bonus post: Middlemarch & science

a short bonus essay about the intersections of Victorian literature and science

Hi, Middlemarch readers!

This weekend, I was up in the mountains enjoying some screen-free sunshine. I had one of my favorite books to learn from on my lap as I sat in a summery breeze, and I learned so much from one of its chapters that I wanted to share some of my learnings and takeaways with you!

The book is A Companion to the Victorian Novel, edited by Patrick Brantlinger and William Thesing.¹

And the specific chapter is “Scientific Ascendancy” by John Kucich.

-please feel free to screenshot this and make it your phone background or desktop background. it’s mine right now and it’s weirdly satisfying!

In today’s short, bonus post for paid subscribers, I’m sharing a short outline of Kucich’s chapter along with some of the best tidbits and learnings I gleaned from reading. In short, the chapter explains how Victorian fiction and Victorian science overlap in their thinking, logic, and communication with the reading public. The chapter also offers loads of insights into Middlemarch, along with a reading of Eliot’s integration of science into the novel.

Victorian fiction and Victorian science

“An enormous increase in the prestige and authority of science was, perhaps, the central intellectual event of the Victorian period,” writes John Kucich in “Scientific Ascendancy.” Throughout the chapter, Kucich argues that Victorian fiction and science were deeply interwoven cultural discourses.