Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T02:27:29.342Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

POETRY AND PARALLAX IN MARY SOMERVILLE'S ON THE CONNEXION OF THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2017

Michelle Boswell
Michelle Boswell*
Affiliation:
Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

During the first astronomy lesson shared by the two protagonists of Thomas Hardy's Two on a Tower (1882), Lady Viviette Constantine and Swithin St Cleeve share a decidedly gloomy interpretation of human insignificance in the face of a vast universe:

“We are now traversing distances beside which the immense line stretching from the earth to the sun is but an invisible point,” said the youth. “When, just now, we had reached a planet whose remoteness is a hundred times the remoteness of the sun from the earth, we were only a two thousandth part of the journey to the spot at which we have optically arrived now.”

“Oh, pray don't; it overpowers me!” she replied, not without seriousness. “It makes me feel that it is not worth while to live; it quite annihilates me.”

“If it annihilates your ladyship to roam over these yawning spaces just once, think how it must annihilate me to be, as it were, in constant suspension amid them night after night.” (28-29; ch. 4)

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 45 , Issue 4 , December 2017 , pp. 727 - 744
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

“Art. VIII—On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences. By Mrs. Somerville.” Edinburgh Review Apr. 1834: 154–71. British Periodicals. ProQuest. 22 Jun. 2012.Google Scholar
Ashfield, Andrew, and de Bolla, Peter, eds. The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.Google Scholar
Athenaeum 15 Mar. 1834: 202–03. British Periodicals. ProQuest. 10 Oct. 2016.Google Scholar
Baym, Nina. American Women of Letters and the Nineteenth-Century Sciences: Styles of Affiliation. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2002.Google Scholar
Brock, Claire. “The Public Worth of Mary Somerville.” British Journal for the History of Science 39.2 (June 2006): 255–72.Google Scholar
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Ed. Phillips, Adam. Oxford World's Classics Edition. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Byron, George Gordon, Lord. Three Plays: Sardanapalus; The two Foscari; Cain. 1821. Oxford and New York: Woodstock, 1990.Google Scholar
Chapman, Allan. Mary Somerville and the World of Science. Bristol: Canopus, 2004.Google Scholar
“The Connection of the Physical Sciences.” The British Magazine Apr. 1834: 469. British Periodicals. ProQuest. 22 Jun. 2012.Google Scholar
“The Connexion of the Physical Sciences. By Mrs. Sommerville. [Sic]” Metropolitan Magazine Apr. 1834: 102–03. British Periodicals. ProQuest. 24 Oct. 2016.Google Scholar
Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.Google Scholar
Eliot, George, and Haight, Gordon Sherman. The George Eliot Letters. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954.Google Scholar
Ferguson, Frances. Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation. New York: Routledge, 1992.Google Scholar
Hardy, Thomas. Two on a Tower. New York: Penguin, 1999.Google Scholar
Henchman, Anna. The Starry Sky Within: Astronomy and the Reach of Mind in Victorian Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jenkins, Alice. Space and the ‘March of Mind’: Literature and the Physical Sciences in Britain, 1815–1850. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007.Google Scholar
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Ed. Guyer, Paul. Trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.Google Scholar
Lightman, Bernard. Victorian Popularizers of Science. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“Mary Somerville.” Atlantic Monthly 5 (May 1860): 568–71.Google Scholar
McMillan, Dorothy. Queen of Science: Personal Recollections of Mary Somerville. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2001.Google Scholar
“Mrs. Somerville.” Morning Post (2 Dec. 1872): 6. 19th Century British Newspapers. Gale Group. 17 Feb. 2014.Google Scholar
Nagel, Thomas. The View from Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986.Google Scholar
Neeley, Kathryn A. Mary Somerville: Science, Illumination, and the Female Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.Google Scholar
Patterson, Elizabeth Chambers. “Mary Somerville.” The British Journal for the History of Science 4.4 (1969): 311–39.Google Scholar
Patterson, Elizabeth Chambers. Mary Somerville and the Cultivation of Science, 1815–1840. Boston and The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983.Google Scholar
Secord, James. “Introduction.” Collected Works of Mary Somerville. Ed. Secord, James. 9 vols. 4: ix-xv. Bristol: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004.Google Scholar
Secord, James. Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2000.Google Scholar
Somerville, Mary Fairfax Grieg. On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences. London: J. Murray, 1834.Google Scholar
Somerville Collection. Oxford, Bodleian Library Dep c. 352 fols. 5–6.Google Scholar
Watts, Ruth. “‘Suggestive Books’: The Role of the Writings of Mary Somerville in Science and Gender History.” Paedagogica Historica 38.1 (2002): 162–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Whewell, William to Mary Somerville, 5 Jan. 1838. c.372.22. Somerville Collection, Bodleian Library.Google Scholar
Whewell, William. “Art. III: On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, By Mrs. Somerville.” Quarterly Review 51.101 (1834): 54–68. British Periodicals. ProQuest. 24 Oct. 2016.Google Scholar