Richly illustrated study drawing on art, literature and science to explore Victorian attitudes towards sight.

Parts of the Victorian middle class were troubled by how Victorian society was both highly evolved and contained savage parts. I propose a solution to the paradox they faced.

The nineteenth century was a period of science and imagery: when scientific theories and discoveries challenged longstanding boundaries between animal, plant, and human, and art and visual culture produced new notions about the place of the human in the natural world. Just as scientists relied on graphic representation to conceptualize their ideas, artists moved seamlessly between scientific debate and creative expression to support or contradict popular scientific theories, such as Darwin's theory of evolution and sexual selection, deliberately drawing on concepts (...) in ways that allowed them to refute popular claims or disrupt conventional knowledges. Focusing on the close kinship between the arts and sciences during the Victorian period, the art historians contributing to this volume reveal the unique ways in which nineteenth-century British and American visual culture participated in making science - and in which science informed art at a crucial moment in the history of the development of the modern world. Together, they explore topics in geology, meteorology, medicine, anatomy, evolution, and zoology, as well as a range of media, from photography to oil painting. This volume reminds us that science and art are not tightly compartmentalized, separate influences, but rather fields that shared forms - manifest as waves, layers, lines, or geometries - and invest in the idea of the evolution of form. (shrink)

Victorian scriptural hermeneutics : history, intention, and evolution -- Intertext 1 : Victorian legal interpretation -- Carlyle : between biblical exegesis and romantic hermeneutics -- Intertext 2 : Victorian science and hermeneutics : the interpretation of nature -- George Eliot's hermeneutics of sympathy -- Intertext 3 : Victorian literary criticism -- Subjectivism, intersubjectivity, and intention : Oscar Wilde and literary hermeneutics.

ABSTRACT This article examines attitudes towards the Austrian state among British Liberals, in the years between the European revolutions of 1848 and the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867. Much commentary in this period treated Austria as an antagonistic, autocratic menace, as had become conventional since Waterloo. But the 1850s and 1860s also saw the growth of a more substantial interest in the architecture of the Habsburg monarchy. Its transition from despotism to constitutionalism was used to affirm some of the basic claims (...) of mid-Victorian Liberalism, and even to suggest solutions to broader problems in modern politics. At a time when Ireland and the overseas empire were posing serious political difficulties, moreover, British writers also began to find analogies between the British and Austrian imperial projects. This article explores how Liberal thinkers and commentators responded to two decades of rapid, complex, and sometimes contradictory changes in the shape of the Austrian state. It deals both with the periodical press, and with the more developed analyses outlined by the historian Lord Acton and the political philosopher John Stuart Mill. (shrink)

In Victorian Modernism: Pragmatism and the Varieties of Aesthetic Experience Jessica Feldman sheds a pragmatist light on the relation between the Victorian age and Modernism by dislodging truistic notions of Modernism as an art of crisis, rupture, elitism and loss. She examines aesthetic sites of Victorian Modernism - including workrooms, parlours, friendships, and family relations as well as printed texts and paintings - as they develop through interminglings and continuities as well as gaps and breaks. Examining the (...) works of John Ruskin (art critic and social thinker), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (poet and painter), Augusta Evans (best-selling domestic novelist,) and William James (philosopher and psychologist), Feldman relates them to selected twentieth-century creations. She reveals these sentimental, domestic and sublime works to be pragmatist explorations of aesthetic realms. This study, which leads Modernism back into the Victorian age, will be of interest to scholars of literature, art history, and philosophy. (shrink)

Featuring the biographies of leading feminists of the era - Emily Davies, Frances Power Cobbe, Josephine Butler and Millicent Garrett Fawcett - this study explores feminist ideas and strategies of the late 19th century, analyzing the tensions which arose as feminism sought to achieve its aims.

Victorian physics meets industrial capitalism Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-6 DOI 10.1007/s11016-011-9554-0 Authors Bruce J. Hunt, History Department, University of Texas at Austin, 1 University Station B7000, Austin, TX 78712-0220, USA Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

