date: 9 May 2024 online
the format: Warsaw Literary Meetings
plenary lectures:
Prof. Tadeusz Rachwał (SWPS University, Warsaw): Another Tale of Two Cities: Blake’s Golgonooza and Dickens’s Coketown
In my talk I will discuss Blake’s and Dickens’s critiques of science in their visions of two imaginary cities – Golgonooza and Coketown. Though both writers engaged elements of science in their writings, they were strongly critical of its fixity and definiteness which, for Blake, was a Urizenic mistake to be to be annihilated by Los. The city of Golgonooza which appears in a few of Blake’s texts and images is not a simple urban space, but a space in which Los’s work of destruction opens up gates and ways toward a naturalization of creation and the created by way of bringing in the eternal changeability of the world. This work of Los is, perhaps prophetically, comparable to the revolutionary role of Darwin as a hammerer of a new kind of science. Dickens’s Coketown in Hard Times offers an image of the city which is in a way Urizenic, a city whose design and architecture are projections of factual reasoning and belief in unchangeable truths and facts. The industrial environment of Coketown transforms humans into mathematical and geometrical forms and shapes which do not exist in nature and are in fact a denial of the real and are bound to fail in confrontation with affects, emotions and feelings which, rather than scientific reason, direct our choices.
Dr. Jeremy Parrott (Honorary Research Fellow, University of Buckingham): Electrical undercurrents in David Copperfield
When Dickens sat down in his Devonshire Terrace study at the end of February 1849 he had very little idea what sort of book he was about to write, let alone that he was about to create his ‘favourite child’. What might have been an 18th-century style picaresque featuring a shady figure called Thomas Mag rapidly metamorphosed into an inner odyssey undertaken by the authorial alter ego, David Copperfield. Without a master-plan or even an outline of the novel’s trajectory, Dickens boldly began a literary experiment, a work that was continuously evolving and taking shape over the 19 months of its composition.
I will be arguing that Dickens saw himself at this stage of his career as a Carlylean ‘hero as man of letters’. Taking the relatively simple tale of a boy’s progress from poverty and rejection to success and happiness, the author worked in multiple layers of hidden signification, many of which have escaped critical attention until now. These are fully explored in my forthcoming monograph entitled Copperfield Unbound. One of these layers concerns the author’s multi-faceted preoccupation with the hot topic of electricity, a contemporary analogue to which would be Artificial Intelligence. Dickens was, in 1849, a new convert to the cause of science, largely thanks to a commission he was given by John Forster to write a review in December 1848 of Robert Hunt’s The Poetry of Science.
In this talk I will be showing how Dickens worked the theme of electricity into the name of his protagonist and that of his nemesis, Uriah Heep. Along the way, I will summarize key stages in the development of electricity generation, through Galvani, Volta, Davy and Faraday, as well as taking in the curious natural history of the South American electric eel. But this will be more than a lecture, as I will also recreate, live online, one of the most important breakthroughs in the history of science, using raw materials that are themselves over 200 years old.
David Roberts (1796-1864), The Inauguration of the Great Exhibition: 1 May 1851 (1852)
Call For Papers
After visiting the 1851 Great Exhibition set in the Crystal Palace in London’s Hyde Park, Charlotte Brontë wrote in a letter to her father: “Its grandeur does not consist in one thing, but in the unique assemblage of all things. Whatever human industry has created you find there. It seems as if only magic could have gathered this mass of wealth from all the ends of the earth.” The exhibition not only showcased the work of the best inventors and scientists of the time, but also musical instruments, art, ceramics, staffed exotic animals and precious jewels. Opened ceremoniously by Queen Victoria, the event ultimately welcomed over 6 million visitors, including such eminent scientists and writers as Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Michael Faraday, Samuel Colt, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Lewis Caroll, George Eliot, Alfred Tennyson and William Makepeace Thackeray. Considering its cultural importance, the exhibition commingled technology, art, and natural sciences and equally influenced men of letters to incorporate the ideas of science and technology in their writing. In fact, Victorian journals like Dickens’s Household Words published articles on respiration, vaccination, antiseptic agents, magnets, steam-printing machines and the hippopotamus alongside serialised novels and poetry. Few aspects of Victorian life escaped the impact of industrialisation and scientific progress. At the same time, the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley famously asserted: “I am the last person to question the importance of genuine literary education, or to suppose that intellectual culture can be complete without it.” In the 18th century Tobias Smollett’s surgical training shaped his novels’ descriptions of the body and Erasmus Darwin’s poetry about the natural world was closely interconnected with his medical studies. Among the targets of Jonathan Swift’s satire in book 3 of Gulliver’s Travels is the “new science” promoted by the Royal Society at the time. Lawrence Sterne frequently refers to mechanical philosophy in Tristram Shandy, while the scientific theories of the nervous system influenced the discourses of sensibility in the period. The disenchanting power of scientific reason made some of the Romantic poets see it with suspicion (vide Blake’s painting of Newton), but scientific discourses and discoveries also inspired them, not necessarily only with awe and terror.
The organisers welcome papers exploring in greater depth the dialogues, tensions and confluences between science and literary imagination in the 18th and 19th centuries. The papers may investigate, among many other related topics, various interconnections between literature and
- trans/post-humanist perspectives on literature and culture of the period
- geometry, mathematics and the mathematical sublime
- mechanistic theories; mechanisms, machinery and automata
- matter, materiality, materialism
- (in/non-)human time/pre-history: geology and prehistoric life
- experiments – the laboratory and the clinic
- experimental medicine, anatomy, vivisection
- the microscope: germ theory and infectious diseases
- imageries of evolution: sexual selection, survival of the species
- physiognomy and phrenology: race, gender and (pseudo-)science
- sciences of the mind, mesmerism and hypnosis
- phantasmagoria, optical illusions and spectacular technologies
- social sciences / social engineering
- science and satire: speculations, dystopias and parodies
- economics and statistics vs. social issues and their (in)visibility
Please submit your abstract of 250‒300 words and a short biographical note to seminar convenors Przemysław Uściński and Magdalena Pypeć (p.uscinski@uw.edu.pl, magdalenapypec@uw.edu.pl) by 15 February 2024. The notifications of acceptance will be sent out by 29 February 2024. The complete papers are to be submitted by 30 April 2024.