Clothing Matter: Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus

The book concludes with a reading of Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus. For this work can be characterised, the chapter suggests, as a performance of, and meditation on, what the foregoing sections were meant to examine: namely the bridge-building activities or ways of knowing through which personal experiences of the material world come to be dressed in recognisable social or ideal forms. The chapter ends with an attempt to situate the practice-based approach developed in Artful Experiments within a wider theoretical debate about the relationship between literary work and scientific knowledge.

William Morris’s ‘Work-Pleasure’: Literature, Science and Fine Art

This chapter seeks to elucidate nineteenth-century conceptions of art as fine art. Taking its cue from Raymond Williams’s account of a divorce of (fine) art from (technical) work, the chapter pursues various attempts to define the aesthetic specificity of the fine arts, including literature in the narrow sense, in relation to other ways of exercising skill, including the use of experimental methods in the sciences. In this way, it seeks to show that the idea of the aesthetic, despite all attempts to purify it, remained deeply entangled in a net of work, in which experiences of pleasure (or beauty) and playfulness had not yet been separated from material practices of making useful things. As is further explained, the idea of a mutual inclusiveness of pleasure and use was pivotal to the arts and crafts movement, especially to the creative practice of William Morris. Finally, the chapter pursues Morris’s concept of “work-pleasure”, as derived from his News from Nowhere, through a wider debate about the complex relations between the sciences and the (fine) arts.

Introduction: Experiment and the Art of Writing

The general introduction outlines the topic of the study, experimental knowledge-making in Victorian literature and science, and the practice-based method through which it will be explored. To this end, it provides a brief exposition of relevant work in science studies, sociology and anthropology while emphasising the literary critical perspective of the book. Moreover, the introductory chapter situates Artful Experiments in the field of Victorian literature and science scholarship, showing, by means of two examples from the work of Charles Darwin and Robert Browning, how it deviates from the well established ‘two-way traffic’ approach and what it has to offer instead. The relation between experiment and writing is also introduced and clarified here.

The Making of Sensation Fiction

The argument of this chapter is that the writing of sensation fiction was itself part of the critical endeavour to make sense of the enormous excitement that it produced. There is, in other words, a tendency towards self-investigation and self-reflection inherent in the sensational imagination. Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret and Aurora Floyd, for instance, seem to read and review, repeatedly, the very art that constitutes them. In accordance with Braddon’s letters to Edward Bulwer-Lytton, these novels, being engaged in a quest for their own meaning and social function, are uncertain about the very sensational effects that they helped to create. Likewise, the stories of Wilkie Collins’s Armadale and The Moonstone contain within themselves various models of the creative activity through which they were assembled and made into their characteristically suspended, drawn-out shape. By means of such models, the chapter argues, Collins’s writing makes itself legible, between the lines, as an experimental practice that composes its form as it goes along, rather than on the basis of a predefined plan.

Robert Browning’s Experiment: Composition and Communication in The Ring and the Book

This chapter concentrates on Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book, a series of twelve dramatic monologues, which has repeatedly been described as an instance of “empiricism in literature” (Langbaum) and as one of “the most ambitious literary experiments in the period” (Slinn). Trying to substantiate and make good on such claims, the chapter argues that The Ring and the Book invites its readers to participate in the composition and evaluation of an experimental form that transfers the tradition of the epic into “a novel country” in order to create a mode of writing “in difficulties” and “encumbered with incongruities” (Walter Bagehot). As a result, The Ring and the Book refuses to be read as if it were an accomplished work. Rather, it has to be made to work. Presenting itself as an experimental arrangement, Browning’s multi-voiced and many-sided text demands its readers to follow the grain of a kaleidoscopic pattern in the making, the components of which lack an underlying ground or design to hold them in place. The chapter’s argument is developed by way of an engagement with the controversial Victorian reception of Browning’s long poem.

Learning by Experiment: T. H. Huxley and the Aesthetic Nature of Education

Beginning with John Herschel’s definition of ‘science’ as a specifically impersonal kind of knowledge, this chapter focuses on the relations between the subjective and the objective, pursuing them through the work of T. H. Huxley, Claude Bernard and others. Herschel’s notion of science resonates with the ethos of self-restraint that has been claimed to be constitutive of Victorian objectivity (Daston and Galison). Yet, while some Victorian thinkers certainly subscribed to the ideal of a dispassionate spectator “dying to know” (Levine), many of them were well aware that, in reality, the life of the observer and the matter to be observed were thoroughly entwined. As the chapter shows, this awareness of a deep-seated entanglement of the investigator and the investigated resulted not only in a concern with the ways and means of drawing the personal out of the general (or vice versa), so as to separate the scientific from all that which was not supposed to be part of it. More importantly, the Victorian belief in an intimate connection between being and knowing meant that natural historians such as Huxley attended closely to an experimental field in which the making of science overlaps with questions of sensory perception and aesthetic form.

