In her final work, Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), George Eliot includes an essay, “Shadows of the Coming Race,” in which the fictionalized narrator speaks of his concerns regarding the growing power of machines. This chapter explores Eliot’s responses to actual machines of her time, and the impact they had on her conceptions of human consciousness and the animal/human/machine divide. It argues that the machine she had in mind for drawing the right conclusion was William Jevons’s “Logical Piano.” The chapter examines this connection, but also, more broadly, the various machines Eliot viewed when visiting laboratories. This was the great age for the development of experimental physiology and of the creation of “self-recording” machines that could measure every aspect of human physiological life and also, it was believed, the flows of thought and emotion. Starting with Lewes’s own work on “Animal Automatism,” the chapter explores how these new conceptions of mind, body, and machine enter into Eliot’s thinking.

Chapter 3 examines the formal realism of “reverent natural history,” describing the formal properties of natural histories in ways that we have assumed were the sole province of the realist novel’s descriptive operations. The focus is on P. H.Gosse’s seashore trilogy, including A Naturalist’s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast, The Aquarium, and Tenby. These formal properties include: the prevalence of detail that the inductive process and theological orientation that the texts encourage; the quality of dilation as a function of reverence; and how detail, dilation, and minuteness are formal and thematic attributes of these natural histories, which reflect a religiosity that goes beyond the overt references to design arguments. The chapter’s second half focuses on two natural environments of the seashore naturalist: the aquarium and the tide-pool. These environments are read as literary figures, as heightened sites of metonymic display.