“THE POETRY OF SCIENCE”: CHARLES DICKENS, GEOLOGY, AND VISUAL AND MATERIAL CULTURE IN VICTORIAN LONDON

Abstract

DESPITE THE WELL-ESTABLISHED CONNECTIONSbetween Dickens's novels and Victorian popular entertainment, and between Victorian show business and the display and dissemination of science, critics have not yet explored the possible links between scientific shows and Dickens's fiction. Work on Dickens and science has proliferated since George Levine's work inDarwin and the Novelists, but its central problem has been the fact that, as Francis O’Gorman described it, Dickens's scientific reading was “nugatory” (252). The most well-represented branch of science on his bookshelves was natural history; in even this, Dickens displayed only the “intelligent interest that would be expected of a man of the world” (Hill 203). Levine's influential “one culture” model surmounted the problem by pointing out the similar structural patterns implicit in the worlds described by Dickens and Darwin, but in an attempt to develop more direct links between Dickens's work and evolutionary science, almost all subsequent studies have focused on Dickens's 1860s novels, written after the publication of theOrigin of Species(1859) (Morris 179–93; Fulweiler 50–74; Morgentaler 707–21). There has not been a study that explores Dickens's acquaintance with natural history at different points in his career, or through the visual and material cultures with which he was so familiar.