Science and Technology

This essay argues that William Henry Fox Talbot’s invention of the negative-positive photographic process was facilitated by the fact that he conceived of his historical moment as one in which the ideals of Romanticism, while still attractive, were becoming increasingly untenable. Talbot found the Romantic conception of the poet as the archetypal artist deeply compelling, but he feared that he and other men of his generation might be unequal to the task of artistic creation as it was theorized and practiced by late-Romantic poets like Shelley and Byron. Talbot addresses this anxiety in a poem of his own, “The Magic Mirror,” in which he explores the possibility that a special device might preserve a poetic account of nature in the form of a visual image. For Talbot, such a technology would of necessity fall short of Romantic ideals, being an externalized manifestation of poetic power—a tool to hand rather than an inspired voice within. At the same time, he understood that it would be possessed of a magic of its own in its capacity to revive a Romantic vision of nature. This conception of the visual image as (inadequate) memorial to a poetic ideal actually empowered Talbot by enabling him to tolerate the tendency of his early experimental photographs to darken or fade, and it prompted him ultimately to produce photographs whose melancholy character constitutes an important part of their extraordinary beauty.

This essay explores the cultural context in which Sir Charles Bell’s 1833 Bridgewater Treatise was published by focusing on the work as a culmination of his deep religious faith, his Edinburgh anatomical training, and his occupation as a surgeon at the Leeds Infirmary. It argues that The Hand was not merely an extension of Paleyan natural theology but also an important response to the era’s struggle with the grim physical reality of the supersession of manual labor by automatic manufacture.

The cross-correspondences are a well-known episode in the history of psychical research, a field that arose in the late Victorian period and was devoted to the scientific investigation of paranormal phenomena. Extending over three decades, this case was a study of possible communication from the other world. Psychical researchers collected and compared thousands of automatic writings (texts supposedly channeled unconsciously and authored by the spirits) that, while generated by several mediums, all seemed to cohere, as if spiritually orchestrated, in their tightly corresponding allusions to classical and literary lore. This essay chronicles the origins of and people involved with the cross-correspondences, together with their two most significant alleged spirit communications, the “Palm Sunday” and “Plan” messages. It then goes on to examine the patterns of allusion in the automatic writing, in order to claim the key role of Victorian poetry as constructive material: the messages, as deduced by psychical researchers, appear to be built on the stories and characters of writers like Alfred Tennyson. It was arguably this appeal to familiar literary elements of the previous century that seemed to bring the ghosts in the case to life; thus a literary analysis of the cross-correspondences can help us to understand their power to move their investigators to belief. On this reading, the cross-correspondences, though contemporaneous with the rise of modernism and with events like the Great War, are clearly a part of the “long nineteenth century.” As such they usefully emphasize the fluidity of history itself, frustrating conventional distinctions between the Victorian and the modern.

The first experiments in blood transfusion took place in the seventeenth century, using blood drawn from animals. After the death of a French patient and the trial of his physician for manslaughter, transfusion was abandoned for a century and a half. When it resumed in the nineteenth century, the first trials used human blood. They were conducted by the obstetrician James Blundell, who developed transfusion to treat women suffering from hemorrhage after childbirth. During the course of the century, transfusion was applied as a remedy to different kinds of sicknesses and injuries, and performed at different times with various fluids. By the 1880s, British doctors had abandoned transfusion with blood in favor of infusion with saline solution; the practice was only again resumed after the recognition of human blood types in the twentieth century. Developments in the practice of transfusion and infusion during the century reflect shifting views of how gender and species identity are embodied, and of relations of affinity and immunity between bodies of different kinds. They also reflect a shift from a vitalist to a mechanist understanding of blood and its function.

Edward B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture articulates one of two major theories of culture to emerge around 1870. His theory defines culture in descriptive terms as the “complex whole” that makes up social ideas and institutions, and in this it helped to establish anthropology as a recognized science. Tylor’s ideas were closely related to those published about the same time by Matthew Arnold, who defined culture as a humanist ideal that society should strive for.