The Victorian Mind's Eye: Perception as Form in Literature and Science

Abstract

The Victorians habitually framed knowing as a matter of seeing things clearly, but they were also deeply aware of the limits of human perception. “The Victorian Mind’s Eye” uncovers how aesthetic and scientific thinkers of the period employed literary form to achieve visual and epistemological clarity. Current critical approaches to perception in science and literature tend to reduce literature to a conduit for scientific ideas or treat scientific discovery and technological innovation as the drivers of change in literary form. In this dissertation, I instead argue that for a wide range of Victorian intellectuals, literary forms were not a mere vehicle for scientific knowledge, nor second-order reflections of such knowledge, but were privileged as effective tools for establishing new perceptual modes and changing how readers understood their world. In a series of four case studies that pair Victorians who shaped how we view art with Victorians who changed how we view nature—John Ruskin and Charles Darwin in chapter one, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and James Clerk Maxwell in two, George Meredith and Karl Pearson in three, and Walter Pater and William James in four—I demonstrate that their disparate projects were driven by the same dilemma: how can we know what we cannot see with our own eyes? Drawing on current trends in philosophy of science that posit an analogy between scientific models and literature, I reframe these writers’ use of literary form as a technology of perception rather than an element of style. Much as Victorians used scientific models to detect new phenomena, writers across the arts and sciences used poetic devices including metaphor, juxtaposition, and aphorism to expand readers’ perceptual capabilities beyond the perspectival limits of the individual observer.