“HOSPITABLE INFINITY”: IMAGINING NEW PROSPECTS AND OTHER WORLDS IN VICTORIAN COSMIC VOYAGE LITERATURE

Abstract

On September 3, 1841, George Eliot wrote in a letter to her friend Maria Lewis:I have been revelling in Nichol's Architecture of the heavens and Phenomena of the Solar system, and have been in imagination winging my flight from system to system, from universe to universe, trying to conceive myself in such a position and with such a visual faculty as would enable me to enjoy what Young enumerates among the novelties of the ‘stranger’ man when he burst the shell, toBehold an infinite of floating worldsDivide the crystal waves of ether pure,In endless voyage without port‘Hospitable infinity!’ Nichol beautifully says. (Letters106–07)1Here, Eliot describes an imaginary journey through the systems of the heavens and the unbounded space of the universe. The books she refers to are John Pringle Nichol'sViews of the Architecture of the Heavens. In a Series of Letters to a Lady(1837), andThe Phenomena and Order of the Solar System(1838). InViews of the Architecture of the Heavens, Nichol takes his readers on a tour of the universe with the aim of helping them to “henceforth look at the Heavens” with “something of the emotion which their greatness communicates to the accomplished Astronomer” (vii). Eliot's quote is from Edward Young's poemThe Complaint, or Night Thoughts(1742), where the narrator describes a cosmic voyage he takes in “contemplation's rapid car” stopping at every planet asking for the Deity. From “Saturn's ring,” he takes a more fearless “bolder flight” through the stars with a “bold” cometAmid those sov'reign glories of the skies,Of independent, native lustre, proud;The souls of systems! and the lords of life,Through their wide empires! (276)In Young's scenes of majestic cosmic perspective, the reader, with the narrator, discovers the vastness of space and the existence of other worlds: “On nature's Alps I stand, / And see a thousand firmaments beneath! / A thousand systems! as a thousand grains!” (277). The theme of the cosmic journey enables the reader to explore the universe, often looking back at the earth as they travel through space in their imagination and frequently in a dream. Overcoming the limits of knowledge, the immeasurable distances of the universe and its other worlds become more knowable.