Speech in Action: Victorian Philology and the Uprooting of Language

This chapter is concerned with the use of language, the common medium through which both literary and scientific texts come into the social world. Charting key points of contest in the Victorian debate about the origin and evolution of human speech, the chapter focuses on the contributions of F. Max Müller and Edward B. Tylor in particular. It argues that, in Müller’s work, the very attempt to demonstrate that there is a quasi-divine reason at the “root” of each word makes his writing develop a poetical logic that tends to outgrow the theoretical foundation it is supposed to be built upon. In this way, Müller’s lectures intimate, even though they do not say it, that the logic of language inheres in the multiple ways in which it is used, rather than dwelling in a place or “root” outside of them. As a result, Müller’s work not only enacts its own theory about the creative power of metaphor; it also aligns itself, unwittingly, with the philosophy of Edward B. Tylor whose attempts to reconcile the ideal meaning of words with the material practice of gesturing and drawing seem otherwise to deviate sharply from Müller’s approach.

Steps Towards an Ecology of Experience: Empiricism, Pragmatism and George Eliot’s The Spanish Gypsy

Chapter 4 makes the case that the work of Eliot and Lewes exemplifies a pragmatist understanding of knowledge that is centred on the idea of “experience as experiment” (Jay) or “experience as a craft” (Sennett). Distinguishing between two main senses of ‘experience’, practical wisdom and intense awareness, the chapter traces the manifold implications of that term through G.H. Lewes’s five volume fragment Problems of Life and Mind, Samuel Butler’s Life and Habit and George Eliot’s The Spanish Gypsy. Moreover, close readings of these texts are interwoven with references to the philosophical tradition of American Pragmatism, as represented by the work of William James and John Dewey. Briefly, my main argument is that these Pragmatist writers shared with their Victorian predecessors an ecological view of experience as an incipient pattern, an advancing middle between the past and the future as well as inside and outside, or subject and object, that essentially lacks anything like a firm ground.

Following the Actors: G. H. Lewes’s and George Eliot’s Studies in Life

Opening with a look at the character of Benjulia from Wilkie Collins’s novel Heart and Science, this chapter turns to G. H. Lewes’s Sea-Side Studies. As it argues, Collins’s Benjulia is unhappily tied to a position-based notion of knowledge that separates him from whatever he seeks to grasp. By contrast, Lewes’s studies exemplify an enquiry that goes along with its subject-matters, rather than trying to capture and contain them in an ideal place apart from the observer. Thus, Lewes’s essays invite their readers to learn with, rather than from, them. Instead of merely transmitting knowledge about marine life, these works take their readers through an experimental field that is still in the process of being explored. The section goes on to argue that George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss outlines a non-propositional reason that cannot be abstracted from the particular situations and actions in and through which it is expressed. The chapter therefore puts the case that Eliot’s novels and Lewes’s studies investigated different problems through similar methods. This explains why Eliot described her novels as “experiments in life”, a claim that the chapter clarifies by placing it in the context of Emile Zola’s theory of the experimental novel.

The Art of Science: Nineteenth-Century Theory and the Logic of Practice

This chapter examines how nineteenth-century philosophers from William Paley and Charles Darwin to John S. Mill and William Whewell described and debated the relations between art and science as well as practice and theory. Offering close readings of Paley’s Natural Theology and of various passages from Charles Darwin’s work on breeding and gardening, the chapter distinguishes between two conceptions of art in the sense of skilful practice: art as guided by knowledge and different from nature on the one hand and art as productive of knowledge as well as continuous with an evolving nature on the other. As the chapter argues, these two notions of art played a key role in a controversy between John S. Mill and William Whewell that was carried out, between 1840 and 1872, through successive editions of their published works. Engaging closely with the style and spirit in which this debate was conducted, the chapter shows that Mill and Whewell argued from radically different conceptions of what ‘science’ means. As a result, they disagreed, for instance, about the very question of what constitutes a logical form of argument or proof.