‘Literature Rather Than Science’: Henry Neville Hutchinson (1856-1927) and the Literary Borderlines of Science Writing (2018)
This article demonstrates that, in opposition to Hutchinson’s participatory rhetoric, leading researchers characterized his popular science texts as literature and thus as largely irrelevant to scientific thought. Such generic distinctions were extremely important. Seeley correctly recognized that many non-specialist readers of Hutchinson’s attractive books would be unable to tell that the extremely well-informed author was not, in fact, an accomplished or authoritative primary researcher. Placing Hutchinson’s books in a realm implied to be removed from truly scientific writing was an attempt to police the uncertain bounds of late-Victorian knowledge-making. This characterization of Hutchinson’s books as unscientific could be reinforced by drawing attention to the preferred register of romance with which he appealed to the public. Despite the critical attention that has previously been paid to Hutchinson’s expressive literary techniques and his habit of provoking the ire of the scientific establishment by Bernard Lightman (Popularizers of Science 450-60), Ralph O’Connor (“Henry Hutchinson” 91-94), and Gowan Dawson (Show Me the Bone 369-74), these clashes over his books’ style and function, and his own status in the community, have yet to be explored. In addition to revealing more about a controversial and ambiguous figure, this case study shows how, through the redefinition of literature, men of science were removing science writing from wider culture. At a time when scholars of literature and science are reflecting upon the definitions and practices we mean to take forward in the future (Littlefield and Willis 1), Hutchinson’s dilemma proves to be an enlightening case study in the field’s past.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Book
Richard Fallon;
(2021)
Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature: How the ‘Terrible Lizard' Became a Transatlantic Cultural Icon
(/isis/citation/CBB569188287/)
Chapter
Vermeer, Leonieke;
(2010)
Coping with Entropy: Utopian Reactions to the Second Law of the Thermodynamics (1860--1920)
(/isis/citation/CBB001021561/)
Article
Peter J. Bowler;
(2017)
The Promise of Science in Early 20th-Century Popular Literature
(/isis/citation/CBB927991765/)
Article
Moore, P. G.;
(2015)
Peeping at Nature with the Reverend Charles A. Hall FRMS (1872--1965)
(/isis/citation/CBB001422131/)
Thesis
Elspeth Green;
(2019)
Popular Science and Modernist Poetry
(/isis/citation/CBB377971334/)
Book
Price, Katy;
(2012)
Loving Faster Than Light: Romance and Readers in Einstein's Universe
(/isis/citation/CBB001250414/)
Book
Andrea Tenca;
(2020)
Dinosauri, demoni, operai. Una storia culturale del sottosuolo tra scienza e letteratura
(/isis/citation/CBB116328239/)
Book
Wilson, Robin J.;
(2008)
Lewis Carroll in Numberland: His Fantastical Mathematical Logical Life
(/isis/citation/CBB000953065/)
Book
Galvan, Jill Nicole;
(2010)
The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, the Occult, and Communication Technologies, 1859--1919
(/isis/citation/CBB001230806/)
Book
Federica Millefiorini;
(2020)
Creato e creatività letteraria. La prosa di Antonio Stoppani
(/isis/citation/CBB102450085/)
Article
Hale, Piers J.;
(2013)
Monkeys into Men and Men into Monkeys: Chance and Contingency in the Evolution of Man, Mind and Morals in Charles Kingsley's Water Babies
(/isis/citation/CBB001320622/)
Book
Costlow, Jane T;
(2013)
Heart-Pine Russia: Walking and Writing the Nineteenth-Century Forest
(/isis/citation/CBB001420376/)
Thesis
Walsh, Lynda Christine;
(2003)
The Rhetoric of the Scientific Media Hoax: Humanist Interventions in the Popularization of Nineteenth-Century American Science
(/isis/citation/CBB001562022/)
Article
Bernard Lightman;
(2014)
Contextualising Conan Doyle’s Ideal Reasoner: The Case of the Reluctant Scientific Naturalist
(/isis/citation/CBB253926574/)
Book
Mussell, James;
(2007)
Science, Time, and Space in the Late Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Movable Types
(/isis/citation/CBB000830151/)
Article
Adelene Buckland;
(2021)
Charles Dickens, Man of Science
(/isis/citation/CBB070659844/)
Thesis
Pamboukian, Sylvia Amy;
(2003)
Industrial Light and Magic: Popular Science, Technology, and the Occult in the Late Victorian Period
(/isis/citation/CBB001562340/)
Book
Ben Marsden;
Hazel Hutchinson;
Ralph O'Connor;
(2013)
Uncommon Contexts: Encounters between Science and Literature, 1800-1914
(/isis/citation/CBB598016454/)
Book
Talairach-Vielmas, Laurence;
(2011)
Science in the Nursery: The Popularisation of Science in Britain and France, 1761--1901
(/isis/citation/CBB001230556/)
Book
Cantor, Geoffrey;
Dawson, Gowan;
Gooday, Graeme;
Noakes, Richard;
Shuttleworth, Sally;
Topham, Johnathan R.;
(2004)
Science in the Nineteenth Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature
(/isis/citation/CBB000750856/)
Be the first to comment!