Category: Romantic and Victorian

Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (London: Harper Collins, 2008), pp. xxi + 554. £25. ISBN 978-0-00-714952-0 The best feature of this fascinating survey of Romantic science is Richard Holmes’s skill in bringing to utterly believable life the domestic circumstances in which scientific discovery was…

Jason R. Rudy, Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poetics (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2009). xiii + 222 pp. £40.50 hb. ISBN 0821418823. Electric Meters—the subject of which should not be confused with devices you may (or may not) have fitted to your power mains at home—is an ambitious and welcome addition to the growing field…

Thomas Söderqvist (ed.), The History and Poetics of Scientific Biography (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). xv + 270 pp. £60 hb. ISBN 978-0-7546-5181-9. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) If the modern impulse to write biography—split between seriousness and celebrity, the cerebral and the gossipy—can be traced from James Boswell’s systematic courting and recording…

Bernhard Kuhn, Autobiography and Natural Science in the Age of Romanticism: Rousseau, Goethe, Thoreau (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). 171 pp. £55 hb. ISBN 978-0-7546-6166-5. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) Bernhard Kuhn’s engaging study draws life writing into current academic debates concerning the historical relationship between the arts and sciences. Contesting C.P Snow’s…

Jenny Davidson, Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century(New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), xx+292 pp. £22.50 hb. ISBN 978-0-231-13878-9 (book), ISBN 978-0-231-51111-7 (ebook). Jenny Davidson’s original synthesis appeals equally to specialists in eighteenth-century literature and science, and readers interested in the history of the life sciences, agriculture, education or language. With elegance and…

Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, Wilkie Collins, Medicine and the Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009). 224pp. £75 hb. ISBN 0708322239. Teresa Goddu’s assertion that ‘Gothic registers its culture’s anxieties’ frames an important literary theme in the nineteenth century. With medical theories such as physiology that reduced ‘man to “matter”’ (p. 5), scientific revelations such as Darwin’s…

Julia Reid, Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin de Siècle (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 241pp. £18.99 pb. ISBN: 978-0-230-23032-3. Julia Reid’s Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin de Siècle has this year been published in paperback, no doubt partly as a result of very favourable reviews when it first appeared in 2006. We…

Tabitha Sparks, The Doctor in the Victorian Novel: Family Practices, Nineteenth Century Series (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 177pp. £99.95 hb. ISBN: 978-0-7546-6802-2 (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) When Queen Victoria ascended to the throne in 1837, practitioners of medicine were enjoying new prestige and dominance; as population figures soared, so too did…