Paradoxically, abolitionism contained the seeds of empire. If we accept the general outline of Eric Williams’ thesis in Capitalism and Slavery that abolition was not purely altruistic but was as economically conditioned as Britain’s later empire building in Africa, the contradiction between the ideologies of antislavery and imperialism seems more apparent than real. Although the idealism that motivated the great abolitionists such as William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson is unquestionable, Williams argues that Britain could afford to legislate against the slave (...) trade only after that trade had helped to provide the surplus capital necessary for industrial “take-off.” Britain had lost much of its slave-owning territory as a result of the American Revolution; as the leading industrial power in the world, Britain found in abolition a way to work against the interests of its rivals who were still heavily involved in colonial slavery and a plantation economy.3The British abolitionist program entailed deeper and deeper involvement in Africa—the creation of Sierra Leone as a haven for freed slaves was just a start—but British abolitionists before the 1840s were neither jingoists nor deliberate expansionists. Humanitarianism applied to Africa, however, did point insistently toward imperialism.4 By mid-century, the success of the antislavery movement, the impact of the great Victorian explorers, and the merger of racist and evolutionary doctrines in the social sciences had combined to give the British public a widely shared view of Africa that demanded imperialization on moral, religious, and scientific grounds. It is this view that I have called the myth of the Dark Continent; by mythology I mean a form of modern, secularized, “depoliticized speech” —discourse which treats its subject as universally accepted. Scientifically established, and therefore no longer open to criticism by a political or theoretical opposition. In The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800-1960, Nancy Stepan writes:A fundamental question about the history of racism in the first half of the nineteenth century is why it was that, just as the battle against slavery was being won by abolitionists, the war against racism was being lost. The Negro was legally freed by the Emancipation Act of 1833, but in the British mind he was still mentally, morally and physically a slave.5It is this “fundamental question” which a genealogy of the myth of the Dark Continent can help to answer. Patrick Brantlinger, professor of English at Indiana University, is the editor of Victorian Studies. He has written The Spirit of Reform: British Literature and Politics, 1832-1867 and Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture and Social Decay. (shrink)

Victorian Critics of Democracy was first published in 1938. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Riordan, Marcia This report on the Victorian Abortion Law Reform Bill 2008 particularly considers the fact that it has denied health care professionals any right of conscientious objection. It sees this as part of an international attempt to deny conscientious objection against abortion, and to enforce abortion as an international human right.

The ArgumentHistorians of science naturally tend to express interest in other forms of intellectual activity only when these intersect with science. This tendncy has produced a number of enlightening studies of what happens when science and (for instance) law or theology come into contact, but little by way of how science enters into the calculations and social status of such forms of knowledge after the conjuction has passed. Recent work in the sociology of professions, in contrast, has focused attention precisely (...) on those moments when the expert knowledge produced by different group doesnotoverlap. This has been the contribution of Andrew Abbortt's theory of “jurisdictional boundaries” between competing professions. The case of Victorian actuaries who worked hard to maintain unique intellectual claims in the competitive life insurance industry while maintainiing strong social connections and overlaps in knowledge with organized science, challenges the way both historians of science and sociologists of professions view contending knowledge claims. By observing what motivated actuaries to forge an alliance with men of science in the 1820s, then tracing their gradual recognition of a need to distance themselves from certain of the “scientific” values that had earlier informed their collective identity, it is possible to make sense of connections as well as disconnections between science and other forms of knowledge. A history of quantification from the actuaries' perspective, in other words, allows us to view science bothasandincontext. (shrink)

McGovern, Kevin After a brief account of the Victorian Law Reform Act 2008, this article reports on three responses to this law in the last year. Because Section 8 of this law restricts the healthcare practitioner's usual right of conscientious objection, this article also discusses conscience and conscientious objection.

