Stories with titles like The Time Machine, Journey to Mars, and The Invisible Man described alternate histories, future inventions, and prehistoric aliens to British citizens in late Victorian England. They reconciled religion and science. They served as clever commentaries on Victorian culture – class, race, and sexuality. Known as “scientific romances,” these stories were typically seen in weekly periodicals, including The Strand, Punch, and Pearson’s Weekly. Despite its popularity and widespread readership, Victorian science fiction has largely been excluded from nineteenth-century scientific cultural history. The aim of this post is to offer contestation to that exclusion and, in doing so, highlight several examples of the two-way conversational street between Victorian science fiction and science proper.
One way in which science fiction stands as a legitimate course of scholarly inquiry is the fact that it served as a means of popularization for the sciences so often studied by scientific historians. Thomas Huxley seemingly praised science fiction, however cynically, in a letter to Joseph D. Hooker, when he explained that “The English nation will not take science from above, so it must get it from below. We, the doctors, who know what is good for it, if we cannot get it to take pills, must administer our remedies par derriere (from behind).” The importance of science fiction is not limited to popularization. It offers a new point of view on the “institutionalization, mobilization, and legitimation of scientific knowledge and practice.” It allows for a deeper understanding of the attitudes and ambivalence toward science and technological advancement, and toward scientists, and social change. The study of Victorian science fiction helps us see how integral a role science played in Victorian culture and it “suggests the need to reconceive the history of scientific popularization.”
Science fiction, while most popular among middle-class readers – especially women and children, was not limited to any specific group. It was democratic in the most basic sense of the word. Its proliferation was not only spurred on by professional scientists and naturalists of the day, it actually aided and shaped the work of those professional academics. Among some of the ideas that moved out the realm of fiction and into the realm of science in Victorian England are bio-engineering, time travel and extra-dimensional space, and the possibility for extra-terrestrial life.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is based around the chemical and synthetic devolution of a man to a more primal state, and provides a directly and explicitly biological metaphor for mankind’s fall from grace. Stevenson used his tale, perhaps, to forewarn against bioengineering based on the secular evolutionary concepts as espoused by Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley – elements of which we still see in science-esque journalism and advertising today. Herbert George Wells, in The Time Machine, as well as in essays and columns on human evolution, extinction, and degeneration, subverted progressionist interpretations of evolutionary theory. Paul Fayter, Professor of Humanities at the University of York, notes that the story in Wells’ The Time Machine “cuts both communist and liberal bourgeois utopian pretensions in its evocation of cannibalistic Morlocks, dying suns, and Huxley’s dark moral vision of nature as a decaying garden in [his treatise] Evolution and Ethics.” Moreover, Wells both predicted and offered solutions for space-time and how time travel might function – a full decade ahead of both Einstein and Herman Minkowski:
It is simply this. That Space, as our mathematicians have it, is spoken of as having three dimensions, which one may call Length, Breadth, and Thickness, and is always definable by reference to three planes, each at right angles to the others. But some philosophical people have been asking why THREE dimensions particularly - why not another direction at right angles to the other three? - and have even tried to construct a Four-Dimension geometry. Professor Simon Newcomb was expounding this to the New York Mathematical Society only a month or so ago. You know how on a flat surface, which has only two dimensions, we can represent a figure of a three-dimensional solid, and similarly they think that by models of three dimensions they could represent one of four - if they could master the perspective of the thing. See?
Wells’ reference to Professor Simon Newcomb perhaps illustrates the source of his awareness and apparent knowledge of extra-dimensional space. Newcomb was not a fictional character. He was an actual scientist who published two major papers concerning non-Euclidean geometry and Riemannian spaces during the 1870s. In those papers, however, Newcomb never treated, or ever even alluded to, an extra dimension of space beyond the geometry of Euclidean solids, and certainly did not do so as a means for illustrating time as the suggested fourth dimension. Wells made an enormous intuitive leap in connecting a theoretical mathematical interpretation of the Riemann Hypothesis to reality and a staggering bound in reason in expressly implicating that time itself is that fourth dimension. It cannot be understated how far ahead Wells was of his time. On a personal note, I suspect that Wells’ ideas, as expressed in The Time Machine, carried some weight in Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, though I can find no direct linkage.
