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Article ID: CBB198856022

‘Literature Rather Than Science’: Henry Neville Hutchinson (1856-1927) and the Literary Borderlines of Science Writing (2018)

Fallon, Richard (Author)

Journal of Literature and Science
Volume: 11
Issue: 1
Pages: 50-65
Publication date: 2018
Language: English

URI: http://www.literatureandscience.org/volume-10-issue-2-2017/

DOI: 10.12929

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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.

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