In 1611 the King James Bible was printed with minimal annotations, as requested by King James. It was another of his attempts at political and religious reconciliation. Smaller, more affordable, versions quickly followed that competed with the highly popular and copiously annotated Bibles based on the 1560 Geneva version by the Marian exiles. By the nineteenth century the King James Bible had become very popular and innumerable editions were published, often with emendations, long prefaces, illustrations and, most importantly, copious annotations. (...) Annotated King James Bibles appeared to offer the best of both the Reformation Geneva and King James Bible in a Victorian context, but they also reignited old controversies about the use and abuse of paratext. Amid the numerous competing versions stood a group of Victorian scholars, theologians and translators, who understood the need to reclaim the King James Bible through its Reformation heritage; they monumentalized it. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Victorian Translation of China: James Legge's Oriental PilgrimageRoger CorlessThe Victorian Translation of China: James Legge's Oriental Pilgrimage. By Norman J.Girardot. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2002. xxx + 780 pp.Don't make the mistake I made and allow the size of this book intimidate you. I let it sit around for many months, fearing, as did the author, to "[row] out over the (...) great ocean of material" (pp. xix-xx), but once I had set sail I found myself in enjoyable, if sometimes irascible, company and I was unwilling to jump ship. Girardot is in full command of his ark of fascinating and diverse creatures, and his main argument is never lost in the details. His writing is lucid and the text is broken up into manageable blocks by subheadings with intriguing titles, rendering each segment ehipassiko, encouraging us to keep reading.A book of this importance and weight (about 1.5 kg) deserves a review article more than just a review, or, better, a discussion panel at a major academic conference. This journal is notorious for reviews of astonishing length, but I would like my review to be short enough that it will actually be read, so that it will entice you to read the book. I will not attempt a summary nor will I critically address all the issues that are brought up. Instead, I will try to show why I regard this book as an instant classic and even, I would say, a watershed in the meta-science of sinological and Religionswissenschaftlich self-reflection.We all know James Legge as the perpetrator of The Chinese Classics, the multivolume opus that, in the 1960 Hong Kong University Press revision, dominates the Chinese religion(s) section of our personal libraries. Since there is nothing like it, we consult it, but we pretend we do not, for, after all, it's out of date, surely, and Legge was an old fuddy-duddy—Scottish, a Protestant missionary, and, worst of all, a Victorian. Girardot seems to have had somewhat this opinion of Legge when he assayed a brief biography of him, but he discovered that his "Legge work" (as he calls it) opened the door to a pivotal era in academe and world culture. Once the door to the long-neglected cupboard had been opened, all kinds of fascinating objects came tumbling out. "Oh, so that's how it used to be, and that's why it's like this today!" No scholar of Chinese religion(s) can afford to ignore Girardot's extensive and insightful ruminations on the state of the field then and now.The point of the book is summed up on page 531: "[Legge] is an outstanding [End Page 276] example of the difficult nineteenth-century passage from religious discourse to what Edward Said calls the 'secular criticism' of the modern world." To study Legge is to study the origins of our discipline. He may have been a fuddy-duddy; he was certainly a workaholic, putting his Sassenach colleagues at Oxford to shame by sleeping little and rising in the middle of the night to persist in his hermeneutic labors. But he was also a student of the heathen land he went to convert, and he tried his best not only to see (the presumed universal) God in the ancient texts but also to find something noble in apparent atheists and agnostics such as Confucius. In his interaction with Max Mueller (and this book is as much about Mueller as it is about Legge) he both agreed and disagreed, in a complex choreography, with the comparative method underpinning The Sacred Books of the East. He was a Scotsman's Scotsman, a stag at bay, dourly standing his ground (as a Congregationalist, and therefore a nonconformist both north and south of the border) against, first, the London Missionary Society and, later, the prevailing academic and ecclesiastical climate at Oxford.No armchair orientalist, as were some of his colleagues across the Channel, he befriended native informants and studied the indigenous commentaries (mostly Qing) to which they referred him, so that his translations, although not as fluid as Waley... (shrink)

As familiar as the form of the mathematical equation is to us, the ostensibly simple act of equating unlike things was an achievement many centuries in the making, and one that would ultimately redefine European mathematical enquiry such that its bias toward geometry and the concrete would be displaced by a bias toward algebraic abstraction. The moment of that displacement was the nineteenth century, and its broader significance is on particularly striking display in the British context, where the implications of (...) algebraic abstraction were the object of sustained enquiry among mathematicians, logicians, and economists. This article argues that the ascendance of the algebraic equation, and the transformation in the conception of number on which it was premised, were not simply the product of evolutionary pressures internal to mathematics; the Victorian embrace of algebra was also a response to the practical and cognitive demands of Victorian economic life, which was increasingly reliant on attenuated exchange relations and merely nominal forms of ownership. This was an economy organized around the global extension of trade and characterized by the exponential growth of financial intermediation, of what Walter Bagehot called “number abstracted from reference.” Victorian economic practices thus modeled an abstraction that helped to justify the abstractions of mathematics, and that mathematics in turn was used by economic theorists to argue for the necessity and objectivity of their models. This mutually sustaining dialogue is particularly visible in the writings of William Stanley Jevons, who applied the principles of algebra to philosophy and economic theory so as to reconceive the logic of cognitive and social life in terms of equations. This logic, for which he was merely a spokesman, continues to shape our faith in the special value of abstract, theoretical knowledge. (shrink)

The Victorian period in Britain was an “age of reform.” It is therefore not surprising that two of the era’s most eminent intellects described themselves as reformers. Both William Whewell and John Stuart Mill believed that by reforming philosophy—including the philosophy of science—they could effect social and political change. But their divergent visions of this societal transformation led to a sustained and spirited controversy that covered morality, politics, science, and economics. Situating their debate within the larger context of (...) class='Hi'>Victorian society and its concerns, _Reforming Philosophy_ shows how two very different men captured the intellectual spirit of the day and engaged the attention of other scientists and philosophers, including the young Charles Darwin. Mill—philosopher, political economist, and Parliamentarian—remains a canonical author of Anglo-American philosophy, while Whewell—Anglican cleric, scientist, and educator—is now often overlooked, though in his day he was renowned as an authority on science. Placing their teachings in their proper intellectual, cultural, and argumentative spheres, Laura Snyder revises the standard views of these two important Victorian figures, showing that both men’s concerns remain relevant today. A philosophically and historically sensitive account of the engagement of the major protagonists of Victorian British philosophy, _Reforming Philosophy_ is the first book-length examination of the dispute between Mill and Whewell in its entirety. A rich and nuanced understanding of the intellectual spirit of Victorian Britain, it will be welcomed by philosophers and historians of science, scholars of Victorian studies, and students of the history of philosophy and political economy. (shrink)

