance, during the 1830s and 1840s Whewell and his friend Herschel argued for the use of classical quantitative meters in English poetry, and demonstrated them in both their original poetry and translations of contemporary German poetry.The traditional seal of integrity and authenticity for the student of literature, the condition of being 'no good at maths', is well respected by the simple arithmetic of our system of prosody.Critiquing established metrics as a crude instrument that is ill suited to gauging the subtle musical effects of poetic form, James Joseph Sylvester offers a prosody based upon the continental calculus in his book The Laws of Verse (1870).This accordingly allows the appreciation of infinite gradations of sound, a principle of continuity that Sylvester sees to parallel and indeed instance the mathematics that he and Arthur Cayley, and their continental non-Euclidean peers, were Daniel Brown, Field studies: novels as Darwinian niches, poetry for physicists and mathematicians 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 11 (2010) www.19.bbk.ac.uk 7 engaged in at the time.Much of his poetry from the 1870s is based upon a single rhyme, one of which, 'To Rosalind', extends to 500 lines, each of which closes with a rhyme on the final syllable of its addressee's name.Rosalind is represented by a set of invariants and other formal properties and relations of persistent pulchritude that the remorseless rhyme scheme generates; 'Sum of worth in woman-kind!/ Whose dear praises I could grind, /...' (ll.120-1, Fliegende Blätter, 11). 16e coinages that Sylvester devised for both the new mathematics he shared with Cayley and his own prosody converge in his work, as terms from poetry are applied to mathematics and vice-versa, with some such as the 'catalecticant' and 'syzygy' making the return trip from prosody and back again, collecting decisive semantic inflections from avant-garde mathematics on the way.Sylvester illustrates this new prosody with his idiosyncratic poetry, the remorseless rhymes of which he justifies as illustrating his great mathematical principle of Continuity, which at the time also preoccupied the physicist Peter Guthrie Tait and Sylvester's colleague at Johns Hopkins University during the late 1870s and early 1880s, Charles Sanders Peirce, who develops it in his philosophical pragmatism.
The common idiom that Sylvester develops for his new mathematics and prosody, and the various mathematical principles and conceits that inform his poetry, demonstrate his conception of both poetry and mathematics as games and his experience of them as play, an understanding that he shares with his fellow mathematician Lewis Carroll.
Principles of mathematics and prosody converge in Carroll's word games from the 1870s, one of which, 'Syzygies' he develops directly from Sylvester's mathematics.Indeed, it is the opportunity for play that impels many of the poems by Victorian scientists, especially for those who gathered during the annual meetings of the BAAS for the Red Lions club dinners, where various forms of pastiche, lampoon, and doggerel would be read out.The geologist and paleontologist Edward Forbes founded the original Red Lions club during the 1839 Birmingham meeting of the BAAS, when he and other young naturalists in the Natural History section abandoned the daily formal dinners in favour of cheap meals of beef and beer 'enlivened by joke and song' at a local tavern, The Red Lion. 17The records for the early membership show that the BAAS was dominated by Anglican clergy, which was by far the largest group, the next being medical doctors, then aristocrats, followed closely by academics, with smaller numbers of members of parliament and other government officers and the like (Morrell and Thackray, 110)

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Field studies: novels as Darwinian niches, poetry for physicists and mathematicians Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 11 (2010) www.19.bbk.ac.uk 4 1833 by the Cambridge polymath, and friend of Hamilton's and Herschel's, William

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and the Cambridge system, his intellectual ethics.I have argued in my study of Victorian scientist-poets that poetry's defining formal and semantic concerns with parallelism and analogy provide the focus for the development of Maxwell's scientific methodology in the Daniel Brown, Field studies: novels as Darwinian niches, poetry for physicists and mathematicians Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 11 (2010) www.19.bbk.ac.uk 5 1850s, which through the audacious models elaborated in 'On Physical Lines of Force' (1862) yields the momentous discovery of the electromagnetic theory of light. 11Like science, Victorian and twentieth-century academic philosophy, outside of British Idealism, demonstrated no proprietorial interest in romantic metaphysics, which accordingly found refuge, indeed a Trojan horse, in English Literature, where it has continued the Wordsworthian battle with positivist, utilitarian and materialist science.

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Early influential readings of Tennyson and certain other canonical poets appear to have established a default identification of Victorian science with geological and biological developmentalism, and a godless materialism and positivism that directly affronts the romantic idealist values and faiths of William Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge.This neat antithesis between ideologies of science and literature is happily complicated by physics, with the energy concept and field theory, like the hypothesis of biological evolution, coming of age in the 1850s and early 1860s.The great romantic Daniel Brown, Field studies: novels as Darwinian niches, poetry for physicists and mathematicians Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 11 (2010) www.19.bbk.ac.uk 6

Daniel Brown, Field studies: novels as Darwinian niches, poetry for physicists and mathematicians
readings of poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, the physicist James Clerk 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 11 (2010) www.19.bbk.ac.uk 3 physics through

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. While Forbes and his Red Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 11 (2010) www.19.bbk.ac.uk