Vital compositions: Writing matter in Victorian literature and culture

The Victorian Period is well known for its industrial and scientific progress. Novelist Charles Dickens refers to it as a period of “miraculous material progress,” poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning calls the nineteenth century a “living, throbbing age,” and essayist Thomas Hughes refers to it “the hard materialist nineteenth century.” The Victorians were, in other words, well aware of their uniquely new materialism as it related to colonization, industry, population, science, culture, and art. In response to this new materialism, Victorian authors attempted to understand their world with the help of the growing fields of biology, chemistry, and physics that until this time had been designated the “natural” and “physical sciences.” Through their search, the Victorians remained aware that there was something vital in the world, something forceful, invisible, and omniscient. It was an energetic current that flowed through and evolved all things. This energy produced language, animated life, passed time, and created art. Across the century and across writers the sense remained that something in the world was undiscoverable.

Taking an interdisciplinary approach, “Vital Compositions” brings together Victorian literature, the history of science, and philosophy to show how canonical Victorian authors were interacting with scientific developments in their work to understand our lively and forceful material world. If we can, like the Victorians, see the liveliness among all things, then we can more clearly appreciate our interconnectivity with nature and each other.