Victorian bodies in heat Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9489-x Authors Bruce Clarke, Department of English, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX 79409-3091, USA Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Victorian DoorsErnest L. FontanaILet us begin with a simple observation. If we confine ourselves to mid- and late-nineteenth Anglophone (Victorian) poetry that employs traditional verse stanzas or rooms, it is perhaps not surprising that a line terminating with door most often rhymes with more, particularly as more is found in such locutions as no more or evermore.1 For example, in the work of Emily Dickinson, door rhymes (...) with a more phoneme in 14 of 20 instances. What is of special interest, and the focus of this essay, is the use of door as a rhymed word at the end or near the end of a poem. Of related but secondary interest is its appearance as a rhymed word at the end of an intermediate stanza. Since more signifies a quantitative concept, the frequent use of it to rhyme with door suggests that the designated door often demarcates a site of transition from a state that is quantitatively different (most often less) from the state to which one passes through the door. This imagined other state often involves quantities of time as in the frequent use of no more and evermore. In the first instance the time imagined is completely negated, in the second it is affirmed as a perpetual duration. Poe acknowledged the significance of the door/evermore rhyme in the "The Raven" in which this rhyme occurs at the end of 5 of its 18 stanzas.2 Thus this common English rhyme of door and more requires a signification of transition from one state to another that differ from each other in quantity. Often, particularly in Dickinson, the other state lies beyond the walled or enclosed room of [End Page 277] the self. My essay raises the question of whether without this accidental acoustical concurrence in English, the signification in Anglophone poetry of an implied transition from certain quotidian or phenomenal states to certain visionary or noumenal states would be as frequent or so easily rendered. Does this accidental rhyme in fact generate certain significations or metaphors?3I shall begin my demonstration with what I believe are telling examples of doors as a closural effect of both poems and stanzas.4 In the second, revised version of Hopkins's sonnet "In honour of St. Alphonsus Rodriguez: Laybrother of the Society of Jesus," written in Dublin in 1888, the concluding sestet of this Italian sonnet ends with door.Yet God (that hews mountain and continent, Earth, all, out; who, with trickling increment, Veins violets and tall trees makes more and more) Could crowd career with conquest while there went Those years and years by of world without event That in Majorca Alphonso watched the door.5The sonnet is built on the contrast between honor that is "flashed off exploit," the highly visible exploits of the early Jesuit martyrs and missionaries, with the "Unseen," apparently un-heroic life of the obscure Spanish Jesuit laybrother and hall porter, whose war was "within." While God, through his Jesuit martyrs, "could crown [His] career with conquest," Alphonsus's life passed "without event" as he "watched the door." Hopkins's rhymes his terminal door with the more that results from the silent "trickling increment" of God's ongoing creative act. The foregrounded closural door of the poem becomes, through its position and rhyme, a metaphor for a passage to the abundance resulting from God's creative action, a quantification that extends beyond the perceptible world.Alphonsus is the guardian of the passage to this abundance, one that is subtly implied by the more/door rhyme. The sonnet ends with the reader and Alphonsus positioned on the threshold of an unnamable abundance that is signified by the silence and blank space that follows upon this terminal door. In Browning's "A Lovers' Quarrel," from Men and Women (1855), the male speaker recalls, during the advent of an Italian spring, the amatory intimacies he and his beloved shared during the past winter in their Tuscan farmhouse: "'Twas a time when the heart could shew / All'" (ll. 75–76).6 But the amatory union of the [End Page 278] two lovers has been ruptured by an unidentified, chance "hasty word" spoken... (shrink)

Empiricism, one of Raymond Williams's keywords, circulates in much contemporary thought and criticism solely as a term of censure, a synonym for spurious objectivity or positivism. Yet rarely, if ever, has it had this philosophical implication. Dr. Johnson, it should be recalled, kicked the stone precisely to expose empiricism's baroque falsifications of common sense. In an effort to restore historical depth to this term, this book examines epistemology in the narrative prose of five writers, John Rushkin, Alexander Bain, G. H. (...) Lewes, Herbert Spencer, and George Eliot, developing the view that the flourishing of nineteenth-century scientific culture occured at a time when empiricism itself was critically dismantling any such naive representationalism. (shrink)