Meegan Kennedy, Writing Embodiment in Victorian Microscopy: Beautiful Mechanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025) 480 pp. £117.50 Hb. ISBN: 9780198939009
In Writing Embodiment in Victorian Microscopy: Beautiful Mechanism Meegan Kennedy clearly establishes the terrain not only for her own ongoing multi-book project on Victorian microscopy but especially for anyone working on the literature of microscopy. Both thorough and rigorous, Writing Embodiment attends to the complex network of microscopial practices, purposes, and writings, with frequent close readings from the latter.
One of the major structures of the book is extended consideration of dozens of different tropes commonly used in microscopial writing from the 1830s through the 1870s (the third appendix helpfully lists the tropes discussed in each chapter). Kennedy reads these tropes for their effects upon the reputation of microscopy, the practices of microscopy, and communities of microscopists, especially as they ‘prescribe particular embodied relations between observer, apparatus, and object’ (6). In her analysis of many and varied tropes, Kennedy offers two major classifications: wonder and skepticism. The former collects affective responses while the latter ‘acknowledges and seeks to curtail potential sources of error’ (15).
The first part of Writing Embodiment lays down a firm foundation of ‘Theory, History, and Cultures of Victorian Microscopy’. Situating her consideration of tropes of wonder and skepticism in relation to ‘Two Cultures’ discourse, the introductory chapter outlines the contexts to which Victorian microscopial writing was addressed. Chapter two provides an overview of the microscope’s development and the writing produced about it from 1830 to 1880 and an extended comparison between microscopes and telescopes in the period. The third chapter describes the varied users of microscopes, with attention to efforts in the time to broaden the appeal of the microscope beyond the middle and upper class white men presumed to have the means for obtaining apparatus and samples as well as the time to develop skill with the instrument. In this chapter Kennedy also provides a useful breakdown of a number of different roles microscopists might fulfill, such as ‘investigator’, ‘hobbyist’, or even the ‘virtual viewer’ who does not use a microscope but reads about microscopy and forms part of the larger cultural milieu of microscopy. The opening section’s fourth chapter pivots on those virtual viewers and considers the audiences of Victorian microscopy and the manner in which published materials were at work to influence both what microscopists did and how they wrote about it. In particular, Kennedy classifies the writing across four modes: ‘research, instruction, community-building, and recreation’ (68). Moreover, this chapter introduces some of her major examples and shows how—like microscopists themselves—microscopial writing cuts across convenient classifications. Kennedy is emphatic about the details that would otherwise be smoothed over by the generalizing work of categorization, and this particularity contributes to the clear and declarative style of her argument. The opening section concludes with a chapter on ‘Physiological Psychology and Victorian Microscopy’; in this chapter the value of Kennedy’s short, titled subsections within each chapter becomes clear, establishing a long series of strong steps in her reasoning. Her organization is careful of the reader’s understanding and engagement in this chapter on the relationships understood to exist among perception, thinking, and feeling in the practices of microscopy and remains so throughout the book.
Parts two and three focus, respectively, on wonder and skepticism: ‘Beauty and Wonder’ and ‘Difficulty and Error’. Showing how Victorian microscopists used various tropes such as the microscopial sublime, counting the uncountable, the beautiful mechanism, the divine in the commonplace, and seeing is believing, Kennedy begins with the challenges posed by the likes of Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, and Max Weber, who considered microscopy to present at least a potential for its rational and objective discoveries to overwhelm affective experience of the things of nature. Positioning wonder in relation to the ideas both of it being under threat by magnified observation and of it being a sign of a lack of rigor in pursuit of objective science, Kennedy considers Victorian writers’ uses of tropes of wonder across an array of purposes and for a variety of audiences to support the pleasure and value of microscopial practices. In turning to the difficulties of microscopial practice, Kennedy underscores that these difficulties were central to the Victorians’ discourse in significant part due to their ‘recognition of observation as an embodied practice’ (207). These tropes, she shows, are used to develop a case for the scientific validity of a tool that might be used for entertainment, to explain how to attain physical adroitness in use of the microscope and its related apparatus, and to promote the uses of well-executed microscopial discovery. Unlike the tropes of wonder, which generally have long histories in literature, the tropes of skepticism tend to be much more closely tied to ‘nineteenth-century physiological and psychological research on the instability of human perceptions and techniques for mitigating scientific error’ (207).
The final part of Writing Embodiment brings together the two groups of tropes for a culminating analysis of the linkages between them. Not merely demonstrating that both are present, Kennedy shows incisively how different means of bringing them together were productive for those writers. Kennedy builds her argument from close readings of examples that subject readers to shifts from sections featuring wonder to others featuring skepticism, those which make such shifts on the smaller scale of the sentence or the paragraph, and those which ‘entwine wonder and skepticism in a single thought’ (335). These examples culminate in her presentation of the soirée form, ‘a literary form built on an aesthetic of miscellaneity […], an ethic of sociality, and an appeal to affect’ (346). Taking one further step, Kennedy concludes with Victorian writers’ uses of narrative, especially causality, to bring together not only the experiences of wonder and of skepticism but also the interrelations of the microscopist, the apparatus, and the object under observation.
While one might make use of this meticulous, clear, and detailed volume as a go-to reference on Victorian Microscopy, these are the trees of which a broader forest is made: the argument, built of myriad distinct observations and interpretations, steadfastly connects rhetoric and microscopial practice, finding in both the promotion of particular embodiments and communities of practice.
Jenni G Halpin, Coker University