One small indication of how Wells’ stories have been received by scientists after the turn of the century comes in the form of their inclusion in A Bibliography of Non-Euclidean Geometry by D.M.Y. Sommerville. By 1911, this mathematical field of study had become so large and diverse that Sommerville published a book-length bibliography of the subject. The topics were extensively indexed, cataloged and cross-referenced, so it is not that difficult for anyone to find Wells’ fictional stories of the fourth dimension. They are listed under the general topic “Space of n Dimensions,” within the subject heading of “Generalities” and finally under “Fiction.” Sommerville considered the subject of fiction important enough to be listed alongside professional mathematical papers on non-Euclidean and hyperspace geometries. In fact, Sommerville also wrote two very short fictional pieces on the same subject. The sheer size of Sommerville’s bibliography emphasizes the importance of the field of non-Euclidean geometries and hyperspaces to mathematics, science, philosophy and culture in general during the Victorian era.
Beginning in the 1840s, English opticians began to make great headway in the crafting and polishing of precise optical metal mirrors, and in the pouring and smoothing large optical glass discs, for reflecting and refracting telescopes respectively. By the late 1870s photographs of celestial objects became ubiquitous, both on the English isles as well as on the European mainland. It was in 1859, however, that spectroscopy – a process by which the reflective spectrums of matter can be read and interpreted and the elemental composition of that matter could therefore be deduced – was invented by Gustav Kirchoff and Robert Bunsen.
By utilizing these technological improvements and principles, the Martian surface could be observed with relative clarity and the composition of the atmosphere of the planet could be ascertained. Soon Mars, with its relatively thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide and its feature rich terrain, along with its seasonal shifts, axial tilt and daily rotations, earned a perception of being very Earth-like, and possibly habitable – further still, possibly inhabited. If it were inhabited, it should make sense that, since it so closely resembles Earth in form, should not the inhabitants of Mars resemble the inhabitants of Earth? In 1895 Percival Lowell published his first book on Mars. In 1896 Francis Galton produced a manuscript where, in just sixty pages, he proposed a language that could have been suitable for communication with a Martian intelligence.
Such wide-eyed notions of extraterrestrial beings were nothing new to science fictions writers of the day however. As Paul Fayter points out, Percy Greg’s novel Across the Zodiac included “much astronomical detail with long passages devoted to Martian science, technology, society and language.” To Greg, Martian ideology was rationalistic and positivist; unlike in the religious societies of the Earth, it was not a crime to accept the results of science. Science fiction writers did not all look to Mars with hope, however. In Robert Cromie’s A Plunge into Space, Mars is portrayed as a dry, desolate and dying world – further along its evolutionary path than Earth. “There is no further progress” ahead of Martians, Cromie explained; “their only change must be toward decay.” The implication being that Martians have become so highly evolved and specialized that their only remaining path is one of evolutionary decline. Cromie was holding a cynical and rather skeptical mirror up to Victorian progressives. Though he misunderstood some of the implications of evolutionary theory, Cromie’s point was, no doubt, poignant.
Wells took things a step further than Cromie. In The War of the Worlds, instead of placing humans in a devolutionary decline, Wells pitted Martians in direct conflict with mankind. In the first chapter of the novel, Wells framed his vision of England’s own imperialism in such a way that Martians filled the role of the British Empire and the English themselves filled the role of the “conquerees.” “Remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals […] but upon its inferior races […] The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?” Wells simply highlighted the fact that in evolutionary theory, according to Darwin, invasion “almost inevitably induces extinction.”
Ian Clarke, Professor of literature at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland, observes that The War of the Worlds is about three wars:
1) the war of the Europeans against less civilized people during imperial expansion of the late nineteenth century,
2) the biological war taking place everywhere at all times in nature,
3) and the sort of war that might occur if science were devoted to militaristic interests in so far as it produces highly advanced weapons of mass destruction.
Paul Fayter adds two more types of “Darwinian warfare.” “Fourth,” he notes, “we witness the invasion of the present by the future.” The final form of warfare is the invasion itself, both that perpetrated by the Martians and that perpetrated against the Martians by terrestrial (bacterial) infection, “is Darwinism on an interplanetary scale.” These lessons were all too obvious to Victorian (and later English) societies. Wells’ eloquent expressions of Darwin’s ideas and of general germ theory helped, in no small part to expand a knowledge in medicine, and perhaps aided helped to bolster a relatively peaceful decline of, until around 1914, the largest empire to have ever existed in human history.
Science fiction is worth considering in any study of the Victorian past. In the context of other worlds and alien lifeforms, Victorian science fiction served as a tool for social satire and critique; it reflected on the existence and nature of God as well as the nature of mankind. It brought to light, for an entire nation, the implications of political, technological, and scientific change.
