Charles Dickens, Man of Science
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12410752 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Adelene Buckland (0000-0001-7869-8603, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 49 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 423-455 |
| Publication date | 2021-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Victorian Literature and Culture (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1060-1503 • E-ISSN: 1470-1553 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s1060150319000457 |
| OpenAlex | W2981672756 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 61 |
Though there is now a vast body of work detailing Dickens's extensive interests in contemporary science, technology, and medicine, still there is an overriding sense that Dickens was in energetic contact with scientific knowledge but had no precise role in its constitution, creation, or contestation. In this essay, I argue instead that Dickens was one of the most powerful communicators of scientific knowledge in the mid-Victorian period. Drawing on James A. Secord's model of “knowledge in transit,” the idea that the content of scientific knowledge is arrived at at the same time as audiences for knowledge are constituted or imagined, I also argue that Dickens had a significant role to play in shaping the practices, objects, and values of scientific work. If we have lost sight of this Dickens, I argue, it is because the kinds of science he advocated and the power he wielded threatened other literary-scientific practitioners—including G. H. Lewes—who reshaped Dickens's reception in ways that suited their own aims and agendas. Dickens—a vocal exponent of mesmerists, spontaneous combustionists, sanitary campaigners, early-development hypothesizers, and fantastical engineers—had a far more direct and central role in scientific culture than has yet been understood
Aesthetics · Constitution · Epistemology · Media studies · Period (music · Political science · Power (physics · Sight · Social science · Sociology · Sociology of scientific knowledge · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · History · History of Science and Natural History · Law · Medical History and Innovations · Philosophy
Vestiges of the natural history of creation
The Sky of Our Manufacture
Victorian Sensation
Bleak House
Prefiguring the Posthuman
Dickens, Dinosaurs, and Design
The Poetry of Science”
Our Mutual Engine
The Age of Scientific Naturalism
Reading Victorian Illusions
Gentlemen and Geology
Separate Spheres and Public Places
Knowledge in Transit
Men of Science
Mesmerized
Reflections on Popular Science in Britain
Vibrant Matter
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |