The Starry Sky Within: Astronomy and the Reach of the Mind in Victorian Literature 0199686963, 9780199686964

Table of contents :
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Part One—Observers in Motion
1. Astronomy, Optics, and Point of View
2. Thomas De Quincey’s Disoriented Universe
3. Grief in Motion: Parallax and Orbing in Tennyson
Part Two—Astronomy and the Multiplot Novel
Introduction: Novels as Celestial Systems
4. Hardy’s Stargazers and the Astronomy of Other Minds
5. George Eliot and the Sweep of the Senses
6. Narratives on a Grand Scale: Astronomy and Narrative Space
Conclusion
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

THE STARRY SKY WITHIN

THE STARRY SKY WITHIN astronomy and the reach of the mind in victorian literature

ANNA HENCHMAN

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries # Anna Henchman 2014 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2014 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2013942193 ISBN 978–0–19–968696–4 Printed by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

For my parents, Michael Henchman and Kitsie Henchman-Sallet

Acknowledgments

This project was supported by a Packard Fellowship, a Merit Fellowship, the Society of Fellows, and, in its final stages of production, a Publication Production Award and a Junior Faculty Fellowship at the Boston University Center for the Humanities. An earlier version of Chapter Three was published in Victorian Poetry 41:1 (2003): 29–45, and a version of Chapter Four appeared in Victorian Studies 51:1 (2008): 37–64. In both cases, the help I got from editors, anonymous readers, and copyeditors was invaluable. I am particularly grateful to Gowan Dawson, Sally Shuttleworth, Laura Green, and Andrew Miller for their suggestions. Harvard Imaging Services did a fantastic job of reproducing most of the images in this book. Jenny Higham at the Royal Astronomical Society and Moira Fitzgerald at Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library were also great resources. At Oxford University Press, Brendan O’Neill initially expressed interest in the project. Warm thanks go to Jacqueline Baker, Rachel Platt, Elizabeth Chadwick, Gillian Northcott Liles, Shereen Karmali, Shanker Loganthan, Angela Anstey-Holroyd, and Helen Boyd for all their work and insight in the final stages of bringing this book into being. Elaine Scarry was the primary inspiration behind this study of the starry sky since its first inception in her seminar on Thomas Hardy. Whether phoning in edits from a Wyoming rest stop or reading out passages from Tolstoy, she has been an extraordinary mentor and friend. Every sentence in this book has been shaped by her imagination. I am also grateful to Elaine Scarry for granting permission for me to quote from her book On Beauty and Being Just # 1999 Princeton University Press. Warm thanks go to Philip Fisher, who taught me how to think about the novel. Jesse Matz, Ann Rowland, and Erik Gray were wise readers and fabulous role models. Isobel Armstrong, with her passion for nineteenth-century poetics, theory, and light, has been a constant source of insight. I thank her for her brilliance, her generosity, and for her friendship.

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During my time in graduate school I was lucky enough to have many talented and generous people read and comment on sections of the dissertation that would later grow into this book. These included Deb Gettelman, Zahr Said, Jenny Davidson, Laura Saltz, Katie Peterson, Sophie Gee, Andrew DuBois, Eric Idsvoog, Andy Stauffer, Steve Shoemaker, Tamar Brown, Michelle Syba, Deborah Forbes, Melissa Shields, Larry Switzky, Sarah Kareem, Curtis Brown, Matt Rubery, Imraan Coovadia, Gwen Urdang-Brown, and other members of the British Literature Colloquium. Behind the scenes were some other crucial readers: Roly Chambers, Jon Calame, and Nathan Rein. I greatly benefited from the classes I took with Lorraine Daston, Peter Galison, Gillian Beer, Jimena Canales, Mario Biagioli, and Oren Izenberg. A few other professors, including Helen Vendler, Leah Price, and Peter Gordon made suggestions that have been particularly helpful. Special thanks go to Susan Chambers who was with me at every stage of the dissertation. She gave generously of her wisdom and of her way with words. In addition to the extraordinary gift of three years in which to think, the Society of Fellows provided me with an amazing set of colleagues and friends. Diana Morse made things cheerful and homey. Edyta Bojanowska, Debbie Coen, and Cristina Vatulescu provided brilliance and laughter. Greg Nagy started the atelier des anciens et modernes, in which I benefited from fantastic feedback from him, David Elmer, Lenny Muellner, and Hillary Chute. In Vanessa Ryan I gained a lifelong friend and doppelganger. Thanks too to Kelly Katz, Bill Todd, Jonathan Bolton, Jon Wilkins, and many others. Much of the happiness of recent years has come from my wonderful colleagues at Boston University. Julia Brown has been a fabulous mentor, and gave me detailed notes on the whole manuscript. Carrie Preston has been an amazing editor and a dear friend. Joe Bizup made some strikingly perceptive suggestions. I am grateful for many stimulating conversations with Bonnie Costello, Joe Rezek, John Paul Riquelme, Matt Smith, Andy Stauffer, Aaron Fogel, Larry Breiner, Tom Otten, Magda Ostas, Amy Appleford, Chuck Rzepka, David Wagenknecht, Jonathan Foltz, and Rob Chodat. Susan Mizruchi and James Winn have been great advocates for junior faculty. I thank Bill Carroll and Jack Matthews for their integrity and leadership. Graduate and undergraduate students in the department have been a source of inspiration. Special thanks go to Catherine Nordstrom and Sheila Cordner, and to Michelle Simunovic, Jenna Kelly, Ross Cohen,

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Arielle Zibrak, and Joshua Wisebaker. Gene Jarrett has given me crucial advice and encouragement. He remains a model of how to cultivate an open-minded, collegial, and stimulating intellectual environment. The intellectual communities fostered by the Cognitive Theory and the Arts seminar, the Boston Reading Group, the Northeast Victorian Studies Association, and the Victorian Literature and Culture Seminar have all been a constant source of stimulation. I’m particularly grateful to Maia McAleavey, Elaine Auyoung, Jonah Siegel, John Plotz, Josh Rothman, Daniel Williams, Martha Vicinus, Laura Green, Kelly Hager, Jim Buzard, Mary Wilson Carpenter, Gerhard Joseph, and Anne Humpherys. For decades Ivan Kreilkamp has guided me through every stage of academic life, and has been a fabulous friend. This book would not have been written without the constant companionship of Laura Saltz, my writing partner and intellectual center of gravity for many years now. Ronnie Greenberg guided me through the book’s gestation and birth. The talented Anthony Lee of Honest Struggle designed the cover on which the final one was based. Readers who were also absolutely crucial in the last months of revising included Deb Gettelman, Hillary Chute, Heather Brink-Roby, Rachel Cohen, Sophie Gee, Suzanne Smith, Anne Janowitz, and Karen Chase. Eric Idsvoog provided unbelievable help and inspiration. For conversations extending over many years I am forever grateful to Sophie Gee, Lev Grossman, Sophie Roell, Charlie Maynard, Steve Fish, Jon Calame, Anna Hepler, Nadja and Doug Lavin, Rachel Cohen, Matt Boyle, Hillary Chute, Laura Saltz, Roly and Susan Chambers, John Plotz, Alex Star, Ivan Kreilkamp, Jess Moss, Cian Dorr, Margaret Litvin, Jeanne Follansbee, Larry Switzky, Katherine Fletcher, John Hodgman, Maureen McLane, Theo Davis, Caitlin Macy, Lynda and Bob Lloyd, Stephen Teichgraeber, the late Ron Richardson, Nicko and Alex van Someren, and Sacha Henchman. This book is dedicated to my biological parents, Michael Henchman and Kitsie Henchman-Sallet, both of whom have loving and supportive spouses. My mother and Herb Sallet provided emergency supplies of food, ink cartridges, and babysitting. It is great to have the opportunity to thank them for their generosity and love. Thanks to my father and Kate Henchman for their love and generous support over the years, as well as for providing a lifetime of books and inspiration. Quincey Simmons changed the pivot of my universe when I met her thirty years ago. Liv and Jake have

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provided me with much amusement and constant commentary on what Edgar Allan Poe would call the “vacillating energies” of my imagination. Alexandra is routinely pleased to see the sun go back into his hole, because she loves the sparkly, starry sky. Thanks, finally, to Steve Biel for his unparalleled wisdom, humor, and warmth.

Contents

List of Illustrations Introduction

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PART ONE—OBSERVERS IN MOTION 1. Astronomy, Optics, and Point of View 2. Thomas De Quincey’s Disoriented Universe 3. Grief in Motion: Parallax and Orbing in Tennyson

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PART TWO—ASTRONOMY AND THE MULTIPLOT NOVEL Introduction: Novels as Celestial Systems 4. Hardy’s Stargazers and the Astronomy of Other Minds 5. George Eliot and the Sweep of the Senses 6. Narratives on a Grand Scale: Astronomy and Narrative Space Conclusion

121 129 158 196 231

Endnotes Bibliography Index

236 266 287

List of Illustrations

Introduction 1 Smith, Asa. “Earth and Definitions.” Smith’s Illustrated Astronomy: Designed for the Use of the Public or Common Schools in the United States (New York: Cady & Burgess, 1850), p. 18 (photo Harvard Imaging Services, courtesy of Widener Library, Harvard University). 2 Smith, Asa. “Terrestrial and Celestial Globes.” Detail. Smith’s Illustrated Astronomy: Designed for the Use of the Public or Common Schools in the United States (New York: Cady & Burgess, 1850), facing p. 54 (photo Harvard Imaging Services, courtesy of Widener Library, Harvard University). 3 Smith, Asa. “Terrestrial and Celestial Globes.” Smith’s Illustrated Astronomy: Designed for the Use of the Public or Common Schools in the United States (New York: Cady & Burgess, 1850), facing p. 54 (photo Harvard Imaging Services, courtesy of Widener Library, Harvard University). 4 “Terrestrial and Celestial Globes.” Engraved for Thomas Bankes’s New System of Geography (London: C. Cooke, 1787). (photo Steve Batrick Antique Prints and Maps).

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Part One Chapter 1 5 Smith, Asa. “Mercury and Venus.” Smith’s Illustrated Astronomy: Designed for the Use of the Public or Common Schools in the United States (New York: Cady & Burgess, 1850), p. 16 (photo Harvard Imaging Services, courtesy of Widener Library, Harvard University). 6 Ball, Robert S. “Two Eyes Are Better Than One.” Star-Land, Being Talks with Young People about the Wonders of the Heavens. (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1892). p. 19 (photo Harvard Imaging Services, courtesy of Widener Library, Harvard University).

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list of illustrations 7 “Apparent Variation in the Height of a Tower at Different Distances [Parallax].” The Heavens: An Illustrated Handbook of Popular Astronomy by Ame´de´e Guillemin, edited by J. Norman Lockyer, Fourth Edition, revised by Richard A. Proctor (New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1871), p. 482 (photo Harvard Imaging Services, courtesy of Boston University Libraries). 8 Ball, Robert S. “How We Measured the Ball.” Star-Land, Being Talks with Young People about the Wonders of the Heavens. Boston: Ginn and Co., 1892. p. 19 (photo Harvard Imaging Services, courtesy of Widener Library, Harvard University). 9 Young, Charles A. “Triangulation and Parallax.” Manual of Astronomy: A Text-Book (Boston: The Athaneum Press, 1902), p. 268 (photo Harvard Imaging Services, courtesy of Widener Library, Harvard University). 10 Fine´, Oronce. “La Sphere du Monde. [Ptolemaic Representation of the Cosmos].” MS Typ 57. Handwritten Manuscript, 1549. (photo Harvard Imaging Services, courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University). 11 Ball, Robert S. “A Juvenile Lecture at the Royal Institution.” Star-Land, Being Talks with Young People about the Wonders of the Heavens (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1892), facing title page (photo Harvard Imaging Services, courtesy of Widener Library, Harvard University).

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Chapter 2 12 “Lord Rosse’s Great Telescope” Colored engraving from Ame´de´e Guillemin,The Heavens: An Illustrated Handbook of Popular Astronomy (London: Richard Bentley, 1878). (photo David Parker; Science Photo Library). 13 Herschel, John. Engraving of the Nebula in Orion, Turned Upside Down. John Pringle Nichol, Thoughts on Some Important Points Related to the System of the World (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1846) plate VIII, facing p. 51 (photo Harvard Imaging Services, courtesy of Widener Library, Harvard University). 14 Herschel, John. Engraving of the Nebula in Orion, and the facing page in Original Orientation. John Pringle Nichol, Thoughts on Some Important Points Related to the System of the World (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1846), plate VIII and p. 51 (photo Harvard Imaging Services, courtesy of Widener Library, Harvard University).

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Chapter 3 15 Guillemin, Ame´de´e. “Apparent Variation in the Height of a Tower at Different Distances [Parallax].” Detail. The Heavens: An Illustrated Handbook of Popular Astronomy by Ame´de´e Guillemin, edited by J. Norman Lockyer, Fourth Edition, revised by Richard A. Proctor (New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1871), p. 482 (photo Harvard Imaging Services, courtesy of Boston University Libraries). 16 Smith, Asa. “Parallax.” Smith’s Illustrated Astronomy: Designed for the Use of the Public or Common Schools in the United States (New York: Cady & Burgess, 1850), p. 53 (photo Harvard Imaging Services, courtesy of Widener Library, Harvard University). 17 Smith, Asa. “Refraction.” Smith’s Illustrated Astronomy: Designed for the Use of the Public or Common Schools in the United States (New York: Cady & Burgess, 1850), facing p. 52 (photo Harvard Imaging Services, courtesy of Widener Library, Harvard University). 18 Nasmyth, James. “Apparent change in the form of spots approaching or receding from the centre.” The Heavens: An Illustrated Handbook of Popular Astronomy, Ame´de´e Guillemin, edited by J. Norman Lockyer, Fourth Edition, revised by Richard A. Proctor (New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1871), p. 25 (photo Harvard Imaging Services, courtesy of Widener Library, Harvard University). 19 Nasmyth, James. “Sun-spots showing umbra, penumbra, and luminous bridges.” The Heavens: An Illustrated Handbook of Popular Astronomy, edited by J. Norman Lockyer, Fourth Edition, revised by Richard A. Proctor (New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1871), p. 32 (photo Harvard Imaging Services, courtesy of Widener Library, Harvard University). 20 “Tennyson in his Study on the Isle of Wight, 1884.” Celebrities of the Day Series. The Graphic. 22 March 1884, p. 11 (photo Harvard Imaging Services, courtesy of Widener Library, Harvard University). 21 Smith, Asa. “Venus Evening Star and Morning Star.” Smith’s Illustrated Astronomy: Designed for the Use of the Public or Common Schools in the United States (New York: Cady & Burgess, 1850), p. 16 (photo Harvard Imaging Services, courtesy of Widener Library, Harvard University).

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Part Two Introduction 22 Smith, Asa. “Orrery, with a view of the Solar System in the back ground.” Smith’s Illustrated Astronomy: Designed for the Use of the Public or Common Schools in the United States (New York: Cady & Burgess, 1850), p. 6 (photo Harvard Imaging Services, courtesy of Widener Library, Harvard University). 23 Guillemin, Ame´de´e. “The Apparent Size of the Sun Seen from the Principle Planets.” The Heavens: An Illustrated Handbook of Popular Astronomy, edited by J. Norman Lockyer, Fourth Edition, revised by Richard A. Proctor (New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1871), p. 13 (photo Harvard Imaging Services, courtesy of Widener Library, Harvard University).

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Chapter 4 24 Secchi, Pietro Angelo. “Solar Cyclone, May 5th, 1837.” Ame´de´e Guillemin. The Heavens: An Illustrated Handbook of Popular Astronomy, edited by J. Norman Lockyer, Fourth Edition, revised by Richard A. Proctor (New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1871) p. 42 (photo Harvard Imaging Services, courtesy of Widener Library, Harvard University). 25 Guillemin, Ame´de´e. “Lunar Landscape: Ideal View, taken in the mountainous region of the south-west.” The Heavens: An Illustrated Handbook of Popular Astronomy, edited by J. Norman Lockyer, Fourth Edition, revised by Richard A. Proctor (New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1871), plate X (photo Harvard Imaging Services, courtesy of Widener Library, Harvard University). 26 Phillips, Sir Richard. “Telescopic Appearance of the Moon,” inscribed in pencil by Thomas Hardy. A fold-out engraving in Hardy’s copy of The Wonder of the Heavens Displayed in Twenty Lectures (London: Sir Richard Phillips, 1821). (photo courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University).

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Chapter 5 27 Smith, Asa. “Earth and Definitions.” Detail. Smith’s Illustrated Astronomy: Designed for the Use of the Public or Common Schools in the United States (New York: Cady & Burgess, 1850), p. 18 (photo Harvard Imaging Services, courtesy of Widener Library, Harvard University). 28 Guillemin, Ame´de´e. “Curvature of the Continents. Horizon of the same Place at Different Altitudes.” The Heavens: An Illustrated Handbook of Popular Astronomy, edited by J. Norman Lockyer, Fourth Edition, revised by Richard A. Proctor (New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1871), p. 94 (photo Harvard Imaging Services, courtesy of Widener Library, Harvard University).

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Chapter 6 29 Guillemin, Ame´de´e. “The Earth Suspended in Space.” The Heavens: An Illustrated Handbook of Popular Astronomy, edited by J. Norman Lockyer, Fourth Edition, revised by Richard A. Proctor (New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1871), p. 82 (photo Harvard Imaging Services, courtesy of Widener Library, Harvard University). 213 30 “The Face of the Earth Turned Toward the Sun at the End of the Transit [of Venus] of 1882.” Royal Astronomical Society. RAS MSS Add. 88, f. 30 (illustration from The approaching transit of Venus by Richard A. Proctor), 1873 (photo courtesy of Royal Astronomical Society). 217 31 Minard, Charles. “Figurative Map of the successive losses in men of the French Army in the Russian campaign 1812–1813.” Drawn up by M. Minard, Inspector General of Bridges and Roads in retirement. Paris, November 20, 1869 (photo Harvard Imaging Services; by permission of Harvard Map Collection, Harvard University). 221

Conclusion 32 “Signor N. Perini’s Planetarium, 1879.” Historical artwork of the Interior of the Planetarium. Royal Astronomical Society Photo Library. (photo Royal Astronomical Society; Science Photo Library).

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One submits oneself to other minds (teachers) in order to increase the chance that one will be looking in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep through a certain patch of sky. — Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

Introduction

I

n one of Thomas Hardy’s earliest poems, the speaker stands on the surface of the earth with the starry sky above him. Earth is at the center of the visible world. His mind unfurls itself out into the universe, as far as vision will take it: “And as I thought my spirit ranged on and on / In footless traverse through ghast heights of sky.”1 He mentally travels past trees, moon, and planets, to distant stars that are on the cusp of perceptibility. Then he turns back toward his body still anchored to the earth. The earth is just a tiny speck of light. The universe has rearranged itself as the result of his motion, the stars have shifted, and earth has moved to the periphery. Now that his disembodied mind is suspended in space, the center of the universe appears to be here, among the stars. As he looks again down toward the earth, that planet beneath him, he is conscious of being simultaneously distant from but still belonging to that body. In nineteenth-century Britain, both astronomers and literary writers were preoccupied with problems of where we see things from. This scene of extending the self out into the universe distills the central topics of The Starry Sky Within: an observer’s changing locations in space, and the way the cosmos constantly rearranges itself as a result of that motion. Hardy is focusing on a single consciousness in this lyric, but in the novels and The Dynasts, he explores what happens to perspective when a work centers on two, ten, or even hundreds of characters. As those characters move through time and space, we see a splitting and fracturing of point of view that resonates powerfully with the problems of representing a viewer’s changing position in astronomy. This book contends that findings in nineteenthcentury astronomy helped writers to articulate a set of formal concerns that are central to grand-scale narrative works like In Memoriam, Bleak House, and Middlemarch. These works constantly telescope from the cosmic to the personal, and from the personal to the cosmic. Large-scale narrative works need to be understood as complex spatial systems in motion that change over time. In the nineteenth century a universe with many centers became the prevailing astronomical model. Similarly, what Alex Woloch terms the

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“polycentric” multiplot novel became the dominant form of fiction.2 I draw from a wide range of British writers, and focus on the four writers who were most deeply immersed in the astronomy of the day. Thomas De Quincey, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and George Eliot befriended leading astronomers and visited observatories, while Thomas Hardy learned about astronomy through the immense popular literature on the subject. The term “point of view” is not capacious enough to capture the Victorian preoccupation with extreme shifts in perspective that dislodge readers from the surface of the earth. Attending to the reader’s motion through space allows us to understand the novel with new clarity. By exploring the importance of astronomy to Victorian literature, The Starry Sky Within throws four under-recognized norms of the novel into relief. The first is the multiplot novel’s focus on the persistent misperception of one’s own centrality. Second is how character and narrator tend to be set against each other spatially in techniques such as free indirect discourse. Third are shifting networks of character relations, which are often figured as orbiting celestial systems. Fourth is the extent to which the reader is required to move imaginatively through the space of a work, taking on a wide range of implicit spatial positions. The reader experiences radical shifts between viewing the entire space of a work from above and adopting individual subject positions. The contradictory impulses to make sense of the world as a whole on the one hand and to account for the specificity of individual experience on the other can be seen in all areas of nineteenth-century thinking. This is the age of world’s fairs, panoramas, giant taxonomic systems in science and history, and the sweeping novels of Eliot, Dickens, and Leo Tolstoy (I will be considering Tolstoy’s works as a point of comparison). At the same time the era is influenced by Romantic ideas of the self that must be placed within these large-scale systems. Thinking back over the nineteenth century, Georg Luka´cs argues that the novel thrives in an “age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given . . . yet which still thinks in terms of totality.”3 By contrast, he links the epic to earlier integrated societies in which “the starry sky is the map of all possible paths” and “the fire that burns in the soul is of the same essential nature as the stars.”4 In the fallen world of the writers I treat, the soul is severed from the stars and totality instead involves a tense combination of cosmic and subjective essences. An allencompassing God’s-eye view seems increasingly problematic. The Starry Sky Within is about the dynamic nature of the imagination—literary and

introduction

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scientific—that results from these intellectual uncertainties. Seeking a vantage point from which to see and know the world, Victorian writers move restlessly back and forth between self and universe, part and whole. While the mind’s expansion and contraction in such movement unsettles a secure placement of the self, it also heightens one’s awareness of the theoretical and moral gains in our knowledge of the world that result from changing one’s position. Much-publicized breakthroughs in late eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury astronomy particularly reorganized the way people understood the perception of time and space.5 While such findings culminated in Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, the discovery that it takes many earthly years for light to travel from one star to another had revealed the existence of multiple contradictory times well before Einstein. By the end of the eighteenth century, astronomers were already gauging “deep space” and conceiving of space and time as integrally interconnected. One of Tennyson’s earliest lines of poetry, written in the 1820s, reflects on the temporal delay involved in viewing the stars: “The rays of many a rolling central star, / Aye flashing earthwards, have not reach’d us yet.”6 In effect, this means that gazing on different stars involves looking at different moments, each of which happened long ago. The light from a nearby star might have left ten years before, while that of a more distant star would be eighty years old. Astronomers such as Richard Proctor (1837–88) and Felix Eberty (1812–84) conceived of the earth itself as a perpetual projector, sending versions of itself out into space, with each moment in history still perceivable from a distant star.7 A universe in which nothing was at rest captured the imaginations of a host of literary writers.8 Nineteenth-century astronomers revealed a complex universe in motion. Tennyson describes the “Rush of Suns, and roll of systems.”9 Intricate systems of moons and planets revolve around what were once called the “fixed stars.” Each so-called fixed star is itself “moving at an inconceivable velocity, but no magnifying will show that velocity as anything but rest,” as Hardy explains.10 In 1871, looking back on Pico della Mirandola’s fifteenth-century view of the cosmos, Walter Pater writes, “For Pico the earth is the centre of the universe: and around it, as a fixed and motionless point, the sun and moon and stars revolve, like diligent servants or ministers.”11 Pater goes on to characterize Pico’s world as finite and walled in, in contrast to the infinite nineteenth-century universe:

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For Pico the world is a limited place, bounded by actual crystal walls, and a material firmament; . . . How different from this childish dream is our own conception of nature, with its unlimited space, its innumerable suns, and the earth but a mote in the beam. (32)

Pater gestures at the range of spatial positions the new starry universe without “crystal walls” offers to those that contemplate it. The earth is no longer a fixed point, but a single planet in a universe of many suns. While he acknowledges the indignity of being ousted from the center of the cosmos, Pater also registers the possibilities that come from inhabiting a universe with many centers and no spatial bounds. As we will see again and again, Victorian literature displays a recurrent longing to get outside the limits of individual perception: omniscient narrators, plots that are staggeringly comprehensive, and perpetual motion in points of view. Astronomical discoveries give writers new spaces in which to indulge that longing. For many Victorian writers, astronomy itself embodies dueling impulses. On the one hand, literary writers associate distant views of the earth with objectivity.12 On the other hand, findings in nineteenth-century astronomy repeatedly upset the idea that a single version of the universe exists independent of an observer located in time and space. The Starry Sky Within begins by investigating the problem of a single observer in motion, and then moves on to consider the complex formations of human beings and celestial bodies found, respectively, in Victorian novels and stellar astronomy. Part One, “Observers in Motion,” brings together literary and scientific accounts of an observer who struggles to apprehend the universe even as she is moving in relation to that universe. As we will see, the relation between a self and a universe is frequently envisioned as an act of unfurling oneself out into space. Thomas De Quincey’s 1846 essay on astronomy contemplates the mind’s relation to the largest physical spaces conceivable. De Quincey figures both mind and universe as characterized by their continual motion. Referring to the “chambers of ether” that the earth moves through in its journey around the sun, he notes that though we spend “all our lives flying past them and through them, we can never challenge them as known.” This is just one example of a universe in which orientation can no longer be found in the objective world but resides in the observer alone. In the next chapter, I argue that the astronomical technique of parallax becomes a key structural device for Tennyson. Parallax describes the apparent change in the whole arrangement of things out

introduction

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there as a result of one’s own motion. Parallax works on the principle that accurate perception of an object depends on its being observed from several disparate positions. In In Memoriam, Tennyson uses movement through astronomical spaces to show his own grief in motion. This unusually fragmented elegy is composed of 133 sections written over 17 years. He travels relentlessly forward in time while his dear friend Hallam is stuck back in 1833, the year in which he suddenly died. Part Two, “Astronomy and the Multiplot Novel,” turns from poetry and the essay to the novels of Hardy, Eliot, Dickens, and Tolstoy, all of which are suffused with references to astronomy and the stars. These complex works set multiple characters in motion, guided by the organizing consciousness of a narrator. Here I identify a larger analogy between star systems and novels.13 Star systems resemble the complex networks of “consciousness of the consciousness of others” that J. Hillis Miller uses to distinguish Victorian novels from such genres as lyric poetry.14 Once one starts looking at constellations of characters rather than at a single observer moving through space or time, three important features of these novels become visible. The first is the apparent centrality of every person to himself; the second is the systems of relationships among characters; the third is the oscillation between narrator and character that is so important to the Victorian multiplot novel at the micro and macro levels (whether within a line of free indirect discourse or in the larger movements between narratorial and character-based perspectives). By focusing on moments in which literary writers employ astronomical schemas, we can see both the distortions and the advantages of close-ups and distant views, and we can follow how these writers move us back and forth between them. My argument builds on more than a century’s worth of narrative theory that holds contrasts in narrative positioning (such as free indirect discourse) and point of view to be central to the novel. Such acts of positioning dominate accounts of the novel from Henry James on. In 1921 Percy Lubbock, drawing on James, describes two readerly orientations: “in one case the reader faces towards the story-teller and listens to him, and in the other he turns toward the story and watches it.”15 Lubbock constantly uses the spatial language of shifts in points of view, or centers of vision, to characterize a basic energy of the novel. Later in the century Wayne Booth and Seymour Chatman are still trying to come to grips with the bagginess of the term point of view.16 Chatman notices:

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at least three senses . . . in ordinary use: (a) literal: through someone’s eyes (perception); (b) figurative: through someone’s worldview (ideology, conceptual systems, Weltanschauung, etc.); (c) transferred: from someone’s interest-vantage (characterizing his general interest, profit, welfare, well-being, etc.). (251)

The general term “point of view” embodies so many distinctions—between two different characters, two moments in time, two points in space, two worldviews, or states of knowledge—that the term often fails to remind us what aspects of a representation to compare to each other—one character’s motives to another’s, or one’s expectations to the same character’s subsequent knowledge. The illustrations in this book show how carefully nineteenth-century astronomers tracked differences between two or more scientific points of view. In Figure 1, for instance, the illustrator uses dotted lines to show what the top viewer can see of his horizon and to contrast that with the sightlines of observers standing on other parts of the earth. Many astronomical diagrams collapse several spatial and temporal points of view into a single image so that the viewer can compare one view to another. One typical example shows the sunspots at four different moments in time (see Figure 18), while another shows the size of the sun as it appears from Mercury, Earth, and Neptune (see Figure 23). My emphasis on spatial positioning in literary point of view helps us to isolate what is changing and what stays the same in each particular perspectival contrast. Astronomy allows the Victorian writers I study to create extreme contrasts—from a view from earth to Godlike celestial views—and to rotate their readers between the one and the other. And as we will see, celestial viewpoints often spill over into a set of metaphorical associations that make a particular work feel comprehensive. My own use of the term point of view is particularly indebted to critics such as J. Hillis Miller, Ge´rard Genette, and Mitchell A. Leaska who focus on physical and optical location.17 In his analysis of Hardy, Miller writes about the “careful attention to details of optical placement in The Dynasts” as “an extension of the implicit point of view in the novels and in the lyric poems.”18 Leaska uses the language of closeness, distance, and “angles of vision” in association with film. That language is likewise essential to astronomy. In a literary context, such terms are helpful because of their spatial precision and their emphasis on moving points of view. In the Victorian period, astronomy helps writers to perceive and articulate problems at the heart of literary point of view. In the human scale of

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Figure 1 An 1850 image of the earth with definitions of positions on its surface, and terms such as “visible horizon.” In the case of the top viewer, the dotted lines indicate what he can see in three different directions, and why a ship would seem to disappear over the horizon.

everyday life (such as walking down a hallway), acts of locating and orienting the self occur effortlessly and automatically.19 In astronomy such acts have to be laboriously calculated due to the extremes of motion and distance involved in observing a vast universe from a spinning globe that is itself revolving around the sun. Astronomy gives Victorian literary writers a model through which to understand and articulate the cognitive functions of locating ourselves and navigating space that are virtually invisible in daily life but that form the background against which all cognition happens.

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The other aspect of point of view I want to stress is the importance of the viewer’s (or reader’s) own motion to many of the effects of point of view. This motion often remains invisible—like the earth’s rotation around its own axis, it evades visceral detection and can be understood only by studying the visual results of readerly position with great care. Hugh Kenner suggestively wonders whether parallax—which I will define as a subset of point of view that relies on the reader’s own imagined movement through space—“is perhaps elementary narrative technique.”20 Exploring the role of literary parallax in Victorian literature helps to delineate a spatial version of point of view that is mobile, multiple, and comparative. In these cases, the object (whether tower, planet, or person) being looked at remains the same, but the position from which it is viewed changes significantly, creating dramatic contrasts for the reader. The Starry Sky Within shows the power and place of astronomy in shaping such narratorial perspectives.

Perceptual Discrepancies in Astronomy and Literature In the coming chapters I will show that the visual discrepancies that dominate astronomy make the science an invaluable resource for philosophers and literary writers. John Herschel’s 1833 Treatise on Astronomy begins by calling attention to the conflicts between the “apparent and the real,” explaining that they make the study of astronomy a particular challenge: Almost all its conclusions stand in open and striking contradiction with those of superficial and vulgar observation, . . . the most positive evidence of [the] senses. Thus, the earth on which he stands . . . is divested by the astronomer of its attribute of fixity, and conceived by him as turning swiftly on its centre, and at the same time moving onwards through space with great rapidity . . . and the stars themselves, properly so called, which to ordinary apprehension present only lucid sparks or brilliant atoms, are to him suns of various and transcendent glory.21

In order to comprehend why these contradictions occur, Herschel explains, we must understand certain physiological characteristics of the human visual system. Herschel spends much of his Treatise explaining why human beings systematically misperceive the earth, moon, sun, and stars, distinguishing between “apparent and real” motion, size, and position. These discrepancies

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Figure 2 A man standing on the surface of the earth viewing the North Star.

directly result from the spatial position of the observer—down here on earth. An astronomer views the solar system and the Milky Way from a constantly shifting position within those systems. By looking at two contrasting renderings of the universe—Asa Smith’s 1850 “Terrestrial and Celestial Globes” (see Figure 2)—we can visualize all that results from these disparate spatial positions. Smith’s terrestrial globe shows the earth at the center of the sphere of stars, and positions a man on the surface of the earth looking through a telescope toward the North Star, observing the starry sky. This illustration places that observing figure in a set of four contexts: his own body, the earth’s surface, the positions of the stars, and the context of looking at the illustration. We see a tiny man and a telescope placed on a spherical earth, surrounded by a transparent globe of stars. The image positions its viewer outside the cosmos. And yet we, the viewers, simultaneously know that in some reality we are there, on the surface of the earth, like that man peering through a telescope. Even as we pull back and see that position diagrammed in a set of contexts, we remain attached to an earthly position.

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Figure 3 An 1850 illustration showing the spatial relationship between terrestrial and celestial globes, with the man viewing the North Star standing on the earth.

I want to propose celestial globes and terrestrial globes as models for two opposed orientations in literary representation: the standpoint of a human being grounded on the earth and what Thomas Nagel calls “the view from nowhere” (see Figure 3).22 These globes were common objects in Victorian times, and tended to be made in matched pairs (see Figure 4). Celestial globes represent the entire starry universe patterned with stars and constellations; terrestrial globes stand in for the planet earth as a whole. Both are spherical maps of a large swath of the world, and resemble each other in size and shape. Celestial globes were used for navigational purposes, to locate one’s position

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Figure 4 A matched pair of two globes, terrestrial and celestial, engraved in 1787.

on the earth based on the stars’ apparent positions above. One of the crucial skills in which children were educated was in reading these maps of the earth and sky. Pairs of globes appear in countless Victorian novels, including those by Charlotte Bronte¨, Dickens, Hardy, Thackeray, and Elizabeth Gaskell.23 In this book, these globes embody profoundly opposed strategies for representing the outside world. The celestial globe positions the viewer at the center of the globe—the earth—and therefore reinforces the viewer’s idea that she is at the center of the universe; the terrestrial globe imagines a viewer in outer space, or in the God-position. Both of these orientations toward the external world are crucial to Victorian literature, and both often appear throughout literature in general. At their starkest, these representational strategies can be mapped on to contrasts between appearance (celestial globes) and reality (terrestrial globes). Nineteenth-century astronomers repeatedly invoke appearance and reality to distinguish optical illusion from empirical observation. But this book aims to demonstrate the poverty of terms such as “apparent” and “real” when understanding the nuances of spatial position and point of view in a literary text. We can contrast these globes on three different levels: in terms of how they represent space, in terms of the implied position of the observer, and in

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terms of how closely they claim to resemble the object that they represent. The terrestrial globe presents the earth as we actually know it to be, whereas the celestial globe collapses the entire starry universe as it appears from the earth’s surface onto the surface of a sphere. While the image of the earth as a sphere has been familiar to human beings at least since the first terrestrial globes in Greece in the third century BC, the only way one can physically see the earth as a sphere is to be suspended in space hundreds of miles above its surface. The celestial globe, by contrast, attempts to articulate the patterns of stars as they are seen by actual human beings stuck to the earth’s surface. Though the arrangements of these constellations are largely the result of earth’s position in space, the patterns of constellations are consistent over time, changing very slightly over millennia. A terrestrial globe is based on an extreme version of an aerial view, presenting the whole earth as an observer would see it from a distance. Its purpose is to remove the human observer from the limitations of an earthbased position. It attempts to replace the sensory data with which earth’s inhabitants are confronted daily with a more objective view of the world.24 The earth, which to ordinary vision appears flat, stationary, and topped by a dome of sky, is presented to the senses as the sphere one theoretically knows it to be. A celestial globe is based on a much more strangely positioned observer’s point of view, one that roughly approximates how the stars are seen by the tiny man standing on the earth. The two globes remind us that both “subjective” and “objective” points of view entail perceptual gains and losses. The quasi-objective terrestrial globe represents the real shape of the earth, but from an unreal position; the celestial globe distorts the shape of the stars, but retains the observer’s real position. The two types of globe I have been describing, celestial and terrestrial, present apt analogues for standpoints in the literary representation that The Starry Sky Within takes as its subject. These standpoints have often been labeled subjective and objective, but such terms tend to obscure whether they refer to where something is seen from, or to a set of values and attitudes that have been attached to embodied or distant views. Recent work—most notably that of Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison—has helped to analyze how intricately (and often imperceptibly) optical distance and an escape from embodied perspective are interwoven with the metaphor of objectivity. Each type of globe represents one extreme end of a spectrum of representational strategies that we find in De Quincey, Tennyson, Hardy, Eliot, and many other literary writers.

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The writers this book treats are each struck by the discrepancies between the sensory and the theoretical in astronomy, and find them deeply suggestive for thinking about how human beings place themselves within the world. Tolstoy outlines this contrast particularly starkly towards the end of Anna Karenina. Here Levin stands outside and watches the stars move past the silhouetted branch of a birch tree: “Do I not know that it is not the stars that are moving?” he asked himself, looking at a bright planet that had already shifted its position to the top of a birch-tree. “But seeing the stars change place and not being able to picture to myself the revolution of the earth, I am right in saying that the stars move.”25

The illusory “movement of the stars round a stationary earth” is both inaccurate, he realizes, and yet stable; it “has been and always will be the same.” There is something right about his knowledge that the stars are not moving—he knows that that apparent movement is due to the motion of the earth. And yet there is something that is also true about saying that the stars are moving. The movement of the stars is vividly present before him. This example presents two contradictory explanations of what Levin is seeing—the stars are moving, or the earth is moving—and credits both explanations with capturing some form of truth about the world. A moment early in Tess of the D’Urbervilles shows these contrasts at work in the context of free indirect discourse. Here Hardy uses the visual effects of astronomy to explore the abiding misperception that one is at the center of the cosmos. He combines third-person narration and astronomical optics in order to move his reader toward and away from that apparent centrality. The scene occurs at the point when Alec D’Urberville has persisted in trying to seduce Tess, and she has steadily resisted his advances. But one evening she is walking home with a group of drunken villagers who begin to quarrel with her. Alec passes by and offers Tess a ride on his horse. She reluctantly accepts it in order to escape the quarrel, and on the way home Alec rapes or seduces her. (Hardy leaves the interpretation of the actual event open.) As Tess rides off with Alec in great danger, Hardy keeps the reader stuck back in the points of view of the villagers. The narrator calls the reader’s attention to the way in which each villager interprets the behavior of the moonlight reflected on the grass below him or her. To visualize this scene, we need to remember that the moon is shining from behind their heads: as they went there moved onward with them, around the shadow of each one’s head, a circle of opalized light, formed by the moon’s rays upon the glistening sheet

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of dew. Each pedestrian could see no halo but his or her own, which never deserted the head-shadow, whatever its vulgar unsteadiness might be, but adhered to it, and persistently beatified it; till the erratic motions seemed an inherent part of the irradiation.26

For each viewer, the moonlight seems to organize itself around his or her own “head-shadow.” Each notices how persistently the circle of light sticks to the head-shadow even if he or she lurches to the right or the left. Each assumes that this adherence is “an inherent part of the irradiation.” The narrator stands apart from this drunken misperception, emphasizing that “each pedestrian could see no halo but his or her own” and satirizing the idea that these erratic haloes are anything more meaningful than an optical effect. This passage uses free indirect discourse to contrast the implicit spatial position of the narrator with those of the villagers. The villagers are stuck in their own heads, and each sees himself as central. We, the readers, are in Tess’s story, so we are angry with the villagers for not recognizing the danger they have put her in. On the one hand, the narrator ridicules the idea that there is something inherent about the light itself that makes it stick like a “halo” to one particular character’s head. On the other, he simultaneously lets us feel how compelling that impression of centrality is, as the head-shadow travels over the ground. The illusion of centrality is critiqued and recreated at the same time. The conflicting perspectives allow the reader both to see how the mistake could be made—a phrase such as “there moved onward with them” presents the phenomenon as self-evident fact—and to distance himself from that illusion. Morally, this optical effect is registering the self-absorbed perspectives of Tess’s companions in their inability to save her from Alec’s seduction and showing us the perceptual reasons behind that neglect. Formally, Hardy’s free indirect discourse seamlessly weaves together the vantages of narrator and characters.

Astronomy as a Literary Resource: The Formal and the Moral Hardy uses reflected moonlight to demonstrate a moral problem that is central to nineteenth-century novels: one character’s inability to perceive another’s interior world. As many have argued, the reader’s access to the

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minds of other people is the key characteristic of the classic Victorian novel. I want to call attention to an analogy between the individual self and the earth that appears again and again in literary works. This analogy links an individual’s perception of his own centrality to the equally persistent earthly perception that our planet is at the center of the cosmos. In the 1866 poem with which I began, we see Hardy’s speaker beginning with his own body and the earth at the center of the visual world. That is how all of us see the universe when (as is almost always the case) we are stuck on the surface of the earth. In the example from Tess, we can begin to see the extent to which spatial positions—being centered on the self, or taking a view from nowhere—have a moral weight attached to them. By drawing on the multiple spatial positions made available by astronomy, literary works in the Victorian period often locate their readers imaginatively in space without requiring them to choose between being localized in a single self or inhabiting a view from high above the earth. De Quincey, Tennyson, Hardy, and Eliot are preoccupied in different ways with the contradictory impulses to represent sense-based perceptions and to erase the distortions of embodied subject-positions. By watching how they negotiate the tension between these impulses, we can see how they represent both the sensory and the theoretical in consciousness without either valuing one over the other, or smoothing over differences between them. These writers help us to see the mind in motion, as it rotates between sense-based and theoretical standpoints.27 Examining the range of mental standpoints involved in a literary text illuminates the ways in which those texts depict minds as knowing several contradictory things simultaneously. While the genres and scopes of their works vary greatly, each of the writers I examine is careful to demonstrate the validity of these contrasting stances towards the world they represent.28

PART ONE Observers in Motion

1 Astronomy, Optics, and Point of View

“M

en, like planets, have both a visible and an invisible history,” writes George Eliot in Daniel Deronda.1 With this statement, Eliot calls attention to the moments in which the characters we are tracking resist being captured in the text—what those characters are doing and thinking when we no longer have access to them. But in what sense should we think of planets as being invisible? They disappear at dawn when sunlight drowns out their light, and at night when a cloud moves in front of them. They can no longer be seen when the earth turns away from them, and its hefty form occludes them from earthly view. They vanish behind the sun, engaged in their own separate orbits. When we start to think about the complexity involved in looking at other planets from the earth, we get a quick glimpse of the reasons why, in Daniel Deronda, Gwendolen Harleth might “tremble” when her imagination is stimulated by the “little astronomy taught her at school” (63). Astronomy poses a systematic set of challenges for visual perception. Human vision evolved to deal with landscapes or other spaces that contain distant objects a few miles away at most—objects that tend to stay in one place. In astronomy the objects observed are both distant and in motion, and our planet’s own movement through interstellar space becomes a problem for perception. Although these difficulties inconvenience astronomers, they make astronomy a powerful resource for literary writers interested in the extension of the mind out into the external world. In astronomy, everyday perceptual problems of which we are ordinarily unaware are suddenly striking. The visual system is hard to study in part because acts of sensory perception and the unconscious processing of that information are so intricately entangled. The whole perceptual system is designed to render

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itself transparent, beneath the perceiver’s awareness. But astronomy creates striking disturbances in perception. This chapter brings together findings in nineteenth-century astronomy and optics in order to highlight three aspects of vision that ordinarily escape our notice: first, our perception of our own centrality and the way that the cosmos seems to orient itself around us; second, the huge challenges involved in perceiving distant objects; and third, the impossibility of distinguishing our own motion from that of objects out in space. Developments in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century astronomy dramatically changed ideas about the size of the universe, highlighting how much of the cosmos escapes everyday perception. William Herschel’s 1781 discovery of Uranus doubled the known size of the solar system, while in 1838 Friedrich Bessel calculated that a nearby star in the Swan was 10.4 light-years, or more than 60 trillion miles, away. It became more and more clear that the solar system was at the center of neither the universe nor even of the Milky Way. The idea that the universe was not inherently stable but existed in a state of constant flux was one of the most radical ideas of stellar astronomy. Newton and most eighteenth-century astronomers had conceived of a largely stable cosmos. They tended to treat the “fixed stars” as unmoving reference points in the sky against which the motions of the solar system could be charted.2 William Herschel (1738–1822) was the first to map the stellar skies comprehensively. Herschel and contemporaries such as Pierre-Simon Laplace replaced the sphere of symmetrical fixed stars with shifting astral systems separated by vast tracts of void space. Astronomy at this time was increasingly involved with optics. This was in part due to William Herschel’s intense focus on building telescopes and engaging in direct astronomical observation; eighteenth-century astronomy on the continent had focused much more on mathematical aspects of the science.3 It was also due to the fact that astronomers in particular have to understand a consistent set of distortions that are built into the human visual system. Aspects of the visual system that influence astronomy were explored in a wide range of nineteenth-century writings on optics by such figures as William Whewell, John Herschel, David Brewster, Charles Wheatstone, Mary Somerville, and Hermann von Helmholtz. Many of these writers on optics were also astronomers.4 Optics became an increasingly exciting area of study in its own right in the early nineteenth century. As scholars such as Jonathan Crary, Isobel Armstrong, and Martin Willis have shown, optics was a subject of intense

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interest, dominating nineteenth-century visual culture.5 In addition to countless treatises on topics such as stereoscopic vision, essays on optical toys like the stereoscope, the telescope, the microscope, photography, light, and optics in general appeared in periodicals throughout the nineteenth century. The Popular Educator, a midcentury magazine for autodidacts that Thomas Hardy owned as a young man, contains ten articles on optics, suggesting that an understanding of how the eye functioned was part of what an educated person was expected to know.6 In Techniques of the Observer, Crary calls attention to an early nineteenthcentury fascination with subjectivity and distortion in optics and other forms of natural philosophy. He identifies a break between nineteenthcentury conceptions of the observer and earlier ideas of the eye as a camera obscura that conceive of the eye as an objective instrument rather than an instrument of distortion. Earlier models of human vision, he argues, depend on a one-to-one correspondence between that world out there and the image that the eye recreates in the mind. He writes: The most influential figurations of an observer in the early nineteenth century depended on the priority of models of subjective vision, in contrast to the pervasive suppression of subjectivity in vision in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thought.7

If we apply this idea to the concept of the starry sky within, the image of the world in the observer’s mind, we can see a distinction between vision as something that replicates the world when it enters the mind, and vision as something that fundamentally transforms it. Crary’s work differs from many earlier accounts of the Romantic era in that it shows a deep fascination with “subjective vision” to be continuous with positivist and empiricist practices: A certain notion of “subjective vision” has long been part of discussions of nineteenth-century culture, most often in the context of Romanticism, for example in mapping out the shift in “the role played by the mind in perception,” from conceptions of imitation to ones of expression, from the metaphor of the mirror, to that of the lamp. But central to such explanations is again the idea of a vision or a perception that was somehow unique to artists and poets, that was distinct from a vision shaped by empiricist or positivist ideas and practices. (9)

Conflicts between embodied and theoretical modes of perception are alive in science and literature alike, and science, I am arguing, becomes a literary resource for writers interested in how perception works. While the bulk of The Starry Sky Within focuses on the literary effects that these conflicts make

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possible, this next section lays out three key problems of astronomical optics. When we bring together optics and astronomy, three perceptual problems emerge: our own centrality, the difficulty of seeing distant objects accurately, and the problem of attributing motion. These categories are my own; astronomers like John Herschel do not divide them up as explicitly as I am doing here. I do so because separating these categories out from one another sheds light on a variety of important nineteenth-century literary techniques, as we will see in the chapters that follow. But all nineteenthcentury astronomers do distinguish between the “apparent and the real,” as John Herschel’s 1833 Treatise on Astronomy does.8 While Herschel is perhaps unusual in the clarity with which he writes about optical effects, he is typical of nineteenth-century astronomers in his preoccupation with how the eye works.9 Nearly every popular book on nineteenth-century astronomy has a section on optics. Herschel uses the terms “apparent and real” to point out that astronomy consistently upsets “what appears to everyone . . . the most positive evidence of his senses” (2). The earth is not at the center of things, the stars are not “sparks” or “atoms,” but suns, and most of the motion we attribute to the sun and the stars is due to the fact that the earth is “turning swiftly on its centre, and at the same time moving onwards through space with great rapidity” (2). Herschel emphasizes the need to understand physiological characteristics of the human visual system in order to comprehend why these contradictions occur. He spends the first several chapters of his Treatise distinguishing between apparent and real size, position, and motion. Human beings systematically misperceive the earth, moon, sun, and stars. Optics produces a consistent set of mistakes.10 The first visual problem for astronomy is the fact that the observer always appears to be central. The visual system places the observer in the middle of things, with the rest of the world extending out from where he or she is standing. Writers on optics speak of the visual field in terms of degrees of a circle organized around the observer. “If we sail out of sight of land,” writes Herschel, “whether we stand on the deck of a ship or climb the mast, we see the surface of the sea . . . terminated by a sharp, clear, well-defined line . . . which runs round us in a circle, having our station for its centre. That this line is really a circle, we conclude, first, from the apparent similarity of all of its parts; and, secondly, from the fact of all its parts appearing at the same distance from us” (15).11

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Secondly, at the great distances involved in observing celestial bodies, all of the techniques we use to perceive the relative distance of objects break down. Beyond a certain range, of about two hundred yards, our visual system loses the ability to judge distance through stereoscopic vision. Thus the stars all appear to be equidistant from earth, no matter how near or far they may actually be.12 Stereoscopic vision is in no way the only means by which we determine distance: we judge distance by noticing the ways in which shadows fall from a light source; by recognizing objects of known size, like a human being or a tree; by occlusion, which tells us that one thing is in front of another and therefore nearer to us; by perspective, in which two parallel lines appear to meet in the distance; and by parallax, the relative motions of near and far objects. Our eyes are excellent at perceiving the size-change of objects as they move toward or away from us.13 But none of these techniques help when we are looking at the sun, moon, or a star, and trying to judge their respective distances from the earth. Finally, astronomy highlights the fact that without external indicators (such as solid ground or a table) we find it impossible to distinguish between our own motion and the motion of what we are observing. In A Treatise on Astronomy John Herschel discusses this problem in light of the most famous example of subjective error in astronomy, namely that we still see the sun, moon, and stars revolve around the earth however much we believe that it is the earth that is actually moving. Herschel explains: “a spectator in smooth motion, and surrounded by, or forming part of, a great system partaking of the same motion, is unconscious of his own movement”; thus, the earth appears to stay in one place.14 He distinguishes between relative and absolute motion, noting: if a spectator at rest view a certain number of moving objects, they will group and arrange themselves to his eye, at each successive moment, in a very different way from what they would do were he in active motion among them,—if he formed one of them, for instance, and joined their dance. (54)

Herschel emphasizes the way that the eye rearranges the world around itself. Human vision cannot distinguish between visible motion caused by the movement of what is being observed and motion caused by the movement of the observer. Herschel asks: How is such a spectator to disentangle from each other the two parts of the motions of these external objects,—that which arises from his own change of place, and which is therefore only apparent (or, as a German metaphysician would say,

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subjective—having reference only to him as perceiving it),—and that which is real (or objective—having a positive existence, whether perceived by him or not)? (54)

The human visual system makes no distinction between “subjective” and “objective” motion. In the case of astronomical objects, this means we continually attribute the earth’s own motion to the objects we see in the sky. We can think of Tolstoy’s Levin staring at stars moving past the stationary branch of a tree, knowing that that movement results from the earth’s own motion, but continuing to see the stars move. These three aspects of visual perception—the centering of the visual field around the observer, the flattening out of distant objects, and the confusion between subjective and objective motion—combine to give the abiding impression that the earth is the center of the universe and that the stars act essentially as a spherical container for that universe. The perception that the stars are all equidistant from earth and organized round it in a dome or a sphere is compounded by the fact that the fixed stars seem to circle the earth as a group while the earth remains still (see Figure 5). One of the most important overlaps between optics, astronomy, and narrative techniques occurs in the phenomenon of parallax, which became a focus of stellar astronomy in the 1830s. Parallax is a fundamental principle of vision that relies on both perspectival perception and the observer’s own motion.15 The term is ubiquitous in nineteenth-century astronomical treatises.16 In 1838 advancements in instrument making enabled Friedrich Bessel finally to measure the distance of the nearest stars. For centuries, astronomers had tried to detect a stellar parallax, a shift in the observed position of a star caused by the changed position of an earthly observer, due to the earth’s revolution round the sun. Bessel showed a star in the Swan, 61 Cygni, to be at a distance of 657,700 times the distance between the earth and the sun.17 He was able to measure parallax in part because he used a recently invented heliometer to make an accurate map of the stars visually behind 61 Cygni. The nearby star’s apparent motion could only be measured accurately if it were very clear where the more apparently stable “fixed” stars behind it were positioned. Here again, perceived motion could only be judged in relation to other objects. Working independently of Bessel, two other astronomers, Friedrich Wilhelm Struve and Thomas Henderson, announced that they had used parallax to measure the distances of two different nearby stars that same year.

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Figure 5 This 1850 diagram captures the changing appearance of Mercury and Venus as they orbit the sun. Earth remains still, in the foreground, and the sun rests in the center. Each image of Mercury and Venus represents one moment in time in each planet’s trajectory. Here the illustrator captures the movement of two planets by imagining that the earth and the sun could stay still.

Judging distance and position by parallax is a fundamental technique we use to locate ourselves in the world and navigate through space. It is one of the most basic acts of human perception, although we are rarely aware that we are engaged in that act. As we will see repeatedly in subsequent chapters, parallax relies both on perspectival perception and the observer’s own motion. The neuropsychologist Richard Gregory (1923–2010) is one of the only scholars in any field to connect this everyday aspect of perception to findings in nineteenth-century astronomy. Gregory saw himself as building on the work of nineteenth-century innovators in optics such as Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–94). In The Intelligent Eye (1970), he devotes a chapter entitled “Scaling the Universe” to explaining the difficulties astronomy poses for visual perception. While problems in gauging distance and scale are especially striking in astronomy, Gregory suggests, they are continuous with the perceptual challenges human beings

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encounter constantly in everyday life. Much of human vision involves constant contradictions between what we physically see and what our minds register. The technique of parallax depends on measuring the apparent shift of something observed because of an actual shift in the observer. It occurs when the apparent displacement of objects in the world around one, the way objects appear to rearrange themselves when one changes one’s position, is in fact due to one’s own motion. Gregory emphasizes the ubiquity of parallax in everyday perception by pointing out that the astronomical technique of using stellar parallax to measure the distance of a star from earth in 1838 relied on the same method human beings use automatically to judge much smaller distances. We can distinguish between three scales on which human beings use parallax. Each scale was an object of study in nineteenth-century studies of subjective vision. The smallest scale does not rely on the observer’s own motion; instead it results from stereopsis, the way that the disparate positions of each of our two eyes produce two slightly different versions of the world. Stereopsis—the way that binocular vision produces the impression of threedimensional space—was first explained by Charles Wheatstone in 1838 (see Figure 6).18 This form of parallax uses the distance between the eyes to gauge distance and respective position in space. The second scale does rely on moving one’s body. When one is walking across a room, or riding along a road, objects in the foreground and the background change place in relation to one another. The eyes use those shifting angles to determine the location of those objects and one’s own shifting position in space. This is done without conscious effort, but sometimes we can feel ourselves making these kinds of judgments regarding an object’s relative distance from us—when we are passing another moving vehicle, for instance. But the same methods can be used to calculate the distance of an inaccessible object, like a tower (see Figure 7 and Figure 8). In the first illustration, for instance, the tower (S) appears lower to the observer from point B than it does from point A. By measuring the distance between A and B, and the angle between the lines of sight labeled a and b, one can calculate the actual distance of the tower from both spots. At the largest scale, stellar parallax relies on the disparate position of the earth in relation to the sun at two times of year (see Figure 9). The

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Figure 6 Robert S. Ball depicts the benefits of stereoscopic vision by showing the finger seen by each eye. The dotted lines of sight are meant to suggest that each eye places the finger before a slightly different background. By noting the difference in the relation between the foreground and background perceived by each eye, the visual system unconsciously calculates the distance of the finger from the face.

alternating positions of earth produced by its orbit create tiny but measurable shifts in the positions of nearby stars. In parallactic measurement of the stars, then, the object in motion is the earth. The position of a nearby star relative to a background of much more distant stars is measured from one point in the earth’s orbit around the sun, and then measured again from the opposite position in the orbit around the sun half a year later. Here the earth’s motion around the sun registers in an apparent change in the position of the nearby star observed with respect to the background stars.19 Once the apparent shift in the position of the star in question has been measured, its distance from the earth can be calculated. Gregory compares this act of calculation to everyday judgments of distance: For comparison, stereoscopic vision has a useful range of a few hundred yards. Its range is so much smaller because . . . the base-line—the difference between the eyes—is so very much less than the diameter of the Earth’s orbit. (99)

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Figure 7 Parallax used to calculate the distance of an inaccessible tower. The observer stands at point A and point B. By calculating the angle between the two sightlines, and the distance between points A and B, he can calculate his actual distance from the tower.

Astronomical measurement, then, relies on the same cognitive activities that the eye and the brain engage in collaboratively when walking towards or away from something. Astronomers depend on artificial extensions of our ordinary perceptual abilities, such as telescopes, sextants, maps, and illustrations, to make such calculations. William Herschel’s discovery that the whole solar system was itself in orbit around some unknown center in the Milky Way likewise relied on a common technique we use in everyday life. As we have seen above, human beings cannot distinguish between their own motion and the motion of the object observed without external indicators. Typically when we and the object we are looking at are both moving, something apparently stable remains: the floor beneath our feet, for instance. But for the earth suspended in space, no stable background exists. Gregory compares the method that William Herschel used to identify the solar system’s own proper motion with respect to other stars to the cognitive activities one engages in when walking through a crowd. The term “proper motion” is used by astronomers to distinguish between the sun’s and the stars’ apparent motion, as they seem to circle round the earth, and their actual change in position

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Figure 8 Here two children measure the distance of an inaccessible ball by calculating the angle between their line of vision and the table, and the distance between the two of them.

through space. In 1783 Herschel detected “a motion of our solar system with respect to the stars.”20 He calculated that the entire solar system was moving through space towards the star Vega. That movement was measured by tracking the shifting positions of “fixed stars” over time, writes Gregory: It is a complex matter, requiring many observations and much calculation to derive this motion of the sun towards Vega; but it is precisely what the brain is called upon to do when we walk through a crowd, or drive in heavy traffic, or take part in formation flying. (101)

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Figure 9 Triangulation and Parallax. This diagram shows how the same principle is used to calculate the distance of a nearby star. The star’s apparent position with respect to stars behind it is measured from two different positions in the earth’s revolution around the sun. By measuring the angle of the two sightlines and the diameter of the earth’s revolution around the sun, the star’s distance from earth was first calculated in 1838.

What I want to emphasize in Gregory’s comparison is the difference between arduously calculating the solar system’s motion and unconsciously locating ourselves in space. In most cases, locating ourselves in space is an act we do not even notice that we are doing, but our ability to function in the world—cognitively and physically—depends on that unconscious act. In astronomy, when the distances involved elude the kind of unconscious

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sensory perception human beings engage in when walking down the street, such calculations must be made consciously and laboriously.21 Later in the nineteenth century, Helmholtz would note the ease with which the eye automatically and instantaneously adjusts its focus so that “near and distant objects pass in rapid succession into accurate view.”22 One of the things that this eye movement achieves is the constant charting of the changing parallax of external objects (a chair, a table) due to one’s own movement through a room. John Herschel emphasizes this continuity between everyday perceptions and astronomical observation in his discussion of objects at rest. He reminds us that while we think we see a sphere when we look at an orange, or a cube when we look at a box, the actual image that the eye takes in does not correspond to these ideal shapes: No geometrical figure, or curve, is seen by the eye as it is conceived by the mind to exist in reality. The laws of perspective interfere and alter the apparent directions and foreshorten the dimensions of its several parts. (55)

This discrepancy between the sensory perception of an orange and our conception of it as spherical is essentially invisible to us. It is only when, for instance, we try to capture it on a two-dimensional surface that we become aware of the differences between the shape that is presenting itself to our eyes (a shadowed ellipse) and the shape that we theoretically attribute to the orange (a sphere). It is important to remember that sensory perception (such as the texture of the earth beneath your feet) and theoretical thinking (such as imagining the structure of the universe) are both cognitive activities. In describing the workings of the visual system, writers on optics consistently distinguish between these two types of mental activity, but they are in fact quite hard to disentangle from each other. Victorian writers are particularly interested in both the desire to disentangle the senses from the intellect, and the difficulty of doing so. Human beings are generally unconscious of the conflicts between sensory and theoretical knowledge, as both Herschel and Gregory show. But a larger question remains of how our mind tolerates those conflicts. On this point, the two writers differ. Writing in the 1830s, Herschel suggests that once we understand the actual structure of the solar system, our visual system is no longer troubled by what we continue to see. In 1970, by contrast, Gregory stresses that our belief about what we are looking at does not affect the way we “see” something:

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To the Greeks, the stars were luminous points on a hollow sphere, with the Earth as centre. This is still how we see the Universe though we know it to be quite otherwise. (105)

For the most part, Gregory suggests, human beings are unconscious of such conflicts, holding two contradictory models of the universe in their minds without anxiety. At the same time, he allows that, once acknowledged, such a division between perception and conception may be unsettling: Perhaps it is surprising that intellectual knowledge of [the universe’s] physical scale does not affect how we see it. Although perception is a kind of problem-solving activity, evidently intellectual knowledge has little effect on perceptual solutions. (104–5)

The two men offer conflicting accounts of how the human mind deals with this clash between sensory perception and theoretical understanding—does the theoretical trump the sensory, or does the sensory trump the theoretical? A third possibility exists: that the mind is constantly negotiating between them without being conscious that it is doing so. Taken together, nineteenth-century optics and astronomy do much to explain why astronomy creates such disturbances to our perceptual system. While in astronomy these visual conditions cause dramatic challenges, each condition is characteristic of human perception in general. In everyday life, problems such as our own apparent centrality are less noticeable than in astronomy, and there are usually reliable grounds for the attribution of distance and motion. But in extreme situations like viewing celestial bodies, these aspects of vision create sharp contrasts between the cosmos as it is apprehended by the senses and theoretical accounts of what the universe is like. In Chapter 4 we will see Thomas Hardy’s fictional astronomer in Two on a Tower being troubled by the discrepancy between the enclosed dome of stars he sees from the earth’s surface and the great expanse of space “I know is there but cannot see” (63). He characterizes the universe as “a vast formless something that only reveals a very little of itself.” Astronomy, I am suggesting, helps makes visible the relationship between seeing and theorizing when that relationship is at its most strained, when what we see and what we know directly contradict each other. The set of literary writers I focus on are particularly adept at using this strange fact about astronomy to make everyday acts of apprehending the world newly visible to their readers.

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The Starry Sky Within: Philosophical Perspectives I have been drawing from some optical and astronomical accounts of what astronomy reveals about how human beings apprehend the outside world. The chapters that follow focus on literary engagements with this problem. But before turning to the literary treatment of astronomy and point of view, I want to discuss some models of mind that emphasize how spatially inflected our acts of apprehending the outside world tend to be. The title of this book is adapted from Kant’s statement that two things fill his mind with wonder the more he meditates upon them: the starry sky above him and the moral law within. The moral law does not interest me here; instead, I want to think instead about the starry sky within, the question of how we interiorize something as vast as the cosmos. While my question of how we take the universe into the mind does not come directly from Kant, it is a question that consistently preoccupied him. Kant wrote an important treatise on astronomy early in his career (1755), and he invokes astronomy in a wide range of philosophical texts: on orientation in thinking, perception, and aesthetics (in reference to the sublime). In his 1781 Critique of Pure Reason, Kant explores what human perception reveals about the apparatus of the mind. He suggests that we should discard the traditional empiricist idea that our ideas conform to the objects of our perceptions. That traditional idea presents the mind as a passive recipient of sensory information and it suggests that the things we see inhere in the objects we are looking at. Instead, he says, we should embrace a new model of perception that involves understanding the mind as something that actively structures the external objects it observes. It makes more sense, he suggests, to assume that the objects we apprehend conform to certain features of our mental apparatus, such as the tendency to orient things in space. Essentially, he is redefining the truth as we can know it as fundamentally subjective, as coming at least partially from within us. The nature of our mind, then, determines the way in which we see things at least as much as the things that we look at determine what we see. Kant repeatedly uses astronomy as an analogy for thinking about models of mind. Most famously, in his introduction to the 1787 second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant compares his own philosophy to the Copernican revolution. The pre-Copernican view of the universe posited

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the earth as passive and immobile. Aristotle’s and Ptolemy’s views attribute the earth’s own motion to external objects: the sun, moon, and stars. Copernicus is famous for stopping the movement of the sun and the stars and setting the earth spinning, though he retained the image of a fixed sphere of stars containing the cosmos. Thus both Copernicus and Kant are arguing that the earth and the mind respectively are far more active than we would initially think. Kant specifically compares the blinkered view that our view of the outside world is unmediated with the belief that the earth stands still and the rest of the universe is in motion. Both men call attention to the movement of the observer: the earth rotates on its axis, and the human mind actively structures the world that it perceives. Poets and novelists repeatedly invoke this analogy between the moving earth and the active human mind. Kant uses this analogy to emphasize the mind’s own invisibility to itself. In perception and astronomy, we repeatedly fail to detect our own motion. The Copernican and Kantian models are calling attention to that motion, arguing that in fact the earth’s rotation or the mind’s structure creates much of what we think belongs to the outside world. We cannot see outside our own categories of time and space, but we can, on reflection, recognize that we have these categories. We cannot see outside our visual system, but by studying it we can learn certain properties it possesses. And we cannot see the motion of the earth, although we can learn that the earth is moving. The questions Kant is asking are different from the ones theorists of vision like Herschel and Helmholtz are asking, but the structure of the problem he sets up is similar. Many of the intellectual problems that people today commonly associate with Albert Einstein’s twentieth-century writings on frames of reference were already being worked through in nineteenth-century astronomy. Most eighteenth-century philosophers had conceived of the solar system as an orderly, clock-like mechanism that could run indefinitely. Gradually, the image of the universe as stable and self-perpetuating was broken down. By 1833 William Whewell was acknowledging a “tendency to indefinite derangement” in the solar system in his Bridgewater Treatise On Astronomy and General Physics. Like the other Bridgewater Treatises, Whewell’s book was designed to place recent scientific discoveries in the context of a divinely created world.23 Whewell, writes Isobel Armstrong, was “deeply involved in theorising astronomy in terms of flux. He opened up a world in which the stability of the universe could not be guaranteed.”24 Likewise, in his Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (12 editions, 1844–84), Robert

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Chambers reflected, “Amongst the orbs, which seem so still and serene to our ordinary perceptions, we now know that there is no such thing as rest.”25 Increasingly, since both the solar system and the rest of the vast universe were known to be in constant motion, natural philosophers found it difficult to imagine a vantage point in the material universe that was not subject to serious spatial and temporal distortions. Richard Holmes notes: “Already in a paper of 1802 [William] Herschel considered the idea that ‘deep space’ must also imply ‘deep time.’” (203). In looking at “a remote nebula,” Herschel was looking “almost two million years” back in time. The implications were profound. If one could not imagine a vantage point that is not entirely temporally and spatially contingent, what value could one place on the notion of divine or objective truth? Whewell provided one answer by attempting to separate human “faculties” from the divine capacity to perceive (277). His Astronomy and General Physics stresses “the limits of our nature” in contrast to those of the Creator in order preserve the notion of objective truth. Whewell addresses a contemporary anxiety that a universe full of star systems conflicts with traditional Christian models of a superintendent God. The Creator, he argues, does not have the optical limits we do: the difficulty of a personal superintendence and government, exercised by the Maker of the world over each of his rational and free creatures, is founded upon illusory views . . . If we can conceive of this care [i.e. Divine care] employed on a million persons—on the population of a kingdom, of a city, of a street—there is no real difficulty in supposing it extended to every planet in the solar system . . . nor to every part of the universe, supposing each star the centre of such a system. (281)

By extending the idea of God watching over multiple individuals to an image of God caring for multiple planets, Whewell underscores the fallacy of confusing human and divine modes of perception. But a lingering image from centuries of Christian imagery hovers in the background: of heaven above, hell below, and a divine eye focused on earth in particular. The confusion between optical and divine oversight has a long history. Even thinkers who are less invested than Whewell in this view from high above the earth being specifically divine frequently link distant views to ideals of impartial objectivity. How can we conceive of what Thomas Nagel calls “the view from nowhere” if we live in a universe characterized by flux? Every nowhere is a somewhere in this cosmological model; there is no way

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to get outside. On several levels, the newly understood physical structure of the universe called into question the status of divine or objective knowledge as an ideal. This move from the physical structure of the universe to the structure of thought might seem an unnecessary leap. Why, one might ask, need there be a connection between a universe in flux and objective knowledge as an ideal? But in astronomy it became increasingly clear that any attempt to erase the situated state of the observer was at best temporary, and at worst distorting. Kant’s 1786 essay “What is Orientation in Thinking?” outlines the connections between orienting oneself physically and geographically (either in relation to the sun or to the North Star) and orienting oneself “in thought, i.e. logically.”26 Orientation, Kant demonstrates, is not only mental but also bodily, given in relation to oneself, to one’s own sense of a center and right and left. “I orient myself geographically purely by means of a subjective distinction,” Kant writes, and “even the astronomer, if he heeded only what he saw and not at the same time what he felt, would inevitably become disorientated. But in fact, the ability to make distinctions by means of the feeling of right and left comes quite naturally to his aid.”27 The newly understood universe threatens to do away with these common ideas of direction, up and down, or right and left, and a profound sense of intellectual disorientation results. Whewell’s distinction between human faculties of perception and a Creator’s unmediated view of the cosmos is helpful here, but Kant suggests that such distinctions are almost impossible to maintain in apprehending the outside world. The nineteenth-century Scottish writer David Masson uses the term “cosmological conception” to emphasize the spatial nature of our inner models of the outside world. His 1865 survey Recent British Philosophy: A Review, with Criticism connects knowledge about the physical universe to an individual’s philosophical “theory of the universe.” Masson was a polymath who would edit all of De Quincey’s writings after he died in 1859. While many people like to make a distinction between the “internal perceiving mind” and “an external world,” Masson writes, such a distinction is impossible to sustain. “When I imagine the depopulated Earth still wheeling its inanimate rotundity through the daily sunshine and nocturnal shadow . . . it is because, in spite of myself, I intrude into the fancy the supposition of a listening ear and a beholding eye of my own.”28 Masson’s point emphasizes how visually specific our imagination is. In order to

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imagine the earth spinning in space, we unconsciously envision a place from which that earth is seen. Masson makes this point about how difficult it is to remove a physically placed consciousness from any imagined scene in the context of philosophy. This connection between what one sees and the implicit position and orientation of the beholder figures crucially into literary writers’ conceptions and techniques of literary perspective. In a number of the literary works I discuss, authors will explicitly situate an observer within the space of a narrative. In Dickens’s Bleak House, for instance, Esther Summerson describes her own position before telling us what she saw: “I sat, with my bird-cage on the straw at my feet, forward on the low seat, to look out of the high window; watching the frosty trees.”29 But much more often in literary passages, the placement of the observer remains unspecified, and is simply implied. When Esther later writes, “I opened my eyes to encounter those of a dirty-faced little spectre fixed upon me. Peepy had scaled his crib,” we picture her lying in bed, with Peepy’s face hovering above her (94). In such cases, the situation of the observer can usually be derived from what can and cannot be seen, the grain of detail included, and the scale of what is being described (the interior of a drawing room, a foggy cityscape). In these cases, the position of the observer is indirectly communicated by the writer describing a set of visual conditions that result from the observer’s situation in space. This effect of placing an observer who himself remains unrepresented is also common in two-dimensional illustrations. Strictly perspectival images lock their observers in a particular spot. In illustrations of the earth, for instance, we see the earth from one side only. Our vision cannot reach around the astronomical horizon of the earth. I want to underscore how often literary texts create a perspectival situation for the observer, how dramatically that situation changes in different passages or scenes, and the importance that position and movement play in narrative technique. This visualized location and movement is part of the dynamic nature of the imagination in literature and science. How we visualize space depends not only on where we see it from but also on what models we use to make that space intelligible. In Space and the “March of Mind,” Alice Jenkins emphasizes all that follows from choosing between different ways of conceptualizing real and imaginary space: [W]ithout a basic sense of space we would not be able to understand whether one thing is inside another, whether it is bigger than another, whether it touches

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another. The same kinds of basic relationship that allow us to organize a sock drawer also allow us to organize sets of information about things that we cannot see and hold, such as our knowledge of the world beyond the range of our immediate sense experience.30

Jenkins identifies a range of spatial models that appear in writings about knowledge in the first half of the nineteenth century. In a chapter on organizing the conceptual space of knowledge, she distinguishes between models that use hierarchies, symmetry, treelike structures, or alphabetical order to systematize intellectual matter. Two of the models for organizing knowledge she describes are particularly relevant to astronomy: the huband-ray model and the aerial view. A view of the solar system as a whole, for instance, uses the sun as a hub, while a picture of the earth seen from the moon provides an aerial view. Both models belong simultaneously to the material world and to the conceptual realm. Both models, Jenkins argues, imagine a relationship between the viewer and the stuff of knowledge, and set up their own power relations. Unlike the image of a path through knowledge, both of these models are atemporal. The hub-and-ray metaphor is organized around a center, in patterns of circles connected by lines to the middle. The aerial view, by contrast, works by flattening objects onto a two-dimensional plane. It enables the imagined viewer to survey everything at once and to understand the hierarchical relationships between different parts of the whole. Jenkins associates the aerial view with mastery and even an imperial gaze; the position of the viewer in this imagined scene is one of distance, rather than intimacy. She points out that these two models are very much with us today—when we talk about centers and peripheries, life at the margins, or simply look at maps and plans. Jenkins’s two spatial models are examples of what Masson calls “cosmological conceptions,” ways of organizing the universe into spatial systems. Astronomy is unusual among nineteenth-century sciences in the extent to which it asks its audience to conceive of the universe as a spatial whole. Masson emphasizes the philosophical significance that any account of the universe tends to acquire. He divides philosophers according to their cosmological conception, which he defines as: that general image of the totality of things which each one carries about with him, and which is sometimes spoken of more grandly as his “theory of the universe” [or] . . . working-image of the world [he] lives in . . . The “cosmological conception” of any man, his sensuous image of the world, would be, if we could get at it, the truest abstract or representation of his whole mind of philosophy. (57)

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With developments in astronomy, and especially in ideas about what the universe as a whole is like, come new ideas about the role of mankind with respect to the whole, the role or absence of a divine creator, and general characteristics of the environment in which one finds oneself. This philosophical response to the world informs many of the literary texts I will be discussing. In the final chapter of this book I will argue that literary texts possess cosmological conceptions of their own. For now, I simply want to suggest that astronomy differs in part from other sciences in that it describes not only a physical state but also a kind of psychic container for existence as a whole. Geology’s version of deep time provides another way of spatializing time—compressed, rich, mysterious layers, each of which represents a different moment or period. In astronomy, time becomes the vertiginous movement of light over spatial distance—the way that matter is arranged in space. The circling orbits, and the gradual shifts in those orbits over time— what Whewell terms a “tendency to derangement”—offers an astronomical model for time and relation. Astronomy provides a psychic container, or a cosmological conception of things, because it describes what the cosmos is like as a spatial whole. The Starry Sky Within shows the universe being conceived of in a range of ways: at one moment it is smoothly running clockwork; at another “the stars . . . blindly run.”31 It can be empty, full of “voids and waste places” or plentifully populated.32 It can contain cyclones or burnt-out “cinders of . . . stars.”33 It can expand to infinity, or contract like . . . a deflating balloon, as it does for Edgar Allan Poe, with the “vacillating energies of the imagination.”34 The problems I have outlined in nineteenth-century astronomy and optics grow out of contradictory impulses found in all aspects of nineteenth-century life: the desire to see things as a whole paired with a growing realization that such a goal is impossible. This is articulated as a philosophical problem in Thomas Nagel’s 1986 The View from Nowhere. Nagel maps these competing impulses onto objectivity and subjectivity respectively, and reveals how profoundly point of view is woven into both orientations toward the world. The philosophical problem he takes on is how to join the view from earth with a view that transcends the situated individual: “how to combine the perspective of a particular person inside the world with an objective view of that same world, the person and his viewpoint included” (3). Nagel’s emphasis on the mind’s ability to conceive of the

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universe and an individual human being contains echoes of Emily Dickinson: The Brain—is wider than the Sky— For—put them side by side— The one the other will contain With ease—and You—beside—35

Nagel emphasizes the mind’s motion as it goes back and forth between self and universe. If we read Dickinson’s “Sky” here as the physical cosmos, and not just the visible horizon, then the brain she describes contains both cosmos and individual. What is less clear is how the relationship between the two is imagined spatially—are two separate objects of vastly different scales placed “beside” each other? Or does the mind first conceive of “the Sky,” and then place the individual within the starry sky it has internalized? Nagel likewise asks how we can join the cosmic to the individual without letting one overwhelm the other. Nagel embraces a productive “perplexity” that, I will suggest, is akin to the energetic tension between objective and subjective stances found throughout Victorian literature. He argues against the attempt to seek what he calls a “unified standpoint,” which would erase the contradictory information that the view from the self provides when it is set against a view from nowhere: The difficulty of reconciling the two standpoints arises in the conduct of life as well as in thought . . . [O]ne of my claims will be that often the pursuit of a highly unified conception of life and the world leads to philosophical mistakes—to false reductions or to the refusal to recognize part of what is real. (3)

One of the solutions Nagel advocates in order to resist the temptation of believing in a “unified standpoint” is deliberate juxtaposition: a deliberate effort to juxtapose the internal and external or subjective and objective views at full strength, in order to achieve unification when it is possible and to recognize clearly when it is not. Instead of a unified worldview, we get the interplay of these two uneasily related types of conception, and the essentially incompletable effort to reconcile them. (4)

In its juxtaposition between sensory and abstract information, astronomy presents an ideal instance in which “unification” is impossible. However sure we are theoretically that the Copernican model of the universe is correct, that the stars are not equidistant from the earth, or embedded in a celestial sphere, it will always take a concerted mental effort to conceive of the actuality of the universe’s size and structure. Our knowledge of the universe’s structure is, in fact, a lesson that must be learned and re-learned.

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The implication is that what we commonly think of as stable knowledge can only be realized temporarily. An account of the workings of visual perception with respect to the starry universe helps to explain why we can recognize clearly when it is not possible to unify or reconcile “subjective” and “objective” views. Nagel argues that the tension between the two standpoints creates a “perplexity” that is both more accurate and more productive of insights than a reconciliation would be: I find it natural to regard life and the world in this way—and that includes the conflicts between the standpoints and the discomfort caused by obstacles to their integration. Certain forms of perplexity—for example, about freedom, knowledge and the meaning of life—seem to me to embody more insight than any of the supposed solutions to those problems. (4)

Such forms of perplexity characterize the range of mental experiences that De Quincey, Tennyson, Eliot, and Hardy create in their readers when they use astronomy as a literary resource. In fact, understanding how eye movement works may clarify how the internal perceiving mind might move from one orientation to another. Helmholtz repeatedly emphasizes the mobility of the eye, the fact that it never rests but constantly moves from spot to spot within the visual field. This means that the mind is constantly adjusting and readjusting its focus as the eye moves from a nearby object to a distant one, and back again. Since the visual system is able to adjust quickly between near and far, it seems likely to me that the imagining mind has a parallel function that enables rapid readjustment of focus and scale. Even when the eye is not involved (as when one pictures the earth first seen from its surface, and then from the moon), mental acts of adjustment and refocusing can occur. Nagel makes the important point that to see these two standpoints as fundamentally opposed is a mistake. It is more accurate to think of them as existing on a continuum: the distinction between more subjective and more objective views is really a matter of degree, and it covers a wide spectrum. A view or form of thought is more objective than another if it relies less on the specifics of the individual’s makeup and position in the world. (5)

This point will become important when we look at literary renditions of subjective and objective stances that involve gradual transitions. These

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include moments in which Tennyson leaves his body behind him and contemplates the earth as a whole, or Hardy’s technique of surveying a wide expanse of land before zooming in toward a particular character. In literary texts these standpoints appear in a variety of forms, whether it is setting the wider viewpoint of a narrator against a character’s embodied perceptions, working with extremes of spatial and temporal scales, or using the technique of free indirect discourse. The subtlety of the spectrum of views to which Nagel refers here can be seen in free indirect discourse, in which a narrator’s voice and a character’s voice are merged, often indistinguishably. Certain words or phrases can be attributed to the mindset of the narrator or character in question, but other observations are far more ambiguous. That ambiguity derives from the points of overlap between subjective and objective stances. In this form of narration one orientation or another comes into focus at certain moments, but over the course of a sentence the view from the narrator and the view from the character are inextricably intertwined. Nagel points out that one of the greatest correctives to an objective standpoint is one’s own embodied sensory perspective: One of the strongest philosophical motives is the desire for a comprehensive picture of objective reality, since it is easy to assume that that is all there really is. But the very idea of objective reality guarantees that such a picture will not comprehend everything; we ourselves are the first obstacles to such an ambition. (13)

Here we can think back to the ambiguity written into Emily Dickinson’s combination of “the Sky” and “You—beside.” How can the self be integrated into, joined to, or juxtaposed with a comprehensive picture of reality? Is the relation one of combination, addition, or contradiction? Nagel’s own imagery for describing the attempt to climb out of the self suggests the extent to which we rely on what I will call landing places, concrete ways to punctuate undifferentiated space. Nagel uses an astronomical model of concentric spheres that implicitly likens the human self to the earth at the center of a Ptolemaic system (see Figure 10). Larger and larger spheres radiate out from the center of this system, the earth-self: “We may think of reality as a set of concentric spheres, progressively revealed as we detach gradually from the contingencies of the self” (5). His model does not directly refer to the set of crystal spheres that were thought to contain the earth from Aristotle through Copernicus. But the two models strongly resemble each other and, I would suggest, indicate a common model for

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Figure 10 A 1549 representation of the cosmos. This Ptolemaic model places earth at the center, encircled by a series of spheres containing the moon, the five other known planets, the sun, and finally the sphere of stars. This was the conventional model of the cosmos from the time of Ptolemy (circa AD 90–168) through the sixteenth century. Copernicus’s image of the heavens retains the concentric spheres shown here to constitute the cosmos, but places the sun rather than the earth at the center of the system.

placing the self within the universe. Nagel’s model of reality as consisting of spheres orbiting the self suggests once again how fundamentally spatialized many conceptions of the relationship between the self and the rest of reality are—as we imagine ourselves climbing out of ourselves, or reality radiating out to more and more distant horizons. The idea of reality as a set of spheres to which the self has access derives from our optical perception of reality as radiating out from us, or (if we think in astronomical terms) from the earth. This unfurling out into space involves a complex collaboration between sensory perception and theoretical activity. The farther one extends the mind, the more effort it requires.

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Within any conceptual space, the mind requires landing places of some kind to mark sustained movement through space. Nagel’s use of a material “set of concentric spheres” suggests how helpful it is to imagine quasimaterial landing places in order to visualize space. In Ptolemy’s view of the cosmos, each individual sphere belonged to a celestial body, while the stellar sphere contained all the inner spheres. In astronomy, those landing places often consist of the moon, the sun, the planets, and the stars. In literary works, landing places temporarily situate the reader as she moves through the space of a novel or poem. They can include objects used to differentiate space (like the celestial bodies in the passage below), or they can be loci of consciousness that the reader attaches herself to in the process of reading. I will return to this claim in the next chapter, but first let me use one literary passage as a demonstration of what these landing places look like. In Hardy’s Two on a Tower, Lady Constantine’s introduction to the heavens includes an insight into the precariousness of conceptualizing the size of the universe. Swithin uses his telescope to take Lady Constantine through the universe step by step, in order to counteract her vision’s tendency to flatten out the stars: Then, by means of the instrument at hand, they travelled together from the earth to Uranus and the mysterious outskirts of the solar system; from the solar system to a star in the Swan, the nearest fixed star in the northern sky; from the star in the Swan to remoter stars; thence to the remotest visible; till the ghastly chasm which they had bridged by a fragile line of sight was realized by Lady Constantine. (32)

Hardy’s strategy in this passage is to instruct his reader through a mental collaboration between vision and conception that allows him or her to conceive of the distances between the stars. In much the same way that Swithin takes Lady Constantine through the universe step by step, Hardy guides his reader through a series of mental leaps. Each leap is attached to something physically perceptible, something that has sensory content, a body, or an edge: a planet, a star, the “remotest visible” star. They are landing places for the eye, and also for the mind, places of punctuation without which the reader would be unable to go on (see Figure 11). Without such instruction, Hardy’s narrator suggests, it is impossible to realize the spaces between the earth and the remotest visible star.36 The passage implies that Lady Constantine “realizes”—experiences as a shock— the vastness of the universe as well as the fragility of that realization itself. She becomes aware of the “fragile line of sight” that connects her to the

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Figure 11 In this lecture to young boys, Robert S. Ball uses an orrery, a threedimensional model of the solar system with sun, planets, and moons, to demonstrate the relations between orbiting bodies. When the cosmos was thought to be organized around the earth, the landing places were thought to include sun, moon, and planets. This heliocentric model, by contrast, accounts for orbiting planets and moons around those planets.

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stars. Hardy contrasts the infinitesimal width of this imaginary “line of sight” with its extraordinary length, which extends from Lady Constantine’s eye to the remotest star visible.37 The physical connection between eye and star is impossible to sustain for more than a few moments. The sky, after all, reveals very little of itself to human eyes, and as soon as one stops concentrating on the distances between the stars, one’s vision flattens them out again. This passage makes the mental act of imagining a source of wonder in part by showing how easy it is not to imagine. Pairing Nagel’s concept of deliberate juxtaposition with literary works involving astronomy calls attention to the mind’s own motion between a view from earth and a view from nowhere. The mind is spatially flexible, capable of taking on an extraordinary number of points of view, whether consciously or unconsciously. Some of these points of view contradict one another and expose the others’ limitations. Literature is able to articulate the conflicts between these standpoints while showing them to be necessary and even productive, rather than a problem that requires resolution. If we look back at the constellation of optics, astronomy, and philosophy I have been discussing, we are now in a position to understand how the optical problems that occur in astronomy map onto literary point of view. The first such problem is the constant perception of our own centrality, as individual and earthly beings, which astronomy allows us to see as a perceptual fact rather than a moral failing. A self at the center of things becomes the starting point of all cognition, a base from which the mind reaches itself out into the external world. The mind requires landing places to reach far out into space. In astronomical models, these are provided by concentric spheres attached to the moon, planets, the sun, or the stars. In literature, individual characters often become loci of consciousness that the reader uses as bases from which to explore a fictional universe. The second problem is the invisibility of our own motion, whether that involves the physical movement of our bodies, or the figurative labor of our minds. Although our own motion tends to remain imperceptible, it is a basic fact that structures our whole way of thinking. Victorian writers make use of astronomical models to make this cognitive background visible. A third problem is measuring and, even more importantly, valuing distance. In literary texts, distance often has an unstated association with a cluster of interrelated ideas: God, objectivity, impartiality, and omniscience. The unsettling discoveries of nineteenth-century astronomy help literary writers to re-examine this set of associations, and to see how a distanced

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view can create distortions as serious as those that result from an individual viewpoint. I return to that constellation of associations—and its link to omniscient narrators—in the final chapter of this book. There I argue that individual works can be seen to have a “cosmological conception” of their own, a larger way of understanding the world as a whole that is embedded in the largest physical space in which a narrative takes place. For now, I want to show that attending to the connections between nineteenth-century astronomy and optics allows us to identify an oscillating movement in literary works between being oriented upon the earth or pulling back to a cosmic scale. In the next chapter, we will see De Quincey’s struggle to locate the self in a universe that contains no point of rest.

2 Thomas De Quincey’s Disoriented Universe

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o nineteenth-century literary writer wrestled with the implications of an ungrounded universe more unflinchingly than Thomas De Quincey. At the end of his 1846 essay “System of the Heavens as Revealed by Lord Rosse’s Telescopes,” De Quincey describes a man’s journey across an infinite universe.1 Guided by an angel, the man moves “at unutterable pace” “over frontiers” of space, through “the blazing of suns” and “rushing of planets”: To the right hand and to the left towered mighty constellations, . . . above was below, below was above, to the man stripped of gravitating body: . . . suddenly, as thus they tilted over abysmal worlds, a mighty cry arose—that systems more mysterious, that worlds more billowy,—other heights, and other depths,—were coming, were nearing, were at hand. Then the man sighed, and stopped, shuddered and wept. . . . “Angel, I will go no farther.”2

De Quincey conjures a universe in which there is no final landing place. The journey he describes combines the optical difficulties in astronomy with the imagined observer’s own vertiginous movement through space. It ends with cognitive exhaustion. Like Kant, with whose work he was deeply conversant, De Quincey is preoccupied with the roles of orientation and disorientation in the imagination. In the passage above, the voyaging mind uses the language of direction in an attempt to give the journey structure. Suns and planets mark his path through space, but as he speeds past them, he must rely on an orientation that derives from his own body and does not belong to the external universe. The language of “to the right hand and to the left” echoes Kant on the orientation of thinking, while the confusion of “above and

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below” shows how much the mind tries to grasp onto some kind of stable anchor (like the earth) to retain the sense that space contains categories of up and down. In this searching treatment of nineteenth-century astronomy, De Quincey presents a universe in which direction and orientation no longer exist in the external world, but instead depend solely on the bodily position of an imagined viewer. “System of the Heavens” is a non-fictional work that tells us about the universe in light of recent scientific and technological developments. But, as in the passage above, it serves this pedagogical goal by creating imagined spaces. Though fictional, these spaces have some kind of ontological reality; they are meant to be “experienced” as well as conceptualized and understood. In this sense, De Quincey’s essay helps us begin to see how literary texts in a range of genres make the reader simulate his or her own situation in space. Published in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, the essay celebrates the construction the year before of the largest telescope ever built. (It remained the largest until 1917.) With its 56-foot-long tube and a six foot-wide mirror, Lord Rosse’s telescope had dramatically increased visual access to the stellar universe, revealing new stars where previously only dark space had been visible (see Figure 12).3 Its light-gathering power was unprecedented. The telescope was built to study nebulae, the swirling bodies of luminous matter that many astronomers thought might be the origins of evolving star systems like our own. Rosse’s telescope was greeted with great fanfare and widespread praise in both the British and the international press.4 On the surface, De Quincey’s essay echoes this praise, citing the telescope as another instance of technological progress that increases human understanding of the universe. He announces that the telescope inaugurates “a new era for the human intellect” and pictures Rosse wielding his telescope like a king with his scepter, who, “sitting upon the shores of infinity . . . says to the ice which had frozen up our progress,—‘Melt thou before my breath!’” (569, 570). But while De Quincey appears to pay reverence to the rhetoric of scientific progress, the substance of the essay emphasizes the fundamental instability of human knowledge within a stellar universe in which every celestial body is “drifting at [a] shocking rate, with no prospect of coming to an anchorage” (574). Ostensibly, the essay is a review of John Pringle Nichol’s just published Thoughts on some important points relating to the system of the world, though like many reviews of the day, it uses the book in question as a jumping-off point

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Figure 12 Lord Rosse’s telescope, the Leviathan of Parsonstown, completed in 1846. The tube was 56 feet long, and it contained a 6 foot-wide mirror. The telescope still stands today.

for larger subjects.5 Nichol was a professor of astronomy in Glasgow, and a popular writer on astronomy. (A young Mary Ann Evans reports reading two of his books on astronomy in 1841.) While their attitudes toward astronomy sometimes differed, he and De Quincey became good friends. When De Quincey was avoiding creditors in 1841 he hid out in Nichol’s home, which was located inside the Glasgow observatory.6 De Quincey was in his sixties when he reviewed Nichol’s book, toward the end of a long career as a prose writer who published hundreds of essays ranging in subject matter from philosophy to Romantic poetry and politics to the autobiographical work on opium (1821) that would make him most famous. While “System of the Heavens” is the longest and most evocative piece De Quincey ever wrote on astronomy, his interest in astronomy had a long prior history. His biographer and editor Grevel Lindop describes astronomy as “a science of deep interest to De Quincey.”7 In the early 1800s he read, in German, the little-known treatise on astronomy that Kant had written in 1755, Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens. This was an extraordinarily prescient account of the probable structure of the universe, in which Kant, considering the shape of the Milky Way, proposes

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that it must be a disc-shaped collection of stars, and that mysterious nebulae might also be distant “island universes,” Milky Ways in their own right.8 Kant’s treatise on astronomy made a strong impression on De Quincey, who several times promised to translate parts of it into English, though he never did. “System of the Heavens” sets the discoveries of Victorian astronomy against eighteenth-century views of a fundamentally stable cosmos. The contrast between these two models of the universe emerges most vividly in the stark distinction De Quincey makes between the clocklike “regularity” and “horrible precision” of eighteenth-century astronomy and the astronomy of the 1840s, which is unprecedentedly various and irregular. Eighteenth-century astronomy, he writes, involved “mere planetary astronomy,” but now, in the days of sidereal astronomy, the solar system “has dwindled by comparison to a subordinate province, if any man is bold enough to say so, a poor shivering unit amongst myriads that are brighter” (576). Sidereal astronomy is “almost wholly a growth of modern times” and largely “the creation of the two Herschels, father and son” (572); astronomers of the day must now make sense of comets, nebulae, stars themselves, and the structure of the stellar universe. While De Quincey probably overstates the starkness of the distinction between the two eras, contemporary historians of astronomy often continue to contrast the primarily planetary astronomy of the eighteenth century with the stellar astronomy popularized by William Herschel and Pierre-Simon Laplace. Writers of the time frequently turned to the category of the sublime to think about the relationship between mind and universe, whether the brain is wider than the sky. The clash between eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury universes maps onto competing versions of the sublime that either emphasize the triumph of mind or acknowledge its exhaustion when it attempts to apprehend something that stretches its perceptual capacities. Anne Janowitz discusses the contrast between earthly images of the sublime (such as totalizable landscapes) and accounts of the night sky: For the poet of the night sky . . . who looks up, not out, the task is to totalize something that cannot be encompassed: the infinitude of the universe itself. And one of the clear changes in the project of totalization is how it shifts, in the course of the eighteenth century, from a confident set of assertions about universal coherence, to a more troubled, secular, and psychological representation of the experience of sublimity.9

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Janowitz distinguishes between “the sublime of awe,” in which the mind triumphs over perplexity, and the “unruly sublime,” the sublime of awe’s “dizzying counterpart” (480). In the unruly sublime, “one’s stomach flips over with an awareness of either the object’s incomprehensibility or the experiencing self ’s inability to process what it has seen, or some combination of the two” (480). She argues that while the sublime of awe turns the mind toward contemplating a coherent universe outside, the unruly sublime tends to turn our thoughts inward, to the workings of consciousness itself. Once again we see that astronomy creates disturbances in perception that in turn allow us to realize how the mind positions itself within literary space. Janowitz notes, “the very experience of the unruly sublime elicits a thought about how thinking itself happens” (480). At stake for De Quincey in making this distinction between eighteenthand nineteenth-century astronomy is an analogy between the universe and the mind. He uses the astronomy of his time to present a model of the mind that is fundamentally dynamic rather than stable. He presents this model on two levels: through the heady subject matter of his essay and through his own characteristic manipulation of scale, style, register, and tone. He pictures the earth flying through space “without leaving time to say, How are you off for soap?” and yanks his reader from a discussion of “the quadruple system of suns in Lyra” in one sentence to Jan Swammerdam spending “his life in a ditch watching frogs and tadpoles” in the next (576). De Quincey’s abrupt shifts in both scale and register as he moves from “quadruple . . . suns” to “tadpoles” enable his reader to feel his or her own mental apparatus at work in the act of adjustment. Such mental adjustments are akin to the physical refocusing that eyes undergo unconsciously as they shift from looking at a nearby tree branch to a star and back again to the tree. For De Quincey, space within and space without are mutually constituted. He repeatedly collapses external and internal worlds. “Space,” he writes, “ . . . has no grandeur to him who has no space in the theatre of his own brain” (576). Both the ungrounded material universe itself and the contemplating mind that apprehends that universe are places of instability. For De Quincey there is a profound connection between the open spaces that the astronomers have disclosed and the amount of space that the human mind can occupy. He writes of astronomers who, stuck on the surface of the earth and given a minimum of visual data, must struggle to “disentangle the labyrinths of worlds” (575). As John Plotz notes, “labyrinths” is an important word for De Quincey, one he applies to London and to crowds as well as

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to outer space.10 The characteristics that draw De Quincey to nineteenthcentury astronomy are comparable to aspects of his treatment of the crowd and the city of London in his nighttime circumnavigations, identified by Plotz: “cartographic confusion” (84); “unmooring” (86); and “a confusion about classification” (86) that leads to the sense of something “irritatingly not quite there” (91). Readers of De Quincey’s essay are faced with a similar challenge of classification: disentangling his accounts of the physical universe from his account of the minds that perceive it. He depicts a contemplating mind that is characterized by dynamic movement rather than stable knowledge, a mind that can conjure up the monstrous nebula in Orion, endow it with lips, temples and a “cruel brain” in one moment and then transform it back into a vast body of luminous celestial fluid in the next (571).

Progress and the “All-Conquering Telescope” In order to understand what is unusual about De Quincey’s dynamic model of the mind, it is helpful to see the range of attitudes toward knowledge that De Quincey is writing against in this essay. For instance, while De Quincey appears to echo John Pringle Nichol in lavishing praise on Rosse’s new telescope, he implicitly resists Nichol’s idea that increasing visual access to the universe renders it more and more intelligible. While several critics have noted the fact that De Quincey presents two contradictory attitudes towards Rosse’s telescope, it is worth distinguishing his praise for the telescope’s technological innovations from his discussion of the multitudinous “perplexities” that the nineteenth-century astronomer must face (574). De Quincey departs from Nichol, who suggests that technological improvement and an increased access to the far reaches of the universe come hand in hand with an increase in overall scientific knowledge. That kind of confidence in the power of the human intellect and the rigorous method of scientific investigation is a common attitude in Britain of the 1830s and 1840s. We hear it echoed, for instance, when Humphry Davy remarks in his 1830 Consolations of Travel that “the progress, and the improvement of civil society is founded in mechanical and chemical inventions.”11 Nichol’s discussion of Rosse’s telescope equates technological progress with broader versions of progress. He suggests that extending the vision farther into outer space yields a quantifiable increase in human

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knowledge. He characterizes the telescope’s power of magnification as an actual expansion of the universe to which human beings can now have access: The massive sphere through which the eye can now travel, having a diameter 500 times larger than what belongs to unassisted vision, these instruments may be said to have enlarged our accessible Universe by 125,000,000 of times—a sphere which, though it may be a mere point or islet amid Infinitude, is assuredly comprehensive enough to contain, if not all that men can desire to know, at least intimation the most precious, of the nature of the Majestic Scheme to which it is his present destiny to belong.12

The connection Nichol makes rests on an equation between vision and knowledge. The telescope makes this “massive sphere” accessible not only to the eye, Nichol suggests, but also to the understanding, providing the viewer with almost “all that men can desire to know.” While De Quincey draws from some of the rhetoric of the triumphant scientist, he refuses to equate visual access to space with theoretical understanding of what the universe is like. Instead, he shows that recent developments in astronomy have increasingly revealed the limitations of the mind that apprehends it. For him, the new “astronomies” present fundamental challenges to the idea that we can aspire to understand the universe completely (576). He makes different arguments for this idea: first, that in a constantly shifting universe it does not even make sense to think about knowing the universe optically; second, that every vantage point on the universe that one can imagine taking depends on where the viewer is located in time and in space; and third, that even astronomers have so many working versions of the universe that they refer to in their daily lives, that no one can be said to have what John Herschel describes as a “tenacious hold” on what the universe objectively is like.13 Even when he echoes Nichol’s statement that Rosse has made the accessible universe much larger than it has ever been before, De Quincey stops short of suggesting that to access the universe visually is to understand it better: The theatre to which he has introduced us, is immeasurably beyond the old one which he found. To say that he found, in the visible universe, a little wooden theatre of Thespis, a tre´teau or shed of vagrants, and that he presented us, at a price of toil and of anxiety that cannot be measured, with a Roman colosseum,—that is to say nothing. It is to undertake the measurement of the tropics with the pocket-tape of

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an upholsterer. Columbus, when he introduced the Old World to the New . . . did in fact only introduce the majority to the minority; but Lord Rosse has introduced the minority to the majority. (569)

De Quincey’s shifts in scale and register in this passage leave the reader continually on edge. Unlike Nichol, who expresses the new size of the visible universe in numerical terms, De Quincey uses a series of metaphors. These require us to readjust constantly the scales on which we are thinking (from shed to coliseum), and to reimagine the environment he is referring to (from rustic setting to Roman grandeur to tropical exploration). When De Quincey does use numerical measurement, he gives us the woefully inadequate “pocket-tape of an upholsterer.” And the disorienting nature of the passage is compounded by the fact that De Quincey does group like with like: buildings, worlds, and populations. This gives the impression that we should be able to follow his line of thought, but we keep feeling the sands shifting beneath our feet. In resisting an easy link between technological and intellectual progress, De Quincey is writing against models of the mind that portray it as stable and consistent. This is an attitude expressed in John Herschel’s Treatise on Astronomy, when, after eloquently citing all the contradictions that astronomy presents between what one sees and what one knows, Herschel asserts that once the human mind knows something intellectually it is able to discard incoming sensory information with ease. De Quincey’s version of the starry sky within involves mental gymnastics that draw on both sensory perception and theoretical knowledge when the two approaches toward apprehension no longer match up. Edgar Allan Poe makes a similar suggestion in his prose poem “Eureka” (1848). He argues that the very concept of an infinite space is anything but stable. The universe, he writes, should be thought of as simply the “‘utmost conceivable expanse’ of space—a shadowy and fluctuating domain, now shrinking, now swelling with the vacillating energies of the imagination.”14 What is notable about Poe’s model is that it asks us to picture the actual universe inflating and deflating with the fluctuating powers of the observer. De Quincey’s model of the mind, like Poe’s, involves a fluid and constantly shifting organ that never maintains a tenacious hold on any single stance. His own stylistic play likewise enacts such instability for his readers, giving them the visceral sensation of existing in an ungrounded universe. But far from mourning the idea that neither the universe itself nor the

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human mind that contemplates it offers any stability, De Quincey suggests that astronomical and mental stability would be stifling and dreary. He uses the contrasts between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century astronomy to suggest that the way in which this constantly shifting universe acts on the imagination should be seen as a source of exhilaration rather than frustration. The new “astronomies” inspire the imagination rather than set the entire search for knowledge grinding to a halt (576).

Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century “Astronomies” The distinctions that De Quincey makes between stable and unstable systems emerge in his discussion of the ambiguities found in the astronomy of the 1840s. He contrasts the stimulating astronomy of his own day with the dull predictability of eighteenth-century astronomy. While De Quincey is similar to many of his contemporaries in viewing recent developments in astronomy as peculiarly exciting, he is unusual in the extent to which he emphasizes the mysteries and “perplexities” which confront the astronomer. For De Quincey, the Newtonian eighteenth-century universe is drearily predictable in its smooth-working motions. Astronomers in Isaac Newton’s day (1642–1727) dealt with a clocklike universe, he claims, while the nineteenth-century astronomer contends with new data and perceptual problems. To animate this contrast De Quincey invents an unnamed eighteenth-century thinker who used to complain that the planets were so “infernally punctual” in their courses that he found their predictability disappointing:15 There was a man in the last century, and an eminent man too, who used to say that whereas people in general pretended to admire astronomy as being essentially sublime, he for his part looked upon all that sort of thing as a swindle; and, on the contrary, he regarded the solar system as decidedly vulgar; because the planets were all of them so infernally punctual, they kept time with such horrible precision, that they forced him, whether he would or no, to think of nothing but post-office clocks, mail-coaches, and bookkeepers. Regularity may be beautiful, but it excludes the sublime.16 (576)

In this passage, De Quincey mocks the eighteenth-century impression that celestial bodies were as predictable as post-office clocks, mail coaches, and

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bookkeepers. The image of a post-office clock deflates the familiar eighteenth-century image of a clocklike universe designed to run indefinitely.17 Through these figures he associates this kind of science, in which answers are attainable and clear, with bourgeois predictability and a lack of imagination. While historians of astronomy suggest that eighteenth-century astronomers did on the whole conceive of the cosmos as a static, stable system surrounded by fixed stars, the ultimate accuracy of De Quincey’s contrast is less important than the conflicting models of universe and mind he sets up here.18 As we have seen, eighteenth-century astronomy did center primarily on the sun, the planets, and their satellites. Telescopes were not strong enough to penetrate beyond the solar system, and as a result, the universe could be seen as more predictable and clocklike than it could when nebulae and double stars became central objects of study in the nineteenth century. Newton had answered a number of questions that had remained unclear since Copernicus suggested that the earth circled the sun. He seemed to have explained the force that held the planets and solar system together, finally accounting for a stable, self-perpetuating system. And yet, De Quincey explains, eighteenth-century writers on astronomy were missing something in their complacent sense that most of the essential questions about the nature of the universe had been answered. Although Adam Smith’s view of the cosmos incorporates complex kinetic motion, it remains a fundamentally stable system. Smith’s mid eighteenth-century work The Principles which lead and direct Philosophical Enquiries; Illustrated by the History of Astronomy in many ways corresponds to De Quincey’s characterizations. While De Quincey is not responding to Smith explicitly, Smith presents an eighteenth-century view that emphatically downplays the irregularity of the universe.19 He invokes the history of astronomy to argue that visual perception of the universe and the scientific account of its structure need not necessarily be at odds with each other. Smith sees Newton as the culmination of the history of astronomy because his account of gravitational attraction between the sun and planets succeeds in reconciling conflicts between vision and theoretical knowledge that had plagued astronomers since Copernicus. By the nineteenth century this aspect of Smith’s argument became untenable as scientists realized that the same contradictions that tormented the post-Copernican astronomers recurred in sidereal astronomy. According to Smith’s essay, the goal of philosophical inquiry is the discovery of coherent explanations and systems. He uses the progression

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from Ptolemy to Copernicus to Newton to argue that the systems scientists propose to explain natural phenomena always get simpler, tighter, and more harmonious as scientific understanding progresses. Smith’s history culminates with Newton as the one who linked the attraction between celestial bodies to the force of gravity, which all human beings directly experience on a daily basis. Smith sees Newton’s discovery “as the greatest discovery ever made by man, the discovery of an immense chain of the most important and sublime truths, all closely connected together, by one capital fact, of the reality of which we have daily experience.”20 Newton shows the scientific explanation of the structure of the universe to be harmonious with human sensory perception, Smith argues, by linking the mysterious, invisible force that holds the solar system together to gravity, a force that human beings encounter every day. Smith’s argument has a distinctly paradoxical feel to it; he resembles John Herschel in describing the contradictions built into astronomy so evocatively that it is subsequently hard to believe him when he declares such difficulties resolved. We can find plenty of examples of the kinds of attitudes that De Quincey is writing against closer to his own time as well. William Whewell’s 1833 third Bridgewater Treatise On Astronomy and General Physics is a telling example. Whewell incorporates many of the most recent findings of stellar astronomers like William Herschel, who view stars as in a state of constant evolution rather than as fundamentally stable, and star systems as similarly much more subject to change over time than astronomers in previous centuries had thought. But while he brings this new data into his account of astronomy, he remains invested both in the idea of a generally stable solar system and in smoothing over the contradictions and problems that the study of astronomy raises. After acknowledging the “tendency of the [solar] system to derangement,” we see him reassuring his reader that derangement is not inconsistent with “stability”: It may perhaps appear to some, that this acknowledgement of the tendency of the system to derangement through the action of a resisting medium is inconsistent with the argument which we have drawn in a previous chapter, from the provisions for its stability. In reality, however, the two views are in perfect agreement, so far as our purpose is concerned. The main point which we had to urge, in the consideration of the stability of the system, was, not that it is constructed to last for ever, but that while it lasts the deviations from its mean condition are very small.21

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Whewell replaces the idea of perpetual stability with stability for a very long time. Arguments that might appear to be contradictory are “in reality . . . in perfect agreement.” Whewell refers here to “our purpose” and it is worth remembering that the central project of the Bridgewater Treatises was to incorporate new scientific discoveries into an intelligently designed universe. But in passages such as this, the way in which Whewell veers away from contradiction reveals the extent to which many thinkers were invested in the idea of a stable universe. Later, while Whewell adjusts his account of astronomy to incorporate the “multitude almost innumerable of worlds” that have recently been made visible through advances in telescopy, he does not adjust his worldview accordingly, but instead uses new data to support an old model of a largely coherent universe in which star systems are “all governed by one law, yet this law so concentrating its operation on each system, that each proceeds as if there were no other, and so regulating its own effects that perpetual change produces permanent uniformity” (288–9). In order to resist the idea of stability, De Quincey invests his fictional eighteenth-century thinker with a disgust for “regularity” (576). That thinker is unusual among his contemporaries in being frustrated by the predictability of the astronomy of his day, considering the solar system “vulgar” because it runs with such clocklike precision (576).22 This man would have preferred, De Quincey explains, a “Lloyd’s list” for celestial bodies to report on the stars and planets that keep getting lost. Lloyd’s lists, which provided ship owners and insurance companies with news of their far-off vessels, kept track of voyaging trade ships whose whereabouts could only be known with difficulty once they lost sight of land. They announced wrecks and successful arrivals. De Quincey’s analogy between such ships and celestial bodies is a clever one, suggesting that there is little reason to believe that celestial bodies should be any easier to keep track of than ships gone out to sea. Referring to the astronomer who was frustrated by eighteenth-century astronomy’s predictability, De Quincey writes: What he wished for was something like [a] Lloyd’s list. Comets—due 3; arrived 1. Mercury, when last seen, appeared to be distressed; but made no signals. Pallas and Vesta, not heard of for some time; supposed to have foundered. Moon, spoken last night through a heavy bank of clouds; out sixteen days: all right. (576)

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De Quincey’s list compares astronomers to ship owners who anxiously await sight of voyaging ships.23 Once a ship leaves port, its whereabouts are unknown. The humor in this passage derives from the fact that it seems ridiculous to imagine the moon or Mercury waylaid in their paths through the heavens. Astronomers depend on the continuity between the paths celestial bodies trace through space when they cannot be seen and the fractions of such paths that astronomers can observe, depending on the weather, the time of day, and the time of year. De Quincey’s analogy questions the reasoning behind this assumption, suggesting that the faith astronomers have in the predictability of the moon, stars, and planets departs significantly from their earthly experience of not knowing what something is doing when it is not in sight. This passage renders the celestial bodies alive and fragile, objects of anxious but helpless attention. Two expected comets are missing. The asteroids Pallas and Vesta are “supposed to have foundered.” Mercury appears “to be distressed,” struggling to communicate, “but made no signals.” Only the previously elusive moon is finally, reassuringly, “all right.” The list reveals yet another way in which astronomers must distinguish between their sensory perception of celestial bodies and their theoretical beliefs about them. When the moon or planets disappear from their sight, they assume those bodies are still there, but perhaps, he suggests, they should not be so secure in the assumption that the universe will continue to run like clockwork. In any case, such a feeling of security deadens the mind. By contrast, the uncertainty De Quincey creates by comparing celestial bodies to voyaging ships renders the observation of comets, planets, asteroids and moons full of suspense. De Quincey’s contrast between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century astronomies implies that scientific study invigorates not when it provides clear answers but instead when it stimulates the imagination. Nineteenthcentury astronomy is just such a science. He goes on to explain that his unnamed thinker would have been exhilarated by what the past five decades of astronomical discovery have revealed: Now this poor man’s misfortune was, to have lived in the days of mere planetary astronomy. At present, when our own little system, with all its grandeurs, has dwindled by comparison to a subordinate province, if any man is bold enough to say so, a poor shivering unit amongst myriads that are brighter, we ought no longer to talk of astronomy, but of the astronomies. (576)

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Recent astronomy, De Quincey continues, has made visible not only thousands of new celestial bodies but also new types of celestial body: double or binary stars, star clusters, nebulae, and asteroids. Thus, there are now several branches of astronomy: “the planetary, the cometary, the sidereal, . . . the nebular.” The sky is vaster than it was ever imagined to be, and the astronomer’s work more varied: in the starry heavens, that are now unfolding and preparing to unfold, before us, are many vacant areas upon which the astronomer may pitch his secret pavilion. He may dedicate himself to the service of the Double Suns; he has my license to devote his whole time to the quadruple system of suns in Lyra. (576)

He may study Hercules, the zodiacal light or the interplanetary ether. All these new data, and these new categories of celestial bodies, have disrupted earlier conceptions of the stars as perfect, static and eternal. De Quincey continues: There is no want of variety now, nor in fact of irregularity: for the most exquisite clock-work, which from enormous distance seems to go wrong, virtually for us does go wrong; so that our friend of the last century who complained of the solar system, would not need to do so any longer. There are anomalies enough to keep him cheerful. There are now even things to alarm us; for any thing in the starry worlds that looks suspicious, any thing that ought not to be there, is, for all purposes of frightening us, as good as a ghost. (576)

The universe that appeared to consist of “an exquisite clock-work” after Newton now must be reinterpreted as astronomers confront new data, such as evolving nebulae and constantly shifting stars, that do not fit into the model of a stable universe. This is what De Quincey means when he writes that if something “from enormous distance seems to go wrong, [it] virtually for us does go wrong.” Far from the predictability the eighteenth-century man so despised, these skies provide “anomalies enough to keep him cheerful” and “even things to alarm us.”24 The nineteenthcentury skies are for De Quincey various and irregular. The model of the clock works when we consider the system from outside, but as soon as we situate ourselves inside of it, as observers in space for whom light takes ten to a million years to travel from a distant star, anomalies begin to be observed. Astronomical observation is filled with what De Quincey terms “equivocating appearances” (573). He lays out three “separate cases of perplexity”

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that face the sidereal astronomer in particular (573). First, astronomers must distinguish between magnitude and distance—if a star is faint, “is the size less, or the distance greater?” (573). Second, they must disentangle their own motion from the motion of what they observe in order to avoid “a motion in ourselves doubtfully confounded with a motion in some external body” (573). Finally, they must determine the relationships between pairs of stars that appear to be next to one another: “is it a real proximity that we see between two stars, or simply an apparent proximity from lying in the same visual line, though in other depths of space?” (573). He refers, in the latter category, to the recent work on double stars, pointing out that in some cases, two stars that appeared conjoined do indeed revolve around each other, showing a connection that is objective (that is, independent of an observer). Elsewhere the proximity is subjective (only caused by an apparent closeness based on the observer’s line of vision). In his 1830 Preliminary Discourse William Herschel’s son John notes that it is “only since a comparatively recent date [that] any great attention has been bestowed on the smaller stars.” He explains, “The minute examination of them with powerful telescopes, and with delicate instruments for the determination of their places, has . . . disclosed the existence of whole classes of celestial objects” (282–3). The first half of the nineteenth century witnessed the discoveries of many of these new celestial objects: thousands of nebulae, hundreds of double stars, and the first asteroids.25 In isolating the perceptual problems that arise when one tries to distinguish one’s own motion from the motion of bodies observed, De Quincey refers to the perceptual problem that had always thwarted pre-Copernican astronomers in constructing an accurate model of the heavens. The discovery of the Copernican system had revealed how easy it had been to attribute the earth’s own motion to the sun, moon, and stars. By 1846, the same problem has again arisen in sidereal astronomy. While the proper motion of the so-called fixed stars is now well understood, it remains essentially invisible because the relative motions of stars can only be detected over the course of centuries.26 Again, this term “proper” motion is used to distinguish a star’s own motion through space from the apparent movement of the fixed stars as they circle the earth. The stars are termed “fixed” because they appear to remain fixed in place with respect to one another, as if they were affixed to a transparent sphere. Stars millions of miles away from one another appear to fuse into each other. Thanks to Rosse’s

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telescope, other stars and nebulae are suddenly revealed to exist where previously only dark space had been visible. De Quincey’s account of the tormented nineteenth-century astronomer replaces the more typical Victorian story of scientific progress that he invokes elsewhere in his essay: All these cases of simulation and dissimulation torment the astronomer by multiplying his perplexities, and deepening the difficulty of escaping them. He cannot get at the truth: in many cases, magnitude and distance are in collusion with each other to deceive him: motion subjective is in collusion with motion objective; duplex systems are in collusion with fraudulent stars, having no real partnership whatever, but mimicking such a partnership by means of the limitations or errors affecting the human eye, where it can apply no other sense to aid or to correct itself. (574)

De Quincey takes some of his rhetoric of the stars as “fraudulent” from Nichol, but he pushes this idea to an extreme by stating that the Victorian astronomer “cannot get at the truth.” He imagines the stars as intentionally coy, and pits the stars against the observer. The stars collude, they are “fraudulent” in that they take advantage of flaws in our visual system; astronomy inherently plays tricks on its practitioners. His language attributes deceit to the stars when in fact it is the human visual system that is misleading. One of the key problems in astronomical observation arises from the fact that an observer must rely on vision, a sense that keeps breaking down at the distances involved.27 Astronomy depends on vision but cannot get past its limitations. Isobel Armstrong quotes John Herschel, who spent several years charting the stars in the southern hemisphere, wondering: “But how are we to ascertain by observation, data more precise than observation itself?”28 This passage threads together the three examples of the “equivocal phenomena” De Quincey has laid out: the difficulty in attributing a star’s brightness to magnitude or distance, the impossibility of disentangling “motion objective” from “motion subjective,” and the problem of knowing whether two stars that appear close to each other only appear so because of the flattening effect of vision. Some of the difficulties he identifies can be corrected through careful calculation and observation over time. Other problems, such as determining whether or not gaseous matter exists in space, as it appears to in some nebulae, genuinely seem beyond the power of human beings to determine at this time.29

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Lord Rosse and the Nebula in Orion De Quincey dwells at length on the interpretive problems with which an astronomer is presented in “disentang[ling] the labyrinths of worlds.” This problem is evident in the extreme difficulties of assigning meaning to the visual data that the telescope makes available. Major interpretive conundrums arise when astronomers attempt to extrapolate from the telescope’s observations of the nebula in Orion. Late in 1845 Rosse claimed (mistakenly, it would turn out) that what had previously appeared to be nebulous matter in the sword of Orion was in fact individual stars, what Nichol terms “a SAND-HEAP of stars!”30 The significance of this claim comes from its involvement in the debate that had been going on for half a century about the nebular hypothesis. This was the theory of the origins of the universe proposed by Kant and Pierre-Simon Laplace and developed by William Herschel in the 1790s, which by the 1840s had been accepted by many astronomers.31 The hypothesis suggested that the stars and the planets around those stars evolved from swirling bodies of luminous gas which condensed into systems of spheres like the solar system. Today most astronomers would agree that William Herschel’s nebular hypothesis presents an accurate account of how stars develop. Rosse’s claim that he had resolved the Orion nebula into stars was one new development in the decades-long debate. William Herschel, one of the first to catalog these nebulae, had discovered hundreds of them while studying the sky from the northern hemisphere prior to 1800. Herschel himself went back and forth on whether he believed the luminous bodies of gas to be actually gaseous or made up of star clusters so distant that they merged optically into a luminous mass. As Herschel discovered, what had previously appeared to be nebulous matter through one telescope sometimes turned out to be clusters of stars when viewed through a more powerful instrument. His finding raised the possibility that with powerful enough telescopes all the apparent nebulae might be resolved into stars. The only way to determine whether this was the case (it seemed in the early nineteenth century) was to build more powerful telescopes. Writing in 1849, William’s son John Herschel distinguishes between those nebulae that are “optically nebulous” and those that appear to be “physically nebulous” as well.32 To be physically nebulous would mean to be made up of

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luminous gas or fluid. Celestial objects that are solely “optically nebulous” are clusters of solid individuated celestial bodies (stars) that simply appear to be gaseous because they blur together when seen from a distance. The ramifications in terms of the nature of the visible were huge either way. If a nebula was a cluster of stars, that meant it was millions of miles away, outside the Milky Way. If it was a body of luminous gas, it would be relatively local, and could be a star seen in the process of forming. In three essays—on astronomical drawing, Lord Rosse’s telescope, and the nebular hypothesis—Simon Schaffer has shown that the data that Rosse’s telescope made available were extraordinarily hard to interpret.33 Lord Rosse built his telescope in part to see whether it could show “defiant” nebulae to be clusters of stars. Rosse’s claim that the Orion nebula was in fact a star cluster suggested that if telescopes were powerful enough, every apparent nebula might be shown to be made of stars. But the larger problem was extrapolating from visual data. We would now judge Rosse to have been mistaken—he may have seen stars shining through the nebula, but astronomers today agree that the Orion nebula does consist of physically nebulous matter, luminous gases, and that it is one of hundreds of thousands of nebulae now visible in the universe. Most significantly for the connection between seeing and understanding, modern science indicates that the question of whether nebulae exist in the universe is one that could never have been answered by appealing to visual data. So long as nebulae continued to be perceived in the heavens, the possibility would remain that a more powerful telescope might one day resolve them into stars, showing them to be clusters of stars. More conclusive data would come instead in 1864 by way of the spectroscope. The process of spectroscopy relies on the spectral analysis of the light emitted by celestial bodies, rather than on direct observation of them, to determine their constitution. William Huggins performed a spectral analysis of a planetary nebula in Draco and found that it produced a single bright line, indicating that the nebula was made of glowing gas and not of solid matter.34 Spectroscopy, coupled with photography, marked the beginning of astronomical observation that relied on mechanical tools for observation rather than on human vision.35 The uncertainty surrounding the nebular hypothesis gives the lie, then, to the equation of seeing more with understanding the universe better. Rosse’s telescope was remarkably large and powerful, as De Quincey claims, but the data it collected gave no clear account of whether nebulae were gaseous.

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Seeing and Understanding: Sensory and Intellectual Knowledge in Astronomy For De Quincey, the source of astronomy’s inspiration lies in how it stimulates the mind rather than in how it offers an increase in stable knowledge. The controversies surrounding the nebular hypothesis and the “equivocal phenomena” that characterize stellar astronomy both point to ways in which increasing the powers of human vision does not necessarily lead to advancement in the understanding of the heavens (574). The new mysteries that nineteenth-century astronomy involves are only symptoms of larger perceptual problems inherent in astronomy. The science of astronomy is peculiar, De Quincey shows, in that it involves a constant conflict between “apparent phenomena” and “real phenomena.” One’s knowledge about the structure of the universe does not affect the way one sees it, and thus perception is always coming into conflict with theory. In Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, the 1821 work for which he was most famous, De Quincey capitalizes on these conflicts between what we see and what we know is there. He uses the starry universe as a metaphor for the mind: Of this, at least, I feel assured, that there is no such thing as forgetting possible to the mind; a thousand accidents may and will interpose a veil between our present consciousness and the secret inscriptions on the mind. Accidents of the same sort will also rend away this veil; but alike, whether veiled or unveiled, the inscription remains for ever; just as the stars seem to withdraw before the common light of day, whereas, in fact, we all know that it is the light which is drawn over them as a veil; and that they are waiting to be revealed, when the obscuring daylight shall have withdrawn.36

In this passage, De Quincey works through the distinction between something we know to exist and our actual access to it. De Quincey anticipates Marcel Proust in his musing on access to memories that lie locked in the mind. Here sunlight functions as a metaphor for an overwhelming influx of information, drowning out a star that can be seen against a dark nighttime sky. The stars, De Quincey reminds, still shine during the day—we just can no longer distinguish their light from that of the sun. His comparison resembles Shelley’s use of Venus in “To a Sky-Lark.” Like Shelley’s planet, which becomes invisible “in the broad day-light,” De Quincey’s stars are

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simultaneously there and not there. Daylight becomes a source of obscurity rather than illumination. In his essay on Lord Rosse’s telescope, De Quincey similarly emphasizes the challenges involved in perceiving the universe; he pictures nineteenthcentury astronomers as valiantly straining to see the stars when the rest of humanity is asleep: at wide intervals, but intervals scattered over Europe, whilst “all that mighty heart” is, by sleep, resting from its labours, secret eyes are lifted up to heaven in astronomical watch towers; eyes that keep watch and ward over spaces that make us dizzy to remember, eyes that register the promises of comets, and disentangle the labyrinths of worlds. (575)

In this lovely image of a silent but alert body of astronomers hard at work, De Quincey characterizes astronomical observation as involving complex acts of interpretation. The astronomers strive to “disentangle the labyrinths of worlds,” struggling against their vision’s tendency to flatten out objects at a great distance, so that they look as if they are all equidistant from the earth (575). De Quincey’s metaphor of disentangling emphasizes the many separate layers of space that actually exist in the universe, what William Herschel refers to as “deep space.” The conflicts between what one sees and what one knows in astronomy are evident in the language astronomers use to refer to celestial bodies. As scientists, they refer to the earth’s rotation, the earth’s annual revolution around the sun, and the “proper motion” of the stars outside the solar system. But astronomers, without exception, are inconsistent, reverting to everyday descriptions of the sun, moon, and stars in their ordinary life, and that inconsistency reveals the mind to be mobile and dynamic rather than static and tenacious. De Quincey reminds us: For the man of science, equally with the populace, talks of the sun as rising and setting, as having finished half his day’s journey, &c., and, without pedantry, could not in many cases talk otherwise.37

An astronomer cannot avoid referring to the sun’s journey for precisely the same reason that he cannot help but perceive the sun rising and setting. One’s theoretical understanding of the universe’s structure is impossible (without pedantry) to hold onto consistently. As a result, the apprehension of celestial bodies necessarily involves a mental split between what one sees and what one understands. It is in this context that De Quincey contrasts

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astronomy with geology, in which “there is no such stream of apparent phenomena running counter (as in astronomy there is) to the real phenomena,” and “neither is there any popular language opposed to the scientific.”38 Nineteenth-century discoveries and innovations have only exacerbated the problem. The larger telescopes have extended the study of astronomy from the solar system to the stars, which are even less available to the senses than are the constituents of the solar system. With these new views of the universe, De Quincey realizes, the sense of the cosmos as a whole has fundamentally shifted. Two centuries earlier, Milton had acknowledged the discrepancies between sensory and theoretical versions of the universe but suggested that the cosmos itself is regular and stable, that the fault was in human perception alone. Milton writes that the stars are “regular . . . when most irregular they seem.”39 For De Quincey, such a view is no longer tenable; every star and stellar system has its own proper motion, and the result is a cosmos in constant flux. As we will see in the next section, this idea has important implications for the status of subjective and objective knowledge.

Orientation in Thinking: Astronomy and Objectivity The idea that De Quincey finds perhaps most striking about the universe is that astronomical observation has disrupted the categories of subjectivity and objectivity by revealing that there is no fixed point in the entire universe. Since both our solar system and the rest of the universe are in constant motion, we cannot even imagine a vantage point in the material universe that is not subject to serious spatial and temporal distortions. On a practical level, De Quincey points out, this causes problems in distinguishing one’s own motion from the motion of what one observes: If it could be a safe assumption, that the system to which our planet is attached were absolutely fixed and motionless, except as regards its own internal relations of movement, then every change outside of us, every motion that the registers of astronomy had established, would be objective, and not subjective. (578)

De Quincey speculates that if our solar system were fixed in space, “then every change outside of us . . . would be objective, and not subjective,” in that we would know this was not simply the result of our perception. As I began to suggest in Chapter 1, for De Quincey this is not simply a

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technical problem but a problem that has much larger epistemological implications. The newly understood physical structure of a universe in which everything is in motion upsets the idea of an objective truth to which human beings have access. De Quincey’s most important point of reference for thinking about subjectivity and objectivity as philosophical problems was the work of Immanuel Kant. As both Grevel Lindop and R. L. Snyder show, De Quincey’s admiration of Kant ebbed and flowed in the early 1800s. Initially enthusiastic about The Critique of Pure Reason, he ended up finding it too disturbing in its emphasis on the subjective nature of external reality. In his autobiographical essay “German Studies and Kant in Particular,” De Quincey gently mocks Kant’s famous analogy between the Copernican attribution of motion to the earth and Kant’s own emphasis on the agency of the mind in apprehending external reality.40 Later in the essay, he takes the analogy up again, and himself compares the effect of Kant’s philosophy to a shaking up of the “steadfast earth”: Let a man but meditate a little on this or other aspects of this transcendental philosophy, and he will find the steadfast earth itself rocking as it were beneath his feet; a world about him which is in some sense a world of deception . . . (101)

It was this sense that Kant offered no way in which to know the world that frustrated De Quincey. De Quincey’s enthusiasm for the philosopher was renewed, however, by his friendship with Coleridge, who was highly influential in introducing Kant to British readers.41 In the 1830s we find De Quincey writing two long essays on the works of Kant. Finally the 1846 “System of the Heavens” intertwines Kant’s early writings on astronomy with his ideas on orientation in thinking, the way in which the mind structures the world it apprehends, and his discussion of the sublime. De Quincey is particularly influenced by Kant’s idea that orientation and direction are necessary parts of thinking.42 De Quincey’s earlier writings on the discovery of the planet Uranus both draw a distinction between the roles of sensory and theoretical knowledge in how we know what we know, and emphasize how interconnected observation and theory can be. For an 1819 piece on “Immanuel Kant & Dr. [William] Herschel,” De Quincey observes a striking fact that he may have been the first to notice, namely that “twenty-six years at least before Dr. [William] Herschel discovered the planet . . . Uranus, . . . it had been predicted—or to speak more

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truly it had been demonstrated—by Kant that a planet would be found in that region of the heavens.”43 This article emphasizes how two very different approaches to the problem of understanding the cosmos produced a similar result. What is at stake for De Quincey is effectiveness of empirical observation and mathematical approaches to astronomy. Herschel was made famous when he discovered Uranus in 1781; he went on to transform astronomy in the decades that followed (until his death in 1822), building the most powerful telescopes in the world, identifying the motion of the solar system toward the constellation Hercules, suggesting that stars originated as nebulae, cataloguing hundreds of nebulae and double stars, and proposing a disc-like shape for the universe after “gauging” the stellar universe, surveying it and recording the density of stars in every direction visible from the northern hemisphere. In short, in the minds of the British at least, Herschel had invented stellar astronomy.44 Kant’s writings on astronomy were far less well known in Britain, but to someone like De Quincey who had read his 1755 Theory of the Heavens, the continuities between what Kant had predicted by theorizing about the universe and what Herschel later discovered through meticulous observation were striking. In this short piece, De Quincey characterizes Herschel as a good observer who benefited from “the excellence of his telescope.” But he celebrates Kant’s achievement even more. Kant, he writes, realized “the necessity of such a planet as a consequence of a law previously detected by his own sagacity at least six and twenty years before Herschel made the same discovery.” He contrasts the methods by which each gets his knowledge: The difference between the discoveries is this: Herschel’s was made empirically or a posteriori by means of a fine telescope: Kant’s scientifically or a priori as a deduction from certain laws which he had established in his Celestial System (Himmels System). (289–90)

In this formulation, De Quincey appears to value Kant’s method over Herschel’s, in part because of the emphasis Kant places on the way in which the mind structures the world it perceives, whereas empirical scientific methods can be interpreted as characterizing the mind as a passive recipient of objective data. But what De Quincey finds most remarkable is that two such different methods lead to a conclusion that is essentially the same. Knowledge derived from sensory information and knowledge that is

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essentially deductive produce equivalent results rather than contradicting each other. Kant’s essay “What is Orientation in Thinking?” underscores the importance of using both an external object (like the rising sun or the Pole Star) and subjective orientation (the sense of right and left, up and down) in order to organize mentally the outside world. Kant writes: “To orientate oneself . . . means to use a given direction—and we divide the horizon into four of these—in order to find the others.”45 Orientation involves aligning apparently objective direction—the external world of a room or a horizon— with subjective direction—that inner sense of right and left. Kant connects this physical and geographical orientation to the process of orienting oneself “in thought, i.e. logically” (238). It is through orientation that “pure reason regulates its use when, taking leave of known objects (of experience), it seeks to extend its sphere beyond the frontiers of experience and no longer encounters any objects of intuition whatsoever, but merely a space for the latter to operate in” (239–40). Thus abstract thinking itself relies on an orientation that places an orienting bodily presence within that imagined world. David Masson insists that he cannot “imagine the depopulated Earth still wheeling” without intruding “into the fancy the supposition of a listening ear and a beholding eye of my own.”46 Those bodies themselves remain unrepresented, but we can detect the presence of such a body by Kant’s references to right or left hands, or by Masson’s references to ears and eyes. The more abstract cognitive act (imagining the earth) depends on a prior act of imaginative self-positioning. De Quincey’s sense of the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity is highly influenced by Kant. In fact, he borrows the structure of his passage on the relative motion of the sun and the stars from a passage in Kant’s astronomical treatise. In his treatise, Kant cites a long passage from the eighteenth-century astronomer James Bradley (1693–1762), who discusses the possible motion of the fixed stars in terms very like those De Quincey uses in this essay. Bradley (as cited by Kant) writes: if our own solar system may be conceived to change its place with respect to absolute space, this might, in process of time, occasion an apparent change in the angular distances of fixed stars; and in such a case, the places of the nearest stars being more affected than of those that are most remote, their relative positions might seem to alter, though the stars themselves were really immovable. And on the other hand, if our own system were really at rest and any of the stars really in motion, this might likewise vary their apparent positions.47

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De Quincey follows this very structure in his essay, proposing first that if the solar system were “absolutely fixed and motionless,” we would be able to attribute any motion we detected to other stars, and second that “if no motion was possible in the starry heaven, then every change of relations in space, between ourselves and them, would indicate and measure a progress, or regress on the part of our solar system” (574). In the ninety years since Kant wrote his treatise, however, the known facts themselves have changed, and both the proper motions of all the so-called fixed stars and the sun’s own motion through space have been established. Nothing in the universe is static, and, De Quincey writes, “the immediate difficulties are multiplied.” We may recall his image of the star in the Swan, “drifting at this shocking rate, with no prospect of coming to an anchorage” (574). All of the stars in the universe have been set adrift. De Quincey suggests that the very idea of progress makes little sense within a universe in flux. We find De Quincey using the word “progress” not only to characterize Lord Rosse’s technological achievements but also to describe the motion of the solar system in relation to other so-called fixed stars. Here we can see a connection between the physical movement of the solar system and the ways in which people commonly assign direction—and meaning—to the historical and social changes that occur on earth. Much as the perpetual motion of everything in the universe unsettles the distinctions between objectivity and subjectivity, it also upsets a sense of spatial direction—of forward or backward motion, progress or regress. In the idea of progress, a spatial idea is projected onto a temporal framework, whether it refers to the movement of history or scientific advance: Or, reversely, if it were safe to assume as a universal law, that no motion was possible in the starry heavens, then every change of relations in space, between ourselves and them, would indicate and would measure a progress, or regress, on the part of our solar system, in certain known directions. (574)

De Quincey refers here to the motion of the whole solar system, which functions as a unit following the trajectory of the sun. The now familiar problem of seeing something from a body that is itself in motion arises once again. As we can see from the discussion of the relative motions of stars, this idea of direction begins to be emptied of meaning when one starts discussing stellar motion, for there is no stationary object in the universe with which to orient oneself. Without any stasis on the part of the solar system or the rest of the stellar universe, the idea of bodily orientation or solar orientation

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breaks down as an intelligible idea as well. Once one conceives of human beings existing on a rotating planet swirling around a sun that itself is in motion, ideas of direction, progress and regress lose their epistemological stability. We again see the importance of external stationary objects in locating either the observer or the thing observed. Those so-called stationary objects can simply be stationary in relation to another object—much as the floor of a ship appears stationary to someone who is traveling on that ship. De Quincey raises this problem of motion and orientation in terms of our relationship with the very tracts of space through which the earth regularly travels. In the earth’s journey round the sun, the distant stars act as markers but the actual path through which the planet travels eludes apprehension completely. De Quincey suggests that while these empty tracts of space should be familiar to us—we have traveled through them for millions of years—we “can never challenge them as known” because they completely elude our sense of sight. How can the perceiving mind come to know something as difficult to see as uninterrupted space? Only periodic shooting stars, which appear in August and November, vary the appearance of the earth’s path around the sun. Without such shooting stars, he points out, there are no sensory data to distinguish one stretch of space from another. De Quincey’s recoil from undifferentiated space underscores the basic human need for landing places as a form of punctuation. Even though the “chambers of ether” that the earth constantly flies through and past should be “old roads,” deeply familiar, they are so featureless that we can never register them as something we know: It always struck me as most disgusting, that, in going round the sun, we must be passing continually over old roads, and yet we had no means of establishing an acquaintance with them: they might as well be new for every trip. Those chambers of ether, through which we are tearing along night and day, (for our train stops at no stations,) doubtless, if we could put some mark upon them, must be old fellows perfectly liable to recognition. I suppose, they never have notice to quit. And yet, for want of such a mark, though all our lives flying past them and through them, we can never challenge them as known. (577)

Making physical contact with something like these empty tracts of space, even flying past and through them, then, still does not allow them to be known. First, the object encountered must be available to the senses, somehow apprehensible. The earth’s path through the stars is a new

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example of the peculiar and difficult sensory relationship that human beings have to the stars. Even more than the celestial bodies themselves, these empty tracts of space stretch De Quincey’s contemporaries to the limits of their capacity to know and to comprehend. In writing about outer space, De Quincey suggests that much of it eludes the senses altogether. Space contains so little sensory information that De Quincey conceives of it as “an abstract idea” rather than as a concrete phenomenon. He compares the earth’s route round the sun to a path through the desert, in which nothing marks off one stretch from another: The same thing happens in the desert: one monotonous iteration of sand, sand, sand, unless where some miserable fountain stagnates, forbids all approach to familiarity: nothing is circumstantiated or differenced: travel it for three generations, and you are no nearer to identification of its parts: so that it amounts to travelling through an abstract idea. (577)

What does it feel like to travel through an abstract idea? Not only is the scenery sparse, but also even a sense of one’s own motion is lacking. There is nothing to cling onto, and this is one of the problems that astronomers constantly confront in “disentang[ling] the labyrinths of worlds.” We can think back to the journey through space with which this chapter began—human beings cognitively collapse when they cannot locate themselves in space.

“To see what I see”: The Orion Nebula and the Problem of Representation Once we understand the intellectual implications of the disorientation De Quincey finds in astronomy, we can begin to see his own literary devices in a new light. To read “System of the Heavens as Seen Through Lord Rosse’s Telescopes” is to experience rapid and extreme shifts in point of view, scale and even genre. Critic V. A. De Luca eloquently proposes that we see a parallel between De Quincey’s responses to the universe in this essay and the shifts in tone that De Quincey enacts upon his reader: The variation of tone in this work represents a stylistic equivalent to the agility of a mind responding to the ambiguous shiftings of external reality. These shiftings both conceal and advertise the presence of giant forms, polar principles writ large upon the cosmos.48

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Supplementing these shifts in tone are De Quincey’s shifts in register, which create an epistemological disorientation in the reader, for the words and images a writer chooses provide a sense of generic orientation that are analogous to the physical orientation of up and down or right and left. When De Quincey swerves suddenly from fact to fiction, from scientific analysis to fantasy, and back again, the reader is rendered uncertain about what epistemological attitude to assume. It is never clear when one is meant to attend carefully to scientific fact and when one is supposed to release oneself to fiction. De Quincey’s most dramatic experimentation with literary form occurs in his fantastical descriptions of the nebula in Orion, located at the heart of the essay. He takes an etching of the nebula that appears in Nichol’s System of the World and riffs on it, finding within the picture a monstrous head that raises “its face . . . in the very anguish of hatred, to some unknown heavens” (571). As we will see, the description is difficult to place in relation to the more scientifically rigorous sections of the essay. It is tempting to give his rhapsodic portrait of the nebular monster the stamp of the literary, and to set it against the scientific accuracy of Nichol’s treatise or the illustration itself. To do so, however, would be a mistake, for contemporary attempts to illustrate nebulae reveal any representation of nebulae to be fraught, involving an unwieldy negotiation between what the observer half-perceives and what he half-creates. In “On Astronomical Drawing,” Simon Schaffer cites Rosse’s own warnings about the accuracy of his sketches of nebulae. Rosse admits that “the eye may in some degree be influenced by the mind” and cautions that the sketches, “however accurately conveying the impressions made upon the eye at the time, cannot be taken as in all cases representing real facts.”49 De Quincey is unusual in the extent to which he foregrounds his own interpretive decisions, but his representational practices are more continuous with those of the astronomers than one might imagine.50 De Quincey’s description of the nebula, which Lindop dubs a “bizarre prose poem,” is set off with its own title, “Description of the Nebula in Orion, as forced to show out by Lord Rosse.”51 It consists of a portrait of the Orion nebula, based on an etching done by John Herschel that appears in Nichol’s System of the World (see Figure 13). De Quincey refers to “a picture” and introduces it as follows: It is the famous nebula in the constellation of Orion; famous for the unexampled defiance with which it resisted all approaches from the most potent of former

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Figure 13 De Quincey’s monster: John Herschel’s representation of the nebula in Orion, as De Quincey instructs his reader to view it, turned upside down so as to reveal its resemblance to a monstrous face.

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telescopes; famous for its frightful magnitude and for the frightful depth to which it is sunk in the abysses of the heavenly wilderness; famous just now for the submission with which it has begun to render up its secrets to the all-conquering telescope; and famous in all time coming for the horror of the regal phantasma which it has perfected to the eyes of flesh. (571)

This passage, which precedes the portrait itself, already begins to anthropomorphize the nebula, attributing to it “defiance” and the capacity to resist, a newly submissive quality, and a “regal” aspect. The categories of defiance and submission that De Quincey introduces render the scientist heroic, and the issue of control that he alludes to is particularly pertinent to the study of nebulae at this time. Astronomers observing the nebulae had little sense of the substance, structure, or scale of these luminous and cloudlike bodies. The sense of human helplessness can be read as evident in the strange phrase “eyes of flesh,” which depicts the eyes as vulnerable apertures, soft spots on the human body. The illustration on which De Quincey riffs does not appear alongside his essay (although it later became the frontispiece for Masson’s 1859 edition). Instead, De Quincey refers his readers to an illustration in Nichol’s book in a most peculiar way: The reader must look to Dr. Nichol’s book, at page 51, for the picture of the abominable apparition. But then, in order to see what I see, the obedient reader must do what I tell him to do. Let him therefore view the wretch upside down. (See Figure 14.)52

De Quincey’s authorial instruction here is surprising. Only if his readers mishandle the book and turn it upside down will they “see what I see,” a strange celestial monster. Here the essay veers most extremely away from any notion of realism or objectivity, precisely because what De Quincey does see depends so heavily on an array of circumstances that have nothing to do with the form of the actual nebula in space. His description is subjective in a basic sense of the word, having reference only to the observer, rather than to something inherent about the object observed. Not only is the description that follows blatantly impressionistic, flaunting the perspective of an active imagination, but it also requires an accident of a single perspective not intended by its illustrator, the author of the book it appears in, or its publisher.53 In calling attention to the way orientation transforms what we see, De Quincey invokes the arbitrariness of any viewpoint, whether it is

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Figure 14 Herschel’s nebula in Orion as it appeared in the first edition of John Pringle Nichol’s Thoughts, facing page 51. De Quincey instructs his reader to “turn the wretch upside down” in order to perceive the monstrous face.

the viewpoint of a human being stuck on a particular spot on the surface of the earth, or the arbitrary view of the stellar universe that all earthly beings are subject to because of the spatial position of our planet. As we have seen earlier in this chapter, De Quincey eloquently describes the perplexities that the tormented astronomer faces in studying the contents of the heavens: distinguishing between magnitude and actual proximity, identifying double stars, and disentangling other “equivocal” phenomena. No celestial phenomenon is more equivocal, more slippery, than the nebula in Orion. De Quincey’s emphasis on control in this passage can be read as enacting a type of revenge on the nebula for the uncertainty and epistemological anxieties that such perceptual mysteries inspire in their viewers. We can identify De Quincey’s impulse to control in both his address to the “obedient reader,” who must “do what I tell him to do,” and in his instruction that we should “view the wretch upside down.” How alarming can a nebula be if he can be so easily squeezed into two dimensions, turned upside-down, and manhandled in this way?

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Yet in fact the unintelligibility of the nebula—if not, indeed, of De Quincey’s essay—remains a looming threat. De Quincey issues the following caution regarding his request that his reader turn Nichol’s book upside down: If he neglects that simple direction, of course I don’t answer for any thing that follows: without any fault of mine, my description will be unintelligible. This inversion being made, the following is the dreadful creature that will then reveal itself. (571)

His statement can be read in several ways. On one level, the description that follows is so easily rendered “unintelligible” because of the perversity of the decisions De Quincey makes in describing it. His imagination imposes a face onto a scientific illustration and then comes to associate that nebula with this monster. And yet De Quincey is accurate in describing the nebula itself as “unintelligible.” One of the odd things about his description and the situation he sets up for his readers is his switch from the measured awareness elsewhere in the essay of all the possible distortions that can be made in observing the skies to a celebration of a distortion in an illustration. Suddenly, the accidents of two-dimensional representation become an insight into the epistemological challenges that surround this celestial form, the nebula, and the essay celebrates a subjective and arbitrary point of view of an already mediated image. The possibility remains, however, that in doing so, he accurately captures the emotional and epistemological anxieties that surround nebulae at this time. De Quincey has already played with contradictory epistemological attitudes by first revering Nichol’s book and then lapsing into a fantastical rhapsody in describing the monster. Even as he flings scientific accuracy to the wind, he uses a cautious rhetoric, modifying his own assertions meticulously: You see a head thrown back, and raising its face, (or eyes, if eyes it had,) in the very anguish of hatred, to some unknown heavens. What should be its skull wears what might be an Assyrian tiara, only ending behind in a floating train. (571)

De Quincey’s emphasis on the words “should” and “might” paradoxically gestures towards precision and accuracy within the context of the fantastic. By using the subjunctive, he seems to be announcing that he would not trespass into fantasy or metaphor, but of course we are already embedded in many layers of fantasy by the time we get to his scrupulous grammar. The

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form he identifies “might” be a tiara, possibly an Assyrian one, we are to understand. He is careful to remind us that the nebula does not have eyes, but he is happy to refer to its face, raised “to some unknown heavens.” These linguistic markers contribute to the reader’s disorientation, giving subtle and contradictory clues about De Quincey’s commitment to accuracy. Despite the fantastical nature of the description, the portrait does on one level render the celestial body intelligible. It endows it with a face and thus a bodily orientation, a sense of what is up and what is down (yet only after turning it upside-down). It even is given a consciousness, a sense of “anguish” as well as “hatred” and “defiance.” It becomes a monster who elicits our fear and our sympathy. The vitality it accrues is marked by De Quincey’s switch from “it” to “he” in the statement that follows: “He is beautiful where he pleases” (571). He is exotic and certainly royal, wearing a “tiara” with a “floating train.” His gender is fluid, for while he defies and hates, he remains a bit of a coquette—a dandy, perhaps. He is a “mysterious mixture of the angelic and the brutal,” containing deformities such as a mouth that merges into a snout: “Brutalities unspeakable sit upon the upper lip, which is confluent with a snout; for separate nostrils there are none” (571). Lest this impulse to endow celestial bodies with apprehensible bodies seem utterly foreign, we might remember that a similar act occurs in naming a set of stars Orion the hunter. As De Quincey continues his description, he draws his reader in toward the monstrous face by portraying the monster as a dangerous beast who might be startled into violence by the slightest noise. “Ask not, whisper not,” he warns his reader: But the lower lip, which is drawn inwards with the curve of a conch shell,—oh what a convolute of cruelty and revenge is there! Cruelty!—to whom? Revenge!— for what? Ask not, whisper not. Look upwards to other mysteries. (571)

Then, once he has drawn the reader in, he switches scales abruptly, reminding the reader of the actual size of the “chasm” that separates the snout from the forehead, a chasm “that many centuries would not traverse”: In the very region of his temples, driving itself downwards into his cruel brain, and breaking the continuity of his diadem, is a horrid chasm, a ravine, a shaft, that many centuries would not traverse. (571)

De Quincey plays recklessly with scale and readerly orientation, careening between the scale of the human observer, who would take centuries to

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traverse this slice of space, and the scale of the monster himself, for whom the chasm is something driven “downwards into his cruel brain.” This attribution of pain heightens our awareness of the monster’s consciousness, and we are to understand, perhaps, that the cruelty of his brain results from the pain he has suffered. I would suggest too that this image of a pierced or wounded brain registers De Quincey’s own mental anxiety about the difficulty of conceiving a form as huge and formless as the nebula. With his swift shifts in scale and point of view, De Quincey purposely disorients us, enabling us to contemplate the feeling of a consciousness that is split in half or broken. A soft and unprotected part of the skull opens up. Again, we can read this fanciful description of the nebula as De Quincey’s attempt to get us “to see what I see.” Implicit in such a statement is not only the work of De Quincey’s eyes but also the work of his imagination. Allusions to Milton and to “Kubla Khan” enter his description of the nebula. At one moment we are in a gothic novel, confronted with a cruel monster with whom we sympathize, and the next moment we are in a social satire observing a dandy who dresses himself up in “floating trains” and “the plumes of a Sultan,” snubbing one woman and courting another (572). In his treatment of the Orion nebula, De Quincey seems to discard all aspirations to science and objectivity. He turns Herschel’s engraving, which flattened a three-dimensional object into a two-dimensional image, into a fanciful portrait as though compensating for the loss of dimensionality with enriched description. Disregarding the authority that illustrations in scientific treatises would ordinarily be given, De Quincey instead uses it as a springboard from which to construct fantasies about the horror of the skies. And yet it is crucial to see De Quincey’s representation not as a literary anomaly but as part of a continuum in the range of representations of the nebula. These kinds of negotiation between sensory perception and abstract thought, vision and the imagination, were just as urgent for scientists and illustrators. Rosse, William and John Herschel, and Nichol all had to make similar sets of representational choices in order to teach their readers “to see what I see.” The only record of what astronomers had seen through a telescope came through illustrations that they themselves made. The choices involved in illustrating nebulae were manifold. Astronomers had not yet begun to use photography to represent the sky, so there was not even the comfort of relying on what Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison term “mechanical objectivity.”54 How much imagination should an observer use in order to “arrest” the nebula and capture it in two dimensions?

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How could such observations and illustrations be valued or weighed against one another as “evidence” for or against the nebular hypothesis? Herschel’s original etching itself exemplifies ways in which astronomical illustration was an urgent topic, as Simon Schaffer and Jonathan Smith have pointed out. Before photography, the only way in which an astronomer could fix what he or she saw through a telescope was to draw it. Rosse would take twenty years before he produced a public drawing of the nebulae he saw through his 56-foot telescope. The Herschel etching De Quincey uses was itself a compilation made from several different observations. When De Quincey later refers to “the mouth, in that stage of the apocalypse which Sir John Herschel was able to arrest in his eighteen-inch mirror,” his use of the verb “arrest” is complicated by the fact that the drawing itself was a compilation. This is not the momentary “arrest” of a camera shutter but the fixing upon paper of several different temporal perspectives. In a way that we might find difficult to understand now, scientists were comfortable doctoring an image in such a way that it did not conform to an observation made at a certain moment but rather to one that derived from extended familiarity with the object depicted.55 William Herschel was explicit about the fact that he considered himself to have access to celestial images not only because of the telescopes that he built but also because of his long familiarity with the heavens. He writes, with reference to the discovery of Uranus that first made him famous: Seeing is in some respects an art that must be learnt. To make a person see with such a power is nearly the same as if I were asked to make him play one of Handel’s fugues upon the organ. Many a night have I been practicing to see, and it would be strange if one did not acquire a certain dexterity by such constant practice.56

From this point of view, Herschel presents his illustration as relatively unproblematic. And yet there were discrepancies between what one person drew and what another saw. Similarly, there were significant discrepancies between one sketch of a celestial body and another sketch of the same body, done by the same person. This reminds one how much interpretation was involved in rendering an astronomical illustration. Without any method of comparing an illustration done by one astronomer and another, it was that much more difficult to interpret discrepancies in the visible data. In Objectivity, Daston and Galison explore this problem of negotiating between observation and the imagination as it is dealt with later in the nineteenth century.57 They demonstrate that concerns about tinkering with

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illustration and human interpretation led nineteenth-century scientists and atlas-makers to rely on machines rather than on knowledgeable individuals. In fact, within a decade or two of De Quincey’s essays, astronomers too would begin to use photographs rather than sketches and engravings. But Daston and Galison show that the larger movement away from human agency and towards mechanical objectivity was not the result of photography. These concerns about constructing illustrations preceded the photograph and, for a time at least, relied on a belief that the photograph could remove the human eye from the equation. The debates over the status of the nebula mark an uncomfortable transition between a moment in which the astronomer’s knowledge and authority was celebrated and relied upon in fashioning illustrations and a later period in which mechanical objectivity became the preferred representational mode. In its exploitation of the imagination, De Quincey’s playful representation of the Orion nebula is not a departure from scientific representational strategies, then, but one end of a continuum. William Herschel’s remark that “seeing is in some respects an art that must be learnt,” with its assertion of the experienced astronomer’s capacity for accuracy, lies at the other end of this continuum. De Quincey, by contrast, constantly disorients his reader and indulges the arbitrary impressions of a particular point of view at a particular moment in time, by a particular consciousness. The reader of De Quincey’s essay is confronted by dizzyingly contradictory accounts of what celestial bodies are like. At one moment, the earth is a young lady of fashion “seen to advantage, with her bonny wee pet of a Moon tripping round her like a lamb” (567). At another, she is “Tellus,” a respectable planet enjoying the height of scientific and technological progress. The nebula is at one moment one of a group of “milky spots in various stages of diffusion” and at another a horrifying apparition associated with Milton’s figure of Death. De Quincey suggests that such shifts in genre and register do not produce unintelligibility but a self-conscious awareness of the discomfort that occurs as a result of disorientation, the sense of sands shifting beneath one’s feet. De Quincey forces his reader to experience the kind of disorientation that nineteenth-century astronomy imposes on him. To study at the universe means “to see what I see”—there can be stability that feels like objectivity in a certain context, but when you place it in the context of a world in constant motion, we don’t even have access to a single moment of time, not to mention space. But should this disorientation seem daunting, should the problem of “disentangl[ing] the labyrinths of worlds”

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seem discouragingly impossible, we might do well to remember a worse fate: the boredom of De Quincey’s eighteenth-century thinker as he faces a cosmos that reminds him of “nothing but post-office clocks, mail-coaches, and bookkeepers.” However much De Quincey’s account of the tormented astronomer strains the ability of the mind to perceive and understand, it at least reminds us of the capacity of consciousness to be invigorated by perplexities. Finally, in nineteenth-century astronomy, De Quincey finds “anomalies enough to keep him cheerful.”

3 Grief in Motion: Parallax and Orbing in Tennyson

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uring his lifetime, and since, Alfred, Lord Tennyson has been consistently hailed as the Victorian poet who knew the most about science in general and astronomy in particular. In this chapter I show how Tennyson mobilizes astronomical space to illuminate characteristics of point of view that are central to literature, but that tend to remain beneath conscious notice. In particular, I want to think through the way that parallax—the apparent rearrangement of objects in the world as the result of the observer’s own motion—can help us to understand literary point of view as involving constant comparisons between what one can see from different spatial positions. Tennyson was intimately familiar with stellar parallax from the many astronomical treatises he owned. Although he uses this and other dramatic perspectival techniques throughout his oeuvre, this chapter focuses on his use of astronomy in In Memoriam, A.H.H. It does this in part because the poem’s grand scale and fragmented form throw into relief many of the more familiar characteristics of the novel that are explored in subsequent chapters. In moving from Thomas De Quincey’s essay to Tennyson’s elegy for the brilliant Arthur Henry Hallam, suddenly dead at 22, we are shifting from looking at a work about astronomy to examining a work that employs astronomical metaphors and schemas in order to think about concussive human experience, ruptures in the self, and the distance between the living and the dead. Tennyson’s elegy is famously unprecedented in both its length and in the time it took to write: seventeen years between Arthur Henry Hallam’s death in 1833 and the poem’s 1850 publication.1 Its 133 sections address Hallam’s death from a variety of perspectives that rely on the spatial dimensions of a nineteenth-century universe. The force of the poem comes

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from vivid contrasts between close-up and distant views of Hallam’s death. That distance is simultaneously optical and emotional. Tennyson feels himself moving relentlessly forward in time, away from the years he shared with Hallam, and he figures that loss in terms of spatial distance. An elegy usually involves a simple trajectory from death to burial. The convention of including a procession of mourners echoes this linear structure, while the grave provides a locus of arrival. With burial comes consolation and a repositioning of the identity of the dead—from the dead person’s earthly body to a more abstract space, such as a star. What Tennyson creates in place of a linear trajectory is 133 poems that provide disparate—and utterly contradictory—perspectives on Hallam’s death and its repercussions for Tennyson’s own cosmological conception. This chapter identifies a sustained analogy between the viewpoints in Tennyson’s In Memoriam and the key astronomical technique of parallax. In astronomy, stellar parallax involves determining the distance of an inaccessible nearby star by measuring its apparent shift relative to the more distant stars behind it. Tiny shifts in the apparent relative positions of the nearby and distant stars (as seen from Earth) are actually caused by the earth’s own orbit around the sun. Literary parallax is a particular form of point of view that compels the reader to move through radically disparate optical positions and notice the visual results of his own motion through space. In Chapter 1 I emphasized how invisible our own motion is to ourselves under the optical conditions that astronomy involves. Parallax relies on one’s own motion in the sense that seeing an object from two disparate positions enables one to determine the position of an otherwise inaccessible object. Parallax also helps us to infer, on the basis of contrasting points of view, motion that usually escapes our notice (like the earth’s revolution around the sun). Although we rarely feel the earth’s rotation—like Levin in Anna Karenina, we think “the stars are moving,” rather than the earth—in certain conditions we can understand that the earth is rotating because of how the universe rearranges itself around us in the process. In Memoriam’s overall trajectory is neither circular nor linear; it can be pictured as something between a line and an orbit. One title Tennyson considered for the poem was The Way of the Soul, which suggests the pathlike feel of the poem as it moves from a state of paralyzing grief to resignation. As the passage of time relentlessly moves Tennyson further away from his years with Hallam, the poem circles back to a series of topics that allow the reader to gauge the speaker’s own motion: the allegorized

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figure of Sorrow, the planet Venus, the ship that carries Hallam’s body back to England, the street outside Hallam’s former home, birthdays, Christmas, and the stars, among others. One of the benefits of using the term parallax to think about these movements in In Memoriam (and other works) is that it reminds us to think about point of view as multiple, mobile, and comparative. Point of view can be such a fluid term that it does not necessarily make readers consider the metaphorical consequences of an individual’s specific spatial situation at a particular textual moment. As we have seen, the term point of view encompasses worldviews, narrative choices (first and third person), or the reader’s interest in certain characters. Like De Quincey, Tennyson is preoccupied with a universe in flux, and wonders how to ground the self optically and philosophically in such a universe. In contrast to De Quincey, Tennyson makes repeated analogies between human beings and celestial bodies. We will see the same analogy in the multiplot novels, but here the context is different. In Memoriam is written in the first person, and its arc explores the shifting relationship between a single individual (Tennyson) and a vast universe. In the context of the novels I will analyze, the analogies between planets and people tend to tell us more about the relationships and rearrangements of a set of characters than they do about a self ’s relation to past and former selves. In In Memoriam, Tennyson repeatedly compares himself and Arthur Hallam to individual planets or stars. Parallax has two interrelated roles in this poem. Tennyson uses it to locate himself in relation to the rest of the universe, and he uses disparate views of celestial bodies to emphasize discontinuities in his perception of the outside world. Because parallax is such a complex phenomenon, it is worth rehearsing its components, and distinguishing between astronomical and literary forms of parallax. In astronomy, parallax is generally used to determine the position of objects out there, in the universe, rather than the position of the earth. But on a larger level, parallax describes a relation between the observer and the observed. This is similar to its unconscious use in everyday life (such as in walking down a hallway), in which we use changes in angles and distances of a whole set of objects to orient ourselves as well as to navigate the space we are in. In astronomy, parallax almost always involves one observer in two disparate positions, two lines of sight, a foreground and a background (see Figures 15 and 16). Those sightlines are created by the relationship between the eye at two different positions and the apparent position of the nearby object against the background. Parallax depends on the geometry of triangles, in

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Figure 15 Using parallax to calculate the distance of a tower from a shift in the observer’s position.

Figure 16 Using parallax to calculate the distance of the moon, Mars, and the sun from the earth.

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which measuring either two angles and one side, or two sides and one angle, is sufficient to infer all of the other angles and sides. In astronomy, a parallax measurement overcomes the conflicts between sensory and theoretical knowledge; it allows us to calculate the depth (an earth-to-star distance) that we know is there, even though the stars appear flat to the naked eye. It operates by a clear mathematical inference from known measurements (such as the distance between the earth and the sun, or the observer in position A and position B) to unknown ones. In literature, parallax instead intensifies the difference between sensory and theoretical knowledge by giving us two emphatically different perspectives on an object that we know theoretically to be the same (such as the evening star and morning star, or Earth seen from its surface and Earth seen from space). To understand the role of parallax in situating the self, it is also helpful to recall its unconscious everyday use in depth perception, which depends on the brain processing as a measurement of depth the difference between views of an object from the right and left eyes. As we move, too—think of objects seen from the window of a speeding train—the different speeds at which distant objects shift against a background allows us to judge their relative distances from us. Parallax names a laborious calculation, but it also names a cognitive function as intimate as our breathing. I use the term orbing to trace one effect of parallax that particularly appeals to Tennyson and later to Thomas Hardy. Parallax involves an apparent difference between two objects that are in fact the same but which appear different from each other when seen from an alternate standpoint. Venus, for example, is sometimes the morning star and sometimes the evening star. Orbing enables the reader to recognize a continuity of identity (the sun is still the sun; Venus is still Venus; Tennyson is still Tennyson) even when that entity is radically transformed by a shift in time and space. It involves taking the reader through space and watching an object (like the earth) transform as the result of his or her own motion. For the same reasons that it presents particular challenges to the visual system, astronomy offers Tennyson a wealth of images in which one’s own constant movement through space—and all the optical changes that result from that movement—becomes suddenly palpable. Astronomy captured Tennyson’s imagination from childhood to old age (1809–92).2 He is said to have soothed his brother Frederick’s anxiety by noting how small his worries were in the context of a cosmos filled with

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clusters of stars: “think of Herschel’s great star-patches, and you will soon get over all that.”3 One of his earliest lines of poetry reflects on the time it takes starlight to reach earthly observers: “The rays of many a rolling central star, / Aye flashing earthwards, have not reach’d us yet.”4 At Cambridge, Tennyson’s tutor was the natural theologian William Whewell, who went on to write the 1833 Bridgewater Treatise On Astronomy and General Physics and the 1853 Of the Plurality of Worlds. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, Tennyson followed contemporary debates in astronomy. He owned Whewell’s History of the Inductive Sciences from the Earliest to the Present Times (1837), John Pringle Nichol’s popular Views of the Architecture of the Heavens (1837), John Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1830), John Bonnycastle’s Introduction to Astronomy (1797), and Mary Somerville’s On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1834).5 He also appears to have acquired both Whewell’s Bridgewater Treatise and Robert Chambers’ Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), which begins with an evolutionary account of the origins of the universe.6 Later in life, he had his own telescope at Aldworth and visited more powerful observatories to view double stars and nebulae such as those in Cassiopeia and Lyra.7 His friend Norman Lockyer, an innovator in the recent science of spectroscopy, describes the poet’s mind as “saturated with astronomy.” In his final decades, Tennyson continued to follow the latest developments in the new field of astrophysics, building up a substantial collection of books on astronomy.8 He was particularly interested toward the end of his life in “the spectrum analysis of light, and the photographs which reveal starlight in the interstellar spaces where stars were hitherto undreamt of.”9 A. C. Bradley has asserted that Tennyson is “the only one of our great poets . . . to whose habitual way of seeing, imagining, or thinking it makes any real difference that Laplace, or for that matter Copernicus, ever lived.”10

Loss, Death, and Stellar Decay This chapter is primarily concerned with how astronomy shapes the form of Tennyson’s elegy, its many perspectives on Hallam’s death. But it is worth noting too that the content of 1830s astronomy, especially its preoccupation with stellar decay and systems in flux, resonated with Tennyson’s reaction to Hallam’s devastating death. Like De Quincey, Tennyson draws

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parallels between the material universe described by contemporary astronomy and large-scale conceptual systems. Both men are preoccupied with the idea that the universe is not inherently stable. Tennyson’s tutor at Cambridge, Whewell, was the one who first coined the term “nebular hypothesis” to describe the idea that solid star systems gradually condensed out of gaseous nebulae.11 Five direct references to this hypothesis appear in In Memoriam, and its larger implications are found throughout the poem. The hypothesis conceived of celestial bodies like the sun and moon as evolving, and put them in an analogous relationship to the elements of geological and biological evolution. Tennyson introduces one of the implications of this hypothesis—the idea that the sun would eventually burn itself out—early in his elegy. Whewell had spelled out the certainty of stellar decay: It now appears that the courses of the heavens themselves are not exempt from the universal law of decay; that not only the rocks and the mountains, but the sun and the moon have the sentence “to end” stamped upon their foreheads. They enjoy no privilege beyond man except a longer respite.12

Tennyson was profoundly aware of the metaphysical implications of such scientific revelations: that the solar system was probably one of millions of such systems in a universe with no single center; that no sentient force governed the movement of the stars; and that the natural world contained nothing eternal. Early in In Memoriam, Tennyson invokes these implications to express the anguish he feels in the wake of Hallam’s sudden death. Through the figure of Sorrow, he articulates the idea that the entire cosmos has become lawless, empty, and moribund: O Sorrow, cruel fellowship, . . . What whispers from thy lying lip? “The stars,” she whispers, “blindly run; A web is woven across the sky; From out waste places comes a cry, And murmurs from the dying sun[.]” (Sec. 3)

Subjective perception and scientific accuracy concur powerfully in this passage. Read outside the context of contemporary astronomical debates, Sorrow’s statement could be interpreted as a straightforward instance of pathetic fallacy, of the false projection of human sorrow onto the natural world. Here we see the stars as a psychic container. The idea that the stars

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blindly run reflects Tennyson’s newly bleak cosmological conception, his “general image of the totality of things,” to cite David Masson. The speaker would appear to have generalized his specific grief into a universal despair. This reading of Tennyson’s view as distorted by grief would be supported by the fact that Sorrow’s bleak images of the sun and stars are discredited as lies before she utters them: “What whispers from thy lying lip?” the speaker asks. Moreover, her claim that the stars run blindly directly contradicts the poet’s ultimate assertion that there is “One God, one law, one element, . . . / To which the whole creation moves” (Epilogue). Again, the discrepancy between Sorrow’s nihilism and the Epilogue’s optimism might encourage us to interpret this stanza as a false worldview produced by grief. Tennyson draws these images of a dying sun, blind stellar motion, and waste places, however, from the very astronomical discoveries that he himself was convinced were accurate.13 Sorrow articulates the poet’s worst fears about the physical world, fears drawn directly from his reading in astronomy. The passage’s scientific accuracy makes it impossible, therefore, to dismiss as the merely subjective misperception of a miserable mind. We might expect the two registers—the subjectivity of poetry and the objectivity of science—to be in conflict with each other. Emotion is often associated with distortion; science with objectivity and accuracy. But in this passage the two agree. If we are persuaded by their scientific authority, we cannot dismiss Sorrow’s bleak assertion as false.14 This passage epitomizes tensions between In Memoriam as a personal lament and In Memoriam as an articulation of the larger metaphysical doubts of the age. Tennyson uses contradictory perspectives on the cosmos as metaphors for the many concurrent yet contradictory psychological states produced in him by Hallam’s death. The power of In Memoriam stems in part from its ability to allow conflicting accounts of a single experience—Tennyson’s response to Hallam’s death— to stand next to each other without canceling each other out. Even when his cosmological conception becomes less bleak, Tennyson shows astronomy to be characterized by ambiguous data out of which large systems must be erected. The great question In Memoriam poses, how to assimilate an experience as brutal as Hallam’s sudden death, presents a similar problem. In the Prologue, Tennyson alludes to the fragility of any attempt to systematize, and the inevitable inadequacy of any cosmic model of the natural world: “Our little systems have their day; / They have their day and cease to be.” “Systems” has multiple meanings here, referring not only to scientific and theological explanations of natural phenomena but also to more

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personal perceptions. “Systems” is also a word that the poet uses to refer to celestial clusters like galaxies or the solar system, as in the Epilogue’s “star and system rolling past” and the “Rush of Suns, and roll of systems” in the 1892 “God and the Universe.”15 Read this way, these lines depict a solar system subject to “the universal law of decay” that Whewell describes above. The pronouncement of the Prologue, “Our little systems have their day,” likewise refers to an individual’s own systems for making sense of an experience. An elegy itself is such a system, turning raw loss into a comprehensible work of art. Tennyson complains that sorrow has taken away precisely this ability to assimilate experience and perception into a larger sense of “a plan.” The “shock” of Hallam’s death, he writes: . . . stunned me from my power to think And all my knowledge of myself; And made me that delirious man Whose fancy fuses old and new, And flashes into false and true, And mingles all without a plan[.] (Sec. 16)

The poet has lost the ability to distinguish both past from present and falsehood from truth. If we follow Tennyson’s pattern of mapping time onto space, this suggests that the foreground and background have been fused, mingled, so that he finds himself utterly disoriented, “without a plan.” We begin to sense the extent to which “knowledge of myself” depends on locating that self in some sort of spatial system, as a past or former self. This is a form of metaphorical depth perception that Tennyson loses when “fancy fuses old and new.” These lines suggest that such a loss threatens one’s ability ever to make sense of it. Yet In Memoriam refuses to turn away from that loss. An acquaintance describes Tennyson telling the story of “a Brahmin destroying a microscope because it showed him animals killing each other in a drop of water.” Tennyson’s comment was: “Significant, as if we could destroy facts by refusing to see them.”16 The deaths of protozoa, the projected death of the sun, and Hallam’s death confront their observers with facts that jeopardize their larger belief in “a plan.” Tennyson insists, however, that the most disturbing scientific and psychological facts must be faced head on. For this reason he creates a system that upsets the elegiac tradition of ending with stable consolation. All human attempts to systematize are inherently ephemeral, so when Tennyson achieves a feeling of calm or peace, we come to learn that that outlook too shall pass.

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Tennyson’s five specific references to the nebular hypothesis reflect the ambiguities surrounding the theory, and the fluid nature of what seems a coherent system. The two we have seen thus far—“Our little systems have their day” (Prologue) and “the dying sun” (Sec. 3)—are deeply pessimistic.17 Elsewhere, Tennyson casts the theory in a far more positive light. He figures the solar system as a family, connected even in death, describing the evening star, Venus, as the sun’s daughter; when she sets with the sun, she falls “into her father’s grave” (Sec. 89). This image of the solar system as a family might well have been inspired by the metaphors Nichol and Chambers use to describe relations between suns and planets.18 Nichol describes a “single sun” as “having come . . . from the womb of the Nebulae,” while Chambers writes of the “mazy dances of vast families of orbs” in the universe as a whole and a “true family likeness” and “web of relation” among the constituents of our solar system.19 Tennyson’s final two references to the nebular hypothesis contribute to the poem’s more optimistic evolutionary thrust, in which the universe progresses towards “ever nobler ends,” towards an ideal form of man of which Hallam is a prototype: “They say, / The solid earth whereon we tread / In tracts of fluent heat began” (Sec. 118). In Section 103, the poet has a vision of two maidens, one singing “Of that great race, which is to be, / And one [maiden singing of] the shaping of a star.” Thus, the nebular hypothesis, as Tennyson uses it, demonstrates that the conclusions to be drawn from scientific fact are quite as slippery as subjective perception. Richard Holmes notes how enormous questions surrounding the nebular hypothesis remained for nearly a century. If a nebula was resolved into stars, it would mean that it was a huge star cluster “outside the Milky Way” (123). If a nebula turned out to be truly gaseous, that meant it was located within the Milky Way and was still in the process of forming. In either case, the scale of the universe and ideas about the shape and origin of the cosmos were radically different from those held by earlier astronomers. The nebular hypothesis can be used with such flexibility by Tennyson in part because of its embryonic status as a scientific concept. Gillian Beer makes this point in reference to biological evolution, but her insight applies equally well to the nebular hypothesis: Major theories tax, affront, and exhilarate those who first encounter them, although in fifty years or so they will be taken for granted, part of the apparently common-sense set of beliefs which instructs us that the earth revolves around the sun whatever our eyes may suggest. When it is first advanced, theory is at its most fictive.20

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As I suggested in Chapter 2, some certainty about the accuracy of the nebular hypothesis was achieved in Tennyson’s lifetime; in 1864, William Huggins used a spectroscope and a telescope to show that the nebula in Draco produced bright-line spectra, proving that it was indeed “not an aggregation of stars, but a luminous gas.”21 But for Tennyson, the intellectual implications regarding the limits of scientific understanding— how much always remains beyond our understanding—would outlast the uncertainty surrounding this particular hypothesis.

Human Beings as Celestial Bodies: Refraction and Position Tennyson compares human beings to stars and planets repeatedly in In Memoriam. He compares himself to Venus (Sec. 121), his own past to a “perfect star” (Sec. 23), and human beings to “worlds” in the Prologue. This analogy has profound consequences for Tennyson’s representation of how we see and know each other, and nowhere more so than when he recruits refraction as a metaphor for such knowledge. In Section 92, Tennyson uses the optical illusion of astronomical refraction to express the idea that anticipation can lead one to see something before it actually appears: “such refraction of events / As often rises ere they rise.” The poet glosses these lines as follows: “the heavenly bodies are seen above the horizon, by refraction, before they actually rise” (italics mine).22 He uses a visual distortion in the physical world as a figure for the theoretical distortion of the mind caused by anticipation. His phrasing directly echoes Mary Somerville’s account of the effect of refraction on human vision. Like many contemporary books on astronomy, Somerville’s On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, which Tennyson received for Christmas in 1838, contains a section on refraction.23 Somerville explains that because the atmosphere inflects rays of light towards the earth, “all the celestial bodies appear to be more elevated than they really are.”24 As a result, she writes, “the stars are seen above the horizon after they are set” (italics mine).25 She extends the effects of refraction to any vision of a distant object: all we see is through the medium of the atmosphere. Without some knowledge of its action upon light, it would be impossible to ascertain the position of the heavenly bodies, or even to determine the exact place of very distant objects upon the surface of the earth; for, in consequence of the refractive power of the air, no distant object is seen in its true position. (italics mine)26

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Figure 17 1850 image illustrating the effect of refraction on the apparent position of the sun at the horizon.

Refraction—the way that light bends when it travels through a medium such as water or Earth’s atmosphere—is one of the most important properties of light, and every nineteenth-century treatise on astronomy contained a section on it (see Figure 17). In scientific contexts, refraction can usually be corrected for with relative ease. Indeed, Somerville stresses that the distortion involved in refraction is negligible: “no object either in or beyond our atmosphere is seen in its true place. But the deviation is so small in ordinary cases that it causes no inconvenience.”27 In light of this emphasis, the leap Tennyson makes between the phenomenon of refraction and its epistemological consequences is surprising. For Tennyson, the significance of refraction is intimately wrapped up in questions of point of view and where we see something from. In In Memoriam, one distant object that cannot be seen in its true position is Arthur Hallam. He is separated from Tennyson by a growing distance in time and the distance between life and death. Tennyson thus imagines the distorting atmosphere as an image for his own shifting grief. An 1839 letter to Tennyson’s future wife Emily Sellwood echoes Somerville and directly

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applies the phenomenon of refraction to the ability of one person to know another: The light of this world is too full of refractions for men ever to see one another in their true positions. The world is better than it is called, but wrong and foolish. The whole framework seems wrong, which in the end shall be found right. (italics mine)28

Far from being negligible, the distortions of earthly refractions are profound enough to threaten the “whole framework” by which we understand our own experience and other people. Tennyson here converts Somerville’s benign wonder at the pervasiveness of small misperceptions into a more general despair over the limits of human understanding. Behind this statement lies the subject of much of In Memoriam, the religious crisis that Tennyson experiences as a result of Hallam’s death, leaving him without a spiritual framework.29 He suggests that the difference between what human beings perceive and the true framework of things may be as dramatic as the other reversals that characterize astronomy—the difference, for instance, between a universe contained by a sphere of stars and a universe that encompasses millions of star systems. The medium through which we see distant objects, whether it is air or water, becomes a metaphor for the extent to which Tennyson’s own attitudes shape what he sees around him.

Parallax Tennyson is unique among his contemporaries, not perhaps in the extent to which he uses stellar imagery, but in the extent to which he requires that imagery to be consistent with astronomical innovation. Because recent astronomical discoveries so easily eluded everyday sensory perception, they were easy for poets to overlook. Marilyn Gaull notes, for instance, that while Wordsworth and Keats knew that the stars were in perpetual motion and gradually dying out, each continued to use the stars as symbols of fixity and permanence.30 Likewise, the consolation in Shelley’s 1821 “Adonais” depends on the image of the “immortal stars” as a symbol of life after death and ends with the image of the dead Keats as a star.31 In Memoriam transforms this traditional image for stability and immortality into a figure for radical discontinuity.

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I have defined literary parallax as a particular application of point of view that allows the reader to move through radically disparate optical positions and notice the visual results of his own motion through space. In In Memoriam, the basic movement is temporal, forward in time and away from Hallam, but Tennyson brilliantly uses spatial and especially astronomical metaphors to represent this motion. He highlights conflicts between the sensory and the theoretical in conflicting views of the sun, of the planet Venus, and of the stars, apparently steadfast but invisibly decaying. In each case, Tennyson and Hallam are themselves figured as celestial bodies seen from disparate positions in space. In drawing our attention to the gap between sensory and theoretical knowledge, parallax resembles other aspects of astronomy that inspire literary writers. Its job is not to solve perceptual problems, but rather to give such problems form. In his critical work Ulysses, Hugh Kenner suggests that Joyce uses literary parallax to build up the sense of the reality of a place (the city of Dublin), and to give readers a vivid sense of multiple parts moving against the stable background of that city. Kenner’s discussion of parallax is directly inspired by Joyce’s own preoccupation with Victorian astronomy in Ulysses. As Kenner points out, “That different observers will see different phenomena is guaranteed by parallax, a principle Joyce explicitly installed by name in the book itself, where the word is used six times” (5 n. 11). Leopold Bloom has learned about parallax from one of the most popular writers and lecturers on astronomy in the latter part of the nineteenth century, Robert Stawell Ball. Toward the end of Ulysses, we learn that Bloom owns Ball’s The Story of the Heavens (1885), a work that cites lines by Tennyson on astronomy. Much of Ball’s work focuses on the parallactic measurement of nearby stars, and Story of the Heavens gives a complex explanation of stellar parallax. Kenner defines literary parallax as something (a bicyclist, a cloud, a clock) seen from two disparate positions in time that thereby produces a different arrangement of things. For Kenner, literary parallax is tied to the narrative techniques in Ulysses that ask us to connect disparate moments in the novel, and which enhance our sense of the reality of three-dimensional space: in Elaine Scarry’s terms, one might call this an effect of vivacity.32 Kenner writes: Two different versions at least, that is Joyce’s normal way; and the uncanny sense of reality that grows in readers of Ulysses page after page is fostered with the neatness with which versions of the same event, versions different in wording and often in constituent facts—separated, moreover, by tens or hundreds of pages—reliably render each other substantial. (75)

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Kenner’s examples of literary parallax include a little cloud seen by Stephen and Bloom at different times of day, “the poet Russell pushing his bicycle” who passes Bloom, and then is seen later “ensconced in the library” (75). Kenner argues compellingly that “This does much to assure us that Bloom really did see Russell, a substantial Russell in motion through Dublin’s Newtonian space. It does something, too, since Russell ‘existed,’ to help confirm the reality of Bloom. It is perhaps elementary narrative technique” (75). Kenner notes that Bloom is “responsive to optical instruments and timepieces,” and calls attention to the disparity between two standardizations of time, one based on observation from Dunsink, and the other, signaled to Bloom by a dropping ball rather than a clock, calculated from the Greenwich observatory (75). It is in this context that Kenner makes his distinction between optical (what he calls “actual”) parallax and its more metaphorical literary equivalent: he has just let slip through his mind unnoticed a homely example of parallax: two standpoints, two different alignments of phenomena. For not only have his thoughts in two different places addressed the dropped ball differently (metaphorical parallax); not only that, but the Ballast Office itself presents parallactic readings, two times simultaneously: Greenwich Time by the ball for mariners, and Dunsink Time by the dial for pedestrians. And Greenwich Time and Dunsink Time are different by twenty-five minutes because astronomers in those two places observe the sun from stations separated from 6 1/4 degrees of longitude. This is, precisely and technically, parallax. (75)

At both the metaphorical and the literal levels Kenner describes, the optical placement of the reader is central to the effect. Kenner’s version of parallax is much closer to the forms of parallax we will see, for instance, in the Victorian novel than it is to Tennyson’s use of it in In Memoriam. Tennyson uses parallax not primarily to ground the reader in a realistically conceived space, but more often to figure the self as emotionally and intellectually torn between different views of the world. Sometimes that self has been untethered from stable space, as when he invokes the blindly running stars that have no predictable motion. Elsewhere he seems to be attached to a stable set of concentric spheres, and even Hallam is implicitly figured as orbiting the earth. But the fear that haunts Tennyson’s use of parallax is the fear that, because of death, he and Hallam will somehow lose their relation to each other. Tennyson uses parallax to create disturbing motion in In Memoriam. He creates a dynamic model of space in which the self has no secure point of rest, but constantly has to be placed and repositioned.

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Parallax in Joyce requires the reader to make the connections between one glimpse of a cloud and another. That labor is in part what creates a belief in fictional Dublin as a complex space that obeys Newtonian laws of motion and of optics. The effects of Tennyson’s use of parallax do overlap with those Kenner describes. We see Tennyson encounter a number of environments more than once, and we use those to orient ourselves. We can measure change, or grief in motion, without feeling that that change has to constitute progress. Change brings about a lessening of pain that is more comfortable than feeling pain, but also a corresponding lessening of contact with the deceased. In both works parallax helps us identify the reader’s movement through a text and the changes that result because of a predictable set of laws from that movement. The optical positions we find in In Memoriam include the whole cosmos seen from outside, the stars seen from the surface of the earth, the surface of the earth viewed from a few miles above, and views underground and of the ocean floor. When exploring Tennyson’s uses of parallax, it is helpful to distinguish two different types of motion in which an observer might engage. The more standard version of parallax in astronomy involves an orbit, specifically the orbit of the earth around the sun. In this instance, the relative distance between Earth and the sun, or Earth and the nearby star, does not change much, nor does the appearance of the star; instead, what changes are the relative positions of the three bodies. A proportionally small change of position leads to a more precise, and potentially more stable perception of the object. This is how parallax works and feels when we encounter the two views of Venus as morning or evening star: “Thy place is changed; thou art the same.” The version of parallax that I will refer to as “orbing,” by contrast, involves a distinction between two radically different views of an object, most typically between the earth seen from its surface and, on the other hand, seen from a distance at which its curvature becomes visible. Orbing is an intensification of parallax. Tennyson uses it repeatedly to create startling discontinuities among multiple views of an object, a person, or a place that we theoretically know to be the same. What we can easily absorb as a perceptual change in a real object in standard parallax threatens to become, in orbing, a change in the object itself. Another way to examine this distinction is in terms of the movement of the observer herself—in orbing, the observer typically moves toward or away from the object observed, while in standard stellar parallax, the observer typically moves laterally with respect to the object. We can also distinguish between scenes

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in which the reader is taken through the process of moving and scenes in which that shift has occurred behind the scenes.

Orbing: Observers in Motion In Section 23 Tennyson employs orbing to upset a conventional association between stars and continuity. As we have seen, Tennyson often uses analogies between celestial bodies and human beings. Unlike most other poets, though, he uses these analogies to emphasize radical discontinuities in ideas commonly expected to be coherent, such as the concept of human identity. In these analogies, one’s present corresponds to a star or planet viewed from its own surface, and one’s past to a celestial body seen from afar. For instance, the poet says that when Hallam was alive, “all we met was fair and good, / And all was good that Time could bring” (Sec. 23). But in the next section he stops to question this statement: . . . was the day of my delight As pure and perfect as I say? The very source and fount of Day Is dashed with wandering isles of night. (Sec. 24)

This is a classic example of parallax: a change in the appearance of things out there based on the observer’s own motion. He shows us two vastly different versions of the sun that are produced by closeness or distance. In this passage, Tennyson evaluates his current perception of his own past by comparing the sun seen from a distance, “The very source and fount of Day,” to the fact he knows about its surface, that it is “dashed” with enormous “wandering” spots (see Figure 18). As he will write in Section 121 (addressing the planet Venus), “Thy place is changed; thou art the same.” The sun is the same object whether seen from up close or far away, yet because in these lines the change in perspective is dramatic, the sun’s appearance changes radically, as do the ideas we associate with it. The existence of sunspots had been known for centuries, but they were the source of much fascination in Victorian times. Somerville, for instance, describes the sunspots “occasionally seen in the radiant fluid masses on the surface of the sun.” (425–6) One of these spots was measured for the first time ever by Sir John Herschel on 29 March 1836. With its penumbra it occupied an area of 3,780 million square miles (see Figure 19). Herschel notes that the

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Figure 18 The change in the appearance of sunspots as seen from the earth as the sun rotates on its axis. Here a single sunspot is pictured at four different moments in time.

Figure 19 A close up of an enormous sunspot, with its umbra and penumbra.

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black central part of a spot that appeared on 25 May following was wide enough to allow the entire earth to drop through it, “leaving a thousand miles clear of contact all around this tremendous abyss.”33 Such figures make newly palpable the contrast between the unblemished sphere seen from the earth and the actual nature of its surface. Tennyson realizes that he must inevitably have idealized his memories of life with Hallam and wonders what the source of the distortion is. Has his grief made him idolize Hallam? Or is it simply that temporal distance itself produces idealized images? In this passage, he asks: . . . is it that the haze of grief Makes former gladness loom so great? . . . Or that the past will always win A glory from its being far; And orb into the perfect star We saw not, when we moved therein? (Sec. 24)

Present experience he compares to the earth as it is seen from its surface; past experience to a “perfect” point of light, devoid of detail. Neither image is comprehensive. Here Tennyson allows us to feel the continuity between the two radically different views of a celestial body. This is orbing. The imagined observer begins on the surface of the planet and rises far above it until he or she can apprehend its roundness. The verb “orb” is carefully chosen to evoke the gradual, yet ultimately dramatic, sensory shift from the apparent flatness of the ground seen from its surface to the later apprehension of the roundness of the planet. The concision of the monosyllable “orb” mirrors the transformation of the planet itself as, with distance, it appears to contract into a sphere and then into a dimensionless point. Tennyson uses spatial distance to explore the effects of temporal distance on perception. Time transforms prior experience, life with Hallam, into something both apparently perfect—“the perfect star”—and disturbingly unfamiliar—“We saw not, when we moved therein.” Tennyson applies spatial parallax to time, and suggests that a complete understanding depends on considering a triangulated version of time that incorporates a close-up view (seen “when we moved therein”), a distant view (“the perfect star”), and the viewer’s changing position as he moves forward in time, away from the planet that seems to “orb” as a result of that motion. One of the key ideas here is that we are able simultaneously to see an object change, and to recognize that it is in fact the same object despite changes in its appearance and position.

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Tennyson uses a similar image of orbing celestial bodies in an 1839 letter to Emily Sellwood, in which he again compares his past and his present, respectively, to a distant planet and the earth he stands on: To me often the far-off world seems nearer than the present, for in the present is always something unreal and indistinct, but the other seems a good solid planet, rolling round its green hills and paradises to the harmony of more steadfast laws. There steam up from about me mists of weakness, or sin, or despondency, and roll between me and the far planet, but it is there still.34

By saying that the “far-off” past seems “nearer” than the present, Tennyson appears to work against his own metaphor, for it is precisely the distance from the past that makes it seem “a good solid planet” rather than “unreal and indistinct.” Nearness here means not proximity but the point at which a past event is distant enough to come into focus. Only after it is far enough away to be apprehensible to the senses can it become comprehensible. Some six months after Hallam’s death, Tennyson writes to Hallam’s father, apologizing that he has been unable to write the tribute to his friend he had envisioned. “I find the object yet is too near me to permit of any very accurate delineation,” Tennyson explains.35 Where Section 24 emphasizes the distortions of distance, these two letters elaborate the distortions of proximity, the way that nearness blunts perception. Orbing occurs throughout In Memoriam, but on different scales and with a striking range of emotional effects. Sometimes the earth is seen from a celestial perspective, as with the “round of green” in Section 34. In Section 12 we find the speaker leaving his body behind and “hast[ing] away / O’er ocean-mirrors rounded large” to hover near the ship carrying Hallam’s remains back to England, and then returning “To where the body sits.” Elsewhere, as in Section 76, the distances are truly astronomical. This passage makes another analogy between space and time, equating “wings of fancy” to the next stanza’s “wings of foresight.” From an astronomical perspective, Tennyson’s poem is insignificant—his “songs are vain”: Take wings of fancy, and ascend, And in a moment set thy face Where all the starry heavens of space Are sharpened to a needle’s end; Take wings of foresight[.] (Sec. 76)

Tennyson’s note to this section emphasizes the extraordinary imaginative act he requires of his reader here—to imagine being “so distant in void space

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that all our firmament would appear a needlepoint thence.”36 A similar image of the firmament viewed from a distance appears early in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Satan sees all of Heaven and cannot tell its shape: “Far off th’ Empyreal Heav’n, extended wide / In circuit, undetermined square or round.” He then sees some version of the universe, shrunk to the size of a star because of its distance: “This pendant world, in bigness as a Star / Of smallest Magnitude close by the Moon.” This image only makes sense if one conceives of the universe itself as spherical, with an exterior as well as an interior, and with Earth at its center. Merritt Yerkes Hughes explains that Milton’s “pendant world is not the earth but the entire spherical universe which Satan has yet to penetrate.”37 In other words, Satan is seeing the outside of the sphere of stars thought by Aristotle and Ptolemy to contain the entire universe, a structure not unlike a celestial globe. In the nineteenth century, when the universe is no longer believed to be encased in a sphere of stars, the idea of the whole universe shrinking to a point becomes a mere fantasy that enables the cosmos to be apprehended as a whole—or as almost nothing, as a “needle’s end”; from this point of view the self is pointless. Tennyson confessed that he “often had the feeling of being whirled up and rapt into the Great Soul.”38 He recreates this feeling and its potential for ecstasy and terror in his readers, requiring them to propel themselves through space at incredible speeds and to notice how their position determines the appearance of the objects they observe. These images of orbing, of extreme perspectival shifts leading to radical discontinuities, raise a crucial epistemological issue: can we predict and correct for the distortions of distance and proximity? This problem is as much a source of anxiety to the elegist struggling against the distortions of grief and memory as it is to the astronomer observing nebulae or determining the motion of our sun by apparent shifts in other stars. The problem is complicated by the fact that the elegist is observing not a separate object but a past time that remains a part of his present self. The discontinuity between the earth’s surface, flat from a human perspective, and its spherical shape as seen from space might be thought of as merely apparent—there is only one earth. It is less apparent that this is true of the “former gladness” that Tennyson compares to a planet in Section 24, because the past has a peculiar status: it is both one’s own and separate from one. It is thus unclear in this section what causes the shift Tennyson evokes. The past seems to “orb into the perfect star,” but he is the one moving forward in time while the time he spent with Hallam gets farther and farther away. His description projects

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Figure 20 Tennyson shown in his study with his celestial and terrestrial globes in the background, 1884.

agency onto the past, which seems itself to transform, to “orb.” This projection, highlighted by the unique use of “orb” as a verb, is a reminder of how easy it is for an observer to attribute shifts in his own position to an external change in what he observes.39 Tennyson uses these images of orbed planets as figures for looking at oneself as something both apart from, and continuous with, oneself (see Figure 20). The schism Tennyson feels between his present and his past takes many forms. Hallam’s death creates fissures not only between Tennyson’s early life and the fifty-nine years by which he would survive Hallam but also within himself, in the sequence of contradictory emotions unleashed in him by the loss. Discontinuities in his own identity prompt his use of the discontinuous planet Venus, sometimes the evening, sometimes the morning star. This is another instance of parallax, because the same object (Venus) is being seen from two disparate positions that made centuries of astronomers believe that they were in fact two different entities:

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Figure 21 Venus a Morning & Evening Star Alternately 290 Days. Sweet Hesper-Phosphor, double name For what is one, the first, the last, Thou, like my present and my past, Thy place is changed; thou art the same. (Sec. 121)

Venus’s two names stem from an optical phenomenon, the change in Venus’s apparent celestial position when it is east or west of the sun. Nineteenthcentury popularizations of astronomy frequently explained this phenomenon as stemming from the changing positions of the earth and Venus as they circle the sun, and as the earth rotates (see Figure 21). While readers may know theoretically that Venus is both “Sad Hesper,” the evening star, and “Bright Phosphor,” the morning star, its names and its positions further the illusion that two distinct celestial bodies exist. Venus becomes a touchstone for the philosophical problem of how two names can refer to the same object. The discontinuities Tennyson feels in his own identity are similar to the split

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appearances of the planet: “Can calm despair and wild unrest / Be tenants of a single breast?” (Sec. 16). The planet provides a model of the self that embodies theoretical unity in sensory fragmentation. These two images—of a celestial object orbing into a perfect star and of Venus’s split identity—are signs of Tennyson’s lifelong preoccupation with the perceptual experiment of imagining celestial bodies seen from dramatically different positions. His 1828 notebook, written when he was nineteen, includes “astronomical diagrams” and a fragment of a poem on “The Moon,” which imagines the sky seen from the moon’s surface without the interference of an atmosphere. To the lunar observer, the sun looks “large as a human eye” and the stars seem “all moons.”40 The speaker of the 1886 “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After” gazes at Venus and asks: Hesper-Venus—were we native to that splendour or in Mars, We should see the Globe we groan in, fairest of their evening stars. Could we dream of wars and carnage, craft and madness, lust and spite, Roaring London, raving Paris, in that point of peaceful light?41

In this passage Tennyson again resists favoring a single sensory version of the celestial bodies he describes. He embodies Venus’s apparent disunity in her name “Hesper-Venus” and requires extraordinary perspectival shifts on the part of his reader. This passage imagines an observer gazing at Venus from the earth, then standing on the surface of Venus or Mars and turning back to look at “the Globe we groan in.” The reader is subconsciously propelled through space. In the space of five words, “the Globe we groan in,” he first sends the reader far into space to where the earth becomes visible as “the Globe.” Just as quickly the next words, “we groan in,” yank the reader back to the earth with a sense of belonging to that entity that he has just been looking at. This movement afar and up close is akin to the spatial shifts between narrator and character at work in a line of free indirect discourse. And a similar expansion and then contraction of the imagination occurs in the title of this book: the starry sky within. Slowing down our reading of these phrases and thinking about them spatially reveal the motion of the imagination as it telescopes from the personal to the cosmic. From afar, the earth appears as the “fairest of their evening stars.” Neither the tumult of earth as we experience it when we “move therein” nor that “point of peaceful light” seen from afar capture the earth’s complete identity. Paris and London are far more exciting and disturbing in their particularity than are points of light. By extension, the stars as we see them

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from the earth’s surface seem to provide an inadequate insight into their particularities. The final couplet poses a question about the capacity of the human imagination to attach a complex set of ideas to an image as disembodied as a point of light. If we only had access to the earth from a distance, could we even conceive of the “wars and carnage, craft and madness, lust and spite” it contains? The deep asymmetry between the rich specificity with which Tennyson endows terrestrial life and the peacefulness with which he characterizes the surface of Venus or Mars here suggests that the answer to this question may be “no.” Venus and Mars retain their peacefulness even when he imagines himself up close to them. By this mental travel from the surface of the earth to Venus or Mars, Tennyson destabilizes the idea that any object—or event—can be perceived accurately from a single temporal or spatial location. But his own reluctance to imagine a rich specificity on another planet suggests that sensory perceptions may have more power over the theoretical mind than one might expect. Another fragment from “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After” illustrates the mental rotations that can occur when theoretical knowledge opposes what one sees. Moved by the vitality of the earth bathed in moonlight, the speaker has to remind himself that the moon is a “dead world,” for spectroscopists have determined that it contains no life: Dead the new astronomy calls her . . . . Dead, but how her living glory lights the hall, the dune, the grass! Yet the moonlight is the sunlight, and the sun himself will pass.

The scientific fact that the moon is dead jars with the speaker’s response to its concrete and specific luminous play over the earth’s surface, over rooms, the rise in the ground, and the grass. Yet the speaker pushes aside the moonlight’s appearance, allowing his theoretical knowledge to take precedence: “Yet the moonlight is the sunlight.” In order to believe in his own abstract knowledge, the speaker has to remind himself that the vitality he sees is an illusion. Only when he has suppressed his perception of the moonlight can he accept the absence of life in the moon. A similar tension between reported death and apparent life occurs in a passage in In Memoriam. Since Hallam died during a trip to Vienna, his body has had to be sent back by ship. Tennyson himself remains at home. While he knows his friend has died, Hallam’s absence is not palpably different in sensory terms from mere geographical distance between two living friends. The speaker imagines a counterfactual situation in which Hallam appears

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twice, first in a coffin and then on foot, alive. He addresses the ship that bears Hallam back to England: If one should bring me this report, That thou hadst touched the land today, And I went down unto the quay, And found thee lying in the port; And standing, muffled round with woe, Should see thy passengers in rank Come stepping lightly down the plank . . . And if along with these should come The man I held as half-divine; Should strike a sudden hand in mine, And ask a thousand things of home; And I should tell him all my pain, And how my life had drooped of late, And he should sorrow o’er my state And marvel what possessed my brain; And I perceived no touch of change, No hint of death in all his frame, But found him all in all the same, I should not feel it to be strange. (Sec. 14)

Here metaphorical parallax is applied to Hallam’s body rather than to a celestial body. In this description of Hallam coming off the ship, Hallam is pictured in two places at once: inside the coffin and on the gangplank. He places his hand in Tennyson’s and consoles him for the loss of his friend. Identity spreads out prismatically, like split light. The release from the body is filled with palpable loss—the hand that cannot be grasped—and yet it is also a release into a more diffuse kind of being, like light radiating out of a star.42 This passage serves as a reminder of how impalpable another’s death can remain, however sincerely it is confronted. The scene Tennyson imagines involves two self-contradictory sensory experiences that follow one after another: the arrival of Hallam’s coffin and then the appearance of Hallam alive. For the reader, this scene of Hallam come back to life and able to console Tennyson about all his pain has no less reality than other scenes that the poem describes. But the brutal intellectual information that Hallam is dead haunts both the speaker and the reader throughout these lines. The act of imagining him alive, down to how he would greet the poet, what he would say, and what Tennyson’s relief would be in telling him all he has

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suffered, is deeply unsettling. The reader is forced to shuttle painfully between the concrete images of his presence and the abstract fact that he is dead. The pathos of the final line comes not only from its extreme understatement of what Tennyson’s joy at his friend’s reappearance would be, but also from the realization it brings that it is very easy to imagine Hallam alive. As with the death of the moon above, it is death, not life, that the poet finds a counterintuitive concept that he must struggle to grasp. The double placement of Hallam—in the coffin and on the gangplank—has equal sensory reality both for Tennyson (who is imagining the scene, and can never bring himself to visit Hallam’s grave after his body has been returned to England) and for the reader. Death of a friend far away is experienced intellectually, but never attains the felt reality of a sensory experience.

“Like a Star”: Revising Stellar Imagery from “Adonais” The novelty of Tennyson’s use of astronomy in In Memoriam can be clarified by setting his way of comparing a person to a star next to other uses of stellar imagery. In more conventional elegies, such as Milton’s “Lycidas” or Shelley’s “Adonais,” consolation is achieved only when the poet is able to let go of the deceased’s earthly incarnation and to realize that the deceased has been transported into a better world. One image for such a transformation is the act of stellification, of turning the deceased into a star as Shelley does to Keats at the end of “Adonais.” And yet, for Tennyson, steeped in contemporary astronomy, it is no longer satisfactory to imagine a heaven hierarchically arranged, in which the stars stand for permanence and eternal life. Tennyson, like Shelley before him, maintains the elegiac convention of figuring the deceased as a star but, unlike Shelley, revises the convention, drawing on contemporary astronomical debates. “Adonais” and In Memoriam share a number of similarities that suggest that Tennyson was consciously reworking Shelley’s use of astronomical imagery. It was Hallam who first introduced the poem to Tennyson. Hallam was one of the two scholars who sponsored a reprint of Shelley’s “Adonais” in 1829, the first time the poem was printed in England, four years before his own death.43 Both poems invoke Urania, the muse of astronomy, and include the allegorical figure of Sorrow. Both represent grief in celestial terms, as a clouding or an eclipsing of the heavens, a “starless

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night” (“Adonais,” line 223). Both consolations are expressed in terms of an unveiling of the heavens, which, for Shelley, reveals the “immortal stars,” and both poems imagine the deceased transformed into a star (line 256). The peculiar sensory qualities of the stars make them an apt image for an elegy since the relationship between sensory perception and abstraction is a central elegiac concern. Death forces a theoretical relocation of the deceased’s identity. When alive, a person’s identity tends to be associated automatically with his or her body. After death, identity is transferred primarily to the theoretical realm, to the memories and thoughts of other people. One aspect of the work of mourning performed within an elegy is to enact that transformation from the sensory to the abstract. The period between death and burial, to which most elegies confine themselves, constitutes a peculiar time in which the body is still available to sensory perception but no longer the primary location of the deceased’s identity. I believe that the elegiac convention of turning the deceased into a star grows out of the stars’ unique relationship to the sensory and the theoretical.44 A star marks a meeting point between abstraction and availability to the senses. Stars are just on the cusp of perceptibility; they seem to have neither substance nor dimension, but they can be seen. They thus provide a reassuring image of the deceased as barely accessible to the senses even though no longer physically present. Because they radiate and glow, stars also possess an apparent animation or inner resource. Looking down on us, they display and withhold themselves in a way that can seem autonomous or willed—even alive. In “Adonais,” Shelley’s stellification of Keats happens twice. In the first instance, the dead Keats is given a sphere of his own in a Ptolemaic system consisting of concentric glass spheres. He is welcomed into a “kingless sphere” that awaits his death (line 411). In the Ptolemaic scheme, the stellar sphere, embedded with the fixed stars, surrounds many smaller spheres. Keats’s “sphere has long / Swung blind in unascended majesty.” (lines 411–12) When he dies and assumes his “winged throne,” Keats appears as a new star in the heavens (line 414). Shelley’s cosmos is strictly hierarchical, and death enables Keats to enter the immortal realm above. At the end of the poem, the speaker can see in Adonais, shining above for the second time, an unequivocal sign of immortality: burning through the inmost veil of Heaven, The soul of Adonais, like a star, Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are. (ll. 493–5)

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Shelley is drawn to the imagery of the stars because they are objects that continually exist but can only be perceived at certain times and in certain circumstances. For Shelley, the human tendency to grieve over death arises out of the misperception that death is a loss, an ending. In fact, his images suggest, death involves a new form of life that is only periodically accessible to human perception. Shelley knew a great deal about astronomy; he befriended William Herschel and was himself an amateur astronomer.45 In this poem, however, he chooses to imagine an outdated, geocentric model of the cosmos. Despite the fact that he is writing three decades after the nebular hypothesis was proposed, he directly contradicts the notion that the stars themselves might decay and burn out: The splendours of the firmament of time May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not; Like stars to their appointed height they climb, And death is a low mist which cannot blot The brightness it may veil. (ll. 388–92)

In this passage, dead spirits or “splendours” are compared to stars, which ascend to a fixed place in the heavens, “their appointed height,” when their earthly bodies die. Shelley figures death as a cloud or “low mist” that obscures the immortal dead from human eyes, but he emphasizes that, seen or unseen from earth, the stars continue to exist. Clouds and eclipses both perform a similar function: they block light from earthly eyes without affecting the source of that light. Stars and human beings alike may be “eclipsed” but cannot be “extinguished.” In “Adonais” human perception is intermittently accurate or flawed, but the universe’s structure is constant. Shelley uses stellar imagery to highlight this disjunction between earthly uncertainty and celestial constancy. Tennyson, by contrast, uses astronomical images for a much more complex portrait of the ambiguities of cosmic structure. Rather than according the universe the constancy it has traditionally possessed in British literature, he highlights the variety of theoretical structures proposed for the cosmos. Like Shelley, he emphasizes the inconsistencies of the sensory realm, but he resists a stable theoretical model of the universe as well. Tennyson also expresses his grief in terms of darkness and a clouded sky. After Hallam’s death, he finds himself “always under altered skies / . . . My prospect and horizon gone” (Sec. 38). Death is “The shade by which my life was crost” (Sec. 66). “A rainy cloud possessed the earth” (Sec. 30), eclipsing

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stars and sun: “clouds . . . drench the morning star” (Sec. 72), “The moon is hid” (Sec. 28), and “ghastly through the drizzling rain / On the bald street breaks the blank day” (Sec. 7). The anniversary of Hallam’s death is addressed as the day that “blurred the splendour of the sun” (Sec. 72). Tennyson’s sorrow is figured as an inability to see the celestial bodies that he knows are still there. In this way, his imagery resembles Shelley’s; for the time being, he does not dispute the existence of the sun and stars themselves but simply loses the ability to perceive them. The movement from grief to consolation is far less straightforward in In Memoriam than it is in most elegies. The elegy does, however, mark a progression from conceiving of Hallam as a bodily presence to conceiving of his identity in the abstract. This is a move from the sensory to the theoretical. Early in the poem, Tennyson feels Hallam’s loss as a physical absence; Hallam is no longer accessible to his senses. Death makes Tennyson “like to him whose sight is lost” (Sec. 66) and transforms Hallam from “The human-hearted man I loved” to “A Spirit, not a breathing voice” (Sec. 13). Death “bore thee where I could not see” (Sec. 22) and “put our lives so far apart / We cannot hear each other speak” (Sec. 82). Only gradually, over many years and many individual sections, does the more abstract conception of Hallam develop: “I felt and feel, though left alone, / His being working in mine own” (Sec. 85). While Tennyson’s stellification of Hallam is less explicit than Shelley’s transformation of Keats, Tennyson does build a sustained association between his absent friend and the stars: “I seem in star and flower / To feel thee some diffusive power” (Sec. 130). Even here, the poet’s conceptual grasp of Hallam’s death is not a stable one; like the Copernican system, death is a theoretical idea unsupported by sensory experience and thus must be recalled and reasserted again and again. Elsewhere, Hallam is more explicitly addressed as the “happy star” who “O’erlook[s] the tumult from afar” (Sec. 127). Tennyson wonders, “Can clouds of nature stain / The starry clearness of the free?” (Sec. 85) and imagines that “Ye watch, like God, the rolling hours / With larger other eyes than ours” (Sec. 51). Finally, he presents an image that has some affinities with the sphere to which Keats ascends: So mayst thou watch me where I weep, As, unto vaster motions bound, The circuits of thine orbit round A higher height, a deeper deep. (Sec. 63)

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In this stanza, Hallam is compared to a planet that revolves around the sun, at a greater distance than the earth, looking over earth’s inhabitants from “A higher height, a deeper deep.” Some version of a hierarchical cosmos is preserved here—Hallam, like Shelley’s splendors, exists on a transcendent plane, above the earth. While Tennyson adheres to the elegiac convention, however, he has reconceived what it means to compare someone to a celestial body. It is no longer an image of immortality and coherence. Tennyson’s imagination is fired more by sunspots and “Herschel’s great star-patches” than by the idea of stars as perfect and eternal. Tennyson’s larger revision of Shelley’s system is to make use of multiple sensory and theoretical versions of the cosmos. Tennyson’s perceptions of the cosmos range from the most positive to the most bleak: he cites the “Fantastic beauty” of this “orb of flame” (Sec. 34); “Phosphor, bright / As our pure love” (Sec. 9); the motherly “bosom of the stars” (Sec. 17); the “brightening moon” (Sec. 89); and the space “where in yonder orient star / A hundred spirits whisper ‘Peace’” (Sec. 86). Elsewhere, however, the skies are “blurred” (Sec. 72), covered in “folded gloom” (Sec. 122), and blank; the moon becomes “yon hard crescent” (Sec. 107), and as we have seen, the stars “blindly run” (Sec. 3). Tennyson produces a range of both psychological and philosophical stances based on the various ways in which we can choose to see the universe. That flexibility arises from difficulty we have in perceiving celestial phenomena and the scientific uncertainties that surrounded the nebular hypothesis and the universe’s structure while the poem was being written. The status of consolation in In Memoriam is highly contingent. Glimpses of consolation, when they come, appear in terms of an unveiling of the heavens. When the poet feels that he has overcome his grief, that psychological progression is expressed in terms of a renewed perception of the universe’s eternity and lawfulness. The speaker addresses Hallam as a quasi-celestial presence: Oh, wast thou with me, dearest, then, While I rose up against my doom, And yearned to burst the folded gloom, To bare the eternal Heavens again, To feel once more, in placid awe, The strong imagination roll A sphere of stars about my soul, In all her motion one with law[.] (Sec. 122)

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This image of a recovered view of the sky has affinities with Shelley’s glimpse of the “immortal stars.” Yet here the triumphant perception is not presented as a certain fact, but as a wish; its accuracy is as tenuous as that of the earlier images of a clouded sky or interstellar “waste places.” Tennyson emphasizes the agency of his “strong imagination” in rolling this “sphere of stars about my soul.” The cosmic structure implied by this image—a revolving stellar sphere and a centered universe—has already been discredited by the poem’s more rigorous astronomical images. Tennyson’s invocation of “the strong imagination” is thus tantalizingly ambiguous. On the one hand, it suggests the power and flexibility that his poetry requires of its readers, the ability, for instance, to shrink the universe to a needlepoint and transport oneself through space. On the other hand, “the strong imagination” suggests a mental force with the power to distort accurate perception, the mind’s problematic tendency to deceive. The form of the elegy likewise works against a sense of coherent progression from grief to consolation. Instead, like the astronomical technique of parallax, its structure works on the principle that a single subject position can never produce a complete description of the object. Missing pieces lead one to draw distorted conclusions, and only a plenitude of positions begins to produce something like the truth. Unlike parallactic measurement, the poem does not provide an identifiable answer to the questions it raises. The elegy’s Epilogue asserts that there is “One God, one law, one element / To which the whole creation moves.” Yet the lessons Tennyson takes from astronomy caution against drawing the kind of conclusion upon which an unambiguous consolation depends. These lessons demonstrate not only that perceptions with no emotional valence can be misleading but also, more surprisingly, that conceptual ideas are just as subject to emotional distortion as are sensory perceptions. What can be achieved in astronomy through parallax is approximated through the continual array of disparate positions occupied by the speaker of In Memoriam. The spaces, voices, and perspectives that Tennyson creates in In Memoriam are infinitely complex. Yet in terms of the number of characters involved, this poem, like De Quincey’s essay, is relatively simple. While Tennyson creates multiple selves that war against each other, he ultimately retains a single physical body. He is one speaker, making his way through the universe and taking the reader with him. Part Two of The Starry Sky Within explores similar perspectival techniques within far more thickly populated fictional spaces. I turn to multiplot novels and other grand-scale

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narratives which center on two, three, four, or sometimes hundreds of named characters. In these social contexts, the position of the self in relation to other people—and other minds—is thought through in terms of astronomy and optical placement. Having studied orientation’s role in apprehension in De Quincey’s ungrounded universe, and Tennyson’s techniques of propelling the reader through space, we are now in a better position to examine how the Victorian novelists perceive their universe. In Part Two, we will see their perspectival techniques with new clarity by attending to the optical contrasts that a reader experiences as she is propelled through the space of a novel.

PART TWO Astronomy and the Multiplot Novel

Introduction: Novels as Celestial Systems

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t is a truth universally acknowledged that the capacious form of the classic multiplot novel—epitomized by Bleak House, Middlemarch, and War and Peace—developed over the course of the nineteenth century. Less widely recognized are the analogies between the form of these novels and the structure of the astronomical universe as it was understood in the nineteenth century: as a universe composed of many centers in constant motion over time. Analogies between novels and the astronomical universe appear in the writings of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Hardy, and their contemporaries. Exploring these analogies enables us to think about several patterns within these novels in spatial and visual terms: their numerous centers of consciousness, their crisscrossing points of view, and the extent to which novels function in the reader’s mind as complex systems of characters in shifting relation to one another. These analogies between the universe and a novel depend on comparing an individual human being to a single star or planet in much the same way that we have seen Tennyson liken himself to a celestial body. But unlike Tennyson’s works, these novels deal with multiple centers of consciousness. They actively set out to juxtapose one person’s version of the universe with another’s. Where Tennyson uses radical and disorienting shifts in perspective on earth or the sun to explore ruptures in his own experience, these novels encompass many planets and suns that act as landing places for the reader. From up close, each character perceives herself to be at the center, at rest. From a distance, they are all moving parts in the complex system of the novel. For these authors, characters in novels are like planets hurtling past each other, attempting somehow to observe the other as they move.

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A character such as Thomas Hardy’s Tess Durbeyfield can be the sun-like center of Angel Clare’s world one week, and hardly present to him the next. Eliot, Hardy, and Tolstoy are each obsessed with the problem of being rooted in a self that always appears to be central, and they use the idea of people as planets and stars to switch back and forth between a view from one of those stars, and an outside view of the whole system. When we turn our attention to multiplot novels, then, our interest shifts from thinking about the self in relation to the universe to thinking about complex acts of observing other people. These novels give readers access to multiple characters, each observing the other characters in the novel from his or her own embodied standpoint. In addition to multiple earthbound perspectives, these novels are inhabited by an overseeing consciousness that we have come to call the omniscient narrator (a term I discuss further in Chapter 6). The narrator provides another landing place, a center of consciousness to which the reader becomes attached. That landing place frequently (although not always) has a spatial position attached to it. Often, this spatial position will be attached to a character, but it is a special flexibility that belongs to a third-person narrator that he or she can be detached from individual characters and rise up above a scene, move through walls, take a bird’s-eye view, or simply inhabit a wobbly position between a character’s point of view and a view from afar. It is the latter fact—that a narrator can be both there, and not there—that makes free indirect discourse such a source of fascination for readers. Hardy and Eliot, as well as Dickens and Tolstoy, explicitly invoke astronomy to think about how large-scale novels track the movements of multiple characters. Here astronomy figures not just as a metaphor for the self or an instance of optical disjunction, but also as a way to set the perspectives of individual characters against other characters’ points of view, and against an omniscient narrator’s larger scope. These novels themselves can be seen as systems of moving bodies organized by the superintendent consciousness of the author (see Figure 22). As we shift our focus to astronomy’s role in large-scale narratives, three interrelated patterns are worth keeping in mind. The first is the way that novels explore the apparent centrality of each person to himself, an idea that repeatedly occurs in comparisons between human beings and individual planets or stars. Many novelists invoke the analogy between the perception that the earth is the center of the universe and each character’s perception that he or she is located at the center of the world. Eliot notes that when a candle is held up to a pier-glass it creates a “flattering illusion” in which “scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric

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Figure 22 This 1850 image of an orrery shows several strategies for representing the fact that even the solar system is a system containing many centers. The threedimensional orrery enables viewers to discern the complex systems of moons orbiting around planets that orbit the sun. The orrery is excellent at showing the components of the solar system in a single set of positions. The two-dimensional image of the solar system in the background uses circular lines to represent the continuous motion of the orbits involved.

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circles round that little sun.”1 Sometimes such perceptions are attributed to particularly egocentric characters, such as Rosamond Vincy in this pier-glass metaphor: “The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent—of Miss Vincy, for example,” Eliot’s narrator explains (297). Dickens likewise uses astronomy to show the blatant egotism of the elder Dombey in Dickens’s Dombey and Son. Dombey believes that “The earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in, and the sun and moon were made to give them light. . . . [S]tars and planets circled in their orbits, to preserve inviolate a system of which they were the centre.”2 But elsewhere writers allude to each person’s apparent centrality as a simple perceptual fact that can be temporarily separated out from an individual’s moral acuity. The first-person narrator of Grant Allen’s Type-Writer Girl (1897), for instance, walks through “the living stream” of a London street and remarks to himself that each of the people he encounters is: wrapped in his own thought, yet each real to himself as I to my heart. To me, they are shooting stars, phantoms that flash athwart the orbit of my life one second, and then vanish. But to themselves they are the centre of a world—of the world, and I am but one of the meteors that dart across their horizon.3

In this case, the analogy between people and planets is used to set an individual perspective against the larger system of which the narrator knows he is a part. For Allen, one’s own centrality is a cognitive condition rather than a moral failure. Second, astronomical models in multiplot novels provide a dynamic, three-dimensional schema for describing complex relationships between characters. While individual characters may each perceive themselves to be central, a novel can reveal these individuals as part of a larger system that functions according to predictable laws. We will see how Hardy uses the bonfire scene at the beginning of The Return of the Native to set up a network of regard that continues throughout the novel. Each point of view presents patterns of light and dark that Hardy describes in terms of individual celestial bodies—moons, planets, and stars—brought down onto the darkened surface of the earth. Pamela Gossin has shown how often Hardy thinks about the intersecting movements of characters in terms of attraction between celestial bodies and astronomical orbits.4 Gossin notes that in Two on a Tower, for instance, “Hardy describes the love of Swithin and Viviette for each other as the mutual gravitational attraction between two heavenly bodies. They revolve around each other, moving in paths and tracing patterns” (178). And in the final section of War and Peace, Tolstoy

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compares the misperception that history is driven by the wills of individual men to the geocentric model of the universe that reigned before “the law of Copernicus was discovered.”5 For Tolstoy, the apparent “independence of the individual” is analogous to the equally illusory belief in “the immovability of the earth” (1443). We can think back to Hillis Miller’s claim that “the primary focus of fiction” is “not isolated consciousness . . . but consciousness of the consciousness of others.”6 When conceiving of “a group of related minds,” Miller writes, “it is inevitable that the reader should think of the field brought into existence by tensions between minds as a space, and that he should use terms like proximity and distance, . . . superimposition and juxtaposition, continuity and discontinuity, to express the way that at any one moment in a novel the narrator is related to the characters, and the characters to one another” (5–6). Through images of star clusters, and planets circling stars, nineteenth-century astronomy provides models of complex relations that are fundamentally dynamic, but that also offer discernible structures and relationships between orbiting bodies. Both Alex Woloch and Franco Moretti ask us to imagine the relation between characters in terms of centers and larger systems. Moretti uses terms from social network analysis, speaking of nodes (which belong to characters) and edges (which stand for relations between characters).7 Woloch’s work on the function of minor characters puts forward the idea of a character system, an economy that can be understood in terms of distribution of the reader’s attention. He consistently uses the language of centrality but does so in a less consciously spatialized way than I want to here in thinking about comparisons between novels and astronomical systems.8 Woloch builds on E. M. Forster’s account of why certain characters never seem to achieve centrality.9 In his famous discussion of flat and round characters in Aspects of the Novel, Forster suggests that flat characters function much like the socalled fixed stars, as a stable background against which the lives of major characters can be tracked. Forster uses this analogy to imply that one of the advantages of having a novel contain flat characters is that they provide stability, an unchanging background against which the fullness of characters we care about can be perceived. Flat characters, he writes, require much less attention from the reader; they “provide their own atmosphere—little luminous disks of a pre-arranged size, pushed hither and thither like counters across the void or between the stars; most satisfactory.”10 An astronomical analogy between what Woloch calls character space and outer space is implicit in Forster’s language of “atmosphere,” “luminous disks,” and “the

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Figure 23 This image of the sun seen from each of the planets indicates the way that relative distance from an object shapes the viewer’s perception. The farther away one is from the sun, the smaller it appears, until, we imagine, it “orbs into the perfect star.”

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stars.” Flat characters are mere “luminous disks,” whereas the few round characters achieve the three-dimensionality of a planet seen from closer up. Third and finally, the relationship between astronomy and the multiplot novel highlights the importance of the reader’s own movement through the universe of a novel or large-scale narrative. Looking at moments in which literary writers employ astronomical schemas makes visible both the distortions and the advantages of close-ups and distant views, and how these writers move their readers back and forth between them. By focusing on moments in which astronomy appears in these texts, we can see how fundamental the astronomical technique of parallax is to the work of the multiplot novel. Parallax relies on tracking the change in the apparent position and appearance of an object as it is seen from two or more points. It relies on the principle that rich perception of an object relies on its being observed from disparate positions (see Figure 23). We have seen how parallax functions in In Memoriam. Each section of In Memoriam acts as a single (and sometimes as a double or triple) perspective on Arthur Henry Hallam’s death, but together these composite views stress the discontinuities in Tennyson’s experience. In large-scale narratives, parallax is central to the constant motion that the reader experiences in oscillating between the perspectives of narrators and individual characters, or simply being jostled between these perspectives on the bumpy road of a line of free indirect discourse. Whether the inaccessible objects kept in view are Marcel Proust’s Martinville steeples or a light in one of Bleak House’s windows (“Presently we lost the light, presently saw it, presently lost it, presently saw it”), what comes across most viscerally is the reader’s own motion, and the world’s constant rearrangement of itself as a result of that motion.11 Bleak House offers a classic model of the novel as celestial system in all three respects: the centrality of individual characters, the dynamic shifting of characters’ arrangements within the novel, and the reader’s changing position with respect to the universe of the novel. Lady Dedlock, the Lord Chancellor, and Esther each stand at the center of three interconnected character systems: Chancery, the fashionable intelligence, and the domestic world of Bleak House. In explaining the Chancery suit to Esther, John Jarndyce remarks that “We are always appearing, and disappearing, . . . and revolving about the Lord Chancellor and all his satellites” (118). We learn that “For years, now, my Lady Dedlock has been at the centre of the fashionable intelligence”; she is the most prominent figure in Tony Jobling’s “Galaxy gallery of British beauty” (22, 510). In Chapter 2, Dickens depicts

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her “world of fashion” as a “tiny speck” relative “even to this world of ours,” which is in turn limited in comparison to “the void beyond” (20). The world of fashion is “a world too much wrapped up in too much jeweller’s cotton and fine wool” to “hear the rushing of the larger worlds, and cannot see them as they circle round the sun” (20). The reader’s circular motion through the novel is perceptible on several scales, most noticeably in the constant oscillation between inhabiting the omniscient narrator’s perspective and identifying with Esther Summerson. Esther begins the novel as a timid outsider for whom everything is new and strange, but by the middle of the book she is so central to the lives of each character that when Harold Skimpole refers to her as “intent upon the perfect working of the whole little orderly system of which you are the centre,” the reader instantly recognizes the aptness of his observation (603). The novel’s cosmology evolves in reverse: from a chaotic nineteenthcentury universe composed of many centers toward a more coherent eighteenth-century heliocentric system in which Esther stands at the center. Some of the greatest effects of the novel occur through literary parallax: as Esther takes us through spaces we have visited many times before through the distant gaze of the omniscient narrator, we see these spaces afresh because we find ourselves in bodily relation to them. Right after Esther talks with Lady Dedlock, for instance, she walks through the fragrant gardens of Chesney Wold. “Grotesque monsters bristle” as she thinks about the lives led there, and for the first time we feel attached to the stately home (584). A similar effect occurs in retrospect when we think over Esther’s first visit to Miss Flite and imagine her walking next to the room in which her father currently lives. Characters who flash past us—a man from Shropshire, a crossing sweeper—resolve into detail, acquire names, and fill out in time and space. The reader’s own movement through the narrative is made palpable by the orbits individual characters trace: the foot passengers’ “slipping and sliding,” the Ghost Walk, Lady Dedlock’s restless movement between town and country, Jo’s “moving on,” or Esther’s admission of how she “passed and repassed her [mother’s] house in town” (13, 300, 669). That motion itself becomes increasingly legible over the course of the novel. What initially feels like fruitless activity develops into a comprehensive system, in which each character can be understood in complex and dynamic relation to the whole.

4 Hardy’s Stargazers and the Astronomy of Other Minds

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homas Hardy repeatedly compares the act of observing celestial bodies with the act of observing other people. Throughout his literary works, in his novels and poems and in his “epic-drama” The Dynasts (1904–8), Hardy uses images of looking at stars, planets, comets, or the moon to reflect on the difficulty of taking in information about other people and understanding their mental lives. We see this pattern in Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), when we are told that Farmer Boldwood has always seen women as “remote phenomena”—as “comets of such uncertain aspect, movement, and permanence” that he has never stopped to consider “whether their orbits were as geometrical, unchangeable, and as subject to laws as his own, or as absolutely erratic as they superficially appeared.”1 Comets are again used to register the elusive nature of other minds in The Woodlanders (1887), when Grace Melbury watches Giles Winterborne die and observes that “his soul seemed to be passing through the universe of ideas like a comet; erratic, inapprehensible, untraceable.”2 In Two on a Tower (1882) we are told that after Swithin St. Cleeve leaves England for the southern hemisphere, “Viviette . . . sank, like the North Star, lower and lower” in his consciousness (262). And we see the similarities between observing stars and people explored in depth in the early chapters of The Return of the Native (1878), where Hardy uses the bonfires lit for Guy Fawkes Day to recreate the night sky—complete with stars, moons, and planets—on the surface of the darkening earth, thereby introducing us to the network of regard that will characterize the rest of the novel. The astronomical techniques that Hardy uses in his novels suggest that studying how the mind negotiates between sensory and theoretical knowledge can shed light on the complicated process by which we gain

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knowledge of other minds. On the one hand, he uses comparisons between observing stars and observing human beings to highlight some of the sensory obstacles to knowing with any certainty the content of other minds: one’s persistent perception of one’s own centrality, and the contrast between the absence of sensory evidence of the interior lives of others and one’s vivid perception of one’s own. On the other hand, his scenes of stargazing show such obstacles being overcome, as the mind of the observer travels into the stellar universe, beyond the constraints of an embodied subject position. Hardy’s preoccupation with our capacity to register the inner lives of others is a familiar topic for Hardy scholars.3 But his lifelong fascination with astronomy and the hundreds of references to celestial phenomena in his literary works are only now beginning to receive attention, most notably with the 2007 publication of Pamela Gossin’s Thomas Hardy’s Novel Universe: Astronomy, Cosmology, and Gender in the Post-Darwinian World.4 Looking at the two preoccupations together crystallizes a set of mutually illuminating concerns: Hardy’s interests in astronomy, in optics and human perception, and in philosophical questions of how we can know anything of other minds when we have no sensory experience of what it is like to inhabit them.5 In this chapter I build on Gossin’s work to show how Hardy uses the tensions between what we see and what we know in astronomy to create a system of relations between characters. Astronomical systems made up of planets and stars in motion provide Hardy with a model for the structure of interpenetrating minds that Hillis Miller shows to be so central to the Victorian novel. The chapter begins by looking at the developments in astronomy and optics that most interested Hardy: the shift from studying the solar system to exploring the vast and largely empty stellar universe; the new understanding of stars as constantly changing, tumultuous bodies that eventually die out; and the techniques in spectroscopy that began to be applied to celestial bodies in the 1860s. Hardy is similar to both De Quincey and Tennyson in perceiving astronomy to be characterized by marked discrepancies between what one can see when one looks up at the night sky and what astronomers know about the universe’s actual structure. Hardy is particularly alert to how nineteenth-century studies in optics are beginning to explain the physiological reasons behind these discrepancies. The chapter turns from showing the connection between astronomy and optics in Hardy’s time to identifying two different ways in which Hardy brings astronomy into his literary works: he compares observing celestial bodies to observing other

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people, and he creates scenes of stargazing or disembodied mental travel into the stars, in which the limits of earthly perception are temporarily suspended. It ends with the claim that by looking at the ways in which Hardy’s characters oscillate back and forth between different types of knowledge in the contemplation of celestial objects, we can better understand the techniques he uses to wrest his readers out of their bodies and into mental journeys of their own, a topic which the final chapter of this book treats in more depth.

Victorian Astronomy in Eye and Mind While many Victorian writers followed the developments in astronomy detailed in periodicals, newspapers, public lectures, and popular treatises, Hardy was unusual in the extent to which he incorporated astronomy into his literary works—second, perhaps, only to Tennyson. References to astronomy appear in his novels and poems as early as 1866 and continue well into the 1920s. He first read about astronomy as a boy, in John M. Moffatt’s The Boy’s Book of Science (1833) and in The Popular Educator, a magazine for autodidacts, which included articles on astronomy, the telescope, optics, and the biography of a self-taught astronomer.6 As an adult, Hardy read a number of works by Richard A. Proctor, a popular writer and lecturer on astronomy, including Essays on Astronomy (1872) (which Hardy owned), Other Worlds Than Ours (1870), and The Poetry of Astronomy (1881).7 Two on a Tower provides Hardy’s clearest articulation of what drew him to the astronomy of his day.8 The novel focuses on the life of an ambitious young astronomer, Swithin St. Cleeve, who studies variable stars, joins the 1882 expedition to see the transit of Venus, and aspires to be “the new Copernicus” of stellar astronomy (32). The novel opens when the beautiful but lonely Viviette Constantine explores her absent husband’s estate and discovers that the aspiring astronomer has set up an observatory on top of an abandoned tower. Swithin offers to teach her about astronomy and over the course of several “nocturnal reconnoitre[s],” the two fall in love (219). The early chapters of Two on a Tower show Swithin introducing Viviette to the study of astronomy. These meditations on astronomy present Hardy’s views almost in lecture form. On an astronomical level, Swithin highlights the emptiness of interstellar space and radical new accounts of the stars as

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variable, stormy, and in constant decay. On a sensory level, he underscores the discrepancies between how the universe has always presented itself to human eyes—even the learned eyes of earlier astronomers—and what recent astronomers now understand about its actual structure. Swithin explains that nineteenth-century astronomy has dramatically revised earlier conceptions of the stars. He emphasizes that the stars themselves are subject to evolution, beginning as clouds of nebulous matter and ultimately destined to be extinguished. “For all the wonder of these everlasting stars, eternal spheres, and what not,” Swithin explains, “they are not everlasting, they are not eternal; they burn out like candles” (34). The stars thus come to be seen as a crucial part of a single evolutionary process that encompasses astronomy, geology, and biology: nebulous bodies of gas turn into systems of stars and planets, including the earth; the earth itself evolves over millions of years; and eventually the earth develops forms of organic life. Gossin puts it beautifully when she writes that Hardy impels his readers to ask, “how it is that beneath an astronomical sky, filled with evolving and decaying stars, upon this actively geological planet, biological beings should ever have evolved consciousness of our own evolution and mortality” (116–17). The sun similarly is in perpetual upheaval, its surface marked by sunspots, enormous prominences, and storms such as the “cyclone in the sun” that Swithin is observing when we first encounter him in the novel (8) (see Figure 24). Like Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Walter Pater, Hardy emphasizes the emptiness of the universe, the idea that rather than being contained by a sphere of stars, the universe is vast and diffuse. William Herschel had revealed how unevenly distributed through space the stars were, arranged in clusters separated by vast tracts of space. Like De Quincey, Hardy enjoys thinking through the parts of the universe that utterly elude human vision, even with the most powerful telescopes. Hardy notes that our solar system is one of millions of systems and is not even at the center of its own cluster of stars. In Swithin’s voice, he explains: “Until a person has thought out the stars and their interspaces he has hardly learnt that there are things much more terrible than monsters of shape; namely, monsters of magnitude without known shape. Such monsters are the voids and waste places of the sky. Look for instance at those pieces of darkness in the milky-way,” he went on, pointing with his finger to where the galaxy stretched across over their heads with the luminousness of a frosted web. “You see that dark opening in it near the Swan? There is a still more remarkable one south of the Equator, called the Coal Sack, as a sort of nickname that has a farcical force from its very inadequacy.” (33–4)

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Figure 24 A cyclone on the sun.

The Ptolemaic sphere of stars has since been replaced by a universe composed of “interspaces,” “voids and waste places.” While these “monsters of magnitude without known shape” cannot be seen, Hardy highlights the impulse to make that emptiness concrete and contained by comparing those dark tracts of space to something as domestic as a “Coal Sack” or as tangible as a “piece of darkness.” And yet such images are, Hardy reminds us, woefully inadequate to the task of describing these stretches of space. To study the starry universe, for Hardy, is to learn again and again that it has no single center and that it is a far less stable and uniform place than eighteenthcentury astronomers imagined. Hardy emphasizes the conflicts between theoretical accounts and human perception of the universe. Swithin uses his telescope to show Viviette a few of the millions of stars that had been invisible to earthly observers until recent decades, remarking that, “Whatever the stars were made for, they were not made to please our eyes” (32). After optically taking her to “that

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(at other times) invisible multitude in the back rows of the celestial theatre—remote layers of constellations whose shapes were new and singular,” Swithin goes on to confess: I often experience a kind of fear of the sky after sitting in the observing chair a long time. . . . And when I walk home afterwards I also fear it, for what I know is there but cannot see, as one naturally fears the presence of a vast formless something that only reveals a very little of itself. (63)

No matter how ardently an observer believes that the earth is revolving around the sun, he or she continues to see the sun rise and set over a stationary earth. The study of astronomy throws into relief the difference between all Swithin knows about the structure of the universe “but cannot see” and the canopy of stars he does see when, walking home at night, he looks up at the night sky. Hardy’s characterization of astronomy as governed by such contradictions echoes the remarks from John Herschel’s 1833 Treatise on Astronomy that I discuss in the introduction to this book. Like Hardy, Herschel emphasizes the conflicts between the apparent and the real in astronomy: Almost all its conclusions stand in open and striking contradiction with those of superficial and vulgar observation, and with what appears to every one . . . the most positive evidence of his senses. Thus, the earth on which he stands . . . is divested by the astronomer of its attribute of fixity, and conceived by him as turning swiftly on its centre, and at the same time moving onwards through space with great rapidity. (2)

Herschel precedes Hardy not only in pointing out these differences between the astronomer’s knowledge and “ordinary apprehension,” but in his appeal to physiological characteristics of the human visual system to explain our systematic misperceptions of the heavens. It is here where Hardy’s interest in the science of astronomy overlaps with his interest in optics. As we saw in Chapter 1, many of the most important writers on optics in the nineteenth century—David Brewster, Hermann von Helmholtz, and John Herschel—also wrote about astronomy and astronomical instruments; to study the stars and build telescopes, one had to be able to understand and correct for the workings of the eye. Hardy was aware of the advances made in optics over the course of the nineteenth century.9 The Popular Educator, which he studied as a young man, contained nine lessons on optics and the behavior of light, describing the perception of

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distance, size, and stereoscopic vision (393–6) as well as the workings of telescopes from Galileo to William Herschel (361–3). Of all the writers in this study, Hardy is the one who most consistently applies the optical distortions found in astronomy to the relations between other people, so it is worth rehearsing them once again. First, at great distances, almost all the techniques we use to perceive relative distance break down. Beyond a range of about two hundred yards, the human visual system cannot judge distance through stereoscopic vision. Vision flattens out the stars into a sphere in which all the stars appear to be equidistant from the earth. Second, without external indicators, we find it impossible to distinguish between our own motion and the motion of the object we are observing. John Herschel discusses this problem by reference to our perception that the sun, moon, and stars revolve around the earth, and shows that it is similarly problematic in an open space such as an uninterrupted ocean (16–20). Finally, our vision is organized in such a way that the observer always appears to be at the center of things, with the rest of the world extending out from him. Writers on optics place the observer at the center of the apprehensible world, and refer to the field of vision as a circle divided up into 360 degrees (see, for instance, Herschel 21–2). These three aspects of visual perception combine to give the impression that the earth is at the center of the universe and that the stars act as a spherical container for that universe. The perception that the stars are all equidistant from the earth and organized around it in a dome or a sphere is compounded by the fact that the fixed stars seem to circle the earth as a group. Like De Quincey, Hardy goes well beyond most scientific writers in thinking about how the mind moves between sensory and theoretical versions of the universe and in teasing out the intellectual implications of the contradictions found in astronomy. Herschel, for instance, characterizes the everyday perception of the earth, sun, moon, and stars as an impediment to knowledge that the reader must discard in order to learn about the actual universe. But Herschel’s primary goal in his Treatise is to educate his reader about astronomy rather than to reflect on how the mind negotiates between sensory and theoretical knowledge. Hardy, by contrast, wants to explore that negotiation. As soon as one asks, “What do the contradictions found in astronomy reveal about how we perceive ourselves and others?” rather than “What is the universe really like?” astronomy becomes a valuable resource for studying our apprehension of the outside world, including other people. While such distinctions between the goals of astronomers and novelists can

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be useful starting points for investigation, there were of course exceptions, and considerable variations within each profession. In Science, Time, and Space in the Periodical Press, for instance, James Mussell contrasts the approaches of periodicals such as the English Mechanic, which “giv[es] readers access to the text and therefore the means of constructing truths within the textual field,” and “The Observatory [which] carefully regulates and controls access to the text,” aligning “itself with the Royal Astronomical Society as the source of astronomical authority.”10 Mussell shows that astronomers and writers on astronomy differed dramatically from one another in the extent to which they were comfortable with embracing openness or wanted to circumscribe access to knowledge.11 As he uses the new astronomy to reimagine our awareness of other minds, Hardy may even arrive at a model of consciousness at variance with the one implicit in Herschel’s own assertions that theoretical ideas can completely override the senses. After citing the contradictions found in astronomy, Herschel claims that the human mind, once it has been educated, can easily discard the sensory information it continues to take in: “There is hardly any thing which sets in a stronger light the inherent power of truth over the mind of man . . . than the perfect readiness with which all these conclusions are assented to as soon as their evidence is clearly apprehended, and the tenacious hold they acquire over our belief when once admitted” (8–9). Once we learn that we are not actually central to the world or that our fellow beings have consciousnesses as rich and detailed as our own, Herschel suggests, those ideas take permanent, “tenacious hold” of our minds. But in Hardy’s model of consciousness, such facts or beliefs are far more tenuously—and temporarily—held. Hardy applies the idea that theoretical knowledge comes and goes to how we apprehend the consciousnesses of beings other than ourselves. While sometimes, Hardy suggests, other beings do become vividly present to our minds, at other times they barely register.

Observing Stars and Persons Hardy uses a variety of literary techniques to bring the perceptual challenges posed by astronomy into everyday human experience. He suggests that the difficulties we face in accurately perceiving celestial bodies have a profound connection to the problem of gaining access to other minds.12 One such

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technique is the analogy between viewing a distant celestial body and viewing another person. This comparison appears repeatedly in his novels.13 In the title of this chapter, I use the phrase “the astronomy of other minds” in order to think about how observing the stars and thinking about other people can be compared to each other.14 While Hardy uses this analogy repeatedly, it is not an obvious one, for two reasons. First, observing a star is primarily a physical act. Though looking at a distant star strains the visual faculties to their limits, it still uses vision to study something material, to learn about its physical constitution or its position in space. While observing another person is physical in the sense that it involves looking at a person’s face, gestures, or behavior, the primary goal tends to be finding out what is going on inside that person, emotionally or psychologically rather than physically.15 We look to perceive something fundamentally invisible, an act of literal observation that melts mysteriously into a figurative kind of seeing. The second difference between these two types of observation involves the kind of distance between the observer and the object observed. While stars are literally distant from the earth, the inner lives of others are figuratively distant—inaccessible, difficult to take in—but the people observed are often just a few feet away. Remember Grace Melbury in The Woodlanders standing right beside Giles Winterborne and thinking that “his soul seemed to be passing through the universe of ideas like a comet; erratic, inapprehensible, untraceable” (380). Giles’s physical proximity is juxtaposed with his mental distance from Grace, which will soon become the distance between life and death. Given these differences, what is the force of the comparison for Hardy? It is by foregrounding the similarities between observing the stars and gaining access to other minds that Hardy explores some of the conditions of perception that he most wants his readers to notice. Both activities involve an attempt to access something that is inaccessible. Both involve a type of looking or observing. And yet both also require that one ignore the input of the senses—in particular, they require one to disregard the persistent perception of one’s own centrality. Astronomers must struggle against their abiding impression that the earth is at the center of the universe. And imagining other minds requires a similar refusal to believe the senses, which tell each of us that the physical world is organized around our own bodies and that we are the only ones with rich consciousnesses. The Return of the Native, published four years before Two on a Tower, contains Hardy’s first sustained analysis of the conditions of perception that

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govern astronomical observation. In the early chapters of the novel, Hardy uses the bonfires lit for Guy Fawkes Day to recreate the night sky on the surface of Egdon Heath. He repeatedly describes these bonfires as stars, planets, moons, or suns. This scene presents a model for the relations between the characters in The Return of the Native as a whole, and sets up the interweaving perspectives that will characterize the rest of the novel. In this way, these early chapters contain the whole novel in miniature form. They prepare us for a narrative about an enclosed community marked by a network of regard that fluctuates between intense vigilance (on the part of Diggory Venn, for instance) and deathly lapses in attention (as when Clym’s exhaustion results in the accidental death of his estranged mother). By bringing the night sky down to the surface of the heath, Hardy draws a parallel between the immense distances involved in astronomical observation and the mental distances between individual characters. It is one of the peculiarities of the concave landscape of Egdon Heath that its inhabitants can see across large distances and keep an eye on one another’s activities; Eustacia Vye often uses her telescope to observe other people. First we see the group of villagers constructing a pile of furze to fuel their own blaze, and then our eyes are turned outward, to all the other conflagrations: While the men and lads were building the pile, a change took place in the mass of shade which denoted the distant landscape. Red suns and tufts of fire one by one began to arise, flecking the whole country round. They were the bonfires of other parishes and hamlets that were engaged in the same sort of commemoration.16

From the point of view of the villagers, the bonfires rise like celestial bodies, “red suns and tufts of fire,” glowing against a featureless dark sky. As the lights of the bonfires grow, the rest of the heath is plunged into darkness. The land becomes invisible, akin to the dark reaches of outer space between the stars: It seemed as if the bonfire-makers were standing in some radiant upper storey of the world, detached from and independent of the dark stretches below. The heath down there was now a vast abyss, and no longer a continuation of what they stood on; for their eyes, adapted to the blaze, could see nothing of the deep beyond its influence. (66)

The heath is featureless except for the patterns of isolated lights, giving the bonfire makers a profound sense of being disconnected from the earth

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around them. Hardy transforms solid earth into empty space, “a vast abyss” that renders the other bonfires apparently inaccessible. Hardy identifies many similarities between observing these bonfires and observing celestial bodies. He depicts Eustacia Vye studying a distant light on the heath with her telescope. The fires appear as glowing lights unattached to the land, so that like an astronomer, these earthly observers must determine the fires’ locations by their relative positions and angles rather than by context: Perhaps as many as thirty bonfires could be counted within the whole bounds of the district; and as the hour may be told on a clock-face when the figures themselves are invisible, so did the men recognize the locality of each fire by its angle and direction, though nothing of the scenery could be viewed. (66)

The visual information each observer can gather is limited; only each fire’s “locality” remains apprehensible. This is an optical locality rather than an actual one. The judgment of a fire’s position by virtue of its relation to others, measured “by angle and direction” is a form of parallax that directly resembles the way human beings judge the relative positions of stars or other people. Hardy underscores various other ways in which these bonfires possess the visual qualities of planets and stars. Like the sun and the moon, they appear to “arise” out of the darkness. Their atmospheres diffuse their light much as the earth’s refracts the rays of the sun: “Some were distant, and stood in a dense atmosphere, so that bundles of pale strawlike beams radiated around them in the shape of a fan” (66). Others possess “steady unaltering eyes like planets,” which do not twinkle like stars (79). The observers are confounded by the astronomer’s problem of distinguishing whether a star is bright because of its proximity or simply because of its actual magnitude. Here the closest fires glow bigger and brighter than distant ones because they are nearby: “Some were large and near, glowing scarlet-red from the shade” (66). From the villagers’ point of view, Eustacia’s blaze is “the nearest of any, the moon of the whole shining throng. Its nearness was such that, notwithstanding its actual smallness, its glow infinitely transcended theirs” (79). Hardy foregrounds the difficulty of distinguishing between distance and proximity by juxtaposing the bonfire’s large appearance with its “actual smallness.” To Timothy Fairway, Eustacia’s fire appears much closer than it really is. When he exclaims, “how near that fire is!” Granfer Cantle corrects him: “That fire is not much less than a mile off, for all that ’a seems so near”

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(79). Thus the bonfires on the heath recreate the difficulties of perceiving depth between celestial bodies in space. This scene is a classic example of the analogy between the structure of a novel populated by characters and a sky patterned with suns, moons, and planets. In an expanse of dark, the bonfires serve as visual landing places for the reader (as well as for other characters). In an analogous fashion, the main characters become mental landing places for the reader as well, who begins to track the movements and experiences of seven or eight characters over the course of the early chapters. The bonfire scene provides Hardy with a model for a system of relationships that is marked off in space but dynamic and highly complex. These characters—the reddleman, Granfer Cantle, the villagers, Eustacia Vye, and Damon Wildeve—exist in a state of interdependence, observing one another from afar with a paradoxical sense of proximity and separation. Each point of view presents a pattern of light and dark that resembles the night sky. The narrator floats above, looking down upon the heath as if from the viewpoint of a star at some moments, and sinking down to observe the action from the surface of the earth at others. By traveling in and out of the minds of different characters, the narrator reveals what each one can and cannot see, charting tugs of attention between one blaze and another. Hardy thus presents a set of people located in one place while observing a constellation of others. They only possess rudimentary information about each bonfire: the brightness of the blaze, its color, and where one might guess that it is located in an expanse of darkness. It is a model for the conditions of knowing other people. For a model of knowledge that transcends straightforward visual perception, Hardy invokes the recently invented technique of spectroscopy, the spectral analysis of starlight.17 The observers engage in a metaphorical form of spectroscopy, determining what fuels each bonfire by studying the type of light it emits: Attentive observation of their brightness, colour, and length of existence would have revealed the quality of the material burnt; and through that, to some extent the natural produce of the district in which each bonfire was situate. The clear, kingly effulgence that had characterized the majority expressed a heath and furze country like their own, which in one direction extended an unlimited number of miles: the rapid flares and extinctions at other points of the compass showed the lightest of fuel—straw, beanstalks, and the usual waste from arable land. The most enduring of all—steady unaltering eyes like planets—signified wood, such as hazelbranches, thorn-faggots, and stout billots. (78–9)

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Spectroscopy comes to embody a strange form of knowledge in this passage, a way in which an observer can learn about a distant object, like a star, that is visible but physically inaccessible. The development of spectroscopy was one of the most exciting innovations of nineteenth-century astronomy. In 1835 Auguste Comte had claimed that while scientists would probably one day be able to measure the motion and magnitude of the stars, “we can never know anything of their chemical composition or mineralogical structure.”18 But by the 1860s the spectral analysis of starlight had already proved Comte wrong by allowing astronomers to determine that remote stars were made up of some of the same chemical elements found on earth.19 Until that time, the study of the stars had been restricted by the scope of human vision and its extensions through optical instruments like the telescope. In The Return of the Native, spectroscopy stands in for a kind of knowledge that relies on vision to go beyond what the eye can actually see. In the strange concave space of the heath, characters can study one another and gather extraordinary amounts of information. The extended scene of different observers intensely watching other bonfires and gauging the positions and compositions of each from their respective standpoints acts as a model for the story that will follow. And yet the distances that separate each from each can never be bridged completely. For Hardy, spectroscopy stands in for a state in which rapt attention to someone is coupled with a helplessness before the events that befall that person. The novel as a whole involves a set of characters who bear witness to the experiences of others but often are unable to prevent their suffering. The reader’s position also combines intensive attentiveness with an inability to intervene. What sets the bonfire scene apart from later scenes is that it juxtaposes such a range of perspectives at a time when most of the action of the novel is suspended. Before plunging his readers into the main events of the novel, Hardy reveals the conditions of observation to which each character is subject. As about thirty bonfires appear, one by one, on the heath, the reader watches from several vantage points: first from the Rainbarrow, then from the reddleman’s van, then from the Quiet Woman Inn, and then from Eustacia’s bonfire. By juxtaposing close and distant views of a single scene, Hardy reveals the rich details that are lost when observing from a distance.20 From afar all that can be seen of a scene in which Eustacia waits anxiously for Wildeve as a little boy feeds “knotty boles of old thorn trees” (109) into the fire is the glow of “the little bonfire over Mistover Knap” (102). Like

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an orrery, this early scene gives the reader a three-dimensional model of relations by which to understand the complex set of relations and vantage points that will follow. Once this scene ends, the parallactic movement of characters begins. Each observer (to whom the reader temporarily becomes attached and then detaches from) comes with a set of optical conditions based on his or her position. These conditions display all the components of stellar parallax: crisscrossing sightlines, foregrounds and backgrounds, standpoints and inaccessible objects about which we want to know more. The analogies between looking at stars and looking at others are sustained throughout the novel. After Clym and Eustacia embark on what is sure to be a disastrous marriage, Hardy uses the image of orbiting double stars to account for the strange effect the relationship has on their perception, comparing them to “those double stars which revolve round and round each other, and from a distance appear to be one” (299). In this case, the relation involves both a powerful gravitation between the two and blindness to the rest of the universe, so that all each sees is the other and “the heath and changes of weather were quite blotted out from their eyes for the present” (299). The narrator describes a “luminous mist” surrounding the two, imagery that resembles the glowing gases of nebulae (299). Later in the novel the distance between the two lovers is registered by the fact that Eustacia only learns that Clym has left their former home when she happens to see her old household possessions being carted across the heath as she scans the landscape with her telescope. Hardy’s comparisons between stars and people show that perception at close range and at a distance both have consistent properties to be studied and understood. One advantage of expressing this imbalance in astronomical terms is that the universe presents Hardy with a model for the capacities and incapacities of the human mind to pay attention—a model that separates moral questions from questions of perception. While even the most ardent stargazer can only obtain a momentary perception of the stars, that inability is typically seen as an intellectual problem rather than a moral one. The inability to attend to another person, however, is often thought of as a moral failure. For Hardy, then, the stars provide a morally neutral example of the perceptual reasons behind the fact that a person can take up one’s entire universe one week and fade into irrelevance the next. The moral dimensions of perception are especially important in Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891). The ease with which one can harm another simply by

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failing to take in enough information about him or her is part of what characterizes the world of the novel as a “blighted” rather than a “sound” planet (70). When Tess worries about her ruined reputation, the narrator notes what Tess does not realize: that “she was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself” (141). Hardy uses a metaphoric vocabulary of stars to explore this problem throughout the novel. Love is again presented in terms of double stars, each of which dominates the other’s world. The growing love between Angel and Tess is described as “the gravitation of the two into one,” an event that has “changed the pivot of the universe for their two natures” (210). Tess’s feelings for Angel “enveloped her as a photosphere” (260). But more often in this novel stars are used to express the failure of one person to register another. When Tess and Angel marry, the other inhabitants of the church produce no effect on Tess: “They were at stellar distances from her present world” (279). After Tess alienates Angel by telling him about the child she had by Alec, she notices “what a weak thing her presence must have become to him” (301); having once been his center of gravity, she now exerts little force on him. The novel as a whole famously asks the question of how it is that Tess, a young woman of infinite goodness and generosity, finds herself bearing an illegitimate child, murdering the father of that child, and being hanged for the crime. In the moment before Alec rapes Tess, he looks down and regards her as nothing but “a pale nebulousness at his feet. . . . Everything else was blackness” (118–19). While she has passionately resisted him in earlier scenes, she and her resistance are reduced to a nebulous glow in the blackness of the night. In the introduction to this book, I described the scene just before Tess is raped in which the image of reflected moonlight registers the self-absorbed perspectives of Tess’s companions and their inability to save her from Alec. This scene recounts one crucial step in the series of events that later lead to Alec’s murder. As she is walking back to the farm one evening with a group of drunken villagers, Alec appears and offers Tess a ride home on his horse. She accepts reluctantly in order to escape her belligerent companions, and on the way he seduces or rapes her. Her decision to accept Alec’s help leads directly to her misfortunes. As Tess rides off with Alec, the apprehensive reader is stuck back in the point of view of the villagers. The narrator asks the reader to notice how the villagers interpret the behavior of the reflected moonlight on the grasses below them. The moonlight shines from behind, casting their shadows in

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front of them as they walk. Hardy presents this phenomenon simultaneously from the perspective of the narrator and from that of the pedestrians moving along the road: as they went there moved onward with them, around the shadow of each one’s head, a circle of opalized light, formed by the moon’s rays upon the glistening sheet of dew. Each pedestrian could see no halo but his or her own, which never deserted the head-shadow, whatever its vulgar unsteadiness might be; but adhered to it, and persistently beatified it; till the erratic motions seemed an inherent part of the irradiation. (113)

By weaving the point of view of the narrator together with those of the villagers, Hardy sets what the more objective narrator knows against what each villager sees. The narrator is conscious of the danger Tess is in while each of the villagers attends only to him- or herself. In this passage Hardy brings several of the perceptual challenges in astronomy down to the surface of the earth. First is the problem of the world appearing to organize itself around each individual viewer. To the drunken villagers, the reflection of the moon radiates out from “the shadow of each one’s head.” That apparent radiation is a function of how the moonlight is visually apprehended rather than anything objective about the moonlight itself. But the persistent impression of attachment is intensified by the fact that as each person moves, the moonlight follows. Even if he or she lurches to the left or the right, the “circle of opalized light” sticks to the head-shadow, adding to the impression that the attachment between halo and head-shadow is an “inherent” one. Each therefore imagines that there is something uniquely important about his or her head-shadow that attracts the halo of light. The narrator stands apart from this misperception, noting that “each pedestrian could see no halo but his or her own” and characterizing the drunken villagers’ movement as “vulgar unsteadiness.” Hardy’s observation here is a physiologically accurate account of the way light behaves in astronomical observation, organizing itself around its source and appearing to move with the movement of the observer. In and of itself, this phenomenon is morally neutral, but applied to a human character within a literary framework, the phenomenon takes on moral implications: the villagers, by being unable to transcend their own perceptual standpoints, put Tess in grave danger. The viewers see themselves as saintly; they take the reflections to be haloes and themselves to be “beatified” by the moonlight. The physiological and psychological circumstances that lead to such

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perceptions are implicated in the events that follow: Tess has an unwanted child, is socially disgraced, and is abandoned by Angel. In formal terms, Hardy uses free indirect discourse to set up this dual vantage in which the perspectives of the narrator and characters are woven almost seamlessly together. This technique allows the reader simultaneously to see that the moonlight follows one’s own head-shadow, and also to understand this effect as merely optical. The effect both registers the self-absorbed villagers’ failure to protect Tess from Alec and shows us the sensory reasons behind that neglect. Even as Hardy creates a moral divide between the narrator and the pedestrians, he lets us feel how vivid the pedestrians’ impression of their own centrality is. In his first sentence the narrator states, “There moved onward with them,” granting the authority of the narrator’s third-person discourse to a false perception. “There moved” is the perspective of the characters masquerading as that of the narrator. The passage’s second sentence immediately rescinds that authority when it redescribes the real motion as merely an apparent motion, in the phrase “the erratic motions seemed. . . . ” A later image of celestial reflections on earthly surfaces employs free indirect discourse to create confusion between the visual results of one’s own motion and the observation of the motion of external things. This passage likewise involves mistaking one’s own motion for a motion that belongs to the optical effects of reflection. The scene involves a state of desperate sadness and a consequent inability to see outside of one’s subject position. Years have passed since the previous passage. On the night after her wedding to Angel Clare, Tess tells her new husband about the secrets of her past life and the child she gave birth to after being raped by Alec. Angel is furious and rejects her. Devastated, Tess decides to return to her parents’ home. On the way she notices the reflection of the stars in tiny puddles on the road. Hardy calls on his readers to set what they know of Tess’s goodness against Angel’s underestimation of her. We find her walking along the road in a state of preoccupation and despair and then are given the following description: The cow and horse tracks in the road were full of water, the rain having been enough to charge them, but not to wash them away. Across these minute pools the reflected stars flitted in quick transit as she passed; she would not have known they were shining overhead if she had not seen them there—the vastest things in the universe imaged in objects so mean. (301)

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Tess’s deep despair is registered in her posture, as she walks along staring at the ground. Once again Hardy uses free indirect discourse to set what the narrator sees against Tess’s subjective impressions. The first sentence belongs to the narrator, who thinks about what natural circumstances must have occurred to enable this particular optical situation: tiny puddles filled with rainwater but not washed away. But the next sentence dips into Tess’s consciousness, containing something that is only subjectively accurate—the flitting of the reflected stars “in quick transit as she passed.” Tess is mistaking her own real motion for the apparent motion of the stars across the puddles. To one schooled in astronomy, as Hardy was, the word “transit” would be associated with the movement of a star across the crosshairs of a telescope. The puddles made by cows’ and horses’ hooves are like the tiny apertures of telescopes, with a severely restricted visual range, momentarily registering the presence of passing stars. With this image Hardy calls attention to the peculiarity of the fact that our vision enables a reflection of the stars—“the vastest things in the universe”—to be contained in a puddle created by a horse’s hoof. These tiny puddles create a frame that allows one to see the relative apparent size of star and puddle and to set that perception against the knowledge of how different their actual sizes are. The narrator knows very well that it is not the stars that are moving; that is Tess’s point of view. Again, free indirect discourse enables Hardy to twist these two dueling perspectives invisibly together so the reader has access to both at once.

Stargazing and Mental Mobility If the scenes I have been discussing highlight a specific set of obstacles to perceiving other people, Hardy’s scenes of stargazing and mental travel into outer space tell the other side of the story: how the limits of an embodied viewpoint can be surpassed, at least temporarily. In “The Difficulty of Imagining Other Persons,” Elaine Scarry proposes two ways in which we can achieve mental equality between ourselves and others: first, by granting other minds “the same weight” as one’s own mind appears to have; and second, by “giving to oneself the same weightlessness that others have” (50). In the previous section I looked at moments in which characters attempt— and often fail—to grant others mental lives as rich as their own. In this section I want to turn to the related topic of stargazing, which can be thought of as

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endowing oneself with a weightlessness equivalent to the weightlessness others have in our minds. In Hardy’s scenes of stargazing, individual characters are granted a weightlessness and mobility that usually only the narrator possesses. Yet while most of the time the narrator moves through the space of the novel with his eyes turned toward the surface of the earth, these characters remain rooted to the ground as they look up at the sky. In order to understand how stargazing works in Hardy, we need to pay attention to how the mind manages to override incoming sensory information such as the earth’s apparent centrality, the flattening out of the stars into a sphere, or the relative paucity of detail we can observe in a distant star. Stargazing paradoxically uses the senses to glean something that is fundamentally not visible, such as the distance between two stars or the structure of the universe as a whole. As I have suggested, this act of using vision to reach something that the eyes cannot reach also occurs in the act of observing another person and trying to understand what is going on in his or her mind. Hardy’s accounts of stargazing can be read as releases from the constraints of an embodied subject position.21 These moments once again involve a complex collaboration between the senses and the mind, a turning of the mind away from the thick sensory detail of earthly life toward a perceptual experience that uses visual information as a jumping-off point for the imagination. These visual—and visionary—journeys into outer space appear throughout Hardy’s literary works, beginning with the 1866 poem “In Vision I Roamed.” Hardy is fascinated with mental travel, with what in A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) he terms the “luxuriant growth” of the mind into spaces that elude the body.22 He describes such travel as a mental exercise that requires forgetting about one’s actual surroundings and allowing the mind to move freely through space. The speaker of “In Vision I Roamed,” for instance, journeys into the stars “in vision,” vision here taking on a double meaning of both a sensory and a mystical experience: In vision I roamed the flashing Firmament, So fierce in blazon that the Night waxed wan, As though with awe at orbs of such ostent; And as I thought my spirit ranged on and on In footless traverse through ghast heights of sky, To the last chambers of the monstrous Dome, Where stars the brightest here are lost to the eye.

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His “traverse” through the sky is “footless,” disembodied, a journey of the consciousness alone. This speaker’s journey extends beyond what is visible from earth, leaving behind the stars that are “brightest here” on earth and traveling to the “last chambers” of the universe. At the same time, the wording Hardy uses to describe this universe does retain aspects of the sky’s earthly appearance: space remains a finite “Dome” and the sky contains “heights,” a word that retains a sense of orientation relative to the earth. Henry Knight in A Pair of Blue Eyes possesses the ability to fling his mind out to individual stars and to imagine the perspective each star has on the earth below it. He describes one “looking down upon the source of the Nile” and another, the North Star, having “no less than the whole equator for his horizon” (187). Tess first captures the attention of Angel by saying that one way to lose the sensation of being stuck in a human body “is to lie on the grass at night and look straight up at some big bright star; and by fixing your mind upon it, you will soon find that you are hundreds and hundreds o’ miles away from your body, which you don’t seem to want at all” (175). In each of these scenes, stargazing begins with an act of looking but then moves beyond what can be seen to an active imagining of elusive celestial bodies and vast tracts of space. The way that characters imaginatively position themselves in such scenes varies. In the case of Henry Knight, the viewer pulls out into space and turns back to look down upon the earth. In Tess’s case, we are reminded that her body lies there flat on the ground as her mind journeys upward, but she does not seem to want that body “at all.” In The Return of the Native Clym Yeobright gazes at the moon as he waits for the lunar eclipse: His eye travelled over the length and breadth of that distant country—over the Bay of Rainbows, the sombre Sea of Crises, the Ocean of Storms, the Lake of Dreams, the vast Walled Plains, and the wondrous Ring Mountains—till he almost felt himself to be voyaging bodily through its wild scenes, standing on its hollow hills, traversing its deserts, descending its vales and old sea bottoms, or mounting to the edges of its craters. (254)

Initially the passage begins with the reader picturing Clym, like Tess, lying flat on the ground, “his face towards the moon, which depicted a small image of herself in each of his eyes” (253). To invoke Elaine Scarry’s terms, the reader is instructed to imagine Clym’s solid, heavy, three-dimensional body by picturing a radiant two-dimensional reflection on each of his eyes.23 Once his eye travels to the moon, that celestial body rather than

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Figure 25 “Lunar Landscape, Ideal View.” This is Ame´de´e Guillemin’s image of the surrounding landscape as it might be seen by someone standing on the moon’s surface. His image is based on the writings, illustrations, and photographs of James Nasmyth.

the earth anchors Clym’s bodily orientation, as he feels himself “standing” on its surface. His viewpoint resembles those of the viewers of James Nasmyth’s fantastic photographs of plaster models of moonscapes (see Figure 25).24 This reverie occurs for “perhaps ten minutes” until Clym hears “a rustling on his left hand,” recognizes Eustacia, and the reader is pulled back to earth with a bump to feel Eustacia’s “figure . . . in his arms, and his lips on hers” (254). The extreme distances involved, and the speed of Clym’s mental travel, make the reader half aware of moving through the space of a literary text. Hardy achieves the contrast in distance by setting vision against the most proximate sense, touch. A strange combination of vision and touch can be found in a map of the moon from Hardy’s own book collection. His copy of Sir Richard Phillips’s The Wonder of the Heavens Displayed, in Twenty Lectures, contains a fold-out lunar map over which Hardy has written—in pencil—seventeenth-century names for the moon’s craters, seas, and marshes (see Figure 26). This was evidently something he did while preparing The Return of the Native, because Hardy incorporates six terms directly from the map and the

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Figure 26 A map of the moon from 1821, inscribed in pencil by Thomas Hardy as he was preparing The Return of the Native in the 1870s.

notes he took on the flyleaf, including Walled Plains, Ring Mountains, and the phrase “old sea bottoms.” The map fuses visual matter that can be best represented by a map with the tactile traces of Hardy’s own hands. Visually, the viewer is positioned either on earth or in a God’s-eye view, but the handwriting situates another reader close to the page, poring over the map of the moon and labeling it in a way that the novel contains only indirect

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traces of. Hillary Chute describes “handwriting as a gripping index of a material, subjective, situated body,” and the lunar map gives a vivid instance of two viewpoints—one far and one near—visually juxtaposed on a piece of paper.25 While scenes of stargazing are embedded in many poems and six of the novels, they occur repeatedly in Two on a Tower. Analogies between looking at stars and at other people are woven throughout this novel; Hardy uses the term “observations” to refer interchangeably to astronomical observation and to one character’s act of studying another (see, for example, 60 and 9).26 The word “reconnoitre” likewise is used both for astronomical observation (219) and for Viviette Constantine’s study of the sleeping Swithin (43). In describing Swithin and Viviette’s mental journeys into space, Hardy’s vocabulary is consistent with that of his earlier and later works: traversing, plunging, and traveling through space, roaming over yawning spaces and being in suspension amid them, bridging distances, and optically arriving at a star. Throughout Two on a Tower, Hardy carefully explores the conditions that enable an observer to travel out of his or her bodily constraints. In a passage I discussed in Chapter 1 with regard to its connection of the sensory and the theoretical, for instance, Swithin uses his telescope to guide Viviette step by step toward a less flattened vision of the sky: Then, by means of the instrument at hand, they travelled together from the earth to Uranus and the mysterious outskirts of the solar system; from the solar system to a star in the Swan, the nearest fixed star in the northern sky; from the star in the Swan to remoter stars; thence to the remotest visible, till the ghastly chasm which they had bridged by a fragile line of sight was realized by Lady Constantine. (32)

Hardy’s strategy in this passage is to recreate the process of imagining space and the collaboration between vision and theory that this process requires. Each arrival provides a conceptual stopping place from which the mind can then venture out once more. Viviette is asked to understand that the star in the Swan is much closer than “the remotest visible” star even if the distances are visually indistinguishable. The strange collaboration that stargazing involves between vision and the conceptual mind is clarified when visual access to the stellar universe is taken away. Early in Two on a Tower, Hardy describes “ten blurred and dreary days” of rain in which the sky is completely covered over (67). During these days, the universe appears to vanish and the stars become

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unreal, “theoretical”: “the sky was a zinc-coloured archivault of immovable cloud. It seemed as if the whole science of astronomy had never been real, and that the heavenly bodies with their motions were as theoretical as the lines and circles of a bygone mathematical problem” (67). The universe recedes and the sky appears vaulted and contained. Again we are reminded of the paradoxical relationship between vision and astronomy: that even though vision is an agent of profound distortion when it deals with celestial matters, astronomy depends completely on being able to view the starry sky. Viviette emerges from her voyage to the remotest star visible feeling a visual connection with that distant body. Though after ten days of clouds she feels as if “astronomy had never been real,” she is able, telescope at hand, to make the distance between her and the star real to herself by traveling there step by step. The accumulation of mental leaps enables Viviette to realize “the ghastly chasm which they had bridged by a fragile line of sight.” Part of the power of this image derives from the ratio Hardy sets up between the infinitesimal width of a line made of rays of light and that line’s extraordinary length—extending from a star millions of miles away to their earthly eyes. This juxtaposition of scales requires a peculiar flexibility of the mind, an ability to switch rapidly back and forth between the infinitesimal and the infinite. And yet what Viviette realizes is not only the physical connection between herself and the stars she observes, but also the fragility of that connection, the fragility of this category of visual experience. Hardy, I have argued, tends to emphasize the tenuousness, rather than the tenaciousness, of theoretical thought’s hold over the perceiving mind. This passage shows how that very tenuousness makes the act of imagining in Hardy a source of wonder. We are shown both the immense tracts of space that the mind can contain and the ease with which the act of imagining falters.27

Coaxing the World of the Novel into Being In much the same way that Swithin takes Viviette through the universe step by step, Hardy guides his readers through a series of mental leaps. There is an important difference between the two experiences, however: Viviette actively engages her senses, looking at the stars and then using a combination of what she sees above her and what she imagines to override the flattening out of her vision. The reader is neither helped nor hindered by

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sensory stimulus in his or her own mental journey, for a reader’s visual input is restricted to words on a page rather than distant stars or the dark spaces between them. The imaginative work that Viviette Constantine performs in conceiving of the vast spaces between herself and the star is analogous to the reader’s work in coaxing the world of the novel into being by attending to abstract marks on a page.28 These kinds of mental journeys involve a manipulation of sensory perception by the conceptual mind, so that the mind is able to see more than the eyes take in. The overwhelming sensory data of daily existence is left behind and the mind is able to expand outward and perceive things ordinarily outside the body’s scope. After Swithin has taken Viviette into the stars, the narrator explains how it is that the distant stars have managed to register so vividly in her consciousness: At night, when human discords and harmonies are hushed, in a general sense, for the greater part of twelve hours, there is nothing to moderate the blow with which the infinitely great, the stellar universe, strikes down upon the infinitely little, the mind of the beholder. (64)

We can think of these “human discords and harmonies” as the influx of sensory information that obstructs visionary travel into the stars—or other minds. In Far From the Madding Crowd, written eight years earlier, Hardy similarly links the obstruction of sense data to a freeing up of the mind. In one scene, Gabriel Oak stands at the highest point in Wessex, on Norcombe Hill, and lets his mind travel into the stars. The narrator explains the “necessary” conditions for having such an experience: The poetry of motion is a phrase much in use, and to enjoy the epic form of that gratification it is necessary to stand on a hill at a small hour of the night, and, having first expanded with a sense of difference from the mass of civilized mankind, who are dreamwrapt and disregardful of all such proceedings at this time, long and quietly watch your stately progress through the stars. After such a nocturnal reconnoitre it is hard to get back to earth, and to believe that the consciousness of such majestic speeding is derived from a tiny human frame. (12)

In this visionary state, the stargazer embarks on an imaginary journey into the universe. The phrase “poetry of motion” commonly referred to dancing at the time, and the “epic form” of such motion is travel into space. Hardy describes an expansion out of the self, a “majestic speeding” through space so vivid that the viewer comes to see himself traveling. This, then, is a particularly vivid example of stargazing not only as a release from the body

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but also as a release from one’s subject position. Gabriel’s journey demonstrates the agility and flexibility of the conceptual mind when freed from earthly stimuli. The word “reconnoitre” here gives some hint of the epistemological implications of this type of journey. Hardy uses the peculiar phrase “nocturnal reconnoitre” twice; first here in Far from the Madding Crowd (12), and then again eight years later, in Two on a Tower (219). A reconnoiter is a visual journey, a survey of territory, figuratively suggesting that the eyes can take one into space. Yet the word has additional connotations from the French of re-knowing or recognizing, coming to know again what one has already known, which point to a problem that fascinates Hardy: how we can know something at one moment and fail to register it at another. In this sense, the “reconnoitre” can be read as a reconception, or realization, of something already known: that the earth is not the center of the universe, that other people have rich consciousnesses. It will always take a concerted effort to conceive of the universe’s actual structure or of the mental life of another person. In order to conceive of the universe in theory we must unlearn the sensory information that our daily view of the sky provides. The implication is that what we think of as stable knowledge can only be grasped temporarily and needs to be learned or realized again and again. Such knowledge does not, in fact, possess what Herschel refers to as a “tenacious hold” on the mind (3). Hardy’s depiction of consciousness suggests, in contrast, that much of what we know is often not present to our minds, particularly when it is contradicted by persistent sensory perceptions. In Hardy’s scenes of stargazing, the ability to release oneself from one’s subject position is analyzed as both a cognitive and a moral activity. The moral decisions Hardy’s characters make depend largely on their abilities to register the minds of creatures other than themselves. In the cases of both Gabriel Oak and Tess, the capacity to travel mentally into the stars corresponds to a capacity to see the world from other people’s perspectives. In Scarry’s terms, the ability to achieve weightlessness is linked to the ability to grant other minds “the same weight as one’s own” (50). We learn of Gabriel Oak that “among the multitude of interests by which he was surrounded, those which affected his personal well-being were not the most absorbing and important in his eyes. Oak meditatively looked upon the horizon of circumstances without any special regard to his own standpoint in the midst” (226).

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This ability to give others the same weight as oneself fascinates Hardy; he endows a number of his other characters with this disregard for their own standpoint, including Tess, The Woodlanders’ Giles Winterborne, and The Return of the Native’s Diggory Venn. We generally do not see them learn these skills. In the cases of Gabriel and Diggory Venn, we immediately see both characters in acts of caretaking that go hand in hand with acute observational skills and practices.29 We learn of Gabriel’s ability to tell time by the stars and Tess’s practice of gazing at a star as things that are simply part of their mental capacities, and in each case their perceptual capacities are linked to a highly attuned moral sensibility. Unlike Hardy’s characters, some of whom simply start by knowing how to transcend their bodily constraints, Hardy’s readers are trained to do so by the process of reading his literary works. Scenes of mental travel model the act of reading as a mode of release from the body. A reader often sits in solitude and, turning his or her attention away from the pressing concerns of the tangible world, engages in an activity that is primarily conceptual.30 Hardy compels his readers to journey into the viewpoints of other (fictional) people. Such journeys offer a relief from the restrictions of the self and of one’s embodied sensory perspective. For the reader, like the stargazer, is able to travel mentally out into the world, albeit an imaginary one. Hardy creates a space in which the reader, freed from bodily constraints, can practice a perceptual flexibility without having to confront the obstacles that the observation of celestial bodies lays bare. The reader is the quintessential traveler into other minds. I have been suggesting that the journeys into space that Hardy’s stargazers undergo are analogous to the mental travel he requires of his own readers: travel out of their own subject positions into foreign landscapes, situations, and minds. As we will see in more detail in Chapter 6, the strange chorus of spirits that Hardy invents to oversee the action of The Dynasts is the most extreme instance of this kind of mental travel in Hardy’s writing. This “epic-drama,” written late in Hardy’s career, is the culmination of his fascination with taking his reader through rapid and disorienting shifts between near and far and back again. It covers ten years of the Napoleonic wars, from 1805 to 1815, as they occur across the whole of Europe. The work, he explains in the preface, is “intended simply for mental performance, and not for the stage”; the action should be performed in the mind of the reader (p. x). On one level, the chorus’s function recalls that of the narrators in Hardy’s novels; like his narrators, the chorus moves weightlessly

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through the space of the narrative, attending to action on the surface of the earth. But Hardy does not grant the chorus access to the minds of his characters, and he pushes both the speed with which it travels and the space that it inhabits to new limits. The movements of the chorus yoke together Hardy’s interests in astronomical observation, views from a distance, mental travel, and the position of the reader. Hardy uses the shifts in position that the chorus undergoes to create vertiginous visual journeys like those of his stargazers, but in this case the object of observation is the surface of the planet Earth rather than a distant star. The Dynasts begins and ends with the chorus of spirits inhabiting the so-called “Overworld,” which stretches into space as far as “earth-invisible suns” (522). These experiments in which a literary character physically takes on a view from outer space rarely happen in Victorian realist novels. In the classic multiplot novels of the nineteenth century, Newtonian laws of gravitation must ordinarily be obeyed, and most characters remain on the surface of the earth. Such perspectival experiments are much more common in poetry, epic, and science fiction. The chorus first observes the planet from the Overworld, then from high above Europe, and later from different spots on the surface of the earth: a ridge in Wessex, Nelson’s deathbed onboard the Victory, or the field of Austerlitz. The perspective shifts with the attention of this chorus of “Phantom Intelligences,” whose role is “but to register and watch / By means of this great gift accorded us— / The free trajection of our entities” (2). The “free trajection” of one’s entity here involves the ability to move weightlessly through the universe while observing what is going on. The skill of trajection approximates the mental travel of both the stargazer and the reader. While these spirits are sentient, observant, and located in time and space, they are not weighed down by material bodies or other physical constraints. This peculiar perspectival device allows Hardy to combine the sensory limitations of human vision with viewpoints that are literally astronomical, located high above the clouds. The chorus’s point of view moves from views high above the clouds to earthbound views of worms, birds’ nests, and “Brass-hued and opalescent bubbles” (251). Hardy’s elaborate stage directions specify the shifting positions of the phantasmal viewers in great detail. By speeding up transitions between celestial viewpoints and terrestrial close-ups, Hardy forces readers to attend to the ways in which distance and proximity shape perception. His imaginary viewer moves upwards through space so that “the city itself

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sinks to miniature, the Alps show afar as a white corrugation, the Adriatic and the Gulf of Genoa appear on this and on that hand . . . till clouds cover the panorama” (37). A distant view of “ships . . . small as moths” (81) zooms forward to a conversation on the deck of a single ship, and another scene, beginning from “high amongst the clouds” over Europe (352), later focuses in on “a flake of snow” (353). The strange genre of The Dynasts allows Hardy to push to an extreme the practice of juxtaposing panoramic and microscopic views of people, places, and events. While revealing the limitations of the human imagination, Hardy also alerts his reader to some of its strengths: the ability to move between points of view in The Return of the Native, between subjective and objective perspectives in passages like those in Tess, and between near and far in the case of The Dynasts. His narrative experiments illustrate the ways in which the imagination can move quickly between vastly different standpoints, inducing a kind of productive perplexity rather than epistemological breakdown. In this way, the mind’s capacity to move rapidly between subject positions outdoes its raw sensory capacity. One of Hardy’s contributions to the representation of consciousness is, I would suggest, not only to reveal its distortions but also to call attention to the human capacity to navigate swiftly among a range of contradictory positions. He does this not only by showing individual characters shifting abruptly from one scale to another but also by taking his readers imaginatively through that very experience. Hardy repeatedly makes us see analogies between the perceptual conditions that govern astronomical observation and those governing the everyday act of one person observing another from the distance of a separate consciousness. At what scale, he wonders, can we best understand the world around us?31 And from what perspective? The answer itself is relatively straightforward: we must see the world in as many scales as possible. But that answer is simpler than the means by which we gain access to such scales, such points of view. We are each of us stuck in our own bodies, with only our own eyes to see through; the scale in which we see is an embodied human one. For Hardy, the science of astronomy provides a rich resource for accessing a vast range of scales and perspectives. In his hands, literature becomes the astronomy of other minds.

5 George Eliot and the Sweep of the Senses

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n her final novel Daniel Deronda (1876), George Eliot suggests that whether we are astronomers, novelists, readers, or characters, we initially experience the world from the middle of it. We can never see the world from the outside looking in. Each person constitutes his or her own center and that center forms the basis of all knowledge that stretches beyond the bounds of the embodied self.1 Although one can inhabit worlds that extend far beyond the bounds of one’s body and one’s senses, it is crucial to pay attention to the way in which each person begins as a body positioned in space and time. To ignore this fact and to try to describe the world as if from a view from nowhere—removed from a particular spatial position—is inevitably to create a false view of the world. I will argue that the challenge Eliot sets herself in this novel in particular is to think first about how human beings build up a sense of the larger universe in relation to the embodied self, and second about how one moves mentally back and forth between radically different scales and textures of experience. By textures of experience, I mean experience attained through the most intimate senses of touch, taste, smell, and the sensation of one’s own body; those that come via the more distant senses of hearing and sight; and finally those ideas and theories that are not acquired through sense perception. As we have seen, Tennyson and Hardy frequently depict the world using the terms of parallax: perspectival sightlines, foreground, background, and shifts in position. With Eliot, by contrast, readers experience the visual qualities that result from the observer’s own position in terms of horizon or a radius of vision. She tends to imagine an individual character’s perception in terms of concentric circles of

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awareness that expand or contract. This pattern is evident in the language of breadth, scope, widening, and shrinking that she uses throughout her writing. In Daniel Deronda Eliot constantly invokes the starry universe and the vocabulary of heavens, firmaments, stars, orbiting planets, and horizons to think about the outer range of human experience: the parts of the universe that elude all the senses except for the vision, but to which the human mind with effort can extend itself. While we find allusions to the sun and stars throughout Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda is suffused with allusions to astronomy to a degree unprecedented in Eliot’s novels. This preoccupation is immediately evident from the “unceasing journey” of the stars in the novel’s first epigraph to the “little lot of stars belonging to one’s own homestead” that the narrator recommends as “the best introduction to astronomy,” and it is sustained throughout the novel.2 I want to begin this chapter with readings of two of Eliot’s best-known passages on astronomy in order to highlight how she moves her readers back and forth between the local and the abstract. Critics such as Neil Hertz and Gillian Beer have provided rich accounts of Eliot’s attention to intimate sensory details, while Amanda Anderson and George Levine have placed her in the context of cosmopolitanism, detachment, and “dying to know.” My focus here is on the specific narrative techniques Eliot uses to take her readers through this wide range of mental experience and how she uses the mental lives of her characters to reflect on what makes such movement possible. Eliot finds astronomy a helpful resource in part because the stellar universe, as we have by now seen many times, presses the senses and the imagination to the theoretical edges of the universe and pulls one away from the anchorage of an earthly body.3 In an 1841 letter Eliot describes her own experience of: reveling in [John Pringle] Nichol’s Architecture of the Heavens and Phenomena of the Solar System and in imagination winging my flight from system to system, from universe to universe, trying to conceive myself in such a position and with such a visual faculty as would enable me to enjoy what Young enumerates among the novelties of the ‘stranger’ man when he burst the shell, to “Behold an infinite of floating worlds / Divide the crystal waves of ether pure,/ In endless voyage without port.” [Edward Young “Night Thoughts”]4

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In this letter, Eliot actively engages her imagination in order to picture the scene of floating worlds or envision herself moving through space untethered, “In endless voyage without port.” This is the kind of thought experiment that we have seen writers like Tennyson and Hardy engage in repeatedly. But, as I will show, Eliot is unusual among these writers in thinking about how a human being grounded in a living body develops such a capacity for mental travel into the stars. More than other writers she explores how radically different categories of mental life are related to one another—how we move from considering the “tender bosom of the mother who nourished us” to abstract forms of thought like “astronomy” or “impartiality” (205, 22, 22). In the course of reflecting on the childhood that Gwendolen Harleth ought ideally to have had, Eliot gives her most explicit account of how the capacities for imagination and abstract thinking develop from the experience of “tender” attachment to a small patch of the world: A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of earth, for the labours men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge: a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection, and kindly acquaintance with all neighbours, even to the dogs and donkeys, may spread not by sentimental effort and reflection, but as a sweet habit of the blood. At five years old, mortals are not prepared to be citizens of the world, to be stimulated by abstract nouns, to soar above preference into impartiality; and that prejudice in favour of milk with which we blindly begin, is a type of the way body and soul must get nourished at least for a time. The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one’s own homestead. (22)

Eliot introduces a wide range of categories of experience here, categories that in ordinary life seem either to be opposed to each other (preference and impartiality) or to be utterly unrelated (a “prejudice in favour of milk” and astronomy). On one level, the narrator contrasts an adult viewpoint with that of a child: five-year-olds “are not prepared to be citizens of the world,” and while adults have the capacity to be “stimulated by abstract nouns,” infants can only be stimulated by milk. But on a larger level, Eliot is thinking through how these varied categories of mental life are connected to one another. She is exploring the connections between the intense early impressions of a child who knows little of the world and the breadth of perspective that the adult will later develop.5

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In this complex passage, then, Eliot creates a continuum between different categories that are only linked by the fact that a human mind can contain them all. She argues that tenderness, “affection,” and attachment to a physical home form the basis for later cognitive abilities, what she calls a “widening of knowledge” and abstraction. The image of rootedness evokes a stable, unmoving center at which the child first learns to feel attached to the world and a home. The mind is rooted to the body, while the body itself is metaphorically rooted to the surface of the earth. Eliot suggests that this kind of feeling of intimate connection to the world forms the basis for more abstract cognitive processes that enable us to conceive of ourselves as one part of a universe that is in constant motion—in which there is no point of rest. Eliot suggests that the ability to form a personal attachment to the world is linked not only to cognitive abilities but also to spiritual and empathetic capacities that enable one to reach out from the anchor of the self. This continuum works on both a spatial and sensory level. Spatially, a child develops from knowing its own body, its mother’s and a small “spot of a native land” to learning about the world and the universe, extending its mind all the way out to the farthest stretches of space found in “astronomy.” In sensory terms, this passage appeals to the most proximate senses (taste, touch, smell, and what Alexander Bain refers to as the “sixth sense” of internal or inner body sensations), the middle-range sense of hearing, and finally the sense with the largest spatial sweep, vision.6 In three sentences, Eliot yokes together sensory phenomena as disparate as “a sweet habit of the blood” (felt internally and described in terms of taste), milk, “sounds and accents,” “dogs and donkeys,” and stars. The “abstract nouns” she invokes include citizens, astronomy, and “abstract nouns” themselves. It is this close combination of the sensory and abstract that accounts for what I am calling the radically different textures of experience that Eliot sets out to capture.7 By recommending a scientifically inaccurate view of the universe as the best precursor to learning what the universe is actually like according to astronomers, Eliot implies that feeling that the stars belong to one, feeling attached to them, is initially more important than understanding the scientific relationship between oneself, the earth and the starry universe. This ideal introduction to astronomy involves a sensory perception of the stars as finite in number and contained in space, as a “little lot”—rather than as vast and infinite. It involves the belief that those stars are attached to “one’s own homestead” at what is perceived to be the center of the universe. The

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child should endow the stars with a personal connection to his or her home; the words “heavens” and “little lot” possess a human warmth that the word “astronomy,” with its connotations of scientific objectivity, lacks.8 The attitude that Eliot embraces dispenses entirely with scientific accuracy; the stars do not actually belong to the child. This recommendation appears particularly counterintuitive, because elsewhere Eliot often uses the perception that the earth is at the center of the universe as an analogy for the misguided egotism of such characters as Gwendolen Harleth, Rosamond Vincy, and even Edward Casaubon. Why would an inaccurate view of the relationship between the self and the rest of the universe be the best way to learn about astronomy? The answer is implicit in the epigraph that begins Daniel Deronda: erasing the particularity of one’s own position in representing the world distorts one’s description of the world more than acknowledging the fact that any thinking being is grounded in space and time. This epigraph, which was written by Eliot herself, famously raises the problem of the “make-believe of a beginning” and reminds us that we can only know the world from the middle of it. On a larger level it addresses the extent to which any observer, whether astronomer or novelist, shapes the world that he or she looks at.9 Even the strictest scientist measuring the movement of stars must engage in an act of pretense (arbitrarily choosing a zero point from which to measure the stars’ movement) in order to chart the universe: Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. Even Science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe unit, and must fix on a point in the stars’ unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that time is at Nought. His less accurate grandmother Poetry has always been understood to start in the middle; but on reflection it appears that her proceeding is not very different from his; since Science, too, reckons backwards as well as forwards, divides his unit into billions, and with his clock-finger at Nought really sets off in medias res. No retrospect will take us to the true beginning; and whether our prologue be in heaven or on earth, it is but a fraction of that all-presupposing fact with which our story sets out. (7)

If we pair this epigraph with the passage about the “best introduction to astronomy,” we can see that Eliot is making us aware of two different kinds of visions of the stars—both of which have limitations. In the first vision, they are seen as “a little lot of stars belonging to one’s own homestead”— when they are not in fact centered on the earth or on any spot of land. In the second vision, they are being measured and described by a strict scientist,

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who tends to erase the traces of his own work and “pretend” that the numbers he uses to measure the journeying stars correspond to some objective aspect of those stars. The second is the more deceptive, Eliot suggests, because it conceals the workings of the mind and the way in which the scientist is positioned in time, whereas the first is true to the way in which we come to know smaller or larger fractions of the world.10 This epigraph exists in a liminal space outside the action of the story that readers are poised to enter.11 It positions us with the astronomer making large-scale measurements of the stars as they appear to circle the earth. Positioned in space (on the earth’s surface) and time (the moment of observation), the astronomer has to invent a starting point in order to measure their motion. And yet that act of invention is not one we ordinarily associate with scientific objectivity; it often tends to be erased from scientific accounts of the world.12 In this passage, Eliot stresses the continuities between any kind of narrative, whether it is a story about the positions of the stars or of a man and a woman in a gaming parlor. Superficially, fiction is “less accurate” than science but “on reflection it appears that her proceeding is not very different from his.” In emphasizing the fact that both her own narratives and scientific narratives are actively made rather than passively discovered, Eliot wants us to see that all human knowledge involves but “a fraction” of the larger universe, and that the content of a narrative integrally depends on the position and decisions of the author. By casting “Science, the strict measurer” as male and “his less accurate grandmother Poetry” as female, Eliot conforms to the longstanding associations with science, objective knowledge and abstract thinking as male and literature, subjective knowledge and the literal as female that has been so well documented by critics such as Margaret Homans and Ludmilla Jordanova.13 But while reinforcing the gendering of these contrasting ways of thinking, Eliot suggests here that the two modes of thinking are more similar than we would expect, and questions the greater value that has been placed on scientific thought. The epigraph is just the first of several analogies between astronomers and novelists that occur over the course of the novel, part of an explicit discourse about the relationship between fiction and science that emphasizes the similarities rather than the differences between the two approaches to knowing the world. The reader encountering the first page of this novel is moved quickly through two distinct spaces, from the liminal space of the epigraph which is filled with journeying stars, clock-fingers, and reflections on Science and Poetry to a

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gaming table in a resort at Leubronn in which the central questions are whether Gwendolen will win at roulette and whether she is beautiful. This distant abstract space of stars in motion is the space in which the novel begins, and as we move from an astronomical to a human scale, these two settings create distinct attitudes in the reader, from thoughtful, measured reflection to a less deliberative immersion in the stories of Daniel and Gwendolen. While the first mode involves thinking about the effects of storytelling and about thinking itself, the second asks one to let oneself be carried more passively into the flow of narrative and human concerns, in a room filled with “gilt mouldings,” “human breath,” “bejewelled fingers,” and the “problematic sylph” that is Gwendolen Harleth (7, 7, 8, 10). In the pages that follow, I show that Eliot repeatedly invokes astronomy and the stars to explore the sweep of mental life from up close to the distant edges of the universe. I argue that astronomy functions on two separate but related levels: first, in her description of the mental lives of characters— including the Meyricks, Daniel, and Gwendolen—and second, on the larger level of her own narrative practices, as she makes her reader viscerally experience radical shifts in position, scale, and texture. Explicit reflections on narrative like the epigraph not only remind the reader that he or she lives in a vast universe of unceasingly moving stars, but also momentarily pull the reader away from the feeling of being attached to the lives of particular characters. Part of Eliot’s project is to place images of the starry universe directly adjacent to the stories of characters like Gwendolen, so that the reader feels the expansion and contraction of his or her own mental space. Even in the epigraph the question is one of relation between this largest manifestation of the material world and the individual observer. Scientists and novelists alike observe the world from an embodied perspective; the grounding in the self is both inescapable and important in a positive way.

Eliot’s Astronomy: Centrality, Scale, and Bodies in Motion Given Eliot’s career-long obsession with connections between fiction and science, it is worth asking why astronomy takes such a prevalent position in her final novel. It is a question few critics have asked. One important exception is Sally Shuttleworth, who includes an illuminating account of astronomy in her chapter on Daniel Deronda, but as the focus of her study is

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organicism, Shuttleworth limits her treatment of astronomy to a rich three pages that allude to many astronomical references in the novel.14 Other writers on science in Eliot have largely ignored the presence of astronomy in Eliot’s writing, tending to focus more on the influence of Darwin and the interactions between free will and environment that play such a crucial role in Middlemarch, for instance.15 George Eliot was well versed in contemporary astronomy. She read two books on astronomy by John Pringle Nichol in 1841 and recommended his works on astronomy as “a rich treat,” particularly noting his image of “hospitable infinity.”16 She also read John Herschel’s Outlines of Astronomy, and, when she lived with George Henry Lewes, acquired several other books on astronomy. Her notebooks show that she consulted several of them as she wrote this novel, noting down information about the eighteenth-century astronomer Charles Messier as well as citations from Bernard de Bouvier Fontenelle’s popular seventeenth-century book on astronomy, The Plurality of Worlds.17 Eliot used one of Fontenelle’s playful remarks about whether or not the discovery that the earth moved round the sun should make human beings more humble as the epigraph for Chapter 6 of Daniel Deronda. Alexander von Humboldt’s five-volume Kosmos, which Eliot and Lewes owned in both German and English, begins with a comprehensive account of contemporary astronomy from dark spaces in the universe named coal sacks to nebulae to variable stars. As we have seen, Robert Chambers’ 1847 Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which Eliot and Lewes owned, begins with an evolutionary account of the solar system before turning to the formation of the earth and then of biological life. Finally, a major source of Eliot’s knowledge was simply the frequent essays on astronomy that appeared in the publications with which she and Lewes were associated. During Eliot’s time as editor and contributor to the Westminster Review from 1850 on, for instance, that periodical alone published numerous articles on astronomy, such as Herbert Spencer’s “Recent Astronomy, and the Nebular Hypothesis” in 1858, Samuel Brown’s discussion of theories of atomism, and reviews of recent work on spectroscopy, the sun, and the nebulae by writers such as Alexander von Humboldt, Norman Lockyer, or John Herschel. The Cornhill included countless articles on planets, star-showers, “Seedbearing Meteors,” and transits of Venus, while Fraser’s Magazine published regular essays by Richard A. Proctor on upcoming eclipses, comets, and the solar corona. The Saturday Review published pieces on distinguished scientific men, such as “Lockyer’s Solar

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Physics” and “Tyndall on Light” throughout the 1860s and 1870s. Eliot was intimately connected with a whole set of writers on science in general and astronomy in particular. By stepping back to compare the ways in which Hardy and Eliot draw on astronomy as a resource for their multiplot novels, we can better see what aspects of the science appeal to the imagination of each writer. Both Hardy and Eliot rely on the analogy between an individual character’s tendency to see him- or herself as central to the world and the perception that the earth is the center of the universe. As we saw in Chapter 4, in many of his novels Hardy uses the challenges that observing celestial bodies present to the astronomer to reveal the optical roots of what becomes a moral problem of failing to register the fullness of another person’s existence. He repeatedly uses characters’ observations of individual celestial bodies to shed light on the difficulty of knowing other minds. By contrast, individual celestial bodies are rarely central to Eliot’s invocations of astronomy. Instead, Eliot’s analysis of egotism in individual characters is frequently linked to the perception that the universe is organized around the earth, as we will see in her treatment of the Marchioness in Fontenelle’s Plurality of Worlds. Like Tennyson, Hardy often thinks in terms of lines of sight, and is apt to move a reader rapidly toward or away from a celestial body. Eliot’s astronomical imagination tends to be more circular than linear—thinking in terms of complex overlapping orbits of stars, planets, and moons that she instructs her reader to picture at once, while Tennyson and Hardy are often more precise about what J. Hillis Miller terms the reader’s “optical placement.”18 In her famous passage from Middlemarch on the “pier-glass,” a mirror situated between two windows, Eliot contrasts the arbitrary organization of scratches on a polished mirror with the way in which they appear to organize themselves around a candle placed next to them. In this passage’s reference to the candle as a “sun,” we see evidence of the analogy between the apparent centrality of persons and the apparent centrality of the earth: Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. (297)

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While the object Eliot uses to drive home this point about the delusion of centrality is emphatically sublunary—a pier-glass—the diction here is astronomical, involving the “little sun” that the candle becomes and the “series of concentric circles” that surround the candle’s reflection. These concentric circles are themselves reminiscent of the system of concentric spheres organized around the earth that the ancient astronomer Ptolemy (AD 85–165) developed to explain the apparent motion of the sun, moon, and stars. In her image of the pier-glass, Eliot attributes moral significance to the “optical selection” that the candle causes, setting objective or impartial randomness against subjective human perception. The scratches are demonstrably “going everywhere impartially,” but the candle “produces the flattering illusion” that they organize themselves around the observer. One is clearly correct, and the other clearly an illusion. Eliot ends this passage by linking that illusion explicitly to “egoism”: “These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent—of Miss Vincy, for example” (297). The inability to get past that optical perception is portrayed as a moral deficiency in Rosamond. Similarly, in the early chapters of Daniel Deronda, Eliot repeatedly calls attention to Gwendolen’s “egoism” or “egoistic desire” and links her egoism to the astronomical perception that the earth is the center of the cosmos (50, 41).19 Like Hardy, Eliot uses both microscopic and astronomical imagery to set everyday conceptions of things out there against alternative perceptual realms that present a radically different view of human actions and the structure of the world. Microscopes and telescopes have a number of characteristics in common that make them interesting objects of contemplation for a novelist obsessed, as Eliot is, with the problem of how our modes of visual perception shape what we are able to know of the world. Both instruments are agents of magnification, using a combination of lenses and mirrors to increase the size of what is looked at while vastly reducing the visual field. Using both instruments involves shifts in scale that radically change the appearance of what one observes.20 They are instruments that introduce a disconnect between the world as it is ordinarily seen and the way a scientist sees it. Twentieth-century philosopher Wilfrid Sellars’ distinction between what he calls the “manifest image” and the “scientific image” of man-in-the-world throws into relief the ways in which Eliot draws on astronomy and microscopy to show how dramatically the scale at which we observe an event shapes what we see.21 In Science, Perception and Reality, Sellars sets a normal, common-sense view of the world against a

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scientific one. He argues that while these versions may differ radically, they should be “joined to” each other in order to approach a complete understanding of the world (40). One example he gives is of the difference between a man as he appears “in sophisticated common sense” and “a man as he appears to the theoretical physicist—a swirl of physical particles, forces, and fields” (20). Every scientist, Sellars suggests, presents a version of the world that differs from and yet must be “joined to” the everyday conception of the world. Sellars’ distinction applies equally to the microscope and the telescope, for both instruments set a normal, commonsense view of the world (based on everyday perceptions) against what science tells us about that world. In Middlemarch, Eliot writes that in order to experience the world fully, “a man’s mind must be continually expanding and shrinking between the whole human horizon and the horizon of an object-glass” (690). Both instruments provide the experience of such expansion and shrinking, as the observer mentally shifts back and forth from one scale to another. Astronomy and microscopy are alike in the extent to which they reveal all that follows from working in a specific scale. But unlike microscopy, astronomy enables both Hardy and Eliot to study perspective from a distance, and how the mind incorporates embodied perceptions with abstract thought. Eliot’s use of astronomy departs most dramatically from Hardy’s in the abiding interest in systems of multiple bodies in motion that we find in her epigraphs: the “unceasing” journey of the stars, and the orbits of planets, whether it is the “visible arc in the wanderer’s orbit” or the invisible pathways that the astronomer must deduce. She places Daniel Deronda in particular within a large-scale setting of empty space filled with wheeling bodies that can only be studied from particular locations situated within those systems. In Space and the “March of Mind”: Literature and the Physical Sciences in Britain 1815–1850, Alice Jenkins asks her readers to consider midnineteenth-century field theories as “ways of exploring the effects that bodies in space have on other bodies around them”; these theories provide, she argues, “another useful means of describing interrelations between elements in the complex systems of novels.”22 Her brief discussion of Middlemarch and Mill on the Floss as involving societies “made up of force” is highly suggestive. It helps us to see how the Victorian critique of the bounded, unitary subject extended to scientific fields beyond Darwinian evolution and naturalism. She writes:

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As well as an organic web we can see Middlemarch as a field in which people—to adapt Faraday’s argument in “Thoughts on Ray-vibrations”—are not bounded, self-contained units operating in neutral space but extend as far as their influence does, creating the space of the town as they move within it. (205)

Eliot’s use of astronomy in Daniel Deronda similarly involves systems of bodies operating on an astronomical scale, as her early epigraphs lead the reader to expect. Jenkins helps to explain Eliot’s interest in circles of awareness rather than lines of sight. Eliot more frequently imagines relations between characters in terms of radiating forces such as gravity and magnetism, rather than through the linear language of optical placement.

Astronomy and Mental Scope in the Inner Lives of Characters Eliot’s view of the universe as a system in which any representation or narrative of the external world is fundamentally shaped by the person who observes and describes it is key to understanding how novels work to describe the world: they are centered on one or several specific characters around whom that world is oriented. The way that individuals understand their unique relationships to that system is an aspect of inner life that she explores in especial depth in Daniel Deronda. The wide sweep of space that this novel includes—from London and the area around where Gwendolen lives to Leubronn and the Mediterranean and Genoa and Jerusalem— provides a larger context for the “small” and “narrow” lives of certain corners of that world. Throughout the novel, moreover, from its very first words, Eliot incorporates the much vaster space of the astronomical universe, from “the stars’ unceasing journey” to the “farthest firmament” (7, 205). Eliot repeatedly asks what the relationship is and should be between the individual self and the larger universe with its vast spaces and unceasing motions of bodies. How does the mind both attach itself to the world and also release itself from a too self-centered attachment? One of the key ways that Eliot explores this question is by juxtaposing the mental dispositions of different characters. Again, Eliot often thinks about what I am calling the range of human experience in explicitly spatial terms, using the vocabulary of narrowness or width, shrinking and expansion, horizon, worlds, and universes

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to describe the mental lives of her characters.23 She uses spatial language to evoke the relationship between an individual self and the rest of the universe; the self remains a kind of center from which the mind or sensory organs stretch outward. Eliot’s exploration of the mental universe, of mental breadth or narrowness, refers not only to intellectual thought, but also to a certain breadth of mind that includes spiritual feeling, attachment and romantic love. While this spatial language for mental range is part of ordinary language—it is common to talk of broadening one’s horizons metaphorically—the spatial vocabulary Eliot uses is unusually pronounced in Daniel Deronda, and I believe it is part of a problem she is working through about the relationship between attachment to the world and travel outside the bounds of the self. These are philosophical problems in some hands, but it is crucial that she works them through in the form of a novel, where a reader is not only attached to individual characters but also stretched well beyond the spatial bounds that those characters inhabit. Different modes of observing the stars act as a litmus test for how specific characters see themselves in relation to a larger universe. Over the course of the novel we are presented with a wide range of ways of looking at and responding to the stars, from the Meyrick family to Daniel, Gwendolen, Mordecai, Joseph Kalonymos, and Daniel’s late grandfather Charisi. As we have seen, early in the novel Eliot bemoans the fact that Gwendolen never had a home where “body and soul” could initially “get nourished” (22). When Eliot later introduces the home of the Meyrick family at the beginning of Chapter 18, Eliot presents her readers with a positive instance of how attachment to a home and thinking of “the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one’s own homestead” should ideally work (22). In the London townhouse where Mrs. Meyrick lives with her three daughters they consistently view the constellation “of the Great Bear seen from the back windows” as actually attached to their window (196). The Meyricks’ home acts as an ideal breeding place for knowledge, breadth of mind, and moral feeling; here both “body and soul” are “nourished” in the way that Eliot earlier pronounces that they should be (22). Its inhabitants are deeply attached to their home: they all clung to this particular house in a row because its interior was filled with objects always in the same places, which, for the mother held memories of her marriage time, and for the young ones seemed as necessary and uncriticised a part of their world as the stars of the Great Bear seen from the back windows. (196)

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Although from the outside the house appears “very narrow and shabby,” the minds of its inhabitants are “like mediaeval houses with unexpected recesses and openings from this into that, flights of steps and sudden outlooks” (197). Though identical to the others in the row, this house possesses a special significance for the Meyricks, which singles it out for them, again reflecting the prescription of the earlier passage in which a human life “may get the love of tender kinship . . . for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge” (22). This sense of attachment involves objects that have been “always in the same places” from the point of view of the girls, objects that hold “memories of her marriage time” for Mrs. Meyrick. While the term rootedness does not specifically appear in this passage, these objects are clearly “inwrought with affection” (22), a phrase that links physical to emotional stability. Eliot emphasizes both the inaccuracy and the value of this stability by comparing the household to stellar objects: the home’s fixtures seem “as necessary and uncriticised a part of their world as the stars of the Great Bear seen from the back windows” (196). The girls’ uncritical view of the Great Bear is a concrete instance of what Eliot earlier describes as viewing the heavens as “a little lot of stars belonging to one’s own homestead.” The frame of the back windows through which the constellation is seen gives this lot of stars a spatial stability, a rootedness, that makes it familiar and recognizable. It is an image that would appear on a celestial globe, with the stars that make up this constellation flattened out by being seen from the surface of the earth, turned into a bear. The constellation of the Great Bear or Ursa Major, which includes the seven stars often known as the Big Dipper, is just degrees away from Polaris, the North Star, and is therefore visible for most of the year in the northern hemisphere. This group of stars is thus a carefully chosen image of fixity and stability amidst the otherwise constantly shifting stars. Eliot, then, instead of critiquing “uncriticised” assumptions, sees at least some of them as both necessary and beneficial. There is something in the Meyricks’ inaccurate sense of regularity that enables the mind to take in not only intellectual, but also moral and spiritual knowledge. The passage goes on to associate this deep attachment to a home with a “wide-glancing” life: Mrs. Meyrick had borne much stint of other matters that she might be able to keep some engravings specially cherished by her husband; and the narrow spaces of wall held a world-history in scenes and heads which the children had early learned by

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heart. The chairs and tables were also old friends preferred to new. But in these two little parlours with no furniture that a broker would have cared to cheapen except the prints and piano, there was space and apparatus for a wide-glancing, nicelyselect life, open to the highest things in music, painting, and poetry. (196–7)

With asides such as this one in which the narrator steps back and comments on the lives of the characters, Eliot lets her readers feel the difference between taking a distanced, analytical stance toward the novel and immersing themselves uncritically in the flow of the narrative, as if the characters belonged to them. Eliot explores the way in which a rich sweep of mental life is attained in much more detail through the characters of Daniel and Gwendolen, both of whom lack the advantage of a secure home and parenthood that the Meyrick children have. Eliot analyzes the spatial characteristics of inner life by juxtaposing Gwendolen and Daniel, showing the conditions that give birth to their respective ways of thinking, and finally marking the changes that occur in each character over the course of the novel. Here too gender plays an important role; the male character possesses the kind of “theoretic” mind that Dorothea exhibits in Middlemarch, a mind that wants “to see the stars by daylight,” while Gwendolen’s initial egotism, her lack of mental breadth, is connected in part to the limited options she faces as a refined beauty with no money. The novel involves a critique of both the limits of an untethered diffusiveness and a too self-centered narrowness. It sets out to capture a model of experience that eludes such categories and reaches toward the spiritual, the moral, and a type of romantic love that combines the two. While the Meyricks function as an ideal model of how the growth from tender attachment to a home to wider knowledge and impartiality should work, Daniel and Gwendolen emerge as models of people for whom this mental development has not occurred in the way that Eliot considers ideal (22). Daniel and Gwendolen embody two modes of conceiving of the self spatially in relation to the universe that Eliot initially appears to set in opposition to each other, but in fact both lack a crucial part of mental life. Daniel is untethered and has to learn to attach himself both to himself and to the world, while Gwendolen is too dependent on a limited sense of self, so attached to the human scale in which she appears central and feels in control that she “shrinks” from contemplating wide spaces and mentally extending herself into the larger universe.

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Daniel’s character plays a key role in illustrating the lack of the type of connection that provides “the best introduction to astronomy” (22). His inner life initially tends toward an excessive objectivity that is both too abstract and too diffuse. The spatial language that Eliot uses to describe his conundrum reveals that he suffers from a lack of attachment akin to Gwendolen’s, even though the effect of this lack of attachment results in trying to erase his own perspective, rather than in seeing himself as the center of the universe: His early-wakened sensibility and reflectiveness had developed into a many-sided sympathy, which threatened to hinder any persistent course of action . . . His imagination had so wrought itself to the habit of seeing things as they probably appeared to others, that a strong partisanship, unless it were against an immediate oppression, had become an insincerity for him. His plenteous, flexible sympathy had ended by falling into one current with that reflective analysis which tends to neutralise sympathy. (364)

Eliot suggests that a sympathy that is too “plenteous,” too “flexible,” ends up being ineffective—“neutralised.”24 Daniel lacks “partisanship” and spends so much time “seeing things as they probably appeared to others” that his own perspective dissolves. We can think back here to the astronomer wanting to measure the “unceasing journey of the stars” who must choose an arbitrary zero point—insert himself into the equation—in order to measure anything at all. Daniel is initially paralyzed by his ability to take on a subject position so different from his own. His sympathetic abilities need somehow to be compressed and directed: A too reflective and diffusive sympathy was in danger of paralysing in him that indignation against wrong and that selectness of fellowship which are the conditions of moral force. . . . what he most longed for was either some external event, or some inward light, that would urge him into a definite line of action, and compress his wandering energy. (364–5)

Daniel’s story is partly a narrative of self-discovery and spiritual awakening. He begins with an inner wound that centers on not knowing who his parents are and fearing that he is an illegitimate son of Sir Hugo. His ignorance of his parentage is described as a “sore that had opened in him,” “a grief within,” and Daniel “shrinks” from any inquiry into who his parents were—which is, in effect, an inquiry into who he is (171, 174). Ultimately his friendship with Mordecai and the discovery that he is also a

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Jew provides him with a sense of spiritual direction that grounds the untethered sympathy with which he begins the novel.25 After his mother reveals that he is Jewish and from a line of learned Zionists, he finally “beh[olds] the world changed for him by the certitude of ties” (683). But these ties—including the decision to marry Mirah rather than Gwendolen—involve doing harm as well as good; Eliot carefully presents Daniel’s consciousness of refusing to care for Gwendolen in part as a way of making him choose one form of sympathy over another. Eliot analyzes both characters’ mental constraints in terms of how they think about and respond to the stars. The stars impel Daniel to reach outside of his own subject position, to take on a kind of mental standpoint associated with aperspectival objectivity—what Lorraine Daston describes as “stepping back” or “climb[ing] outside of our own minds.”26 Eliot invokes the stars as an invitation to climb out of one’s own spatial position and sensory constraints in two scenes: one that describes Daniel and another that describes his late grandfather, Charisi. In the first scene, Daniel settles himself in “a perfectly solitary spot” on the river bank and contemplates the stars as the sun sets. He sits where he can “watch out the light of sunset and the opening of that bead-roll which some oriental poet describes as God’s call to the little stars, who each answer, ‘Here I am’” (189). Eliot describes Daniel’s “identification” with the stars that he looks at: [H]e had a great breadth of water before him reflecting the glory of the sky, while he himself was in shadow. He lay with his hands behind his head propped on a level with the boat’s edge, so that he could see all around him, but could not be seen by any one at a few yards’ distance; and for a long while he never turned his eyes from the view right in front of him. (189)

Like Mordecai, who will not appear until later in the novel, Daniel craves the prospect of wide physical spaces and uses them to expand his own mind. The scene before him presents him with an uninterrupted expanse of sky and erases his own presence from the picture. As the narration continues, we learn that this tendency toward self-erasure characterizes his thought process as well: He was forgetting everything else in a half-speculative, half-involuntary identification of himself with the objects he was looking at, thinking how far it might be possible habitually to shift his centre till his own personality would be no less outside him than the landscape. (189)

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As he watches the stars, Daniel identifies with them, climbing out of his own subject position, and attaining a centerlessness that we would associate with objectivity. This is not a view from nowhere; it is instead a view from many somewheres that transcends a particular point of view. He reels his mind out from his embodied perspective to take on other subject positions. As the passage continues, he aspires “habitually to shift his centre” until he has erased any particular attachment to his own point of view. This mental exercise of decentering the self involves a meditative attempt at selfremoval, an attempt to take on multiple subject positions, without weighing his own perspective more than that of any other point of view. Eliot underscores this tendency of Daniel’s repeatedly, telling us that his “imagination had . . . wrought itself to the habit of seeing things as they probably appeared to others”; or having him explain to his mother that he has been trying “for fifteen years . . . to have some understanding of those who differ from myself” (364, 630). As a young man he has a desire for knowledge of things outside of his own range of experience: a “love of universal history,” an “inward bent towards comprehension and thoroughness,” and an “eager[ness] to know how time had been filled up since the Flood, and how things were carried on in the dull periods” (180, 179, 164). Daniel’s search for knowledge constantly propels him outside of the constraints of his own vision and bodily position. And yet, as I have been suggesting, the impulse to completely erase the self is one that Eliot regards with suspicion. She celebrates capacious thought and harshly criticizes forms of egotism and selfabsorption, but the novel criticizes extreme forms of detachment as well, both through Daniel’s yearning for something to attach his interests to and through the terrifying analysis of “indifference” epitomized by the figure of Malinger Grandcourt. Joseph Kalonymos likewise uses the stars to distinguish between different ways of apprehending the world—ways which again either are “satisfied” with an individual perspective or resist such a constraint (724). After Daniel meets his unknown mother and discovers his Jewish heritage, Kalonymos is the one who tells him about the late grandfather that Daniel so evidently resembles. When Daniel asks if his grandfather’s knowledge was “narrow,” Kalonymos responds by contrasting his own way of taking in the starry sky with the more searching approach of Charisi: “Narrow? no. . . . Charisi thought continually of our people’s future: he went with all his soul into that part of our religion: I, not. . . . Young man, when I am in the

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East, I lie much on deck and watch the greater stars. The sight of them satisfies me. I know them as they rise, and hunger not to know more. Charisi was satisfied with no sight, but pieced it out with what had been before and what would come after.” (724)

Kalonymos invokes two contrasting ways of looking at the starry sky in order to make a distinction between those who are satisfied with what they can see from their own subject position and those who always yearn for greater knowledge. Kalonymos’s own way of looking at the stars is primarily a sensory one; he is satisfied by what he can see of them at any given moment in time and position in space. Eliot uses the sky as a model for temporal extension here, equating “what had been before and what would come after” with the parts of the sky that are occluded by the turning earth at any given time. This image of the visible and invisible swaths of sky resonates with the epigraph to Chapter 9 where Eliot compares the “narrator of human actions” to an “astronomer” who traces the “visible and invisible history” of a planet or a star (164). Charisi’s dissatisfaction with the mere “sight” of the stars and his desire to know “what had been before and what would come after” is associated with the objectivity that Daniel exhibits, a desire to climb out of his own mind, to invoke Daston’s terms. This is a type of capacious knowledge that extends beyond what is available to the senses. Spatial comprehensiveness—knowing more of the stars’ pathways than can be seen at one time—is linked to temporal comprehensiveness, thinking of “our people’s future” (724). In the case of Charisi, this type of larger knowledge is associated not only with objectivity and scientific curiosity but also with spiritual insight. Charisi, like the Zionist visionary Mordecai, devoted himself to the future of the Jews; he combines intellectual curiosity and spiritual conviction. Eliot likewise explores Gwendolen’s interior life by depicting her perceptions of the starry sky, showing her fearful reaction to the “little astronomy” taught to her at school and her superstitious tendency to see “the evening star shine at us with a threat” (64, 329). Gwendolen’s egotism initially repels the reader, but her susceptibility to terror suggests an underlying trauma that may be responsible for her “narrow” inner life (149). Eliot is silent about the source of Gwendolen’s fear, but obliquely connects it to her absent father; we learn that after being rebuked by her mother early in her life, and Gwendolen had “never since dared ask a question about her father,” that he “died by an accident” and was replaced by an “unlovable

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step-father” who sold his own wife’s jewels (24, 75, 24).27 As we will see, the widening of Gwendolen’s mind, her own “introduction to astronomy” and to the larger movements of the world, occurs through trauma rather than through early nourishment. Gwendolen’s mental tendencies involve an actual dread or fear of astronomy that is directly linked to the light it shines on her own relationship to the rest of the world, the way it upsets her persistent impression “that whatever surrounded her was somehow specially for her” (804). Eliot suggests that Gwendolen’s egotism can be traced back to a paucity of possible relations that Gwendolen imagines being able to have with the universe. The alternatives that seem available are either having no attachment to the world whatsoever, seeming like “an exile,” or feeling absolutely central to that world by shutting out the larger cosmos (64). After Gwendolen nearly faints at the sudden unveiling of a morbid picture, the narrator steps back from the scene to explain her reaction in terms of wide scenes, vastness, and astronomy: Solitude in any wide scene impressed her with an undefined feeling of immeasurable existence aloof from her, in the midst of which she was helplessly incapable of asserting herself. The little astronomy taught her at school used sometimes to set her imagination at work in a way that made her tremble: but always when some one joined her she recovered her indifference to the vastness in which she seemed an exile; she found again her usual world in which her will was of some avail[.] (63–4)

Gwendolen’s astronomical terror stems from several lessons she learns from the sky: that there is an “immeasurable existence aloof from her”; that within a larger scale she is in fact “helplessly incapable of asserting herself”; and that there is a “vastness in which she seemed an exile.” Each of these fears involves a lack of attachment to the world. She resists the more disturbing aspects of what astronomy has to teach by limiting herself to a local, human scale, where she can still feel herself to be central. The insertion of astronomy into an account of Gwendolen’s inner life is surprising if not startling. What is astronomy doing in this passage? Eliot suggests that the lessons to be learned in astronomy are ones that work on the imagination in powerfully transformative ways. Here Gwendolen resembles Daniel, Mordecai, and Daniel’s grandfather Charisi in intuiting that the sky and the starry universe have something profound to teach her. Where she differs from them is in her resistance to such knowledge, for astronomy sets “her imagination at work in a way that made her tremble.”

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The narrator writes of her “recovering her indifference” as if indifference were a protection against powerful forces in the world—or in oneself. One of the projects of this novel is to explore the ways in which people respond to aspects of life that elude both vision and control. On a superficial level, a passage like this highlights Gwendolen’s egotism and her reluctance to develop a radius of vision. And yet it is important that Gwendolen’s anxiety comes not from a lack of feeling, but from a fear of feeling too much and a subsequent desire to regain control of her own inner states. Daniel Deronda contains a theory of how people develop mental capaciousness, a developmental theory that ascribes Gwendolen’s sense of the two alternatives (being central or being an exile) to her circumstances as well as to her character. When she is alone Gwendolen becomes aware of an “existence aloof from her,” and yet immediately afterwards we are told that “this fountain of awe within her had not found its way into connection with the religion taught her or with any human relations” (63). The dread she experiences is a force that appears, Eliot suggests, particularly strong when connected neither to spiritual life nor to human attachment. The narrow range of opportunities for attachment available to Gwendolen can be attributed to the mismatch between her own sense of importance and, on the other hand, the range of possibilities available to a beautiful respectable girl without money whose expected fate is to marry well. Thus rather than ascribing Gwendolen’s fear of astronomy to pure egotism, I would suggest that Eliot is analyzing the impulse that makes Gwendolen shrink from that awareness of her own relative smallness in the world. The “widening of knowledge” that Eliot’s characters undergo can either occur as a natural, pleasant opening up (as we assume has happened with the Meyricks because of their attachment to their home and the Great Bear outside their window) or as a violent wrenching (22). Gwendolen’s embodied focus on her self and her fear of astronomy derive from the analogy between a human being’s consistent sensory perception of his or her own centrality and the fact that the earth appears to be the center of the universe. Both illusions result, it will be remembered, from the form of the human visual system, which places the observer at the center of the visual field. Eliot’s reference to Fontenelle’s 1686 Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds in the epigraph to Chapter 6 highlights the integral link between astronomy and the subjective perception of one’s own centrality. Fontenelle’s meditation on astronomy is written as a dialogue between a man and a noble woman who knows nothing of the science. Here the

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woman playfully voices indifference to the fact that astronomy dislodges human beings from their sense of their own supremacy: “Do you think you have humbled me by telling me the Earth moves around the Sun? I swear to you I don’t have any less self-esteem.”28 The speaker resists being cast down by finding out that earth is not the center of the universe—the passage suggests that this information might have been humiliating but in fact does not strike her that way. The epigraph refers pointedly to Gwendolen; at this point in the novel, her misfortunes have not yet begun. Klesmer has just criticized her for singing a piece that contains “no sense of the universal,” and Gwendolen feels “a sinking of heart at the sudden width of horizon opened round her small musical performance” (49). Her own sense of superiority is momentarily shaken, but directly after the Fontenelle epigraph appears, Gwendolen resumes her prior state of confidence. We learn that Gwendolen “rejoiced to feel herself exceptional” and “did not like to dwell on facts which threw an unfavourable light on herself ” (53, 52). Eliot takes this epigraph from a passage in Fontenelle that develops the connection between placing the earth at the center of the universe and developing a “philosophy” that centers on mankind. Fontenelle’s astronomer remarks that: the same desire which makes a courtier want to have the most honorable place in a ceremony makes a philosopher want to place himself in the center of a world system, if he can. He’s sure that everything was made for him, and unconsciously accepts that principle which flatters him, and his heart will bend a matter of pure speculation to self-interest. (17)

This connection between the apparent centrality of the earth and being at “the center of a world system” is the link between visual perception and intellectual conception that Eliot explores through the character of Gwendolen. Both her suffering at the hands of Grandcourt and her friendship with Daniel Deronda give Gwendolen a glimpse of worlds outside her own. But again, I want to suggest that in Daniel Deronda, Eliot’s sense of the connection between early perception and a rich inner life emphasizes the continuities between a limited but intense early subjectivity and later capacious thought. What Eliot wants in this novel is not a mind that repudiates the former but one that incorporates both mental approaches to the world. Gwendolen’s fear of losing her centrality in the world derives from confusion about how to place the self in relation to a larger cosmos. This is

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a problem we have seen again and again in The Starry Sky Within. In both Thomas De Quincey and Alfred Tennyson we find an individual speaker placing himself in relation to a shifting universe. For De Quincey, that universe is stomach-flippingly ungrounded, while for Tennyson it is the relentless forward movement of time that causes problems. Gwendolen initially perceives her choices to be either centrality or failure, being set utterly adrift. We might contrast that attitude with Thomas Nagel’s picture of a self as conceptually extending itself out into the world through a series of concentric globes. Eliot’s suggestion is that the best introduction to astronomy requires recognizing one’s own situated position in the world, a position that will initially appear to be central. But such apparent centrality does not preclude eventual movement outside of the self. We can see two similar models of centrality combined with extension into the world in the writing of Tennyson and James Joyce. Both describe childhood exercises of self-location. As a youth, Tennyson is already using concentric spheres—which I connect to landing places in the Introduction— to locate himself in the vast world. Christopher Ricks notes that as a boy Tennyson inscribed a text of Virgil as follows: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

A. Tennyson Somersby in Lincolnshire in England in Europe in the world in the air in space (11)29

The self unfurls itself out into increasingly abstract areas—from the bounded Lincolnshire, England, and Europe to things with less palpable edges: the world, the air, space. I take space here to mean that baseline category that must exist for something like air to exist in, although it contains overtones of the reaches of astronomical space. Ricks describes this list as a schoolboy’s trick, but notes that “this particular schoolboy was to develop an imagination which haunted those rippling vistas of space.” The astronomical allusions he employs in In Memoriam are part of a lifelong obsession with placing the self in relation to something vast and unknowable that gives off a “mystic hint” of the larger patterns of things.

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In Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus undergoes a similar exercise involving a list of concentric circles that young Dedalus creates around himself while at Clonglowes. The impulse behind bounding something in order to comprehend it comes up when Stephen is a little boy faced with the problem of grasping the abstract. When he has trouble learning the names of far-off places in America, he turns his attention to a list he has made, “himself, his name, and where he was” (15): Stephen Dedalus Class of Elements Clongowes Wood College Sallins County Kildare Ireland Europe The World The Universe30 This list creates frames, or landing places, that resemble the set of concentric spheres Nagel invokes in The View from Nowhere. Rather than drawing a boundary around himself and saying, “I am me, and everything else is not me,” Stephen’s positioning of himself works by an unfurling out into the universe that moves step by step. Yet when Stephen comes to the end of the universe, he again is faced with the problem of the incomprehensibly large, and Joyce conveys the extraordinarily difficult mental work that such an act of comprehension requires: What was after the universe? Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began? It could not be a wall but there could be a thin thin line there all around everything.

When the analogic model breaks down, for nothing is bigger than the universe, Stephen is tempted by the concept of a “thin thin” line marking it off. His impulse to draw that line stems from the need to help himself think rather than from the sense that such a line could actually exists. In the final section of this chapter, I turn to the narrative practices Eliot employs to make her readers aware of the connections between a central situated self and wider horizons of knowledge.

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Narrative Practices: Thrilling from the Near to the Far Eliot’s own narrative practices convey the same values and concerns that we have seen explored in the expansion and contractions of the inner lives of her characters. In her essay on “The Natural History of German Life,” Eliot asserts that “Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.”31 The rhetoric of extension, widening, and amplification is easy to connect to the roving minds of characters like Daniel and Charisi, but the word “contact” is equally important here, implying as it does proximity and touch. The close-up intimate lives of people and experiences must be brought near to the reader—the reader must have contact with other lives in order to expand. If we pair the spatial images Eliot uses to describe the mental lives of her characters with passages that yoke together objects such as breast milk and stars, we can better understand the formal techniques Eliot uses to take her reader through a wide range of spatial positions and sensory textures. She pushes her readers far away from the earth’s surface so that they see a universe of unceasing stars, the journey of the sun, or the pathways of planets, and then pulls them in so that they can feel and hear a heartbeat or a “tender bosom” (205). This continuous action of contraction and expansion is a crucial formal principle in Eliot. These movements from far to near or near to far exist on every scale, from the movement between epigraph and chapter, to the movement from one scene to the next, to the shifts in narrative from paragraph to paragraph, and even in the shifts within sentences through Eliot’s use of free indirect discourse. The act of identification with characters places us right in the story so that we almost inhabit them; the narrator’s voice pulls us away from that intimacy; the epigraphs take us out of the novel at an extra remove. We find the reasons behind such formal movement on Eliot’s part articulated in Middlemarch in terms of Lydgate’s relationship to microscopy and biology. Looking back on the ways in which his experiences have narrowed his own horizons, Lydgate remembers his own insistence on the movement between near and far, between mental contraction and expansion analogous to the “systole” and “diastole” of the human heart (690). In the systole, the heart contracts and blood is pushed through the body; in the diastole, the heart relaxes and expands again, filling with blood. Lydgate asserts:

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that “there must be a systole and a diastole in all inquiry,” and that “a man’s mind must be continually expanding and shrinking between the whole human horizon and the horizon of an object-glass.” (690)

This dynamic biological image provides a contrast between the microscopic scale, framed by the horizon of the microscope, and the “whole” human scale. Eliot continually pulls her readers through such shifts in scale in Daniel Deronda. When she articulates this principle of mental movement by way of astronomy, the human horizon takes the place of the microscope, standing in for narrowness and constraint, and the stellar universe itself comes to stand for the largest possible scope. The key to the novel is not the insistence on the respective ways of thinking embodied in the characters of Daniel, Mordecai, and Charisi, on the one hand, and Gwendolen and Grandcourt on the other, but the reader’s own experience of moving in and moving out from one mode of thinking to the other. Within this movement from far to near to far, closeness is repeatedly associated with mothering and home, and distance with “the firmament.” Eliot suggests that the capacity to appreciate literature depends on the mental capacity to move between the two: And perhaps poetry and romance are as plentiful as ever in the world except for those phlegmatic natures who I suspect would in any age have regarded them as a dull form of erroneous thinking. They exist very easily in the same room with the microscope and even in railway carriages: what banishes them is the vacuum in gentlemen and lady passengers. How should all the apparatus of heaven and earth, from the farthest firmament to the tender bosom of the mother who nourished us, make poetry for a mind that has no movements of awe and tenderness, no sense of fellowship which thrills from the near to the distant, and back again from the distant to the near? (205)

That movement exists in the mind, in the observer, and involves “a sense of fellowship” that is not all identification but a motion towards and away. One important insight that emerges from this passage is that objective knowledge alone is not enough. Eliot is not after the view from nowhere, but a dynamic movement from near to far that involves a mental capacity to see many points of view as well as to understand that distance alone does not produce accuracy. Much as Daniel feels himself attached to the world when he learns he is a Jew and beholds himself bound “by the certitude of ties,” Eliot’s readers are grounded in the lives and sensory perceptions of the characters that people her novels (683).

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Eliot uses the language of distance and proximity to refer to the ways in which characters within the novel respond to narrative. When Daniel brings Mirah home to the Meyricks, for instance, he enters into a scene of reading, in which describing characters is articulated in terms of bringing them “near us with a strong telescope” (198). Here the mediating device of a telescope does not have a distancing effect but instead is associated with conferring vivacity onto that which is represented. We can read this passage as yet another parallel between the project of narrative and the work of the astronomer. Eliot sets the scene thus: The book Mrs. Meyrick had before her was Erckmann-Chatrian’s Histoire d’un Conscrit. She had just finished reading it aloud, and Mab, who had let her work fall on the ground while she stretched her head forward and fixed her eyes on the reader, exclaimed— “I think that is the finest story in the world.” (198)

Mab is gently admonished for her susceptibility to every story she hears. We may guess that, like Daniel, she has a peculiar ability to take on the subject positions of beings other than herself. But her sister, too, feels the force of this story to be more real than the term story would suggest: “It is hardly to be called a story,” said Kate, “It is a bit of history brought near us with a strong telescope. We can see the soldiers’ faces: no, it is more than that—we can hear everything—we can almost hear their hearts beat.” (198)

In Kate’s terms the telescope is an agent of proximity, bringing the story near and making it imaginable. And yet vision is quickly denigrated as a toodistancing sense. Hearing, the radius of which is far smaller than that of vision, is much more intimate. By enabling them to hear the hearts of the soldiers beat, this story renders its participants alive and sensible—and the lifelike beating heart is particularly palpable in a soldier whose life is in more danger than that of an ordinary man on the street or a girl at a dance. What is strange and wonderful about this book’s effect on Kate is that it provides the intimacy of hearing over a distance that real sound waves cannot travel— through the written pages of a book. This passage suggests that while written words cannot literally appeal to the hearing, touch, taste, smell, or the feeling of one’s own body, vibrant concrete images in a literary text can bring those senses to life. Even given the parallels Eliot makes between the astronomer tracing the paths of planets and stars and “the narrator of human actions,” this

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comparison between a book and a telescope is a surprising one (164). It resonates strangely, however, with a similar leap from literature to microscopy that Eliot’s common-law husband, George Henry Lewes, makes in his 1856 article “Sea-side Studies,” later published in book form. Lewes reflects on the ways in which his studies at the microscope transform his imagination, leaving behind “traces as of years, so crowded were they with facts new and strange . . . new in their definiteness and the thoughts they suggested. The typical forms took possession of me.”32 Literature loses its vivacity in contrast. As he reads, a phrase in a novel propels his mind back to the microscope: a phrase like “throbbing heart” would detach my thoughts from the subject of the book, and hurry them away to the stage of the microscope, where the heart of some embryo was pulsating. (196)

The strangeness here lies not in the idea that the throbbing heart in a novel corresponds to the throbbing hearts of the actual world but in a contrast between different types of mediation. The microscope renders such throbbing perceptible in a way that the novel does not—and conveying this feeling of sensory vitality is, I think, for Eliot the ideal she holds herself to in her own novels. We can see a symbiotic relationship between literature and science at work in this passage. While microscopic study of a throbbing heart lends new vitality to a cliche´d phrase, reading likewise inspires a renewed attention to the heart that has been throbbing on the stage of the microscope all along.

Romantic Expectations and the Stellar Universe Unlike Middlemarch, which circulates through many points of view and many subplots, Daniel Deronda is organized around two figures, Gwendolen Harleth and Daniel himself. Gwendolen inhabits a marriage plot in the tradition of Jane Austen (a tradition that Austen herself critiqued), while Daniel belongs more to a novel of vocation. As we have seen, the pairing contrasts the two characters’ worldviews, the ways in which they imagine themselves in relation to the universe, and their capacity to sympathize with points of view other than their own. On one level, Eliot seems to base her own novel on oppositions between two ways of seeing embodied by Gwendolen and Daniel: between narrow

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self-absorption and breadth of horizon, between subjectivity and objectivity. But it is significant that Eliot begins the whole novel with a passage that calls into question the idea that anyone—novelist or scientist—has access to objective truth. Her insight into the ways in which astronomers themselves depend on narrative is an extremely subtle one and begins the whole novel on shifting ground. The strictest scientist, as we have seen, relies on a “pretend” beginning and “a make-believe unit” and “with his clock-finger at Nought really sets off in medias res” (7). If an astronomer changes the world so significantly by simply beginning to count time, how much more mediated must be the world that Eliot creates? While Eliot frequently compares fiction and science, usually these comparisons focus on her own commitment to the kinds of precise attention to observational accuracy that one might associate with the scientific method rather than the fictional qualities of science. Here, by contrast, she calls our attention to the ways in which any narrative beginning—in science and literature alike— will take on a false authority whose falsity tends subsequently to become invisible. The occasion for the beginning of the novel is the first conjunction of our two main characters—it could be said that that is what allows the novel to begin, while their final meeting before Daniel marries and moves east is what allows the novel to end. Sir Hugo explicitly remarks to Daniel, “there must be an entanglement between your horoscope and hers” (717). In a more conventional plot line, that entanglement would take the form of romantic love, but here there is a different resonance between the two characters. Both are orphaned, somehow unrooted and haunted by something outside of themselves that they cannot control; both seek moral and spiritual guidance. We might very well ask how the introduction of those first two chapters shapes the reading of the novel. Eliot later emphasized that she “meant everything in the book to be related to everything else,” and the resonances she creates between her characters take the form of invisible forces—what the narrator calls “hidden pathways”—that bring people together or send them apart (803). Eliot’s epigraph to Chapter 16 likewise emphasizes continuities between the astronomer and the novelist. Much as the astronomer traces the motion of the planets he can only intermittently see, she writes, the novelist sets out to capture the “hidden pathways of feeling and thought” that lead to human actions:

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Men, like planets, have both a visible and an invisible history. The astronomer threads the darkness with strict deduction, accounting so for every visible arc in the wanderer’s orbit; and the narrator of human actions, if he did his work with the same completeness, would have to thread the hidden pathways of feeling and thought which lead up to every moment of action . . . (164)

Eliot’s invocation of both “visible and invisible” phenomena here reveals much about the aspects of human experience this novel sets out to capture: the complex forces that act on human beings, their own hidden fears and longings, the parts of themselves they themselves cannot completely know. On the surface Daniel Deronda is organized around the conventional nineteenth-century topics of proposals, marriages, inheritance, and searches for unknown parents. But on a deeper level the novel takes as its subject the interior lives of complex beings bound to one another in mysterious ways. Like planets determined in their orbits, Eliot’s characters find themselves subject to invisible forces, whether those forces come from within, like the intense moments of “spiritual dread” from which Gwendolen suffers, or from without, like the mysterious “pathways” that link Daniel to his unknown parentage and to his growing sense of a spiritual vocation (63, 749). Eliot’s narrative tools, her use of an intrusive narrator, a complex plot structure, and free indirect discourse, allow her constantly to enact the movement from near to far and back again within the form of the novel. This movement is crucial to Eliot’s self-conscious rewriting of Pride and Prejudice in Gwendolen’s marriage plot; the rumored arrival of the eligible Grandcourt occasions precisely the kind of marital speculation that the beginning of Pride and Prejudice mocks.33 Although Gwendolen reflects that “It was ridiculous of elders to entertain notions about what a man would do, without having seen him even through a telescope,” she herself participates in such a fantasy, predicting that “he will make me an offer of his hand” long before she sets eyes on him (118, 95). Compared to Austen, Eliot is more committed to spatial movements toward and away from the romantic elements of her novel. This larger scope is evident in her large cast of characters and the wide geographical range of its events, which many critics have contrasted with the more restricted settings of Middlemarch, Adam Bede, and The Mill on the Floss.34 Eliot’s use of distance is also felt through her narrative commentary, which steps back farther in space from the action than Austen’s does. Chapter 11, for instance, begins with the moment in which Gwendolen and her future husband first

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meet and ends with his seeking her out, dancing with her at a party, and asking for permission to call. The narrative of the evening ends thus: Gwendolen had no sense that these men were dark enigmas to her, or that she needed any help in drawing conclusions about them—Mr. Grandcourt at least. The chief question was, how far his character and ways might answer her wishes; and unless she were satisfied about that, she had said to herself that she would not accept his offer. (100)

Here the more knowing voice of the narrator can already be heard in the statement of what will turn out to be the truth “that these men were dark enigmas to her.” But the point of view is clearly Gwendolen’s, who thinks solely in terms of her own will and happiness. The presentation here is more mediated than in other moments in which we are closely engaged with what Gwendolen is experiencing. Just afterwards the narrator steps even further back and reflects on her own story line, using the language of mental scope: Could there be a slenderer, more insignificant thread in human history than this consciousness of a girl, busy with her small inferences of the way in which she could make her life pleasant?—in a time, too, when ideas were with fresh vigour making armies of themselves, and the universal kinship was declaring itself fiercely . . . a time when the soul of man was waking to pulses which had for centuries been beating in him unfelt, until their full sum made a new life of terror or of joy. (124)

In setting Gwendolen’s mental preoccupations against “universal” kinship, armies of ideas, and beating souls, Eliot again invokes scale to set one mode of thinking against another. The word “thread” prefigures her subsequent parallel between the astronomer “who threads the darkness with strict deduction” and the narrator of human actions. What motivates Eliot to insert this comment? Is it simply to mock Gwendolen? Is it to question Eliot’s own motives as an author, like the moment in Middlemarch when she asks herself why she always returns to the story of the recently married beautiful young woman: “why always Dorothea?” Eliot may be suspicious about a complacent interest in beautiful women; but there is something about the power of narrative itself that makes her uneasy. Does narrative itself sway our judgment in a disturbing way? I think on some level that it must, that we are little Lydgates in the hands of a novel—willing to do in response to a story what we know to be unwise. Certainly, one effect of her narrative commentaries is to force the reader to pull back from the story, to raise his head and look around before immersing himself again.

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Eliot also differs from Austen in her commentary on her own narrative choices, another form of stepping back. Near the end of the novel, Eliot casts a retrospective look back on the year or two she has narrated of Gwendolen’s life and invites her reader to do the same. Gwendolen has been married, faced the ineffectiveness of her will within that marriage, and has watched her husband drown before her eyes. Eliot compares the length of time to the length of the sun’s journey through the sky over the course of an earthly year, reflecting how little information numerical measurements give us. We should again recall the opening epigraph’s comparison between narrating human actions and measuring the stars.35 In this instance, such measurements are a hopelessly deficient gauge of life or experience and tell us nothing about its contents: Extension, we know, is a very imperfect measure of things; and the length of the sun’s journeying can no more tell us how far life has advanced than the acreage of a field can tell us what growths may be active within it. (705)

This passage requires the reader to wrest himself from the story and reflect on it, to get some distance from it. It inspires him to wonder what information about a person, an object or an event is useful information and what is simply superfluous fact. We can read Daniel Deronda as a critique of the romance form that Pride and Prejudice simultaneously embodies and critiques. While Jane Bennet finds herself happily married to the eligible bachelor whose arrival is announced on page one, Gwendolen’s similar fate links her to a sadistic and controlling husband. In her many invocations of astronomy, Eliot explores the constraints of the imagination that lead Gwendolen to see her life simply in the terms a romance plot appears to offer. When she comes face to face with Lydia Glasher, who has borne four children to Grandcourt and then been abandoned by him, Gwendolen feels herself confronted with a “ghastly vision” that tells her “I am a woman’s life” (152). Eliot puts forth an alternative to this model of romantic love in the complex epigraph to Chapter 32.36 The chapter itself involves the beginning of a romantic attachment between Daniel and Mirah, a marriage plot that, unlike Gwendolen’s, will successfully combine love, art, intellect, and spiritual fulfillment. Here Eliot suggests that the common opposition between love and larger theoretical ideas does romantic love a disservice. The epigraph raises the familiar idea that love, rationality and “the mind’s . . . wonted resolves” are alien to one another, but goes on to object to this notion, arguing

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that romantic love need not be in conflict with other aspects of the mind and the soul. The language of astronomy and the cosmic runs through the passage and resonates with the use of the heavens elsewhere in the text: In all ages it hath been a favourite text that a potent love hath the nature of an isolated fatality, whereto the mind’s opinions and wonted resolves are altogether alien; as, for example, Daphnis his frenzy, wherein it had little availed him to have been convinced of Heraclitus his doctrine; or the philtre-bred passion of Tristan, who, though he had been as deep as Duns Scotus, would have had his reasoning marred by that cup too much; or Romeo in his sudden taking for Juliet, wherein any objections he might have held against Ptolemy had made little difference to his discourse under the balcony. Yet all love is not such, even though potent; nay, this passion hath as large scope as any for allying itself with every operation of the soul: so that it shall acknowledge an effect from the imagined light of unproven firmaments, and have its scale set to the grander orbits of what hath been and shall be. (360)

Eliot observes that love and wisdom, “the mind’s opinions and wonted resolves,” have often been seen as “alien” to each other. Thus Romeo’s attitude toward the astronomer Ptolemy seems unconnected to his passion for Juliet. Eliot insists that this disconnection is both unnecessary and undesirable: “all love is not such.” Love should instead be linked to and continuous with the cosmic scale, affected by light from “unproven firmaments” and “set” to the scale of the universe, the “grander orbits of what hath been and shall be.” The novel’s larger discourse on astronomy, theoretical scale and the visionary links this passage to Charisi, who, in watching the stars, demands to know “what had been before and what would come after.” Terence Cave helpfully glosses this passage. He notes that “it seems to follow on strangely from the previous chapter,” but explains: But GE is weaving together a number of threads, and the point of the epigraph is contained in its last sentence, which picks up the central theme of the novel as a whole: fictional romance gives way to a wider, more cosmic scope, and to a sense of unforeseen possibilities. Above all, GE insists that love is not incompatible with moral choice. (827–8, n. 1)

Shifting Horizons Like Thomas Hardy, Eliot repeatedly links the constant misperception that the earth is central to the universe to the individual’s persistent perception of

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Figure 27 Definition of the “visible horizon,” showing what an observer sees as the earth curves away from where he is standing.

his or her own centrality to the world. But the two authors invoke this analogy with different emphases. In general terms, Hardy’s use of astronomical images tends to focus on celestial bodies themselves rather than the space that those bodies inhabit. Where Hardy often makes an analogy between the challenges involved in observing distant celestial bodies and those involved in accurately perceiving other people, Eliot uses astronomy to think through the connection between a person’s spatial perception of herself in relation to the outside world and the way an individual moves between a deeply embodied perception of the world and a more theoretical one. The term horizon straddles both ideas, referring literally to the radius of space visible to an observer (the “visible horizon”) and figuratively to mental scope or capaciousness (see Figure 27). Kate Flint has emphasized how compellingly the term horizon links an observer’s own situation in space to his or her sense of the limits of the world out there. She reminds us that the horizon:

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has no independent, objective existence apart from the role it plays within the human gaze. It is this fact—that the concept of the horizon simultaneously signifies out there, away from us, somewhere towards which we might reach, and yet is also something that is indivisible from our inward physical and conceptual faculties, that makes it such an ideal trope through which to examine Victorian attitudes towards the visual, towards the practice of seeing. For, like the very idea of ‘sight’, the idea of the horizon is at once material, and figurative.37

One of the key ideas here is that what often feels like a limitation independent of the observer—how far the world seems to extend itself out around one—is in fact intimately connected to one’s own physiological faculties. The connections between the horizon and one’s position on the earth come up repeatedly in astronomical treatises. John Herschel, for instance, explains that the Greeks could initially identify the spherical shape of the earth by measuring the gradual disappearance of a ship’s mast on the open sea. A celestial body’s astronomical horizon is the semi-circular half of it that can be seen from a specific side of that body. When the observer is removed from the surface of a sphere (as is the case when we observe the sun or the moon), the extent of what we see of the sphere is limited by that sphere’s own dimensions. Which half of the sun or moon can be seen, however, still depends on the observer’s own situation in space. Eliot describes the mind unfurling itself from embodied perceptions out into larger spaces that encompass the astronomical: the universe, stars, planets, the firmament. She emphasizes the counterintuitive connection between something as intimate, proximate, and embodied as the baby at the breast or a pumping heart and something that strains or eludes the senses—a distant star, an abstraction. She suggests that the human mind can and must be able to encompass both types of knowledge. One of the disturbing aspects of this novel is that this widening occurs not only through nurturing and attachment but also through wrenching trauma, particularly in the case of Gwendolen. Daniel and Gwendolen share the language of sores, shrinking, and wounds in the early part of the novel, but while, as Shuttleworth puts it, “Daniel gets what Dorothea wanted”—a vocation—the widening of Gwendolen’s horizon occurs through remorse, suffering, and disappointment (see Figure 28). There are moments during the novel that unsettle Gwendolen’s worldview—from those as trivial as Herr Klesmer’s criticism of her singing to chilling moments such as her realization that the bachelor Grandcourt has an entire illegitimate family that he is betraying by marrying her. In the final

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Figure 28 Illustration of the horizon’s growing scope as one rises above sea level, seen from three different elevations.

pages of the novel, Eliot describes the transformation that occurs within Gwendolen in spatial terms, directly echoing the language with which she describes Gwendolen’s fear of “the little astronomy taught her in school”: The world seemed getting larger round poor Gwendolen, and she more solitary and helpless in the midst. The thought that [Daniel Deronda] might come back after going to the East, sank before the bewildering vision of these wide-stretching purposes in which she felt herself reduced to a mere speck. There comes a terrible moment to many souls when the great movements of the world, the larger destinies of mankind, which have lain aloof in newspapers and other neglected reading, enter like an earthquake into their own lives. (803)

Gwendolen feels the growing largeness of her perception of the world as a threat to her sense of self and her own power; she becomes “more solitary and helpless” and feels “herself reduced to a mere speck.”38 Eliot is attending to a strange quality of spatial perception in which it is possible, even easy—until moments of shock like these—not to take in the world that one does not see. In the everyday scale of the world, the self is able to feel central and significant. The passage continues, reinforcing the links between a limited spatial scale or scope (her world before it starts “getting larger”; her “small life”) and a sense of one’s own centrality (“her supremacy in her own world”; the

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“implicit impression . . . that whatever surrounded her was somehow specially for her”) (804). Eliot contrasts this limited sense of scope with the increased sense of the largeness of the world, a vision of “wide-stretching purposes,” a sense of “the larger destinies of mankind” and of “the great movements of the world” (803): That was the sort of crisis which was at this moment beginning in Gwendolen’s small life: she was for the first time feeling the pressure of a vast mysterious movement, for the first time being dislodged from her supremacy in her own world, and getting the sense that her horizon was but a dipping onward of an existence with which her own was revolving. All the troubles of her wifehood and widowhood had still left her with the implicit impression which had accompanied her from childhood, that whatever surrounded her was somehow specially for her[.] (804)

The “crisis” that Eliot describes is a crisis of perception, a moment in which Gwendolen’s habitual way of seeing the world is replaced by a more accurate understanding of how things really are. The crisis of perception extends into what could be called a philosophy of life, a worldview, a way of understanding the world. One of the interesting images in this passage is that of “movement.” The “great movements of the world” enter into the lives of individuals who have felt themselves at the core of a stable center that does not move. Gwendolen is “dislodged,” set adrift, removed from a sense of stability and fixity; in the process she “for the first time” starts to feel “the pressure of a vast mysterious movement.” On one level the passage links this mysterious movement to the motions of her fellow human beings— participants in wars and historical events. But on another level this impalpable “pressure” is the force of gravity and the motion of earth, sun, planets, and the whole stellar universe of which Gwendolen is a tiny part. Again the term “horizon” appears, referring both to a mental scope—a sense of the limits of Gwendolen’s ideas—and to a physical limit beyond which an individual cannot see. The passage suggests a realization on Gwendolen’s part, as opposed to earlier passages in which Gwendolen’s circumscribed views are commented upon by the better-understanding narrator. We see Gwendolen “getting a sense that her horizon was but a dipping onward of an existence with which her own was revolving.” The image Eliot sets up concerns the physical, apparent boundary of a viewer standing on the surface of the earth and being able to see a circular expanse of earth that apparently ends where the earth meets the sky. Up until this

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point, Eliot suggests, Gwendolen has implicitly conceived of the earth as ending at the point in which it appears to end to her. She has taken her horizon (the circular line that marks the boundary between what she can see and what is hidden because of the curvature of the earth) at face value and has neglected to step away from the scene to understand why the earth does appear to fall off just there. What Gwendolen starts to get a sense of in this passage is that “her horizon” is not an actual end, but an apparent one. Her horizon is in fact nothing “but a dipping onward” on the face of the earth. What this means in literal terms is that she starts to understand that the line where earth and sky meet is simply the place where the earth’s curvature— its dipping—renders it invisible to her. Her horizon is an imaginary, perceptual circle determined by her position on the surface of the earth, nothing more. The end of the sentence combines this insight—Gwendolen’s understanding of the arbitrary and imaginary nature of her horizon— with the larger motions of the universe. The “existence with which her own [existence] was revolving” is that of the earth itself. With her understandings about the actual nature of her horizon comes a feeling of the revolving earth, with which she herself is moving. Passages like this, with their dizzying descriptions of spatial situations that are difficult to picture, uproot the reader in addition to “dislodg[ing]” Gwendolen from her position at the center of her world. Throughout Daniel Deronda the stellar universe acts to dislodge the reader from a position of stability, and what emerges is the pleasure and the discomfort of constant motion—a characteristic of both the material universe in which we find ourselves and of the mind’s expansion and contraction from body to taste, smell, touch, sound, sight, and theory.

6 Narratives on a Grand Scale: Astronomy and Narrative Space

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o emphasize the contingent view of the world that results from where a character is situated is a norm of fictional world making. But to emphasize the contingent view seen from the earth is more rare. This final chapter treats Thomas Hardy’s The Dynasts as an antinovel, and its narrating chorus of spirits as an antinarrator to show us a distorted version of narration that makes the norms of the omniscient narrator freshly visible. The narrative structure of The Dynasts exaggerates the form and scale of the novel to show us the assumptions and limitations behind the normal structure of a narrator—oriented to the earth, human, interested in human actions. These orientations are all conditions that seem to be given but become less obvious in an astronomical universe in which earth and its systems (Christianity, humanity) are emphatically local. Hardy is one of few realist writers who regard the earth as one single possible position or center in the universe among many (a view more common among writers of science fiction). In this chapter I suggest that much as individual characters have cosmological conceptions—views of the totality of things—so do works of fiction. Novelists such as Hardy, Leo Tolstoy, and Charles Dickens create fictional cosmoses, each of which behaves according to a logic of its own. This unstated logic makes an entire narrative space feel stable or unstable, coherent or incoherent, complete or partial. Midway through Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), Hardy presents a moment in which Angel Clare, returning to his parents’ home, notices how much his intellectual and religious views have diverged from their Christian worldview. The narrator uses a physical model of the universe— of the relationship between the earth, stars, and sun—to show the contrasts

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between Angel’s and his parents’ views of how the world is organized. Of the Vicarage where Angel’s parents live, Hardy writes: Its transcendental aspirations—still unconsciously based on the geocentric view of things, a zenithal paradise, a nadiral hell—were as foreign to his own as if they had been the dreams of people on another planet. (218)

Angel’s parents’ religion is structured around a belief in a world that has the earth as its unmoving center and locates heaven above it and hell below. The narrator, who is presenting Angel’s perceptions in this passage, notes that the basis for these beliefs is “unconscious”; Angel’s parents do not explicitly articulate to themselves that their model of the universe is geocentric. And yet that assumption acts as the basis for a worldview that extends not only to their beliefs about the material world, but also to their intellectual, moral, and religious sense of how the world is ordered. They have the security of a cosmos in which space is orderly and absolute, and yet their cosmic view is also responsible for a certain kind of parochialism. The Clares’ old-fashioned belief in a stable cosmos, organized around the earth, is as much alien to Hardy’s conception of the universe as it is to Angel’s. For Hardy, their version of the cosmos—and the epistemological framework to which it is attached—had undergone enormous strains and re-imaginings throughout the nineteenth century. One version of the modern cosmology that replaces this Christian one is of a universe characterized above all by constant movement. Agnes Clerke cites the eighteenthcentury theorist Johann Heinrich Lambert in her 1887 History of Astronomy in the Nineteenth Century, describing the motion of the solar system as extending through the universe: “thus everything revolves—the earth round the sun; the sun round the centre of his system; this system round a centre common to it with other systems; this group, this assemblage of systems, round a centre which is common to it with other groups of the same kind; and where shall we have done?”1 Lambert’s view of these systems upon systems, however, retains its hierarchical neatness, while the images of the infinite universe that Hardy puts forth in his lyric poems and in The Dynasts suggest a view of the universe more like Thomas De Quincey’s, in which any stable idea of above and below, up and down, has been discarded. This universe of systems in motion gives the mind no resting point, no source of orientation. As early as 1881, Hardy begins to people his novels with characters like Angel Clare, Two on a Tower’s Swithin St. Cleeve, and Jude the Obscure’s Little Father Time, who have a modern

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conception of the cosmos next to which the geocentric model seems hopelessly outdated.2 But this astronomical universe presents larger formal problems for Hardy, who throughout his life critiques the idea that it is possible to view any event as a whole and provides elaborate analyses of all that is lost when one views something from a distance.3 In the pages that follow, I set the spatial logic of Hardy’s final narrative work, The Dynasts, against earlier works by Hardy, Dickens, and Tolstoy to show the techniques by which these authors create a range of epistemological atmospheres, by which I mean the feeling of a world that either can or cannot be comprehensively accessed and understood. Hardy places The Dynasts within a palpably astronomical universe in which the earth is merely a “mud-moulded ball” in the midst of “ghastly gulfs of sky.” While Dickens often produces what Audrey Jaffe calls a “fantasy” of complete knowledge, an almost stifling world in which no information escapes someone’s notice, The Dynasts leaves its reader with a gnawing sense of incompleteness even as it presents all of Europe in a glance and catalogues ten years of Napoleonic wars.4 One of the questions that the vast astronomical universe raises for Hardy is where in such a universe God could be located, and in the first part of the chapter I focus on how celestial bodies, divine presences and omniscient narrators become intertwined. The second part shows how Hardy applies this intellectual problem to literature by experimenting with narrators and narrative space in The Dynasts. I juxtapose Hardy’s perspectival techniques with those of Tolstoy to show how each balances the desire to see something as a whole against the ache of insufficient knowledge. Along the way, the chapter traces a trajectory in Hardy’s own career, as he abandons the novel after Jude the Obscure (1895) and then invents a new spatial and narrative structure in The Dynasts (published in three parts between 1904 and 1908). Elaine Scarry has pinpointed the techniques Hardy uses in the novels to make the reader privy to aspects of Tess or Jude that the other characters blatantly fail to see.5 In those cases, the reader and the narrator see things that the human inhabitants of the novel cannot. But the narrative structure that Hardy invents in The Dynasts shows him removing this privileged knowledge not only from the characters, but also from the narrator and the reader. As we will see, he turns repeatedly to the vast and empty cosmos to think through the problem of both divine and narratorial perspective. I use the term “narrative space” to refer to the model of the cosmos that a narrative contains, a model that is often left implicit, but that we can identify

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if we pay attention to how the author treats the relationship between earth, sun, stars and the larger universe. This space is not simply a setting, geographical organization, or a sense of center and periphery on an earthly scale, but the relation of the earth to the rest of the cosmos. On the simplest level, texts can be divided between two categories into which these narrative spaces generally fall: fixed or in motion. This is where astronomy comes in. On the one hand, there is an everyday geocentric model of the universe that Angel Clare’s parents unconsciously ascribe to, in which the earth provides a stable, stationary foundation for the action that takes place in the narrative. In this model, the earth rests solidly below its inhabitants, and the sky, sun and stars float above. On the other hand, there is a more astronomically accurate universe in which the earth hangs ungrounded in a vast, constantly shifting cosmos filled with cluster after cluster of star systems. By using the relationship between celestial bodies to study the spatial logics of literary texts, we can account for differences in the epistemological feel of works that run the spectrum from a claustrophobic sense that every act is being recorded to an anxious awareness of the limits of attention.

Looking Down: Stars, Gods, and Narrators in Hardy and Dickens Hardy and Dickens frequently depict celestial bodies—the sun, the moon, and the stars—as looking down from the sky at the narrative’s earthly events. Both Hardy and Dickens read accounts of nineteenth-century discoveries about the structure of the stellar universe in books and articles by William and John Herschel, William Whewell, and Richard Proctor. But of the two authors, Hardy is the only one who chooses explicitly to grapple with the clash between the geocentric and astronomical cosmic models. In Hardy’s works the relationship between astronomy and religion involves not only the space of the cosmos, but also the spatial position of any overseeing consciousness within it. As we saw in Chapter 4, for Hardy and many of his contemporaries, the scientific accounts of the universe by nineteenth-century astronomers jarred dramatically with the Christian model of a cosmos centered on the earth with heaven above it and hell below. Copernicus and Galileo in the late 1500s and early 1600s had provided the most important blows to a

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geocentric model of the universe by proposing that the sun rather than the earth was the center of the universe. Yet subsequent discoveries had further destabilized the Christian model. In Two on a Tower Hardy emphasizes all of the stars that have never been seen by unassisted human eyes, stars that only gradually began to be studied in the eighteenth century and had since been brought into view first by William Herschel’s forty-footer and later by other nineteenth-century telescopes. I have emphasized earlier that astronomy for the most part continued to focus on the solar system—on the sun, the planets, and their satellites—well into the 1780s and that the contents of the stellar universe tended to be seen as a sphere of fixed stars circling our own system.6 By the last decades of the nineteenth century, Hardy had read many accounts of the structure of the universe, and the images that particularly seemed to haunt him involved both the decay of stars and the idea of our solar system as only one among millions in the universe. For Hardy, the newly revealed shape and scope of the universe and the fact that everything within it was in motion raised two troubling questions with regard to religion: Within such a universe, how can one make sense of the idea of a God who oversees human events on earth? And within such a space, where could one imaginatively locate a divine presence? The question of where in space God could be located becomes important both in Tess of the D’Urbervilles and The Dynasts, and in a series of Hardy’s lyric poems. Early in Tess, Tess’s brother Abraham gazes up at the stars, and, after asking Tess whether the stars are “worlds,” wonders where in space God is located: “He asked how far away those twinklers were, and whether God was on the other side of them” (31). The little that young Abraham knows about a stellar universe in which space is filled with worlds like the earth makes it hard to imagine where a godlike figure could reside. He imagines the familiar image of God looking down upon the earth from somewhere behind the stars, on the other side of them. That idea of something “behind the stars” posits the stars as contained on the surface of a sphere rather than extending into three-dimensional space. Like “above” and “below,” “behind” is a term of orientation that expresses relation between observer and observed and depends on both being located precisely in space. In the last few decades of Hardy’s long life (1840–1928), we see him coming back again and again to the idea of God being located far from the earth in stellar space. In “God-Forgotten,” a “Lord Most High” is urged by the “sons of earth” to admit that he once created their planet. At first he

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does not remember making it, but with some persuasion, he finally conjures up a distant recollection: “The Earth of men—let me bethink me . . . Yea! I dimly do recall “Some tiny sphere I built long back (Mid millions of such shapes of mine) So named . . . It perished, surely—not a wrack Remaining or a sign? . . . “And it is strange—though sad enough— Earth’s race should think that one whose call Frames, daily, shining spheres of flawless stuff Must heed their tainted ball! . . . “But sayest it is by pangs distraught, And strife, and silent suffering?— Sore grieved am I that injury should be wrought Even on so poor a thing!”

This poem pivots on the inequality between the expectations of earth’s inhabitants—who expect their creator to “heed” them—and those of God, for whom one “ball” of millions has simply been forgotten. Here and in “By the Earth’s Corpse,” God finally does show grief at the pain he has created; gazing at the corpse of the earth, “the Lord” asserts that: Written indelibly On my eternal mind Are all the wrongs endured By Earth’s poor patient kind.

But while asserting that he holds some record of human pain, this Lord refers to the “oft too unconscious hand” that let pain and suffering go unnoticed. In The Dynasts, the problem of where to locate God, I will argue, defines Hardy’s peculiar narrative choice of giving his reader the structure of total knowledge and omniscience without the feeling or interpretive framework to go with it. Hardy presses harder than in Tess or in these poems on the idea of where a godlike figure could exist in this spatial universe. This huge and wildly experimental work is a 600-page drama in verse that covers the Napoleonic wars from 1805 to the 1815 Battle of Waterloo. It tends not to be read often, but The Dynasts pushes many of the characteristics of large-scale narratives like the classical nineteenth-century multiplot novel or

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the epic to an extreme in its impulse to capture vast movements of hundreds of thousands of human beings comprehensively within the scope of a single literary work.7 In this ambition we see how the gesture toward comprehensiveness of a work like Tolstoy’s War and Peace or Dickens’s Bleak House jibes with that of the Iliad or Paradise Lost. In Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790–1910, Herbert Tucker notes that only in 1910 did Hardy arrive at the generic label “epic-drama” for The Dynasts: Epic in ambition and dramatic in format, The Dynasts was yet so visionary in overall conception that only in 1910, when the author gathered into a single volume the book-length parts he had separately issued in 1904, 1906, and 1908, did he find for its subtitle a generic label that now seems inevitable: An Epic-Drama of the War with Napole´on, in Three Parts, Nineteen Acts, and One Hundred and Thirty Scenes.8

The subtitle continues “the time being covered by the action being about ten years.” The reader is guided through the events of The Dynasts—these ten years of Napoleonic wars—through the perspective of a supernatural “Chorus of Spirits.” These spirits are extraterrestrial; while he is not explicit, Hardy suggests that they ordinarily move through outer space bearing witness to universal events, and that they have to descend to earth to witness these years of war in particular. In a work that is defined by its unusual form, this chorus of spirits and the stage directions that instruct the reader to visualize what the chorus sees are the most radical elements. In his preface, Hardy specifically links this chorus of spirits who look down on Europe to the gods that oversee Greek epics such as the Iliad, or the celestial machinery of Paradise Lost. His use of the chorus form, a group commenting on the action, likewise invokes Greek tragedy.9 He describes them as “supernatural spectators of terrestrial action . . . Intelligences, called spirits,” but explains that he has divested them of the ability to intervene in the action. They are merely spectators. Hardy describes his invention of the spirits as a reflection of a “modern outlook” that breaks from epic traditions: the scheme of contrasted Choruses and other conventions of this external feature was shaped with a single view to the modern expression of a modern outlook, and in frank divergence from classical and other dramatic precedent.10

This modernity incorporates a range of ideas. The first is an absence of God, whom Hardy replaces with a force called the “Immanent Will” or “It.” He does not want to import “Divine Personages” and this excludes what he terms the “celestial machinery” of the Iliad or Paradise Lost. His explanation

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indicates that we should read these spectators as a specifically modern version of a divine presence—their powers shrunk down and their ability to intervene made minimal. While Hardy also objects to the fact that Greeks and Christians modeled their gods on human beings, he particularly emphasizes the problem of where a divine presence is located in space in The Dynasts. Looking down on a scene in which King George III has just gone mad, one of these spirits confesses that he or she “aches to pray” to a god, some “Great Heart.” Another chorus member mocks the impulse, and raises the problem of how God—or any kind of central consciousness—could exist in a universe filled with millions of star systems and no single center: SPIRIT OF THE PITIES Something within me aches to pray To some Great Heart, to take away This evil day, this evil day! CHORUS IRONIC Ha-ha! That’s good. Thou’lt pray to It:— But where do Its compassions sit? Yea, where abides the heart of It? Is it where the sky-fires flame and flit, Or solar craters spew and spit, Or ultra-stellar night-webs knit? (306)

In imaginatively locating God, the chorus suggests three possible places, each at a further remove from the earth: the sky, the sun, or far into interstellar space, “where ultra-stellar night-webs knit.” Hardy finds it illogical to conceive of a consciousness—of a watching presence—that is not somehow located in space. And a God for Hardy implies a single, central consciousness. To have a God or a divine presence means to have a heart that “abides” somewhere; but this raises the question of perspective—of where God watches events from. The astronomical universe in which system after system is in motion and no single center exists makes the question of perspective troubling. From any spot within this universe a consciousness could see some things well and other things poorly. Any spot is temporally and spatially contingent. This universal context allows Hardy to characterize the whole system of Christianity as something local, parochial. One of the spirits asks about a religious reference and another explains it thus:

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Directly addressing the relationship between the astronomical universe of wheeling spheres and the Christian belief system, the passage presents Christianity as just one “thing” that exists within the much vaster “wild dramas of wheeling spheres” and “systems of suns.” Self-perpetuating systems of stars are both “uninfluenced” and “unconcerned” by a belief system that is invented by earthly beings. Hardy also suggests that these star systems have “many-mortaled planet trains,” inhabited by beings that do not belong to the earth. Christianity is attached to our solar system but does not spread to others. In this passage Hardy uses the astronomical universe to show how illogical an idea of a divine presence is in such a space. If we think back to the worldview of Angel’s parents, we can see that, in Hardy’s eyes, a view of the earth as the center of the cosmos is a crucial ingredient of Christian thought.

Cosmic Models and Narrative Space Thus far I have been describing a clash between two models of the cosmos that line up roughly with the science of astronomy and a Christian view of the cosmos—one that links, that is, a divine presence with some position in stellar space. I now want to turn to the question of narrative space—the question of the model of the cosmos that a narrative contains and more specifically what kinds of spatial positions an overseeing narrative consciousness occupies. The standpoint of the narrator or the reader shuttling back and forth between the perceptions of the narrator and individual characters tends to be described using spatial terms such as “perspective” and “point of view,” but I often find myself struggling to distinguish one author’s use of perspective or point of view from another’s—looking for a vocabulary that is more finely grained than “distant” or “close-up,” “cinematic,” “bird’s-eye view,”

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or “zoom,” despite the feeling of motion and an embodied camera-eye that these terms articulate so well. By looking at how Dickens and Hardy create the space in which their narratives take place—and specifically at the relations they imagine between the earth, sun, and stars—I am hoping that we can better account for the way that some different versions of the “world of the novel” feel more or less comprehensive or disorienting. We can think of a literary work’s narrative space, its implicit model of the cosmos, in terms of three distinct but related elements. I have been discussing how nineteenth-century understandings of the stellar universe affected Hardy’s ideas about God. What happens when we add in a third presence— the consciousness of a narrator who oversees the events depicted in a literary work? Although these relationships are rarely acknowledged explicitly, both Hardy and Dickens frequently allow these three different types of consciousness to become intertwined with one another: some version of divine presence, celestial bodies such as the sun or the stars, and an overseeing narrative consciousness. Sun, stars, God, and the narrator are each at various points imagined up there above the earth looking down upon it, conscious of the human actions that are taking place below.11 Sometimes (as in Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, and Bleak House) these connections are left implicit and elsewhere (in Dickens’s “A Child’s Dream of a Star” or Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles) they are explicitly explored, but in both authors’ works the roles of the divine, the celestial, and the overseeing narrator are difficult to disentangle. If we study those relationships carefully, however, they often reveal how a particular writer produces the feeling that a fictional world can or cannot be known accurately or fully—the feeling I have referred to earlier as the epistemological atmosphere that surrounds the narrative. For Dickens, celestial bodies frequently function as attentive presences, shining, watching, reading, or staring. The cosmos that they occupy is implicitly figured as geocentric. This might suggest that Dickens is simply relying on an out-of-date view of the universe or that he possesses the rigid parochialism of Angel Clare’s parents. But I want to stress from the outset that I see Dickens’s narrative techniques and goals as different in emphasis but not less sophisticated than those of Hardy. Spatially speaking, perhaps the simplest example of stars looking down on the earth appears in Dickens’s 1850 short story, “A Child’s Dream of a Star.” A young boy and his sister watch every night for the “one clear shining star that used to come out in the sky before the rest, near the church spire, above the graves,” and they

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bless the star each night before they go to sleep. As the years go by the boy’s sister dies and he looks at the star by himself: . . . and the star made long rays down toward him, as he saw it through his tears. Now, these rays were so bright, and they seemed to make such a shining way from earth to heaven, that when the child went to his solitary bed, he dreamed about the star; and dreamed that, lying where he was, he saw a train of people taken up that sparkling road by angels.12

Among these angels is that of his sister who lingers in wait for him. He calls to her and she turns “her beaming eyes upon him” and “from that hour forth the child looked out on the star as on the home he was to go to when his time should come.” The rest of the story follows the child’s life as he grows up. It is punctuated by the deaths of his baby brother, his mother, his own daughter, and finally his death as an old man. Each time we see the star shining down on him and finally on his grave; the star stands in for a heaven in which the whole family is reunited. In this story we have a stable relationship between earth and the stars in which earth remains below, the star hangs above it, and the rays of the star form a pathway from the earthly world to the heavenly one. The star stands in for a divine presence shining down on the man as well as for the locus of his ultimate destination, heaven. The story moves back and forth between what the little boy imagines the star to represent and the narrator’s account of the star—but there is little distinction between those two accounts, even though the boy’s view is presented as dreaming and supposing while the narrator’s view is presented as a statement of fact: “And the star was shining and it shines upon his grave.” There is little in this story to locate the narrator himself in space except for the limit of what is described—the man on the surface of the earth, the star above with its population of angels and the rays of light that form a pathway between the two worlds. But the star is also menacing—lingering up there in a way that many of Dickens’s observers tend to linger: a reminder of death’s persistent inevitability, its godlike power and the negative light it casts over the whole span of life. Of all the instances in Dickens of stars shining down upon, watching, and reading earthly events, “A Child’s Dream of a Star” is the one that most explicitly links the stars with a divine presence. Little Dorrit, Bleak House, and A Tale of Two Cities tell us more about the role of an overseeing narrative presence in these novels than they do about the presence of God. Early in

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Little Dorrit, for instance, the sun functions as an almost oppressive presence staring down on Marseilles: A blazing sun upon a fierce August day was no greater rarity in southern France then, than at any other time, before or since. Everything in Marseilles, and about Marseilles, had stared at the fervid sky, and been stared at in return, until a staring habit had become universal there.13

Dickens registers an exchange, a network of regard, in which “everything in Marseilles” stares up “at the fervid sky” and the sky in turn stares down at it. That exchange is complicated by the dispersion of sunlight through the town as it bounces from surface to surface, off “staring white houses . . . walls . . . [and] streets.” In Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830–1880, Isobel Armstrong cites Proctor’s writing about what she terms “the immortality of light,” in which light emitted from the planet never gets lost, but sends versions of earthly events perpetually radiating through the universe.14 Armstrong writes: For Richard Proctor, the physics of light (the scattering of rays in all directions from a luminous body) makes images uncanny to infinity. “Events have happened on our earth and been forgotten, which, nevertheless, are at this very instant of my writing visible from some one or other of the orbs which people space . . . and there is no event . . . visible from standpoints without the earth, which has not thus been rendered visible over and over again hereafter as light-messages conveying its history have passed beyond star after star . . . ” (255)

Dickens creates a similar feel of the self-perpetuating nature of light in this opening scene, as here it bounces from surface to surface and eye to eye. Through this act of reflection sunlight fills the town relentlessly and there seems to be no space that remains dark. A little later Dickens charts the shift away from the stare of midday; in this passage the implied analogy between the observing eye of the narrator and the fiercer eye of the sun becomes more explicit: The day passed on; and again the wide stare stared itself out; and the hot night was on Marseilles; and through it the caravan of the morning, all dispersed, went their appointed ways. And thus ever by day and night, under the sun and under the stars, climbing the dusty hills and toiling along the weary plains, journeying by land and journeying by sea, coming and going so strangely, to meet and to act and react on one another, move all we restless travellers through the pilgrimage of life. (43)

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The action of the novel occurs “under the sun and under the stars” and it is only from that distant vantage point that the larger patterns that interest Dickens in this passage can properly be imagined. His vast cast of characters is in the process of “coming and going so strangely, to meet and to act and react on one another” (43). Taking place as it does early in the novel, this moment uses the sun and the stars as a physical embodiment of an overarching presence who observes and registers those patterns—the sun and the narrator are closely allied. It is important that the earth and the sun and stars remain in a stable relation to one another here because there must be an imaginative viewpoint from which these patterns can be seen comprehensively. Rather than registering the limits of knowledge, this moment allows Dickens to give the reader a glimpse of the whole, a whole whose parts are in motion but which can still be grasped as a system. The spatial vantage point imagined, high above the earth, seems to be relatively fixed, but temporally this act of looking spans days, months, years—in other words, the pattern of people meeting and acting and reacting on one another only emerges over time. Dickens creates a narrative space in which human acts and events have an infinite life, and yet the space in which they exist is implicitly finite and stable. This choice on his part opens up certain questions and closes down others. While Dickens’s readers do not worry about the limited nature of attention that preoccupies Hardy, they might, as many critics have noticed, be troubled by the uncomfortable similarity between the narrator’s vigilant watching and that of malignant characters such as A Tale of Two Cities’s Madame Defarge and Bleak House’s Mr. Tulkinghorn; these sinister observers gather up the secrets of vulnerable characters in order to punish them and drive them to their deaths.15 In both novels, the stars looking down on the earth and upon human events are also associated with this capacious and potentially malignant perspective. The stars dominate chapters 41 and 48 of Bleak House, in which the watching eyes of Lady Dedlock and Mr. Tulkinghorn are overseen by stars that “watch them both through the opened window”: Their need for watching one another should be over now, but they do it all this time, and the stars watch them both through the opened window. Away in the moonlight lie the woodland fields at rest, and the wide house is as quiet as the narrow one. The narrow one! Where are the digger and the spade, this peaceful night, destined to add the last great secret to the many secrets of the Tulkinghorn existence? Is the man born yet, is the spade wrought yet? Curious questions to

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consider, more curious perhaps not to consider, under the watching stars upon a summer night. (655)

As many critics have noted, Bleak House is filled with watchers—from Esther, Lady Dedlock, Mr. Tulkinghorn, and Inspector Bucket to the stars above and the narrator with whom those stars are linked. Dickens problematizes ways of looking such as Tulkinghorn’s malevolent hoarding of secrets to further his own power, but nowhere in the novel is any space imagined to which a consciousness does not have access. In other words, there is no worry registered that not enough attention is being paid to earthly events; instead there is not enough unwatched space for a secret like Lady Dedlock’s to remain undiscovered. Dickens pulls back from the earth to reveal another fantasy of total visual surveillance in A Tale of Two Cities. Here he imagines a viewpoint distant enough in space that the earth becomes a “shining” orb. The viewpoint hovers above all of France: As mere human knowledge can split a ray of light and analyse the matter of its composition, so, sublimer intelligences may read in the feeble shining of this earth of ours, every thought and act, every vice and virtue, of every responsible creature on it.16

This passage occurs relatively early in the book when the wrongs done by the French nobility are happening without any substantial justice or retribution. In spatial terms, the phrasing of “the feeble shining of this earth of ours” thrusts the observer farther back into space until the earth becomes a glowing celestial body along with stars, moons, and other planets. The word “earth” magnifies that distance, rounding the planet off into something that can be labeled; its “feeble shining” is the reflected light of the sun that makes any planet, like Venus or Mars, resemble a star from the earth’s surface. The process of human knowledge Dickens describes here, of splitting a ray of light and analyzing the matter of its composition, probably refers to Newton’s use of the prism to split rays of light into a spectrum. We might usefully ask who possesses the “sublimer intelligences” that Dickens refers to here. While the most obvious answer, I think, is God, this image in which “every thought and act, every vice and virtue, of every responsible creature” on earth is read and analyzed is very like the presence of the novelist in the act of recording the events of the novel. Dickens is not interested here in distortion from a distance or in the limits of the knowledge of the narrator; instead he provides his readers with a relatively reassuring image of total

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knowledge, comprehensive analysis and understanding. The comprehensiveness of this act of analyzing the feeble shining from the earth extends to moral responsibility; this image provides a model for moral responsibility in which “every thought and act, every vice and virtue, of every responsible creature on” the planet is being recorded and attended to. While injustice reigns in France at this moment in time, the nobility will get their comeuppance, the narrator seems to be telling us. But as the novel unfolds, this image of comprehensive recording becomes much more disturbing when we notice its resemblance to the sedulous watching and knitting that Madame Defarge does early in the book, watching and record-taking that nearly leads to the deaths of Lucie and Darnay. We are left with no way of comfortably distinguishing these two models of recording human events from each other. In these instances, Dickens connects the sun or the stars to either a divine presence or to the overseeing presence of the narrator on the basis of their distant position in space, far enough away to view actions on earth more comprehensively than earth’s inhabitants do. The relationship between earth and the stars is relatively stable, and we could simply say that Dickens is relying on an out-of-date model of the universe in which there is an up and down one can point to, an ordered world, and the possibility of total knowledge. Though the astronomical model that Dickens implicitly relies on is less modern than those that interest George Eliot, Hardy, or De Quincey, we should not infer from this that his literary goals are likewise simpler and less modern. Dickens’s use of astronomy should be seen in the context of other metaphors in his novels. If we look at Bleak House, for example, we can think about Dickens as initially immersing his readers in fog, in the system of Chancery which seems to have no origin and no end— which takes up the universe, being “total but not totalizable,” as D. A. Miller describes it.17 The reader of Bleak House has some sixty or seventy characters to take in and assimilate. But over the course of the novel the invisible connections between each of these characters develop, and the foggy oppressive atmosphere in which the novel is initially steeped clears up so that the reader finds him- or herself within a functioning system of interrelated but moving parts. Often, I would suggest, Dickens’s use of the relationship between earth, sun, and stars enables him to create a fantasy of total knowledge that is by turns reassuring and claustrophobic. So once again, the narrative space he creates opens up some problems, but closes down the question of narrative knowledge in optical terms.

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Seeing as a Whole In the second part of this chapter, I suggest that Hardy implicitly associates the image of God lovingly observing the earth with omniscient narrators who possess some kind of comprehensive knowledge, and that he becomes increasingly dissatisfied with that literary model as he moves from the 1891 Tess of the D’Urbervilles to his 1908 The Dynasts. If we compare the kinds of narrators that Hardy chooses for Tess of the D’Urbervilles and The Dynasts, we find narrative space being used to register a universe in which every vantage point is desperately incomplete. In Chapter 14 of Tess, for instance, the narration begins by looking down on the landscape from above the earth for several paragraphs before the narrator descends to the surface of the earth and focuses in on Tess herself. The narrator comments on the sun’s apparent position as a benevolent, watching presence, comparing the sun to God: The sun, on account of the mist, had a curious sentient, personal look, demanding the masculine pronoun for its adequate expression. His present aspect, coupled with the lack of all human forms in the scene, explained the old-time heliolatries in a moment. One could feel that a saner religion had never prevailed under the sky. The luminary was a golden-haired, beaming, mild-eyed, God-like creature, gazing down in the vigour and intentness of youth upon an earth that was brimming with interest for him. (86)

Hardy associates this idea of the sun as a God-like presence with pagan worship of the sun, heliolatries, but the idea of a benevolent divine presence looking down on the earth from above could equally well apply to a Christian model of God. In this chapter, the model of a conscious presence watching over human events from above also resembles the role of the narrator who has been assiduously tracking the past year of Tess’s life, gazing down on a figure that is brimming with interest for both him (the narrator) and for the reader. Scholars such as Hillis Miller, Audrey Jaffe, Jonathan Culler, and Barbara K. Olson have discussed the extent to which it makes sense to associate the literary convention of the omniscient narrator with a God-like perspective.18 In this passage, God, the narrator and a celestial body—the sun—are intertwined in seeming to embody an overseeing presence that regards human actions from a more comprehensive view. But the phrase “omniscient narrator” is potentially misleading with respect to both Dickens and Hardy. The question that a God-like perspective in an

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astronomical universe specifically raises for Hardy is less about knowledge than about interest and attention—and I think that Dickens too is imagining a presence looking down and attending to (as opposed to merely taking cognizance of) human events. What is key for Hardy to imagine is not an all-knowing or omnipotent God, but a consciousness that watches earthly events with care and attention, taking in and registering what happens to sentient creatures. This idea of a benevolent God that watches human life with interest is a fantasy that Hardy patently rejects as false, but the form of his novels and the organizing consciousness of his narrator in a sense take the place of this overarching consciousness who can lovingly attend to earthly matters. By inventing a new form of narrating consciousness in The Dynasts, Hardy is able to explore the problem of a centralized consciousness in an astronomical universe and the problem of limited attention. The spirits’ attention to what Tucker calls “the massive pageant of human pain” is marked off in time: the chorus of spirits descend to the “mud-moulded ball” of earth in 1805 and they turn their backs on the planet again in 1815 after the Napoleonic wars are over (see Figure 29). As readers we are asked to imagine their spatial position precisely throughout the work, which is, Hardy explains, “intended simply for mental performance and not for the stage” (x). He intends that the action should be performed in the mind of the reader. On one level, its function recalls that of the narrators in Hardy’s novels; like his narrators, the chorus moves weightlessly through the space of the narrative, attending to action on the surface of the earth. But Hardy does not grant the chorus direct access to the minds of his characters, and he pushes both the speed with which it travels and the space that it inhabits to new limits. We can also place this work in the context of epic narration, recalling that Hardy creates the chorus as a modern day version of the celestial machinery found in epics like the Iliad and Paradise Lost. A key problem Hardy sets for himself in this work is to convey both the enormous scale of these wars and the pain and suffering experienced by hundreds of thousands of individual participants. He foregrounds the difficulty of imagining the lives of individual soldiers by constantly presenting troops from afar, so that soldiers are reduced to mere spots or “atoms” (383). The action occurs on an impossibly large area of land that the reader is repeatedly required to visualize—we are shown a view from above the clouds of the whole of Europe, a view over Eastern Europe of Napoleon’s long retreat from Moscow, and troops moving towards Waterloo from all

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Figure 29 A visual example of the earth seen as a “mud-moulded ball.”

over Europe. The list of dramatis personae includes almost one hundred specific individuals (including Napoleon, Nelson, and Emperor Alexander) and tens of thousands of unnamed men, whether soldiers, seamen, Wessex rustics, or messengers. In a scene tracing the retreat of Napoleon’s troops back to France from Moscow during the brutal winter of 1812, for instance, the chorus of spirits floats as usual above the earth and follows the men as they pass along the road from Smolensk into Lithuania. This passage is characteristically written partly in stage directions and partly in dialogue between members of this

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chorus of spirits, but as the epic-drama is for mental performance alone, the stage directions are an integral part of the scene. SCENE IX THE ROAD FROM SMOLENSKO INTO LITHUANIA

The season is far advanced toward winter. The point of observation is high amongst the clouds, which, opening and shutting fitfully to the wind, reveal the earth as a confused expanse merely. SPIRIT OF THE PITIES Where are we? And why are we where we are? SHADE OF THE EARTH Above a wild waste garden-plot of mine Nigh bare in this late age, and now grown chill, Lithuania called by some. (352)

This exchange locates the point of view, which begins high above the clouds and then descends to a specific place. From a distance, little can be seen of the earth, “a confused expanse merely.” And while the spirits have a far more comprehensive view of things than the men walking the earth, they must go through a process of making sense of what they see. The Spirit of the Years then asks: “And what see you on the far land-verge there, / Laboring from eastward towards our longitude?” SPIRIT OF THE PITIES An object like a dun-piled caterpillar, Shuffling its length in painful heaves along, Hitherward. . . . Yea, what is this Thing we see Which, moving as a single monster might, Is yet not one but many? (353)

The spirit is informed that this is the remains of the French Grand Army on their retreat from Moscow via Tarutino, Jaroslawitz, and Borodino. In this scene, a body of troops numbering almost thirty thousand becomes a creeping caterpillar. Something white floats down toward the soldiers and the stage directions identify it: What has floated down from the sky upon the Army is a flake of snow. Then come another and another, till natural features, hitherto varied with the tints of autumn, are confounded, and all is phantasmal grey and white. The caterpillar shape still creeps laboriously nearer, but instead of increasing in size by the rules of perspective, it gets more attenuated, and there are left upon the

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ground behind it minute parts of itself, which are speedily flaked over, and remain as white pimples by the wayside. (353–4)

The celestial perspective allows Hardy to depict the entire French army at once, as well as, a page later, the Russian soldiers who are about to attack them as they retreat. The range of scales visually available is extreme, from a huge expanse of earth to “a flake of snow.” From afar, individual soldiers who collapse or die from cold and starvation appear simply as the minute parts of the caterpillar. Hardy’s decision to take on a project of this type is not an obvious one, despite the fact that he first conceives the project in the 1880s, at least twenty years before he sets out to write it. One fascinating aspect of The Dynasts is the extent to which Hardy is committed to getting his readers to take in the Napoleonic wars as a whole. He invents an experimental narrative device in order to provide his readers with a visual scope that covers an entire continent. As we have seen, his novels often critique the idea that it might be possible to see something as a whole, and he provides elaborate analyses of all that is lost when one views something from a distance.19 We might recall The Return of the Native’s Mrs. Yeobright, who views communities of people: as we see the throngs which cover the canvases of Sallaeri, Van Alsloot, and others of that school—vast masses of beings, jostling, zigzagging, and processioning in definite directions, but whose features are indistinguishable by the very comprehensiveness of the view. (248)

In this passage, Mrs. Yeobright is implicitly faulted for choosing the comprehensive over the particular; she misses out on the features of individual beings. For Hardy, the key danger in seeing as a whole is missing the human or the conscious element: the pain, the love, and the attachment to the world. The Van Alsloot paintings Hardy refers to in the novel are sixteenthcentury paintings of pageants and processions; the impulse to represent large crowds of people has a long history. At the same time, it is helpful to see Hardy’s longing to represent things as a whole in the context of other such attempts in the long nineteenth century, whether these be the panorama paintings that begin to be popular early in the century, the Great Exhibition of 1851, James Wyld’s great model of a globe seventy feet high and eighty feet in diameter, into which visitors could enter. Thirty percent of panorama paintings in the nineteenth century depicted battle scenes, according to Jonathan Crary; battle scenes are, along with landscapes, a typical topic

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for a large-scale work. He speaks of panorama paintings as participating in a fantasy of comprehensiveness, seeming to give the viewer access to the whole natural world. In On Exhibit, Barbara J. Black cites Wyld’s own description of his huge model globe, which opened in 1851 in Leicester Square: Now, for the first time in English geography, these obstacles to the representation of the earth’s surface have been overcome. In MR. WYLD’S GREAT MODEL OF THE GLOBE, the surface being seen from the inside, the eye may take in, by a rapid survey, the whole extent, figure, magnitude, and multifarious features of the world we live in, as if it were one vast plain.20

In the triumphant rhetoric of these exhibition notes, visual access to the surface of the globe, albeit turned inside out, enables some kind of total knowledge of what the earth is like. In fact, it is precisely because the earth has been turned inside out that the world appears to be fully knowable. Here we see again the conflation of vision and knowledge; to be able to see something as a whole in this context is supposed to offer a model for complete understanding. Black notes the similarities between the impulse to make this globe and other visual attempts to represent totality. She points out that each of these projects of comprehensiveness relies on a movement between “the miniature and the gigantic” (30). We might think back to Hardy’s juxtaposition of a confused expanse of snow and the close-up of “a flake of snow.” Black writes: Like a museum and much like the century’s most enduring spectacle, the panorama, Wyld’s globe operated on a dialectic of the miniature and the gigantic. As contemporary accounts suggest time and again, the wonder lay in the exchanges between the singular—that which could be taken in with one glance—and the abundant—that which required a larger scope, such as “an entire range of mountains.” . . . In effect, Wyld’s illusion seemed to undo the Copernican revolution: humankind was once again at the center of the universe. (30)

In Apollo’s Eye, Denis Cosgrove likewise links panorama paintings to georamas like Wyld’s or to spherical models of the universe that begin with Etienne-Louis Boulle´e’s 1784 design for a “globe of reason,” a huge dome depicting the day and night skies, and continue in the form of nineteenth-century planetaria (see Figure 30).21 The impulse to create models of things as a whole, then, is a familiar one, and the topics these works cover tend to be relatively consistent with the

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Figure 30 Diagram of the different moments at which the transit of Venus of 1882 would occur depending on where on the earth it was viewed. The 1873 article in which this diagram appears emphasizes that the earth’s own rotation poses complications in terms of when the transit would appear to happen. Like so many astronomical phenomena, this transit is an apparent movement of Venus across the sun, based on the alignments of the two celestial bodies as seen from earth.

scenes Hardy incorporates into The Dynasts: a whole city, the earth, the night sky, a battle scene, a crowd, a mountain range, or a landscape in general. At the same time, it strikes me as surprising that a writer as wedded to the concrete and the particular as Hardy is should attempt to be comprehensive in the way he chooses to be in The Dynasts. I find it perplexing that Hardy attempts to convey the incredible suffering of war, the shape of the whole, without giving us the handholds of individual characters with

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whom we can identify, whose lives we can follow meticulously as we do in his earlier novels. There are intimate scenes, such as a conversation at Nelson’s deathbed during the Battle of Trafalgar, but no sustained characters with whom the reader can identify as we do in his novels. To me, the very fact that Hardy chooses to attempt such comprehensiveness sits uncomfortably with his repeated critiques of distance throughout his literary oeuvre. In The Dynasts, Hardy places his readers so far from earth that they can almost see the entire planet; the clouds are his stage curtains. The Dynasts begins and ends in the so-called “Overworld,” which stretches into space as far as “earth-invisible suns”: And onwards into ghastly gulfs of sky, Where hideous presences churn through the dark— Monsters of magnitude without a shape, Hanging amid deep wells of nothingness. (522)

The “deep wells of nothingness” are the waste places of the sky that both Hardy himself and Tennyson before him have been both awed and frightened by. Some of Hardy’s descriptions of outer space are nearly verbatim echoes of descriptions in Two on a Tower, written more than twenty years earlier. Here, for instance, he slightly varies Swithin St. Cleeve’s reference to the interspaces found between the stars, “Monsters of magnitude without known shape,” suggesting that he was conscious of playing with an astronomical scale similar to the scale of his 1881 novel Two on a Tower. The spirits oscillate between views high above the earth where clouds part to “reveal the earth as a confused expanse merely” and close-up views of human conversations, birds’ nests, and “brass-hued and opalescent bubbles” rising to the surface of a marsh. Initially, for instance: The nether sky opens, and Europe is disclosed as a prone and emaciated figure, the Alps shaping like a backbone, and the branching mountain-chains like ribs, the peninsular plateau of Spain forming a head. Broad and lengthy lowlands stretch from the north of France across Russia like a grey-green garment hemmed by the Ural mountains and the glistening Arctic Ocean. (6)

This is a comprehensiveness unparalleled in any of Hardy’s novels or stories. From this description, the spirits’ attention moves in toward the action, as “the point of view then sinks downwards through space.” In other scenes, the movement is from near to far. Napoleon is crowned emperor in the

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Milan cathedral and the chorus hovers inside, watching the ceremony, before rising through the roof to a more comprehensive standpoint: The scene changes. The exterior of the Cathedral takes the place of the interior, and the point of view recedes, the whole fabric smalling into distance and becoming like a rare, delicately carved alabaster ornament. The city itself sinks to miniature, the Alps show afar as a white corrugation, the Adriatic and the Gulf of Genoa appear on this and on that hand, with Italy between them, till clouds cover the panorama. (37)

In this way, Hardy speeds up the transitions between celestial viewpoints and close-ups, forcing the reader to attend to how distance and proximity shape perception. He pushes the scale of celestial perspectives to a new extreme, having his imaginary viewers move with their eyes fixed on earth. Sometimes hundreds of thousands of soldiers are visible, and elsewhere we see only the interior of an opera house. A view of ships “small as moths to the aerial vision” pulls forward to a conversation in the cabin of a single ship. In his literary notebooks from the 1880s, Hardy copies out a long passage from Henry James’s criticism that critiques the very idea of seeing something as a whole: Balzac’s Come´die Humaine is on the imaginative line very much what Comte’s Positive Philosophy is on the scientific. These great enterprises are equally characteristic of the French passion for completeness, for symmetry, for making a system as neat as an epigram—of its intolerance for the indefinite, the unformulated. The French mind likes better to squeeze things into a formula that mutilates them, if need be, than to leave them in the frigid vague . . . The civilizn [sic] of the 19th cent. . . . to us English appears so multitudinous, so complex, so far-spreading, so suggestive, so portentous,—it has such misty edges and far reverberations—that the imagination shrinks from any attempt to grasp it as a whole.22

Here James sets himself apart (as an Englishman) from the French impulse to grasp things as a whole, to aim for completeness and symmetry. What I want to get across about Hardy is that, like James, he’s extremely attuned to the minute, to complexity, to what James calls misty edges as well as the distortions involved in seeing things from a distance. But at the same time, he takes on this project of presenting the Napoleonic wars on a grand scale. So what is it about this global perspective that Hardy wants his readers to see? And how does he write The Dynasts in such a way that it does not gloss over the distortions and subtractions that inevitably occur when one watches live beings killing each other from a distance? In doing so, he

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provides a vision of war that is celestial and comprehensive without the epistemological confidence that often comes hand in hand with representations of things as a whole. If we return to the passage where Hardy represents the retreat from Moscow, we can get a sense of what is unexpected in Hardy’s model of seeing things as a whole: The caterpillar shape still creeps laboriously nearer, but instead of increasing in size by the rules of perspective, it gets more attenuated, and there are left upon the ground behind it minute parts of itself, which are speedily flaked over, and remain as white pimples by the wayside. (354)

What are the characteristics of this point of view? The chorus of spirits is hovering in the air, but they are doing so from a very specific place. They are closer to Lithuania and looking eastward towards Smolensk. The line should, therefore, seem to get wider as it approaches, but instead it gets thinner as the soldiers drop off and die by the wayside. Why give us this optical detail? To answer that question, it may be helpful to focus on the information that this scene does provide to its reader, rather than on all it leaves out. To my mind, this passage employs a representational strategy very similar to the map of the retreat from Moscow drawn by Charles Minard in 1869, praised by Etienne-Jules Marey, and made famous by Edward Tufte in the 1980s (see Figure 31). This map shows how, over the course of the trip to Moscow from Poland and back from Moscow, Napoleon’s troops gradually went from 422,000 to 10,000: On the map, the incredible loss of life during the Moscow campaign is expressed in terms of a line that starts off fat and thins considerably as it runs from Poland through Lithuania to Moscow. It then gets even more dramatically thinner as it charts the return from Moscow to Poland. The moment Hardy describes pinpoints perhaps the most noticable thinning of the black line of retreat. I have not yet been able to find any evidence that Hardy saw this map in the extensive research he did on the Napoleonic wars. The map appeared in Etienne-Jules Marey’s 1878 La Me´thode Graphique dans les Sciences Expe´rimentales. It is certainly the case that the sites Hardy mentions, Tarutino, Jaroslawitz, and Smolensk are each labeled on Minard’s map. But whether he saw it or not, the goals of Hardy’s passage and the goals of Minard’s map have much in common. Both use spatial images of a thinning line to convey a dramatic and rapid loss of life that is otherwise

Figure 31 Charles Minard’s map of Napoleon’s campaign in Russia in 1812–13 and the huge successive losses of life that occurred as the troops retreated from Moscow.

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extremely hard to imagine in concrete terms. Hardy’s unique perspectival techniques allow his reader to see problems that are easy to miss when one is tethered to an earthly scale. In setting up observers who can rise high above the earth and then swoop down into Napoleon’s tent or close to a riverbank, Hardy is employing a type of comprehensive perspectivalism that differs dramatically from Dickens’s fantasy of being able to record “every vice and virtue” contained in “the feeble shining of this earth of ours.” These observers can move anywhere, even through roofs, but they are subject to many of the restrictions of human vision. They cannot see large-scale and small-scale details at once. They either see the whole army as a caterpillar, devoid of individuality, or Napoleon’s red eyes and raw nose when he has a cold. In general they cannot see through things. What they see is utterly dependent on where they view it from. Setting Tolstoy and Hardy’s approaches to the Napoleonic wars next to each other throws the peculiarity of Hardy’s perspectivalism into relief. Thomas Hardy wrote his account of the Napoleonic wars many years after War and Peace came out in 1869; he owned a translation of War and Peace and could have read it anytime after 1886, when the first English translation was published. But his notebooks show that he had conceptualized The Dynasts well before having access to War and Peace, so it does not makes sense to see Hardy as explicitly writing in response to Tolstoy. In terms of battles, the points of overlap between The Dynasts and War and Peace lie primarily in the 1805 Battle of Austerlitz, the 1812 Battle of Borodino, which immediately precedes the French army’s invasion of Moscow, and in the story of the French soldiers’ retreat from Moscow later that winter. The narrative strategy of War and Peace is far more familiar to readers of multiplot novels than that of The Dynasts. There are no phantasmal intelligences haunting Tolstoy’s battlefields, and for the most part, the perspective is very much from the surface of the earth. But like Hardy, Tolstoy sets up a sustained tension between more distant and close-up takes on what happens during a battle. While their specific strategies differ greatly, both authors attempt to represent battles as a whole. We find Tolstoy’s narrator commenting early in the novel: “From general to private, every man was conscious of his own insignificance, aware that he was but a grain of sand in that ocean of humanity, and yet at the same time had a sense of power as a part of that vast whole” (280).

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Tolstoy’s Battle of Borodino spans fifty pages, while Hardy’s covers only six. What both set out to convey is the story of a battle in which neither side gains any territory but something like 70,000 people are killed. The battle occurs in September 1812, when the French army is still marching eastwards towards Moscow. Tolstoy moves through five primary perspectives: Pierre Bezuhov’s, Napoleon’s, Prince Andrei’s, Kutuzof ’s, and that of an omniscient narrator. Pierre acts as a moving observer, riding on horseback, first looking at a glorious view of the battlefield from the top of the hill early in the morning, then finding himself in the middle of it, with bullets whistling by him. Prince Andrei is among the reserve troops, not in battle himself, but still being fired on, until he is mortally wounded and removed to the surgical tent where he watches doctors saw off another soldier’s leg. And Napoleon watches the battle from above and afar over ten hours of ceaseless firing. Through this overlapping of perspectives, a rich sense of the battle is built up. We can see Tolstoy’s account as bookmarked by two versions of the battlefield, one in the morning and one after the battle has occurred. The first occurs through the eyes of Pierre Bezuhov, who is not a military man, but who has come to observe the battle. It is morning and the fighting has just begun: As he mounted the steps to the knoll Pierre glanced at the scene spread beneath his eyes and was spell-bound at the beauty of it. It was the same panorama which he had admired from the mound the day before, but now the whole prospect swarmed with troops, smoke-clouds from the guns hung overhead and the slanting rays of the bright sun, rising slightly to the left behind Pierre, filled the clear morning air with rosy golden light and long dark shadows. The distant forest which bound the horizon might have been carved out of some greeny-yellow precious stone, its undulating outline being pierced beyond Valuevo by the Smolensk high road thick with troops. In the foreground glittered golden cornfields and copses. Everywhere, to right, to left and in front were soldiers. The whole scene was animated, majestic and unexpected; but what struck Pierre most of all was the view of the battlefield itself, of Borodino and the hollows on both sides of the Kolocha. (937–8)

Bezuhov’s view of the battlefield is a comprehensive one because it is distant—he watches the battlefield from above. While that distance enables a stepping back that we associate with objectivity, it is tied to the viewpoint of a specific individual, one who has no effect on the action but who is well known to the reader at this time.

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From this point, Pierre mounts his horse and descends into the heart of the battle, where he loses all sense of a comprehensive view and can no longer interpret facts that would be obvious to a more distant observer: Though he was unaware of it, he had come to the bridge over the Kolocha between Gorky and Borodino, which the French (having occupied Borodino) were attacking in the first phase of the battle. Pierre saw there was a bridge in front of him and that soldiers were doing something in the smoke on both sides of it and in the meadow, among the rows of new-mown hay he had noticed the day before; but despite the incessant firing going on there it never occurred to him that this was the very heart of the battle. He did not hear the bullets whistling from every side, or the projectiles flying over his head, did not see the enemy on the other side of the river, and it was a long time before he saw the dead and wounded, though many fell not far from him. With a smile that did not leave his lips he gazed about him. (940)

The tension between primarily sensory and more theoretical standpoints in this passage emerges through the voice of the narrator, who knows the name of the river, can situate this specific bridge, and provides the reader with explanations that Pierre lacks, calling attention to all the things that Pierre does not notice, does not even “hear” or “see.” The reader can take on Pierre’s perspective and imagine bullets passing by, projectiles flying above, the enemy’s presence, but it is a strange imagining, imagining being in a scene where these things are happening without one being aware of them. The scene provides two ways of knowing: Pierre provides a sense of immediacy and sensory perception without comprehension; the narrator provides names and context that make it recognizably part of a battle. This back and forth between Pierre and the narrator continues, again with an emphasis on Pierre’s misperceptions: Climbing the knoll, Pierre had no suspicions that this little space, dug with some not very big trenches and from which a few guns were firing, was the most important point of the battle. He fancied indeed (simply because he happened to be there) that it was one of the least significant places in the field. (942)

While the double perspective Tolstoy creates here can be seen in terms of a movement back and forth between subjectivity (Pierre’s) and objectivity (the narrator’s), this objectivity differs profoundly from the views of the chorus of spirits in Hardy. The narrator’s perspective is not spatial; it involves the subsequent knowledge of a man steeped in history who simultaneously knows the names of battles, generals, rivers, and towns and

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wants to convey the disorientation of battle that some histories tend to gloss over. Later in Tolstoy’s account of the battle, we find Pierre himself locked in a fight with a French officer; neither can tell who is trying to capture whom and each is glad to be thrown apart from the other. From here, the story moves to an omniscient narrator who comments that the battle is “fought on a seven-thousand foot space . . . in the simplest and most artless manner imaginable.” The narrator’s knowledge, obtained after the battle, is contrasted to that of Napoleon, who cannot tell what is going on. Napoleon stands watching: But not only was it impossible to make out what was happening from where he stood down below, or from the knoll above on which some of his generals had taken their stand, but even from the fle`ches themselves, where Russian and French soldiers now found themselves together or alternately—dead, wounded and alive, frightened or panic-stricken—it was impossible to make out what was taking place. (50)

These scenes are designed both to underscore how little each soldier can perceive about the battle as a whole and also to communicate a valuable piece of information: what the experience of battle is really like. Hardy approaches the same Battle of Borodino with the movement of the chorus of spirits, as they turn their attention to Russia. The scene begins at Salamanca, where Wellington has just defeated the French troops. Hardy decides he needs us to get the phantasmal intelligences all the way from Spain to Borodino, where Napoleon is, on the outskirts of Moscow. This is how he does it: SEMICHORUS I OF THE YEARS (aerial music) What are Space and Time? A fancy!— Lo, by Vision’s necromancy Muscovy will now unroll; Where for cork and olive-tree Starveling firs and birches be. SEMICHORUS II Though such features lie afar From events Peninsular, These, amid their dust and thunder, Form with those, as scarce asunder, Parts of one compacted whole.

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the starry sky within CHORUS Marmont’s Aide, then, like a swallow Let us follow, follow, follow, Over hill and over hollow, Past the plains of Teute and Pole! (339)

Then the stage directions tell us, “There is a semblance of a sound in the darkness as of a rushing through the air” (339). If Tolstoy is giving us a view over the battlefield, Hardy here is once again trying to give us a sense of the space that stretches between Salamanca and Borodino. The “sound in the darkness as of a rushing through the air” is, quite simply, the sound of these spirits moving swiftly from one scene to the other, from the land of cork and olive trees to the land of firs and birch-trees. It is the noise of narrative happening. The scope of the action Hardy is setting out to represent in this single scene covers thousands of miles and the chorus has us imagine the land moving beneath them, as “Muscovy will now unroll.” This panoramic view of Europe, with its discussion of cork and olive trees, recalls a famous passage in John Ruskin’s On the Nature of Gothic Architecture. Ruskin invites his reader to: imagine the kind of contrast in physical character which exists between Northern and Southern countries. We know the differences in detail, but we have not that broad glance and grasp which would enable us to feel them in their fulness. We know that gentians grow on the Alp, and olives on the Apennines; but we do not enough conceive for ourselves that variegated mosaic of the world’s surface which a bird sees in its migration, that difference between the district of the gentian and of the olive which the stork and the swallow see far off, as they lean upon the sirocco wind. Let us, for a moment, try to raise ourselves even above the level of their flight, and imagine the Mediterranean lying beneath us like an irregular lake.23

Ruskin critiques maps and terrestrial globes for not allowing us to “feel” the differences between regions, even though they allow us to take in all of Europe in one glance. Ruskin’s imaginary survey of these territories has much in common with the narrative device Hardy creates years later. Both involve an imaginary observer endowed with a superhuman ability to travel but endowed with human sensory organs and a sense of direct experience. It is essential to Hardy’s technique that the chorus has to travel in order to see the Battle of Borodino. Hardy emphasizes that the attention of this chorus of spirits is severely limited. By choosing to watch this battle, they are wresting their eyes from another part of the world. And they have only descended to the planet earth for ten years to watch these specific battles. He

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makes his reader contemplate an entire universe that is not being watched by a chorus of spirits. When the spirits get to the battle we are given another aerial view: Borodino, seventy miles west of Moscow, is revealed in a bird’s-eye view from a point above the position of the French Grand Army, advancing on the Russian capital. We are looking east, towards Moscow and the army of Russia, which bars the way thither. (339)

This celestial view is not Tolstoy’s scene of thousands of soldiers lying in the fields and meadows; it is specifically located once again, with a view east toward Moscow. The scene of the battle itself is brief; there are few accounts of individuals, nothing like the weaving of perspectives that Tolstoy sets up. There are several individual dialogues involving Napoleon, but none of these offer a glimpse into any particular individual’s consciousness. Like Tolstoy, Hardy begins the day with an overview of the battle scene: The spacious field of battle is now distinct, its ruggedness being bisected by the great road from Smolensk to Moscow, which runs centrally from beneath the spectator to the furthest horizon. The field is also crossed by the stream Kalotcha, flowing from the right-centre foreground to the left-centre background, thus forming an X with the road aforesaid, intersecting it in mid-distance at the village of Borodino. Behind this village the Russians have taken their stand in close masses. So stand also the French, who have in their centre the Shevardino redoubt beyond the Kalotcha. Here Napoleon, in his usual blue-grey uniform, white waistcoat, and white leather breeches, chooses his position with Berthier and other officers of his suite. (343)

Where earlier passages emphasize the ignorance of the chorus of spirits with regard to this ball of earth, here the narrator of the stage directions assumes familiarity and we might wonder whether this reference to Napoleon’s “usual blue-grey uniform” is being imagined from the point of view of the chorus who has now been watching this man for seven years, or simply from the point of view of the historian, whose voice is filtering in here, as Hardy relaxes his narrative constraints. The battle ends with a summary of the destruction that has occurred, glimpsed and heard in the darkening evening:

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the starry sky within SPIRIT OF THE PITIES But mark that roar— A mash of men’s crazed cries entreating mates To run them through and end their agony; Boys calling on their mothers, veterans Blaspheming God and man. Those shady shapes Are horses, maimed in myriads, tearing round In maddening pangs, the harnessings they wear Clanking discordant jingles as they tear! SPIRIT OF THE YEARS It is enough. Let now the scene be closed. (345)

Hardy’s perspectivalism has both the advantages and severe limitations of a view from above. With distance comes a great erasure of detail and of the capacity to feel. He underscores the idea that by looking at one scene we are turning our attention away from everything else that is going on. It is in this sense that he gives us the apparatus of total knowledge and omniscience without the interpretive framework to go with it. If anything, his perspectival strategies emphasize epistemological instability by showing how dramatically perception shifts as one moves up close to an event or views it from high above the clouds. We might think back to the claims of Wyld’s huge model of the globe, that, by standing in that exhibit, “the eye may take in, by a rapid survey, the whole extent, figure, magnitude, and multifarious features of the world we live in, as if it were one vast plain.” Hardy’s God’seye view separates out many of the elements that are often woven together into the concept of objectivity, giving us comprehensive sight without the epistemological confidence that usually goes with it. R. J. White compares Hardy’s and Tolstoy’s depictions of the Napoleonic wars in a way that highlights how astronomy infuses Hardy’s worldview: “With The Dynasts we are in an embattled world from the first word to the last. With War and Peace we are no less in that world, but we come out of it into Count Tolstoy’s study in order to listen to a lecture on history and the historian. If it were possible to imagine ourselves ever coming out of the world of The Dynasts, we know that we should come out upon Egdon Heath, or stand with Gabriel Oak on Norcombe Hill to watch one’s stately progress through the stars.” She notes later on that “Hardy’s world-picture has its foundations in the earth of Egdon, and its roof in the superintendent presences of the Overworld.”24 Both Hardy’s interest in the problem of

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perception in astronomy and the disorienting effects of his narrative techniques raise important concerns about the limitations of human knowledge. They force us to confront how human vision is often an agent of distortion, upsetting an easy equation between seeing something and understanding it. In conclusion I want to emphasize two points that are most relevant to the relationship between astronomy, religion and an overseeing narrative consciousness. The first is that the narrators Hardy invents in The Dynasts enable him to incorporate the stellar universe into the work itself by beginning and ending the epic-drama in the “Overworld,” a space above earth but not of it, outside of its atmosphere. What sets these spirits apart from the narrators of his novels is that they have direct access to the astronomical universe—outer space is their home and they are just visitors on earth. While Hardy’s use of astronomy in the novels is restricted to human beings looking up at the sky from the surface of the earth or at reflections of celestial bodies on the earth, here the action of the Napoleonic wars takes place within a palpably astronomical universe. Second, Hardy makes the question of perspective and the spatial logic of a central consciousness a pressing problem in this work. The chorus of spirits are witnesses rather than a figure for God, but Hardy suggests that these spirits and God would be subject to the same problems of perspective—they cannot be everywhere at once, and to attend to one event means to ignore everything else. Hillis Miller describes this phenomenon as “[t]he careful attention to details of optical placement in The Dynasts.”25 Within this work, the chorus of spirits is constantly making choices—about where their attention is focused and most notably about whether they view the action from near or far. Each scale gives very different information—and leaves key information out. Hardy suggests then that God himself (who probably, in his worldview, does not exist) suffers from or is subject to perspective and the limits of perspectival seeing. At the very end of The Dynasts the chorus of spirits reminds the reader that all they have seen—ten years of war extending over Europe and taking hundreds of thousands of lives—is only the tiniest fragment of what is going on in the universe: Yet but one flimsy riband of Its web Have we here watched in weaving—web Enorm, Whose furthest hem and salvage may extend To where the roars and plashings of the flames Of earth-invisible suns swell noisily,

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the starry sky within And onwards into ghastly gulfs of sky, Where hideous presences churn through the dark— Monsters of magnitude without a shape, Hanging amid deep wells of nothingness. (521–2)

We can read that as a realization of human insignificance or of earthly insignificance, but to do so is to oversimplify the problem that Hardy puts before us. What he wants us to do is not to dismiss the Napoleonic wars not even to dismiss the experiences of a single soldier, but instead to try to hold both in our minds—the experience of one soldier, of a trail of hundreds of thousands worth of troops—and also the astronomical universe within which they exist. In this way, Hardy designs The Dynasts to accord with astronomy, so that the space of the narrative extends into interstellar space. For Hardy, the difficulty with God is not only a matter of science contradicting religion but also of a central consciousness not making spatial sense.

Conclusion

What, then, is the starry sky within? It is a conception of the cosmos, the image of the world as a whole that we carry around in our heads. It is a spatial logic by means of which we orient ourselves. Or, Edgar Allan Poe suggests, it is itself a fluctuating space that expands and contracts with the vacillating energies of the imagination. The phrase brings together both a model of the interior self, “within,” and the largest physical space we can imagine, something by definition external. There is something strange about the concept because it places within the individual the space that is supposed to be out there. A related paradox occurs in De Quincey’s instinct that “space . . . has no grandeur to him who has no space in the theatre of his own brain” (576). How can we make sense of this constant confusion of inside and out? First, as I have been suggesting throughout this book, this complementary movement between extension and contraction is particularly appealing to Victorian writers who long to capture the totality of things even though they no longer believe that it is possible to do so. They address this problem by enlisting astronomy to expose radically unlike views of objects, characters, or locations that are commonly assumed to have some kind of inner coherence. Second, I do not think that the confusion between interior and exterior is as strange as it appears to be at first glance. Instead, it seems to me that the baseline condition of possessing a self is having an opening out into the world. It is the ability to be in relation to others that constitutes having a self. This is what Martin Heidegger is getting at in Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics when he suggests that human beings are “world-forming,” while the “stone is ‘worldless’”: the stone does not exist in relation to others; it “is essentially without access to those beings” around it.1 The mind depends on both being separate from the world and being porous, having access to the world. That access occurs through the senses, which lean out into the world while always remaining connected to a body. Marcel Proust describes a “gaze” as “a window at which all the senses lean out, anxious and

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petrified.”2 His image captures the tension built into reaching out into space while remaining grounded at the same time. The senses are embodied—and yet they take us out into the world. We might think of our access to the world as involving some kind of mental aperture, such as a window, that is directly linked to the senses—to eyes, ears, mouth, and nose, and all the organs of touch that reach out from the rooted body. Of the authors this study treats, Thomas Hardy was the only one who lived to witness Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. He acquired a copy of Relativity: The Special and the General Theory, and in 1919, confessed the following in a letter to the philosopher J. M. E. McTaggart, characterizing Einstein’s revelations as “comic”: I have of late been getting out of patience, if not with philosophers, with men of science. You probably, or I shd [sic] say certainly, have grasped with ease all that Einstein has been telling us, which is more than I have done. Really after what he says the universe seems to be getting too comic for words. However, though one may think queerly of time & space I can see that motion is merely relative, & long have done so[.]3

For Hardy, Einstein’s theories supply a scientific account of what he has “long” believed about motion being “merely relative.” As we have seen, he has explored how the motion of both the observer and the object looked at depends on the distance between the two and their changing positions. These are lessons he has learned from astronomy, optics, and from reading and writing literature; Einstein’s new theories confirm Hardy’s old intuitions about how motion shapes what one is able to perceive. Both erode Hardy’s faith in the existence of an objective external world—objective in the sense of being independent of an observer. Hardy goes on to suggest that we might simply discard what this book has referred to as the theoretical or scientific view of the universe’s structure: & I feel that it is just as true to assert that the earth stands still & the rest of the universe moves as to assert the opposite: & who knows if we may not get to despise Galileo & applaud the view of the Holy Inquisition!

Before Einstein, Hardy has worked with the assumption that the scientific view of the universe described by figures like Richard Proctor is on some level more “true” even if it contradicts all of human experience. But now he has a scientific account to back up what he has often felt intuitively and tried to communicate to his readers—that the competing modes of knowledge

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with which we can apprehend the world are equally valid and necessary even as they contradict each other. The views Hardy expresses in this 1919 letter are not new ones for him. He has always displayed impatience with the authority conferred upon abstract thought and objectivity by some writers and thinkers. Like De Quincey, Tennyson, and Eliot, Hardy continually calls his readers’ attention to the tangled patterns of perception that make up our views of the external world, and to the idea that any single orientation toward the world leaves out as much information as it gives us. We might set Hardy’s 1919 statement that “it is just as true to assert that the earth stands still & the rest of the universe moves as to assert the opposite” next to Levin’s insight at the end of Anna Karenina, when he compares one mode of knowledge to another. As Levin gazes “high up into the cloudless sky,” he asks: Do I not know that that is infinite space, and not a rounded vault? But however much I screw up my eyes and strain my sight I cannot see it except as round and circumscribed, and in spite of my knowing about infinite space I am incontestably right when I see a firm blue vault, far more right than when I strain my eyes to see beyond it. (835)

Levin measures one vision of the starry sky against the other—blue vault against infinite space—and asserts at least momentarily that his sensory view of the sky is “incontestably right.” But his own thoughts have undone the idea that such a question is “incontestable.” All of the authors in this book, Tolstoy included, ask us instead to revel in competing ways of seeing that coexist despite contradicting one another. Each of the four central authors in this study would agree with Thomas Nagel that “not all reality is better understood the more objectively it is viewed.” Each suggests that things that we believe we know can be inaccurate, while things we know to be false can also be “true.” I have suggested throughout this project that the concerns of nineteenth-century astronomy and the epistemological concerns of these authors resonated strongly with one another. In these nineteenth-century writers we see the monstrous face of the Orion nebula, earth “orb[ing] into a perfect star,” the stars as “a little lot of stars belonging to one’s own homestead,” and stars “flitting in transit” across tiny puddles. Even when we find Hardy revealing the limitations of characters that have a tendency towards abstraction he remains deeply invested in the problem of what it means to understand the world in its entirety. The Dynasts, though so comprehensive and in some ways

Figure 32 Perini’s planetarium, 1879. Historical artwork of the interior of the planetarium constructed in London by the Italian astronomer N. Perini. This planetarium was mentioned in journal and newspaper reports of 1879. The planetarium was a hemispherical dome, over 4 meters across and 4 meters in height, resting on twelve columns (three seen in background). At center is a suspended opal globe representing the sun, lit up by gas or electricity. Around it, the planets rotate on wires. Perini, a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, was reported to have spent hundreds of pounds and seven years building this planetarium.

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traditional in its goals, is also daring: Hardy invents a new genre and replaces omniscient narrators with a chorus of spirits that constantly complains of all that it is unable to see. I want to end this book with an image of one of the great astronomical entertainments found in Victorian London, Signor N. Perini’s Planetarium (see Figure 32). The planetarium pictured in this engraving contained a gaslit sun and a set of suspended celestial bodies that orbited around it, with a dome of stars over the ceiling. This drawing pulls together several ideas that are central to this book: looking up at the stars while being anchored to the ground; imagining the complex motions and set of arrangements between celestial bodies as they rearrange themselves over time; tracking all the visual conditions that result from each person’s own position in space. The distortions built into the visual system and the limits of our perception are crystallized here by the solid vault of stars that encloses the observers. And yet the planetarium is in itself a manifestation of the longing to be able to picture the complex sets of relations that characterize the universe—a longing to get outside the confines of our earthbound perceptions and to see the earth and its family of orbs as they really are. Much of the energy of the literary texts I have been discussing derives from similarly dueling impulses. They are enlivened by the constant movement between sensory perception and theoretical thinking that they require of their readers. Nowhere do such contrasts between the sensory and the theoretical emerge more powerfully than in the variety of ways that the starry sky is taken into the mind.

Endnotes

i nt roduc t i on 1. Thomas Hardy, “In Vision I Roamed,” in Thomas Hardy: The Complete Poems, ed. James Gibson (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave, 2001), 9–10. 2. Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 41. Woloch describes the “polycentric arrangement of the story, the plot that pulls in many individuals, each of whom has a unique (perhaps unelaborated) experience within the story and a unique (perhaps unelaborated) perspective on the story,” and sets this against the “actual discourse that arranges such characters in a specific way.” 3. Georg Luka´cs, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 56. 4. Luka´cs, The Theory of the Novel, 29. 5. Michael J. Crowe, Modern Theories of the Universe: From Herschel to Hubble (New York: Dover Publications, 1994). Richard Holmes gives a wonderful narrative account of these discoveries in The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (New York: Pantheon Books, 2008), 121–4; 163–210. Pamela S. Gossin, Hardy’s Novel Universe: Astronomy, Cosmology, and Gender in the Post-Darwinian World (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007) Hardy’s Novel Universe, 83–96. Gossin captures the beauty and modesty of Herschel’s writing as well as the many intellectual implications of his work as he builds up a model of a universe that had not “existed from all time” as a static system but “appeared still to be in the process of becoming, changing, growing and decaying” (91). Simon Schaffer’s many articles on nineteenthcentury astronomy include “Astronomers Mark Time: Discipline and the Personal Equation,” Science in Context 2.1 (1988): 115–45; “Comets and the World’s End,” in Leo Howe and Alan Wain, eds., Predicting the Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 52–76; “The Nebular Hypothesis and the Science of Progress,” in James R. Moore, ed., History, Humanity and Evolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 131–64; “On Astronomical Drawing,” in Peter Galison and Carolyn A. Jones, eds., Picturing Science, Producing Art (New York: Routledge, 1998), 441–74; and “Where Experiments End: Tabletop Trials in Victorian Astronomy,” in Jed Z. Buchwald, ed., Scientific

endnotes

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7.

8.

9.

10.

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Practice: Theories and Stories of Doing Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 257–99. See Allan Chapman, The Victorian Amateur Astronomer: Astronomical Research in Britain 1820–1920 (Chichester and New York: Wiley, 1998) and Jimena Canales, “Exit the Frog, Enter the Human: Physiology and Experimental Psychology in Nineteenth-Century Astronomy,” British Journal for the History of Science 34.2 (2001): 173–97 and “Photogenic Venus: The ‘Cinematographic Turn’ and Its Alternatives in Nineteenth-Century France,” Isis 93.4 (2002): 585–613. The most important work on popular writing on Victorian astronomy (and other sciences) is Bernard Lightman’s wide-ranging Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 219–34; 295–351; 469–88. Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson; a Memoir (London: The Macmillan company, 1897), 16. The Starry Sky Within has benefited from the ongoing scholarly exploration of how developments in technology and science resonated with new ways of understanding the mind and its capacities to access other minds and distant forms of experience. These works include Pamela Thurschwell, Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920, Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture 32 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Kate Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Richard Menke, Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). In his 2012 Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, the artist William Kentridge refers to Eberty: “The light of every event was moving out from the earth at a speed of 186,000 miles per second. If one was at the right point in space, one could see any event that had happened. Near a star 2000 light years away, one could see Pontius Pilate washing his hands, as Eberty wrote. Near a star 500 years away, Luther could be seen nailing his edicts up on the church door at Worms.” Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 254. Throughout Part III of Glassworlds Armstrong shows how the perspectival worlds created by lenses in astronomy, microscopy, and by ludic devices such as the magic lantern, are fundamentally ungrounded. See pages 259, 266, 292, 300, 309, 317–18, and 335. This is from the 1892 poem “God and the Universe,” in The Poems of Tennyson in Three Volumes, 2nd edn., ed. Christopher Ricks (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1987), 3: 251. All citations from In Memoriam and other Tennyson poems come from this edition, henceforth abbreviated as “Ricks.” Thomas Hardy, Two on a Tower, ed. Suleiman M. Ahmad (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 31.

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11. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry: The 1893 Text, ed. Donald L. Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 30-1. Pater’s essay on Pico was first published in Fortnightly Review X, n.s. (1 October 1871), 377–86. I am grateful to Jonah Siegel for alerting me to this passage. 12. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books; Cambridge, MA, distributed by the MIT Press, 2007). 13. In showing how often literary writers turn to the astronomy of star systems to think about narrative, The Starry Sky Within participates in a recent impulse to understand these large-scale narratives as systems behaving according to logics and economies of their own. This concern is evident in recent work by critics such as Alex Woloch, who studies novels in terms of character-systems, various forms of Franco Moretti’s “distant reading,” including work on maps and network theory in narrative, and more scientifically oriented work such as that of Barri J. Gold who shows that certain novels function like engines behaving according to the predictable thermodynamic laws. Alex Woloch, The One vs. The Many; Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London; New York: Verso, 2005); Barri J. Gold, ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010); Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 (London; New York: Verso, 1998). Both Gold and Alice Jenkins offer helpful models for understanding the relationships between characters as moving to a set of scientific laws—physics or thermodynamics. Alice Jenkins, Space and the “March of Mind”: Literature and the Physical Sciences in Britain, 1815–1850 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Vanessa L. Ryan points out that psycho-physiologists, including George Henry Lewes, provide “a new focus on the dynamic, directional relationship between the individual and its physical and social environment . . . such systems-oriented theories, focusing as they do on the dynamic aspect of life, are both precursors of and in some respects an alternative to Darwinian evolutionary theory.” In Thinking Without Thinking in the Victorian Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 4–5. The richest analysis of the relationships between astronomy and novels as systems that I have encountered is Gossin’s Thomas Hardy’s Novel Universe. The Starry Sky Within, like many of the other studies of connections between novels and science I have cited, was originally inspired by the groundbreaking work that both Gillian Beer and George Levine have published over the past four decades. 14. J. Hillis Miller, The Form of Victorian Fiction (Cleveland: Arete Press, 1979), 2. 15. Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1921), 111. 16. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). See, for instance, 3, 67, and 151. Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 153–8.

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17. Ge´rard Genette stresses the distinctions between “who sees” and “who speaks” and uses the term focalization to emphasize the optical in Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980). Gerald Prince provides the following definition of point of view: “The perceptual or conceptual position in terms of which the narrated situations and events are presented.” Prince explains the overlap between the terms point of view, perspective, focalization, and viewpoint in his Dictionary of Narratology. He uses several different terms to distinguish between the ways that novels present contrasting points of view to the reader, namely: omniscient point of view (“not subject to perceptual or conceptual restrictions”), internal point of view (“everything is presented strictly in terms of the knowledge, feelings, and perceptions of the same character or different ones.”) Internal point of view may be “fixed (the perspective of one and only one character is adopted . . . ), variable (the perspective of several characters is adopted in turn to present different sequences of events: The Golden Bowl, The Age of Reason), or multiple (the same event or sequence of events is narrated more than once, each time in terms of a different perspective: The Moonstone, The Ring and the Book). Finally, it may emanate from a focal point situated in the diegesis but outside any of the characters (any thinking or feeling being); it thereby excludes all information on feelings and thoughts and is limited to registering the characters’ words and actions, their appearance, and the setting against which they come to the fore[.]” Gerald Prince, A Dictionary of Narratology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 73–4. Generally, what I refer to as the classic multiplot novel falls under the category of variable rather than multiple point of view. Parallax describes the same thing being viewed from two different positions in space, and also two different moments in time (based, for instance, on the earth’s orbit). In thinking about contrasts in point of view and how they actually work, Prince’s distinction between variable (in which the reader adopts the viewpoints of characters and narrators but time remains relatively unitary) and multiple (in which the same event is told over and over again, especially in different sections of a book) can be especially useful. 18. J. Hillis Miller, Thomas Hardy, Distance and Desire (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1970), 8. 19. See Isobel Armstrong’s Victorian Glassworlds for the connection between everyday experience of walking between trees and the solar system’s own movement with respect to other stars, “separating in front and closing up behind.” She cites Agnes Clerke’s A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1893) on this parallel. Clerke writes, “It is a matter of daily experience that the two objects situated at different distances, seem to a beholder in motion to move relatively to each other.” Clerke, 20, cited in Armstrong, 270.

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20. Hugh Kenner, Ulysses (London and Boston, MA: G. Allen & Unwin, 1980), 75. 21. John F. W. Herschel, Treatise on Astronomy (London: Printed for Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green & Longman, and John Taylor, 1833), 2. The same passage also begins the slightly revised astronomical treatise he published in 1849 as Outlines of Astronomy. 22. Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 23. Until the nineteenth century, such globes were largely the possessions of wealthy families, but by the early 1800s pairs of globes were being massproduced and were common in middle-class households and schools. Over this time period, celestial globes became decreasingly ornamental, placing more emphasis on the positions of individual stars than on the decorative figures of the constellations. Pairs of globes are referred to in countless Victorian novels including Thackeray’s The Newcomes and Vanity Fair, Wilkie Collins’s Armadale, Dickens’s Bleak House, A Christmas Carol, Dombey and Son, Nicholas Nickleby, and Mystery of Edwin Drood, Walter Scott’s The Heart of MidLothian, Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Woodlanders, and The Return of the Native, Mrs. Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, and Charlotte Bronte¨’s Jane Eyre. While the celestial globe distorts the actual shape of the universe, it is a highly useful representation, far more useful, for instance, than two-dimensional maps of the skies. 24. For a fascinating history of Western conceptions and representations of the earth as a globe see Denis E. Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 25. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenin (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978), 849. 26. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman, Penguin English Library (Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin, 1978), 113. 27. My sense of the connections between literature and a wide range of disciplinary approaches to understanding the workings of the mind has been shaped by regularly attending the Cognitive Theory and the Arts seminar at the Harvard Humanities Center, founded in 2000 by Elaine Scarry and Alan Richardson. Speakers who have particularly influenced this book include Stephen Kosslyn, Daniel Schacter, Nicholas Dames, Barry Mazur, Anne Harrington, Mark Turner, Helen Vendler, Patrick Colm Hogan, J. Allan Hobson, Rebecca Saxe, Lisa Zunshine, Philip Fisher, Vanessa Ryan, Suzy Anger, Adela Pinch, Jesse Matz, Daniel Gilbert, Elaine Scarry, Gillian Beer, Deb Gettelman, William Flesch, Isobel Armstrong, Elaine Auyoung, Steven Hyman, Joshua Rothman, Randy L. Buckner, Paul L. Harris, and Elizabeth Spelke. 28. Confronted by the same antagonism between what we know and what we see, some writers solve the problem by privileging one over the other. John Keats and William Wordsworth, for example, both know that the stars are in perpetual motion and are gradually dying out, but they continually use them

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as symbols of fixity and permanence. Marilyn Gaull, “Under Romantic Skies: Astronomy and the Poets,” The Wordsworth Circle 21.1 (1990): 34–41.

c hap te r 1 1. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (London: Penguin, 1995), 164. 2. Michael Hoskin, The Cambridge Illustrated History of Astronomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 185. 3. This contrast can be seen in the different ways in which Kant and William Herschel approach the science, and in the fact that the Russian mathematician Anders Lexell used a series of parallax readings to compute the orbit of Uranus after Herschel first discovered it. Richard Holmes notes, “It is suggestive that it was mathematical calculation, rather than astronomical observation, which finally convinced the scientific community that a seventh planet really did exist.” The Age of Wonder, 100–1. 4. Often accounts of optics occur within an astronomical treatise. See, for instance, Whewell on the perception of light and astronomy Astronomy and General Physics Considered with Reference to Natural Theology (London: William Pickering, 1837), 132. 5. I am deeply indebted to Isobel Armstrong for much of my understanding of the optics of this time, particularly through her 2004 seminar at Harvard University “Victorian Poetry and Optical Culture: The Lens, Mirrors, Light.” See also Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999); and Chris Otter, The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). My countless conversations with Laura Saltz about light and optics have been incredibly helpful as well. 6. For a fascinating discussion of Hardy’s shifting interest in optical effects in relation to painting and literature, see Ruth Yeazell’s chapter on “Hardy’s Rural Painting,” in Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). 125–61. 7. Crary, Techniques, 9. 8. See, for instance, Mary Somerville, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (London: John Murray, 1849), 4 on “real motions of earth” as opposed to “apparent motions of the planets.” 9. See Holmes, Age of Wonder, 115–17 for William Herschel’s preoccupation with optical tricks. Caroline Herschel, John Herschel’s aunt, later indexed all of her brother William Herschel’s papers on optics. 10. Martin Willis describes the “optical misprisions of astronomical seeing” (58) and evocatively explores the tensions surrounding astronomy and vision in depth in Vision, Science and Literature, 1870–1920, especially 57–113. His book as

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11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

endnotes a whole is particularly helpful on negotiations between vision and the imagination in nineteenth-century science. See Kate Flint’s final section on the Victorian horizon to account for one of the reasons that the observer appears to be consistently in the center of things. The Victorians and the Visual Imagination, 287. These different ways in which human beings perceive distance were well understood in the nineteenth century. Accounts of stereoscopic vision include David Brewster, H. R. Sherborn, and R. W. M. Jones, The Stereoscope: Its History, Theory, and Construction: With Its Application to the Fine and Useful Arts and to Education (London: John Murray, 1856), 44–6; Charles Wheatstone, “Contributions to the Physiology of Vision.—Part the First. On some remarkable, and hitherto unobserved, Phenomena of Binocular Vision. Philosophical Transactions (Royal Society of London, 1838),” in William N. Dember, ed., Visual Perception: The Nineteenth Century (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1964), 116; and P. H. Emerson, Naturalistic Photography (London: S. Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1889), 112–13. For twentieth-century accounts of the perception of distance see David Hubel, Eye, Brain, and Vision (New York: Scientific American Library, 1988), 145–8 and Richard L. Gregory, The lntelligent Eye (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), 97–105. See, for instance, Brewster et al., The Stereoscope, 50 and Gregory, The lntelligent Eye, 98–9. See Herschel, Treatise on Astronomy, 26–8. The observer’s own bodily motion is only unnecessary because of the placements of two eyes, which produce two versions of the outside world that the mind automatically compares. Here it is technically more accurate to refer to the motion of the eyes themselves, which are never at rest. Somerville, Connexion, 55–64, describes lunar parallax and solar parallax, and refers to the search for a stellar parallax, which had not been achieved when she was writing in 1834. For a history of stellar parallax, see Crowe, Modern Theories, 152–65. For a contemporary account Tennyson would have read, see Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, 11th edn. (London: John Churchill, 1860), 3. Wheatstone, Contributions to the Physiology of Vision, 116. It is important for parallactic measurement that the star measured (a) is relatively close to the earth, and that the stars its position is measured against are far enough away so that they can serve as a fixed (but only apparently fixed) background for the measurement. So if (a) is 1 light-year from earth, the stars in the “background” should be, say, 100 light-years from earth so that their own apparent movements are invisible to the telescope (and thus negligible for the calculation). Chambers, Vestiges, 3. Chambers later notes: “Yet do we [the solar system] pass on to Hercules, although forty centuries failed to remark the circumstance,” (155).

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21. This question of the laboriousness of such calculations is perhaps more complicated than I suggest here. In a lecture on “Default States of Consciousness,” neuropsychologist Randy L. Buckner notes that while every human navigation through a building or through a crowd often does not seem laborious to the person doing the navigation, the act of navigation in fact involves a large amount of labor metabolically in the brain; we simply do not find it to be effortful because we are not making the calculations consciously. “Default States of Consciousness,” Cognitive Theory and the Arts seminar, Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard, 9 March 2011. 22. Hermann von Helmholtz, “The Recent Progress of the Theory of Vision,” Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects, trans. E. Atkinson (New York: D. Appleton, 1873), 31. 23. Whewell, Astronomy and General Physics, 161. 24. Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, and Politics (New York: Routledge, 1993), 42. She goes on to cite Whewell’s description of an everchanging universe: “The fact really is, that changes are taking place in the motions of the heavenly bodies, which have gone on progressively from the dawn of science. . . . Will these changes go on without limit or reaction?” See Armstrong’s Victorian Glassworlds for an extended discussion of astronomy’s connection with flux. She writes: “the transformation of a stable Newtonian order onto a Herschelian universe of flux ‘founded’ on ungroundedness was a principle of nineteenth-century astronomy,” (270). 25. Chambers, Vestiges, 6. 26. Immanuel Kant, “What is Orientation in Thinking?,” in Hans Reiss, ed., H. B. Nisbet, trans., Kant: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 235–49, 239. 27. Kant, “What is Orientation in Thinking?,” 239. 28. David Masson, Recent British Philosophy: A Review, with Criticism (London: Macmillan, 1865), 60–2. As Gossin points out in Thomas Hardy’s Novel Universe, cosmology is simultaneously a scientific and a narrative pursuit. Across many centuries and many cultures “cosmology has been understood as both that branch of astronomy concerned with the origins, properties, structure and evolution of the physical universe and as the narrative description of such a world view” (105). 29. Charles Dickens, Bleak House (London: Penguin, 1996), 70. 30. Jenkins, Space and the “March of Mind,” 4. See in particular her Introduction, the chapter on landscape metaphors, and another on “Organizing the Space of Knowledge,” 1–140. See Linda M. Shires, Perspectives, for a helpful discussion of the relationship between viewing and knowing in literature and the visual arts. Perspectives: Modes of Viewing and Knowing in Nineteenth-century England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009). 31. In Memoriam, Sec. 3, in Ricks. All further references to In Memoriam will be internal and by section number.

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32. Hardy, Two on a Tower, 34. 33. Two on a Tower, 34. 34. Edgar Allan Poe, “Eureka,” in Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays (New York: Library of America, 1996), 1275. 35. Emily Dickinson, Poem 598, The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition, ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998). Franklin dates the poem as “about summer 1863.” 36. I take the language of “authorial instruction” from Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1999). That book, with its focus on contrasts between shimmering surfaces and solid walls, crystallized for me the extent to which literary writers rely on a wide variety of such contrasts. Here the example would be the contrast between airy space and solid luminous bodies. 37. Elaine Scarry’s Dreaming by the Book contains a chapter on “Radiant Ignition,” which helps to explain many of the contrasts that Hardy and other writers obsessed with astronomy use to conjure up the night sky. Scarry describes a contrast between “nothing, an empty expanse of black” and “a sudden pinprick of light that streaks down from one upper corner to the opposite corner below and disappears . . . this dark space with sudden flares and lights” is an example of radiant ignition, a procedure she identifies that helps to “conscript us into the creation of vivid images” (79–80).

c hap te r 2 1. De Quincey quotes this passage of Jean Paul Richter from distant memory, admitting that it will inevitably contain a mixture of his own words and Richter’s. 2. Thomas De Quincey, “System of the Heavens as Revealed by Lord Rosse’s Telescopes,” Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine 17 (September 1846): 577–8. Unless otherwise indicated, all subsequent citations come from this text and will be noted parenthetically. A revised version of the essay appeared in The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, ed. David Masson (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1890), 8: 23, 33–4. For the purposes of this chapter I have focused on the 1846 version. For an excellent discussion of the revisions De Quincey made see Jonathan Smith, “De Quincey’s Revisions to ‘The System of the Heavens,’ ” Victorian Periodicals Review (Winter 1993): 203–12. 3. James Mussell links Lord Rosse with astronomers such as William and John Herschel or Walter De La Rue as being “totemic Grand Amateurs . . . who used their private incomes to purchase and build their own equipment and fund their own research.” James Mussell, Science, Time and Space in the Late Nineteenthcentury Periodical Press: Movable Types (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 27. See Bernard V. Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 295–421

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4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18.

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for an even more detailed account of Richard A. Proctor’s and Robert Sewall Ball’s influence on public knowledge of astronomy in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. See, for instance, “The Earl of Rosse’s Leviathan Telescope,” The Times, 16 April 1845, 8; “The Leviathan Telescope and Its Revels,” Fraser’s 18 (1850): 591–601; and “The Earl of Rosse’s Telescopes,” Dublin Review 18 (1845), all quoted in Smith’s “De Quincey’s Revisions.” Smith provides a comprehensive list of the publications that appeared in response to Rosse’s telescope, 221 n. 5. It was quite common for reviews to go off topic in this way but this essay is an extreme version, as Lindop explains in The Opium-Eater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey (London: Weidenfeld, 1981), 296. Lindop cites De Quincey’s reminiscences of the observatory. The Opium-Eater, 342. Lindop, The Opium-Eater, Introductory notes, 289. Lindop, The Opium-Eater, Introductory notes, 289. Anne Janowitz, “ ‘What a Rich Fund of Images Is Treasured Up Here’: Poetic Commonplaces of the Sublime Universe,” Studies in Romanticism 44.4 (2005): 469–92, 471. John Milton Gabriel Plotz, The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 89. Humphry Davy, Consolations in Travel, or the Last Days of a Philosopher (London: John Murray, 1830), 228. John Pringle Nichol, Thoughts on Some Important Points Related to the System of the World (Edinburgh, London, and Dublin: William Tait; Simpkin Marshall J. Cumming, 1846), 10–11. Herschel, Treatise on Astronomy (1833), 3. Poe, Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays, 1275. I say this unnamed man is probably fictional for various reasons, including that the post office clocks that he supposedly referred to were a nineteenth-century innovation, so it doesn’t make much sense that he would actually be writing in the eighteenth century. I have found no evidence to suggest that such a statement was ever made and it’s a typical trick of De Quincey’s to invent people or refer to his own writings as if they were those of another. Thanks to the members of VICTORIA list and the HASTRO list for their opinions on this matter. For a helpful discussion of De Quincey’s complex and varied use of the word sublime, see Charles Rzepka, Sacramental Commodities: Gift, Text, and the Sublime in De Quincey (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 37–58. See Barri Gold’s reading of Mr. Lorry’s watch as a stand-in for “the fantasy of perpetual motion.” Gold, ThermoPoetics, 162. Hoskin, Illustrated History of Astronomy, 268.

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19. For a fascinating discussion of Smith and the social implications of his astronomy, see Janowitz, “ ‘What a Rich Fund of Images’,” 482. She reveals the connection between Smith’s astronomical system and “benevolent social Newtonianism, in which the orbits of identification and distance maintain the ‘social machine’ that Smith posits: ‘a great, an immense machine, whose regular and harmonious movements produce a thousand agreeable effects’ (VII.iii.5). Smith’s theory of sympathy through identification requires a quiescent, grand, beautiful, social imagination, and its motor is the principle of gravity: ‘All the different members of it are bound together by the agreeable bands of love and affection, and are, as it were, drawn to one common centre of mutual good offices.’” I return to the way that astronomy is used for social models in Part Two of this book, Astronomy and the Multiplot Novel. 20. Adam Smith, “The Principles Which Lead and Direct Philosophical Enquiries, Illustrated by the History of Astronomy,” in J. C. Bryce and William P. D. Wightman, eds., Essays on Philosophical Subjects (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), 105. 21. Whewell, Astronomy and General Physics, 203–4. 22. For an account of the use of clocks as connoting an outmoded eighteenthcentury vision of the cosmos as stable, see Gold on Mr. Lorry’s watch in A Tale of Two Cities. Gold notes the association of Mr. Lorry’s watch with “gravity and longevity” and argues: “Its ‘gravity’ suggesting both seriousness and Newton, this consummately eighteenth-century machine also evokes Paley’s watch, and its implications of a divine watchmaker.” Gold, ThermoPoetics, 170. 23. Matthew Rubery notes the central importance of the shipping news to the public at this time: “Novelists used this wildly popular feature drawn from the pages of Lloyd’s List to show the impact news had on domestic life. Although the shipping news has often been regarded as an exclusively male interest of sailors, merchants, and investors, this section of the newspaper was read with equal fervor by domestic women separated by the sea from loved ones.” Matthew Rubery, The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction after the Invention of the News (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 24. 24. De Quincey echoes Nichol in his choice of the word “irregular.” Nichol, Thoughts, 40. Nichol elsewhere refers to the nebulae as “deceitful” as well, 49. 25. Hoskin, Illustrated History of Astronomy, 198–255. 26. In comparing the current position of stars to those of earlier times, William Herschel relies on data from centuries before. The importance of keeping such records is part of the impulse behind the star-gauging, Neville Masklyne’s surveys, and John Herschel’s trip to the Southern hemisphere. His effort to chart the heavens was part of an increasingly international and professional effort over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 27. Again see Gregory’s chapter, “Scaling the Universe,” for an explanation of why the human eye cannot locate objects at great distances. He discusses the

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28. 29.

30. 31.

32.

33.

34. 35.

36. 37.

38.

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flattening out of vision that results when observing celestial bodies. From The lntelligent Eye, 97–105. Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds, 304. While De Quincey does not despair of the astronomer’s ability to figure such things out, he does see the interpretive work of current astronomy as refusing to provide clear answers and stable truths. The perplexities he identifies are to a large extent ones that can be corrected for. An example he could have used to demonstrate his point was that William Herschel was able to chart the motion of one star with respect to other stars over centuries (using old records of the positions of stars) and to determine that that star was moving toward the solar system. Crowe, Modern Theories, 166–72. Nichol, Thoughts, 97. Richard Holmes gives a wonderful narrative account of these discoveries in The Age of Wonder. For an overview of the history of the nebular hypothesis see Crowe, Modern Theories, and Schaffer, “The Nebular Hypothesis and the Science of Progress,” 131–64. John F. W. Herschel, “An address delivered at the anniversary meeting of the Astronomical Society, February 9, 1849, by the president (Sir J. F. W. Herschel, Bart.) on presenting the honorary medal of the society to William Lassell, esq., of Liverpool,” in Essays from the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews with Addresses and other Pieces (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans & Roberts, 1857), 661. Schaffer, “Nebular Hypothesis,” 136, and “On Astronomical Drawing,” 441–74. While I only gesture at the fascinating issues surrounding astronomical illustration, see Jonathan Smith, Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) for a nuanced account of the tensions between word and image within nineteenth-century scientific illustration. See also James Mussell’s chapter on astronomical illustration later in the century in Mussell, Science, Time and Space, 27–60. For a particularly helpful account of illustration in sciences other than astronomy, see Rachel Teukolsky, The Literate Eye: Victorian Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 25–45. An excellent history of early spectroscopy can be found in Crowe, Modern Theories, 178–232. See Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds for a fascinating discussion of spectroscopy. She argues that black lines in the spectrum show the presence, not the absence, of a substance such as carbonic acid: “They are the fingerprints of chemistry,” (268). Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, ed. Barry Milligan (London: Penguin, 2003), 77. This passage comes from De Quincey’s revised 1854 version of “System of the Heavens” and presents the distinction more clearly than the 1846 essay published in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine did. (De Quincey, in Masson, 39). De Quincey, “System of the Heavens,” 1854, in Masson, 39–40.

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39. John Milton, Paradise Lost: Authoritative Text, Sources and Backgrounds, Criticism, ed. Gordon Teskey (New York: Norton, 2005), V. 624–5. 40. De Quincey characteristically paraphrases Kant from memory; he does not have the book with him. He writes, “Astronomers, says Kant, had gone on for ages, assuming that the earth was the central body of our system; and insuperable were the difficulties which attended that assumption. At length, it occurred to try what would result from inverting the assumption. Let the earth, instead of offering a fixed centre for the revolving motions of other heavenly bodies, be supposed itself to move about some of these, as the sun. That supposition was tried, and gradually all the phenomena which, before, had been incoherent, anomalous, or contradictory, began to express themselves as part of a most harmonious system. ‘Something,’ he goes on to say, ‘analogous to this I have practised with regard to the subject of my inquiry—the human understanding. All others had sought their central principle of the intellectual phenomena out of the understanding, in something external to the mind. I first turned my inquiries upon the mind itself. I first applied my examination to the very analysis of the understanding.’” The Collected Writings of Thomas de Quincy, ed. David Masson (London: A & C Black, 1896), vol. II, 95. 41. Coleridge’s own reaction to astronomy is striking in its emphasis on his comfort with relying on a theoretical apprehension of the world alone. He recalls: “I remember that at eight years old I walked with [my father] one winter evening from a farmer’s house, a mile from Ottery, and he told me the names of the stars and how Jupiter was a thousand times larger than our world, and that the other twinkling stars were suns that had worlds rolling round them; and when I came home he shewed me how they rolled around. I heard him with a profound delight and admiration: but without the least mixture of wonder and incredulity. For from my early reading of fairy tales and genii, etc. etc., my mind had been habituated to the Vast, and I never regarded my senses in any way as the criteria of my belief. I regulated all my creeds by my conceptions, and not by my sight, even at that age.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge, cited in Richard Holmes, Age of Wonder, 111–12. 42. De Quincey had studied Kant’s writings extensively and translated several of Kant’s works into English. 43. Thomas De Quincey, [11 September 1819] “Immanuel Kant & Dr. Herschel,” The Works of Thomas De Quincey, vol. 1, 289–91. 44. For a detailed discussion of the history of the nebular hypothesis see Silvan S. Schweber, “Auguste Comte and the Nebular Hypothesis,” in Richard T. Bienvenu and Mordechai Feingold, eds., In the Presence of the Past: Essays in Honor of Frank Manuel (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), 131–91. 45. Kant, “What is Orientation in Thinking?,” 235–49. 46. Masson, Recent British Philosophy, 60–2. 47. Immanuel Kant, Kant’s Cosmogony as in His Essay on the Retardation of the Rotation of the Earth and His Natural History and Theory of the Heavens. With

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48. 49.

50.

51. 52.

53.

54.

55.

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Introduction, Appendices, and a Portrait of Thomas Wright of Durham, ed. and trans. W. Hastie (Glasgow: J. Maclehose and sons, 1900), 31. V. A. De Luca, Thomas Quincey, the Prose of Vision (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 91. Parsons, Rosse Papers, 114 (“Observations on the Nebulae,” 1850): 147 (“On the Construction of Specula of 6-feet Aperture,” 1861). Both citations come from Simon Schaffer’s fascinating article “On Astronomical Drawing,” 466. Schaffer focuses on the incredible interpretive problems illustrating nebulae posed. Another superb analysis of De Quincey’s essay and the problems of illustrating nebulae is Jonathan Smith’s unpublished paper “ ‘The Abysses of the Heavenly Wilderness’: Thomas De Quincey, John Herschel, and J. P. Nichol Confront the Great Nebula in Orion” (Paper presented to the Midwest Modern Language Association, St. Louis, 1992). Smith places De Quincey’s essay in the context of contemporary astronomy, and produces what he calls a “genealogy” of visual and verbal representations of the nebula. He treats the same topic briefly in “De Quincey’s Revisions,” 206–9. Jonathan Smith makes a similar point in his talk (see note 49), stating, “De Quincey and the astronomers employ similar representational strategies aimed at controlling the phenomena” (2). My chapter is indebted to his insights and extends them into a further analysis of De Quincey’s own verbal representation. Lindop, The Opium-Eater, 359. De Quincey, “System of the Heavens,” 571. In the 1854 edition of De Quincey’s complete works, the illustration, turned 180 degrees around, appears as a frontispiece. This instruction is edited out by Masson as a result. Even this assertion about the illustrator not intending to draw a monster is complicated by the fact that the illustrator, John Herschel, himself recognizes the semblance of a monster in the nebula he observed, as both Smith and Schaffer note (Schaffer, “On Astronomical Drawing,” 440). And yet there is no way De Quincey would have known that the comparison had been recognized before. Schaffer shows convincingly that many illustrators of nebulae and other celestial bodies incorporated aspects of human and animal physiognomy into the forms they drew in “On Astronomical Drawing,” 441–73. Daston and Galison, Objectivity. See particularly pages 115–38 for the complex perceived connections between automaticity and photography. Daston and Galison stress that the preoccupation with what they term mechanical objectivity did not result from the invention of photography, but an interest in restraining human interpretation was often connected to fantasies of using the camera to downplay human agency. Both Kate Flint and more recently Jimena Canales discuss the role of time in the act of observing celestial objects. “The eye requires a certain time to receive and dispose of an impression, which means that it cannot take in, say,

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all the visual information that reaches one from a swiftly moving body,” writes Flint. “An eye’s power does not increase by gazing at an object for a long time—we can stare for ten minutes or an hour at a faint nebula, and never see it more clearly than we do at first.” Flint, Victorians and the Visual Imagination, 31. Canales explores the links between reaction time, astronomical observation, and the “personal equation” in depth in A Tenth of a Second: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 21–58. 56. Astronomer William Herschel, in a 1782 letter (cited in Crowe, Modern Theories, 74). Holmes, Age of Wonder, 107–8 discusses the skepticism about the then little-known Herschel’s abilities that inspired this remark. Herschel, Holmes explains, was increasingly eager to show that the discovery of Uranus was not accidental, but the result of methodical surveys and long familiarity. 57. Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 138–82.

c hap te r 3 1. Peter Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 167. 2. The most comprehensive treatment of Tennyson’s knowledge of astronomy is Milton Millhauser, Fire and Ice: The Influence of Science on Tennyson’s Poetry, Tennyson Society Monographs (Lincoln: Keyworth and Fry, 1971). Two other excellent, if brief, descriptions of Tennyson’s interest in astronomy are Jacob Korg, “Astronomical Imagery in Victorian Poetry,” in James Paradis and Thomas Postlewait, eds., Victorian Science and Victorian Values: Literary Perspectives (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press 1985), 137–58 and A. J. Meadows, The High Firmament: A Survey of Astronomy in English Literature (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1969), 170–6. Both draw on Lockyer and Hallam Tennyson’s memoir. See also Pamela S. Gossin, “‘All Danae to the Stars’: Nineteenth-Century Representations of Women in the Cosmos,” Victorian Studies 40.1 (1996): 65–96 and Cumberland Clark, Astronomy in the Poets (Norwood, PA: Norwood Editions, 1975), 82–116. For a helpful recent analysis of Tennyson’s interest in temporal scale, see Virginia Zimmerman, Excavating Victorians (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 65–95. 3. Hallam Tennyson, Memoir, 16. 4. Hallam Tennyson, Memoir, 16. 5. Records of the books in Tennyson’s library come from Tennyson in Lincoln: a Catalogue of the Collections in the Research Centre, vol. 1, compiled by Nancie Campbell (Lincoln: Tennyson Society, 1971). The texts from the 1830s in Tennyson’s library are Nichol (No. 1688), Somerville (No. 2073), and Whewell’s History of the Inductive Sciences (No. 2322). Eleanor Bustin Mattes has shown that Tennyson “seems to have come into possession of J. F. W. Herschel’s A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy in 1843.”

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6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

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In Memoriam: The Way of a Soul: A Study of Some Influences That Shaped Tennyson’s Poem (New York: Exposition Press, 1951), 76. Again, we can be certain that Tennyson knew Herschel’s work earlier than that. Nichol, Somerville, and Charles Lyell each include passages from Herschel’s works in their own. The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson, vol. 1, 1821–50, ed. Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981) gives more evidence of what Tennyson read while writing In Memoriam. In 1835 John Moore Heath writes to apologize that he has been unable to borrow Whewell’s Bridgewater Treatise from the library, which suggests that Tennyson was trying to obtain a copy (128). He may well have done so eventually, but in any case, as Whewell was his tutor from 1828 to 1831, we can be certain that Tennyson was familiar with Whewell’s astronomical theories. In 1844 Tennyson wrote to his publisher requesting a copy of Chambers, which he had read a review of in the Examiner (230). James A. Secord writes that Tennyson received “a small volume bound in bright red cloth.” Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 9. Hallam Tennyson, Memoir, 324. The astronomical works Tennyson acquired after 1850 listed in Tennyson in Lincoln, vol. 1, include: Robert Ball’s Story of the Heavens, which appears on Leopold Bloom’s bookshelf in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1885; No. 488); Richard Proctor’s Half-Hours with the Telescope (1868; No. 1836) and Poetry of Astronomy (1881; No. 1837); Norman Lockyer’s Spectroscopic Observations of the Sun (1870; No. 1414); William Huggins’s Solar Corona (1885; No. 1203); Willis Nevins’s Christianity and Astronomy (1876; No. 1682); William Robinson’s First Chapter of the Bible and Last Chapter of Astronomical Science (1856; No. 1889); and Alexander Keith Johnston’s School Atlas of Astronomy (1869; No. 1270). Tennyson’s son Hallam owned an 1883 edition of John Herschel’s Outlines of Astronomy (originally published in 1849; No. 2864). Hallam Tennyson, Memoir, 760. A. C. Bradley, A Commentary on In Memoriam (London, 1930), cited in Robert E. Ross’s edition of In Memoriam (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 95. Again, excellent accounts of the nebular hypothesis can be found in Schaffer’s “The Nebular Hypothesis,” 131–64; Crowe, Modern Theories, 76–185; and Secord, Victorian Sensation, 57–9. Schaffer and Secord both record the fact that the term was coined by Whewell. Schaffer and Secord are particularly interesting on the significance of the hypothesis to the Victorians, while Crowe comprehensively lays out ambiguities in the evidence itself. The most important accounts Tennyson would have known are Nichol, Thoughts, 71–115, and Whewell, On Astronomy and General Physics, 159–91. Nichol cites William Herschel and others, and Whewell quotes Laplace at some length. Whewell, On Astronomy and General Physics, 202–3.

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13. Recent work on Victorian physics and thermodynamics contains fascinating discussions of nineteenth-century predictions about the death of the sun in works by Tennyson, Dickens, Byron, and many other authors. See Gold, ThermoPoetics, especially the chapters on In Memoriam and Bleak House, and T. L. Underwood’s The Work of the Sun: Literature, Science, and Political Economy, 1760–1860 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 14. Millhauser writes beautifully on the scientific accuracy of this passage. Fire and Ice, 19. He observes, “It casts a curious light on Tennyson’s sensibility that, in general, his most successful use of scientific imagery is to support his darkest moods,” Fire and Ice, 18. 15. “God and the Universe,” Ricks, 3: 251. 16. Hallam Tennyson, Memoir, 231. 17. In his edition of In Memoriam, Ross mentions three references to the nebular hypothesis, and does not include this first one. See the first note to Section 3, p. 5. As I argue earlier in the chapter, I believe this reference to our “little systems” to refer in part to theories like the nebular hypothesis. The word “system” would mean both scientific theories and explanations, and more literally, the solar system, which itself is mortal. My interpretation is supported in part by Norman Lockyer and Winifred Lucas Lockyer, Tennyson as a Student and Poet of Nature (New York: Russell & Russell: 1972), who cite these lines as referring to “The Evolution of Stellar Systems” (15). 18. My thanks to Gowan Dawson and Sally Shuttleworth, editors of the special issue of Victorian Poetry on Science and Victorian Poetry, for alerting me to this specific connection between Tennyson’s metaphor and those in Nichol and Chambers, and for making other suggestions about the significance of the nebular hypothesis to this chapter. 19. Chambers, Vestiges, 15 and 12 respectively; Nichol, Thoughts, 93–4. 20. Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 3rd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1. 21. William Huggins, from The Scientific Papers of Sir William Huggins, excerpted in Crowe, Modern Theories, 187. Crowe’s own account of the discovery appears on 183–4. 22. The explanation comes from Tennyson himself, cited in Ross, second note to Section 92, p. 59. 23. Tennyson in Lincoln, vol. 1, records that Tennyson received the fourth edition of Somerville, published in 1837, on Christmas: “on fly-leaf ‘A. Tennyson, Xmas Day, 1838’ ” (No. 2073) 95. Sections on refraction also appear in Whewell’s Bridgewater Treatise, 130 and 132–7. 24. Somerville, Connexion, 171. 25. Somerville, Connexion, 172. 26. Somerville, Connexion, 171. The similarity between Somerville’s passage and the letter is striking, and as he had received Somerville for Christmas of 1838 and wrote Sellwood in 1839, it is certainly possible that he had read this chapter.

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27. Somerville, Connexion, 173. 28. Tennyson to Emily Sellwood, 1839, extracted in Hallam Tennyson, Memoirs, 141. 29. It would be hard to overstate how inspiring I have found Erik Gray’s Introduction to In Memoriam: Authoritative Text: Criticism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), pp. xi–xxvii. 30. Gaull, “Under Romantic Skies,” 38. 31. All citations from “Adonais” are taken from Shelley’s Poetry and Prose: Authoritative Texts and Criticism, eds. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977). 32. Scarry, Dreaming by the Book, 3–9. 33. John F. W. Herschel, Outlines of Astronomy (Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1849), 425–6. 34. Tennyson to Emily Sellwood, 1839, excerpted in Hallam Tennyson, Memoir, 144, and cited in Ricks’s note to “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After,” in Ricks, 3: 156. 35. Tennyson to Henry Hallam, 14 February 1834, Letters vol. 1, 108, cited in Ricks, 2: 307. 36. Tennyson’s explanation, cited in Ross, first note to Section 76, p. 45. 37. John Milton, Paradise Lost: A Poem in Twelve Books, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Macmillan, 1962), II.1046–52, 1059. 38. Tennyson to Emily Sellwood, 1839, extracted in Hallam Tennyson, 144, and cited in Ricks, 3: 154. 39. The verb “to orb” is rare, but it is neither unique to Tennyson nor his only use of the verb. This is, however, the only instance cited by the Oxford English Dictionary when the word is used as an intransitive verb, to mean, “To form itself into an orb.” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978) vol. 7, 175. 40. Hallam Tennyson, Memoir, 34. 41. Lines 187–90, Ricks, 3: 156. 42. See Erik Gray’s brilliant discussion of the motif of grasping in his Introduction to In Memoriam, p. xvii. 43. Sacks, English Elegy, 166. 44. See Sacks’s discussion of the tradition of stars in elegies in Spenser, Shelley, and Tennyson, respectively. English Elegy, 53–5; 162–5; 171. 45. See Meadows, High Firmament, 167–70, for a discussion of Shelley’s familiarity with astronomy.

i nt roduc t i on to part two 1. George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. W. J. Harvey (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965), 297. 2. Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son, Penguin Classics (London and New York: Penguin Books, 2002), 12.

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3. Grant Allen, The Type-Writer Girl (Toronto: Broadview, 2004), 9–10. Thanks to Sarah Gracombe for calling my attention to this passage. 4. Gossin, Thomas Hardy’s Novel Universe. See, for instance, her discussion of The Return of the Native, 147–52; Two on a Tower, 155–95. 5. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Rosemary Edmunds (New York and Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978), 1443. 6. J. Hillis Miller, The Form of Victorian Fiction, 2. 7. Franco Moretti, “Network Theory, Plot Analysis,” New Left Review 68 (March–April 2011): 80–112. 8. Woloch, The One vs. the Many. See, for instance, his discussions of centrality in Dickens, Balzac, Austen, and Shakespeare, 82, 144, 282–91, and 357–72. 9. For Woloch’s discussion of Forster’s concept of flat and round characters in The One vs. the Many, see, for instance 30–7, 156–7, and 340. 10. E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1927), 69. 11. Dickens, Bleak House, 82. For an insightful discussion of perspective and literary parallax (although he does not term it parallax) in Proust see Joshua Landy’s chapter “Perspective (Marcel’s Steeples),” in Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 51–84. Malcolm Bowie calls attention to Proust’s “special fondness for the planets and stars. Albertine is a nebula, the little band a constellation; the face of an actress seen in close-up is a Milky Way, and family relationships are the scattered segments of a single exploding star,” in Proust Among the Stars (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 2.

c hap te r 4 1. Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (New York: Signet Classics, 1960), 93. 2. Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1974), 380. 3. See, for instance, Hillis Miller, Thomas Hardy, Distance and Desire, 108–36, and the brief but highly evocative discussion of Hardy in Elaine Scarry, “The Difficulty of Imagining Other Persons,” in Eugene Weiner, ed., The Handbook of Interethnic Coexistence (New York: Continuum, 1998), 48. 4. In addition to providing an exhaustive scientific and literary context for Hardy’s fascination with astronomy, Gossin’s invaluable Thomas Hardy’s Novel Universe teases out the relationship between individual characters and their cosmologies and traces a wide range of astronomical images through the novels. I have found her discussion of Hardy’s interest in celestial systems as models for “interacting bodies in the plot” of several Hardy novels particularly inspiring (187). Anne DeWitt focuses on the transit of Venus, interstellar distance, and the fueling of the sun, and makes fascinating connections between Hardy’s reading of Richard A. Proctor and passages in Two on a Tower.

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5. Critics who treat Hardy’s interest in visual perception in detail include Sheila Berger, Thomas Hardy and Visual Structures: Framing, Disruption, Process (New York: New York University Press, 1990) (on visual structures); J. B. Bullen, The Expressive Eye: Fiction and Perception in the Work of Thomas Hardy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986) (on pictorial perception); James Krasner, The Entangled Eye: Visual Perception and the Representation of Nature in Post-Darwinian Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) (on the “visual selection” and “narrative eye” [73–107] ); Hillis Miller Thomas Hardy, Distance and Desire (on optical placement [8], narrative technique [40–66], and interstellar space [19, 232] ); and Tom Paulin, Thomas Hardy: The Poetry of Perception, 2nd edn. (London: Macmillan, 1986) (on positivism and empiricism [36, 91, 211] ). 6. Michael Millgate, “Thomas Hardy’s Library at Max Gate: Catalogue of an Attempted Reconstruction,” 2003, 176, 207, http://www.library.utoronto.ca/ fisher/hardy/hardycataz.pdf (accessed 16 June 2008) and Sally Shuttleworth, “Introduction,” in Thomas Hardy, Two on a Tower (London: Penguin Books, 1999), p. xx. 7. Again, Gossin’s Thomas Hardy’s Novel Universe provides the most detailed account of Hardy’s extensive astronomical reading; see 105–22. See also Shuttleworth’s Introduction to Two on a Tower, pp. xvi–xxxi and F. E. Hardy, The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840–1891, Compiled Largely from Contemporary Notes, Letters, Diaries, and Biographical Memoranda, as Well as from Oral Information in Conversations Extending over Many Years (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1928), 32. 8. Holly Henry describes the formative effect of Hardy’s Two on a Tower on a young Virginia Woolf when she read it “while traveling in Italy in 1908 . . . . Woolf described the novel as setting in ‘contrast the stars with minute human loves.’ ” Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science: The Aesthetics of Astronomy (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 3. 9. Bullen, The Expressive Eye, 68, 72. 10. Mussell, Science, Time and Space, 37. 11. See in particular chapter 1, “Astronomy and the Representation of Space” for a fascinating study of astronomy as it was represented in the British periodical press of the 1880s and 1890s. Mussell, Science, Time, and Space, 27–60. 12. In making this statement, I am suggesting that Hardy’s use of astronomy as a literary device does not change dramatically over the course of his career, from the 1860s to his death in 1928. While the developments in astronomy over that time are substantial, my own sense is that the basic concerns in astronomy that resonate so powerfully for Hardy do not undergo an analogous shift. In this respect I concur with J. Hillis Miller’s statement in Thomas Hardy, Distance and Desire: “In my opinion the deeper configurations of Hardy’s work remain the same from the beginning to the end” (p. ix).

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13. We find similar parallels between viewing others and viewing celestial phenomena explored in lyric poems such as “At Rushy-Pond” and “In Vision I Roamed,” in Hardy, Complete Poems, 713–14 and 9–10). 14. In addition to Hillis Miller and Elaine Scarry, see Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel, Theory and interpretation of narrative (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006) for a suggestive account of the links between fiction and knowing other minds. 15. William A. Cohen discusses faces in Hardy as “a screen onto which thoughts and feelings are projected and as a physiological receptacle for sensory encounters with the world.” Embodied: Victorian Literature and the Senses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 88. See further 88–107. 16. Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, ed. George Woodcock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), 65–6. 17. Hardy would have had access to a wide range of writings on spectroscopy through Victorian periodicals and books on astronomy. For an account he almost certainly read, see Richard A. Proctor, Other Worlds than Ours (London: International Science Library, 1870), 53–66. 18. Auguste Comte, The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, 3rd edn., translated and condensed by Harriet Martineau (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Tru¨bner, 1893), 114. 19. This irony was much remarked on at the time; for one account of Comte’s predictions, see Crowe, Modern Theories, 146–9. 20. Scarry has called attention to Hardy’s strategy of making the reader privy to crucial information that characters within his novels fail to perceive. Hardy, she writes, “places before our eyes the dense interior of a man or a woman” and then “juxtaposes this ontological robustness with the inevitable subtractions, the flattenings, the emptyings out that occur in other people’s vision of the person.” Scarry, “The Difficulty of Imagining,” 48. It is a technique Hardy uses repeatedly, giving the reader access to knowledge or understanding that other characters conspicuously lack. 21. It is worth emphasizing that what I am calling a “release” does not involve a rejection of embodiment, but a temporary movement out of the body. Scholars such as Elaine Scarry and William Cohen have shown how deeply embodied Hardy’s depiction of sensory perception is, and how he breaks down boundaries between subject and object. Like Cohen, I want to emphasize the dynamic aspect of the intermingling of the perceived world and the observer, what he terms the “mixture of world and body.” Cohen, Embodied, 101. 22. Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes, ed. Pamela Dalziel (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 262. Henry Knight comments on the mind’s journey into space as a “luxuriant growth,” though not here in reference to the stars. When Knight, Stephen, and Elfride visit a family vault, he remarks: “Such occasions as these seem to compel us to roam outside ourselves, far away from the fragile frame we live in, and to expand till our perception grows so vast that our

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25. 26.

27.

28.

29.

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physical reality bears no sort of proportion to it. We look back upon the weak and minute stem on which this luxuriant growth depends, and ask, Can it be possible that such a capacity has a foundation so small?” Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes, 262. See Scarry, Dreaming by the Book, 10–24 and 77–82. For James Nasmyth’s illustrations and photographs of the moon, see James Nasmyth and James Carpenter, The Moon Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite (London: John Murray, 1885), Plate XXIII (“Normal Lunar Crater”); Plate XXIV (“Aspect of an Eclipse of the Sun by the Earth as it would Appear as Seen from the Moon”), and Plate XXV (“Group of Lunar Mountains: Ideal Lunar Landscape”). See Frances Robertson, “Science and Fiction: James Nasmyth’s Photographic Images of the Moon,” Victorian Studies 48.4 (2006): 595–623. Hillary L. Chute, Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 193. Gossin, Thomas Hardy’s Novel Universe notes that variable or double stars also function as “a structural astronomical metaphor” for the relationship between Viviette and Swithin in Two on a Tower (176); the two become a “star-couple” orbiting around each other and exerting weak or strong influence at different moments (178). See Clare Pettitt for a suggestive discussion of Hardy’s “[f]ears about the transmission of information across vast distances, untethered from origins, and no longer ‘belonging’ to individuals or places” and their connection to his own concerns about intellectual property. Claire Pettitt, Patent Inventions: Intellectual Property and the Victorian Novel (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 275. Again, my own interest in the author’s ability to help readers build up this sensory world is inspired by Elaine Scarry’s work on perception, the making of the world, and authorial instruction. In Dreaming by the Book, Scarry emphasizes that while “the verbal arts . . . are almost devoid of actual sensory content,” literary images “somehow do acquire the vivacity of perceptual objects.” Scarry, Dreaming by the Book, 5. She goes on to describe a passage in which “While Proust drenches the magic-lantern passage in the philosophical issue of habit, what is actually occurring is the slow coaxing into solidity of the Combray wall” (12). In discussing this passage in Two on a Tower, I echo Scarry’s formulation in order to emphasize the slow, laborious, and fragile process of mentally recreating vast reaches of space and gradations of distance. In “Pitying the Sheep,” Ivan Kreilkamp describes Gabriel’s form of care-taking as a type of species crossing that involves a more general empathy with other living things in the world, including human beings. “Sympathy, it is implied, requires a capacity for tactile receptivity to the ‘throb[bing]’ organic life of others,” notes Kreilkamp, “—to bodies that, whatever species they may be, share many of the same physiological responses and processes” (477). Hardy’s

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version of sympathy involves the acute sensory capacity that Kreilkamp describes joined to an ability to move outside of the constraints of one’s bodily limitations. Ivan Kreilkamp, “Pitying the Sheep in Far from the Madding Crowd,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 42.3 (2009): 474–81. 30. Nicholas Dames provides a fascinating analysis of ideas and anxieties about reading and paying attention in Victorian literature and psychology in Nicholas Dames, The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). See in particular 1–24 and 73–122. 31. I have been focusing on spatial scale here, but as Beer shows in great detail in Darwin’s Plots, Hardy loves setting extremes of temporal scale, “time jars,” against one another as well. In thinking through the relationship between scale and astronomy, I have gone back again and again to Beer’s discussion of Hardy’s lifelong project of both “finding a scale for the human” and placing his readers in scales that they find utterly alien (220–41).

c hap te r 5 1. Many critics have explored the relationship between self and the world beyond the self in Daniel Deronda from fruitful vantage points. My own understanding of Daniel Deronda has particularly benefited from the work of George Levine and Amanda Anderson, who explore the tensions within Victorian conceptions of detachment, distance, objectivity, and nonbeing. “If we can know an atom, a star, a geological formation, we can do so by overcoming the obstacles of self,” writes George Levine. Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 176. Levine emphasizes the difficulty of finding a “rigorous epistemology that did not demand utter self-annihilation, but that allowed for passion, imaginative vision, and the satisfactions of desire.” Both Levine and Anderson do much to explain the complexity of Eliot’s exploration of the connections between empiricism and the self (Levine, 182), or “desirable and undesirable forms of detachment.” Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 3. Anderson emphasizes how much “Victorian authors themselves actively and even obsessively engaged questions about critical detachment, questions that lie at the heart of their struggle with the conditions of modernity” (9). 2. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, ed. T. Cave (London: Penguin, 1995), 7, 22. Seven out of the seventy epigraphs placed at the beginnings of chapters refer to the cosmos, the sun, or the stars. 3. Critics have identified this central tension in Eliot in a variety of ways that I have found useful. One central study is Diana Postlethwaite’s Making it Whole: A Victorian Circle and the Shape of their World (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1984), especially pp. xi–xx, 164–266. James Buzard writes suggestively about

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5.

6. 7.

8.

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Daniel Deronda in his chapter “Eliot, Interrupted” and in connection with Bleak House in Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 279–98 and 49–56. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, for instance, refer to the “tension between her detached narrative voice and her commitment to heart and hearth” (479). Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 479. Jules Law describes this dialectic as “the novel’s distinctive shuttling between abstraction and incarnation.” Jules Law, The Social Life of Fluids: Blood, Milk, and Water in the Victorian Novel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 98. In Middlemarch in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), Karen Chase refers to Eliot’s fascination with “the alteration of objects given a change in perspective” (4). Neil Hertz uses the terms “equivocal,” “pulsing,” and “sublime” to describe passages in Eliot that have the feeling of perpetual motion and epistemological clash that I explore in this chapter. George Eliot’s Pulse (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), especially 13–41. The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), Volume I 1836–1851: 106–7. Letter to Maria Lewis, Foleshill [21 August 1941]. See John Plotz, Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 76–7 for a discussion of the nuances of tone in this passage. He writes, “On one level this is a genuinely ardent provincialism, proclaiming that a fabricated ‘natural home’ is better than none at all” (77). Yet he notes that it “follow[s] two chapters after a beginning that disavows all beginnings,” which links it to other instances of “wry [. . .] seeming narratorial regret” (77). Alexander Bain, The Senses and the Intellect (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1868), 102–36, describes the sixth sense of internal bodily sensations in detail. While my focus on remote stars and the empty spaces of the universe calls attention to the more abstract images found in Eliot, one of the aspects of her writing that most interests me is how she pulls her reader from these large empty spaces into a world filled with thingy particulars. Elaine Freedgood’s chapter on Middlemarch captures Eliot’s range of sensory textures beautifully, from the bright hues of emeralds to the moisture and mist. Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 111–38. In a chapter entitled “George Eliot’s Lot,” David Kurnick shows how the word “lot,” like “cast” and “share,” contains contrary impulses, pointing both to a specific destiny of an individual and to the nature of collectivity that undergirds each individual’s exisitence. He writes: “The lot of lots in Middlemarch conveys not only the ethical demand to acknowledge our difference from others but a more properly social awareness of [. . .]the collective ground of existence” (93).

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11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

endnotes Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 67–104. See in particular Sally Shuttleworth’s George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) for an extensive treatment of the connections between science and fiction here. Sally Shuttleworth connects Eliot’s interest in the hidden starting point of the scientist to the writings of Claude Bernard. Shuttleworth writes: “George Eliot’s conception of science here conforms to that of Bernard who, when defining experimental science, contrasted it with the science of ‘scholastics or systematizers [who] never question their starting point, to which they seek to refer everything; they have a proud and intolerant mind and do not accept contradiction, since they do not admit that their starting point may change.’ ” George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science, 176–7. See Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel from Richardson to Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), for the relation of these epigraphs to quoting, excerpting, generalization, and juxtaposition. Daston and Galison’s Objectivity traces a much more nuanced history of these expectations over the course of the nineteenth century. In their history, the act of invention, the active act of observation, and the active choices made by scientists were seen as much more acceptable parts of scientific activity in the beginning of the century than they were by the time Eliot was writing. Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 5. Homans draws on Freud, Lacan, and Chodorow to show the longstanding association between the female and the prelinguistic, purely sensory. In Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989) Ludmilla J. Jordanova discusses the male gendering of science in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discourses. In Bearing the Word Margaret Homans notes that Dorothea moves from “a yearning toward theory to accepting available actuality” in Middlemarch. Homans shows that Eliot uses both women and men as models of what Homans calls a “theoretic mind” (146). Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science, see in particular 175–9. See Beer, Darwin’s Plots; Levine, Dying to Know; Diana Postlethwaite, “George Eliot and Science,” in George Levine, ed., The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 98–118. George Eliot Letters, I: 106–7. William Baker, The George Eliot–George Henry Lewes Library: An Annotated Catalogue of Their Books at Dr. William’s Library (New York: Garland Pub., 1977). Hillis Miller, Thomas Hardy, Distance and Desire, 8.

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19. See Barbara Hardy’s chapter on “The Tragic Process: The Egoists” for one helpful account of Eliot’s interest in egoism throughout her novels. Hardy notes that the “process from innocence to experience is this emergence from moral stupidity,” and emphasizes that this is a process of both “deterioration” and “hopeful nurture” (68). Barbara Hardy, The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form (London: The Athlone Press, 1959), 68–77. 20. Compare Martin Willis’s suggestive discussion of the similarities and differences between microscopes and telescopes and the “variation in the epistemological questions such instruments asked of their users,” in Vision, Science and Literature, 1870–1920: Ocular Horizons (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), 61. Both instruments’ connections to scale are reflected in the division of Willis’s book into sections on “Small,” “Large,” “Past,” and “Future.” 21. Wilfrid Sellars, Science, Perception and Reality (New York: Humanities Press, 1963), 4. 22. Jenkins, Space and the “March of Mind,” 205. 23. The language of sympathy and affect has been explored in detail, but less attention has thus far been paid to how Eliot consistently expresses the extension of the self out toward others in spatial terms. See, among others, Suzy Anger’s wide-ranging discussion of Eliot’s sympathy in Victorian Interpretation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 95–113 and more recently Rae Greiner’s Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). Greiner briefly discusses the language of “extension” in both Austen and Eliot (35, 46). 24. See Amanda Anderson’s chapter on Daniel Deronda, “The Cultivation of Partiality: George Eliot and the Jewish Question,” in Powers of Distance, 119–46, for an important reading of the role of cosmopolitanism in this book. She helpfully contrasts Deronda’s attitudes with Mordecai’s to show that Deronda is committed to a dynamic or dialogic attitude toward his own identity as a Jew. 25. Daniel Novak addresses this tension between embodiedness and diffusiveness by placing Daniel in the context of composite photography, which help “to produce a mode of typological realism, a realism whose bodiless types pass for embodied individuals” (103). He shows that Eliot simultaneously critiques and depends on Daniel’s disembodiment, linking these moments of a loss of self to Eliot’s own experience of “shrinking” into a point (110). Daniel Novak, Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 90–117. 26. Lorraine Daston, “Objectivity and the Escape from Perspective,” Social Studies of Science 22.4 (1992): 597–8. 27. Sally Shuttleworth discusses the midcentury literary interest in “troubling, largely inexplicable fears” experienced by children in The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine, 1840–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 44. Gwendolen’s haunted imagination seems

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30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

endnotes of a piece with fears Shuttleworth discusses in “Fears, Phantasms, and Night Terrors,” 42–59. Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 17. Eliot made several notes from the Fontenelle in her notebooks. I am grateful to Matthew Bevis for calling my attention to this moment in Christopher Ricks’s Tennyson, when we were discussing the moment in Joyce that follows. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. John Riquelme (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 15–16. George Eliot, “The Natural History of German Life,” in Nathan Sheppard, ed., The Essays of “George Eliot” (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1883), 161. George Henry Lewes, “Sea-Side Studies,” Blackwood’s Magazine 880 (August 1856): 192. This comparison to Austen has a long critical history that goes back at least to the disparaging remarks of Sir David Cecil, as well as to F. R. Leavis’s defense of Eliot as one of the great English novelists in The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (London: Chatto & Windus, 1948). I am thinking in particular of the many parallels between the Gwendolen plot and Pride and Prejudice, including the impoverished family of five unwed girls and the speculations about Grandcourt’s appearance that I discuss here. Amanda Anderson’s discussion of Daniel Deronda, and of both Daniel and his mother as emblematic of modern figures of cosmopolitanism, is a notable recent example. Powers of Distance, 119–46. Ian Duncan observes that Daniel Deronda “engineers a catastrophic split between its domestic plot of courtship and provincial life, and its world-historical plot” (332). From “The Provincial or Regional Novel,” in Patrick Brantlinger and William B. Thesing, eds., A Companion to the Victorian Novel (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 318–35, cited in Plotz, Portable Property, 76. For a brilliant comparison of Daniel Deronda and Austen’s novels, see also Adela Pinch’s distinction between asking what a character may be thinking (as Austen does) and comparing how much individual characters are thinking about each other (as Eliot does here). In Thinking about Other People in Nineteenth-Century British Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 151. This also resembles another moment in the text where Eliot comments on the uselessness of measurement in astronomical terms, referring to “the admirable arrangements of the solar system, by which our time is measured” (379). See Debra Gettelman’s discussion of Eliot’s responses to readers’ desires for happy romantic endings and her fascinating discussion of “forecasting” by characters and by Eliot’s actual readers, 29–32. Debra Gettelman, “Reading Ahead in George Eliot,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 39.1 (2005): 25–47. Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination, 287. See also Shires’s discussion of the rainbow, which, like the horizon, has no existence independent of an observer positioned in space. Shires, Perspectives, 106–7.

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38. See Hertz, George Eliot’s Pulse, 20–1 for a wonderful reading of this passage and also for a fascinating connection between this discussion of “speck” and the “speck” of the self.

c hap te r 6 1. Cited in Gossin, Thomas Hardy’s Novel Universe, 87–8. 2. Cannon Schmitt describes Two on a Tower’s Swithin St. Cleeve as a “scientific thinker” who “refute[s] the natural theologians’ claims of an anthropocentric universe, one made by God specifically for man” and replaces it with “a world in which humans are as peripheral as the solar system they inhabit, revolving on the outer edge of the Milky Way Galaxy’s spiral arms.” Cannon Schmitt, “Science and the Novel,” in John Kucich and Jenny Bourne Taylor, eds., The Nineteenth-Century Novel 1820–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 461–75. 3. It is worth noting that Hardy has a habit of placing characters within his works who think about and articulate problems identical to the ones he is working out in the formal structure of his narratives (novels and The Dynasts) or through the voice of the narrator. 4. Audrey Jaffe, Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 5. The various versions of omniscience that Jaffe lays out and distinguishes from one another include a fantasy of mobility (which is especially interesting here); a fantasy of complete and unlimited knowledge; a likeness to God; and a fantasy of impersonality. She suggests that for Dickens the presence of an omniscient narrator and “the sharp epistemological distinctions between narrator and character—suggest that omniscience is not so much evidence for the possession of knowledge as an emphatic display of knowledge, a display of what is not being taken for granted” (5–6, italics mine). 5. Scarry, “The Difficulty of Imagining,” 46–8. 6. The so-called fixed stars are fixed in the sense of appearing to be fixed on a sphere of stars in contrast with other celestial bodies that evidently move, such as the moon, sun, planets, and comets. But the astronomical process of unfixing the stars involved many stages: showing that they were scattered in three dimensions, at different distances from earth; showing that they were not fixed in relation to one another, but were in fact moving at a rate imperceptible to earthly observers because we are so far away. The term “fixed stars,” then, means something specific that dates back to Aristotelian and Ptolemaic models but continues long after Copernicus—and still describes how we see them in everyday life. 7. The problem of imagining a war from a distance, written about so beautifully recently by Mary Favret, was a problem that occupied Hardy throughout his

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9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

endnotes lifetime. An early scene in The Dynasts records the intense anxiety that Wessex inhabitants felt about the threat of a Napoleonic invasion. Mary A. Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). Herbert F. Tucker, Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse, 1790–1910 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 584–601. Tucker provides a riveting analysis of The Dynasts and its perspectivism within the context of epics in the long nineteenth century. This combination of references to tragedy and to epic is worth exploring in more detail—the genre Hardy invents, epic-drama, is a mixture of the two, and while the subject matter conforms to the Iliad, especially with the battle scenes and ten years of war, there is actually more overlap between the chorus and Greek drama than between the chorus and the gods who intervene in the action of Homer’s epics. Thomas Hardy, The Dynasts, an Epic-Drama of the War with Napoleon, in Three Parts, Nineteen Acts, & One Hundred & Thirty Scenes, the Time Covered by the Action Being About Ten Years (London: Macmillan, 1910), p. ix. See Donna Haraway’s chapter “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” for a searching analysis of the capacity of vision “to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything in the interests of unfettered power” (188). Haraway explicitly connects looking down, or the view from nowhere, with what she terms the “god-trick” (189–95). She describes technological feats of seeing that turn into “unregulated gluttony; all perspective gives way to infinitely mobile vision, which no longer seems just mythically about the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere, but to have put the myth into ordinary practice” (189). Hardy is unusual in consistently invoking the god-trick, but then palpably removing the sense of unlimited knowledge that one expects to come with it. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991). Charles Dickens, A Child’s Dream of a Star (Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1871), 8–9. Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, ed. John Holloway (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 15. As we saw in Chapter 4, Hardy consulted at least three books by Proctor in the 1770s and 1780s. See, for instance, D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Jaffe, Vanishing Points; J. Hillis Miller, Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958). The chapter on “Rearranging the furniture of Our Mutual Friend” provides another enlightening perspective on the spaces Dickens creates in his novels, in Andrew H. Miller, Novels Behind Glass: Commodity, Culture, and Victorian Narrative, Literature, Culture, Theory 17 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 119–58.

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16. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, ed. Andrew Sanders (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 169. 17. D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 62. 18. The word omniscient appears regularly in Percy Lubbock’s Craft of Fiction and also in Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, but both writers talk about the author being omniscient rather than the narrator. 19. Again, see Anderson for the connections between distance, detachment, objectivity, and “literary forms such as omniscient realism” (Anderson, Powers of Distance, 3–23). Jenkins helpfully explores viewpoints from above in terms of an “aerial view,” while James Buzard describes a traveling observer as being endowed with “a vantage point atop the inferential mountain from which things that people did, said, and believed transformed themselves, when assisted by selection, into signs of their peoplehood.” James Buzard, Disorienting Fiction, 28. 20. Barbara J. Black, On Exhibit: Victorians and Their Museums (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), 30. 21. Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye, 179–80. 22. The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, ed. Lennart A. Bjo¨rk (New York: New York University Press, 1985), 120. 23. John Ruskin, On the Nature of Gothic Architecture: And Herein of the True Functions of the Workman in Art, 2nd edn. (London: Smith Elder & Co., 1854), 5. I am grateful to Cara Murray for pointing out this connection. 24. R. J. White, Thomas Hardy and History (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1974), 128. 25. Hillis Miller, Distance and Desire, 8.

conc lu s ion 1. Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 196, 197. 2. Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way: In Search of Lost Time, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Penguin, 2004), 144. 3. John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart, the philosopher; Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, 1914–1919, eds. Richard L. Purdy and Michael Millgate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). Hardy refers to Albert Einstein (1879–1955), mathematician, physicist, and astronomer; Hardy’s copy of Albert Einstein’s Relativity: The Special and the General Theory. A Popular Exposition, trans. Robert W. Lawson (3rd edn., London, 1920) is in Dorset County Museum.

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Index

Italic numbers denote reference to illustrations. Allen, Grant 124 Alsloot, Denis van 215 Anderson, Amanda 159, 258 n. 1, 261 n. 24, 262 n. 34, 265 n. 19 Anger, Suzy 261 n. 23 Aristotle 105 Armstrong, Isobel 20, 34, 63, 207, 237 n. 8, 239 n. 19, 241 n. 5, 243 n. 24, 247 n. 35 asteroids 59–61 astronomy: ancient (Greek) 12, 32, 192 apparent and real in 8–11, 22, 41, 66, 89, 96 comparisons of astronomer to narrator 147, 176, 184, 186–7 of astronomical observation to perception 52–3 of astronomical to philosophical discoveries 33–4, 69 of astronomical systems to novels 7, 14–15, 121–8, 140 of astronomical systems to poems 92–3 of astronomical systems to society 127–8 of atmosphere to mood 96–7, 103, 114 of celestial bodies to persons 124, 137–42, 151 of celestial bodies to ships 59–60 of comets to persons 129 of earth to person 15, 33–4, 122, 154, 178–9, 191–2 of Lord Rosse to Columbus 55 of nebula to monster 74–84 of planets to persons 19, 87, 94, 95, 99, 106–8, 114–15, 121–4, 129–30, 186–7 of outer space to desert 74 of solar system to a family 94 of stargazer to reader 155 of starry sky to mind 66 of stars to bonfires 138 of stars to persons 95, 97, 103, 111–14 of sun to God 111, 205, 211 of sun to person 114, 121, 122 discoveries in 3, 94; see also nebular hypothesis; spectroscopy; stellar decay; Uranus eighteenth-century 20

eighteenth-century compared to nineteenth-century 51–2, 56–63 illustration in 75–8, 247 n. 33, 249 n. 49, 249 n. 53 measurement in 262 n. 35 as model for literature 7, 14–15 as model for mind 52–3, 231 observation in 67, 249–50 n. 55 and optics 19–32 photography in 90 atmosphere 125; see also refraction Austen, Jane 262 nn. 33–4 Pride and Prejudice 185–9 Bain, Alexander 161 Ball, Robert Stawell 27, 45, 98, 245 n. 3 Balzac, Honore´ de 219 Beer, Gillian 94, 238 n. 13, 258 n. 31, 260 n. 15 Berger, Sheila 255 n. 5 Bernard, Claude 260 n. 10 Bessel, Friedrich 20, 24 Big Dipper, see Great Bear Black, Barbara J. 216 Bonnycastle, John 90 Booth, Wayne 5–6 Boule´e, Etienne-Louis 216 Bowie, Malcolm 254 n. 11 Bradley, A.C. 90 Bradley, James 71 Brewster, David 20, 134, 242 n. 12 Bronte¨, Charlotte 11 Brown, Samuel 165 Buckner, Randy L. 243 n. 21 Buzard, James 258–9 n. 3, 265 n. 19 Canales, Jimena 237 n. 5, 249 n. 55 Cave, Terence 190 Cecil, Sir David 262 n. 33 centrality 1–2, 5, 46, 133, 154, 175, 203, 230 cognitive as opposed to moral 14–15, 124–5 of the earth 3–4, 15, 24, 105, 178–9, 191–2, 197, 204; see also Ptolemaic model of the self 13–15, 20, 22, 121–2, 135–7, 144, 158, 164–7, 170, 177–81, 190–5 see also egoism

288

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centrality (cont.) social 127 of the solar system 20, 29, 132 in Woloch, Alex 254 n. 8 see also egoism; horizon; polycentrism; Ptolemaic model Chambers, Robert 34–5, 90, 94, 165, 242 n. 17, 242 n. 20 Chapman, Allan 237 n. 5 characters: flat and round 125, 127 character-systems 2, 5, 121–2, 124, 130, 236 n. 2, 238 n. 13, 254 n. 4 compared to astronomical systems 125–7 Chase, Karen 259 n. 3 Chatman, Seymour 6 chorus, see Hardy, Thomas, The Dynasts, chorus in Christianity 35, 200, 203–4, 230 model of cosmos in 35 see also God Chute, Hillary 151 Clark, Cumberland 250 n. 2 Clerke, Agnes 197, 239 n. 19 clocks 245 n. 17 as model for the cosmos 56–7, 246 n. 22 close-ups, see point of view cognitive exhaustion 48, 51 cognitive science, see neuroscience; optics; vision, physiology of Cohen, William A. 256 n. 15, 256 n. 21 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 69, 81, 248 n. 41 comets 59–60 comprehensiveness 198, 202, 210, 215, 216, 218–19, 222, 231, 263 n. 4, 265 n. 19 astronomy as model for 39 of knowledge 36, 51, 54, 176, 181 of a literary work 6 of view 3, 35, 211–22 Comte, Auguste 141, 219 constellations, see Great Bear; Swan contraction, see self; point of view Coperinicus, Nicholas 33–4, 90, 114, 199 Cosgrove, Denis 216, 240 n. 24 cosmological conception 36, 38, 47, 92, 196, 231 cosmology 243 n. 28 Crary, Jonathan 20–1, 215–16, 241 n. 5 Crowe, Michael J. 242 n. 17, 247 n. 31, 247 n. 34, 256 n. 19 Culler, Jonathan 211 Cygnus (constellation), see Swan Dames, Nicholas 258 n. 30 Darwin, Charles 165 Daston, Lorraine 174

and Peter Galison on objectivity 12, 249 n. 54, 260 n. 12 Dawson, Gowan 252 n. 18 Davy, Humphry 53 de Luca, V. A. 74 De Quincey, Thomas 2, 87, 90, 116–17, 132, 135, 180, 197, 231 on the instability of knowledge 59–60, 78–9, 246 n. 29 and Kant 48, 50–1, 69–72, 248 n. 40, 248 n. 42 on scientific progress 53–6, 63, 66, 72–3 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater 52–3, 66 “German Studies and Kant in Particular” 69 “Immanuel Kant & Dr. Herschel” 69 “System of the Heavens as Revealed by Lord Rosse’s Telescopes” 4, 244 n. 2, 245 n. 15 changes of register in 52, 54–5, 75 changes of scale in 52, 54–5 changes of tone in 74–5 dynamic model of mind in 52–3, 55, 67 imagination in 77–9 metaphor in 55, 59–60, 74–8 Orion nebula in 75–84, 249 n. 49, 249 n. 52 depth perception, see vision, stereoscopic Dickens, Charles 1–2, 11, 122, 196, 199, 205, 211, 222 “A Child’s Dream of a Star” 205–6 A Tale of Two Cities 205, 208–10, 245 n. 17, 246 n. 22 Bleak House 37, 121, 205, 208–10 as celestial system 127–8 compared to Hardy 205, 211–12, 222 Dombey and Son 124 Little Dorrit 205–8 omniscient narrator in 263 n. 4 overseeing narrator in 204–10 Dickinson, Emily 40, 42 distance 265 n. 19 valuation of 46–7 see also comprehensiveness; point of view; objectivity Duncan, Ian 262 n. 34 earth 7, 9, 191, 213 rotation of 86, 195, 217 revolution around the sun of 13, 30, 67, 73–4, 94, 134–5, 197 see also centrality; globes; motion, attribution of; self Eberty, Felix 3, 237 n. 7 eclipse 113, 148 egoism 124, 144, 162, 167, 175, 178, 261 n. 19 Einstein, Albert 3, 34, 232 elegy 85–6, 93, 111–12, 114, 116

index Eliot, George 1–2, 122 Adam Bede 187 beginnings as problem in 162–3, 173, 186 compared to Jane Austen 262 n. 33 compared to Thomas Hardy 157–9, 166–8 concentric circles in 158–9, 169 Daniel Deronda 19, 158–65, 167, 168, 169–79, 182–90, 258 n. 1, 261 n. 24, 262 n. 34, 263 n. 38 as system 169 compared to Jane Austen’s novels 185–9, 262 nn. 33–4 detachment as problem in 172–5 epigraphs in 258 n. 2, 260 n. 11 stargazing in 174–8 trauma in 177–8, 192, 261 n. 27 see also self, expansion and contraction of; rootedness of Middlemarch 121, 122–4, 159, 162, 165, 166, 168, 172, 182, 187, 188 reading of Fontenelle 262 n. 28 reading of John Pringle Nichol 50 responses to her readers 262 n. 36 sympathy in 185, 261 n. 23 textures of experience in 158, 161, 259 n. 7 The Mill on the Floss 187 “The Natural History of German Life” 182 Emerson, P. H. 242 n. 12 English Mechanic, The 136 epic 2, 155, 202, 212, 264 nn. 8–9 Evans, Mary Ann, see Eliot, George evolution 91, 94, 132 see also stellar decay eye, see optics; parallax; perception; point of view; vision Favret, Mary 264 n. 7 Flint, Kate 191, 242 n. 11, 249 n. 55 flux 3, 35, 72, 68, 87, 243 n. 24 see also motion; stability; stellar decay Fontenelle, Bernard de Bouvier 165–6, 178–9, 262 n. 28 Forster, E. M. 125–7, 254 n. 9, 265 n. 18 Fraser’s Magazine 165 free indirect discourse 2, 13–14, 122, 144–6, 182, 187 Freedgood, Elaine 259 n. 7 Galilei, Galileo 199 Galison, Peter, see Daston, Lorraine Gaskell, Elizabeth 11 Gaull, Marilyn 97 gender 80, 163, 260 n. 13 Genette, Ge´rard 6, 238 n. 17 geocentric model of solar system: see Ptolemaic model geology 39, 68, 91

289

Gettelman, Debra 262 n. 36 Gilbert, Sandra 259 n. 3 globes: celestial and terrestrial 9–12 106, 240 n. 23 Etienne-Louis Boulle´e’s design for 216 history of 12, 240 n. 24 James Wyld’s 215–16 God 46, 205 narrator compared to 211, 264 n. 11 perceptual capabilities of 35, 229 problem of locating in space 35, 200–1, 203 see also comprehensiveness; narrator, overseeing; point of view God’s-eye-view, see God; narrator; point of view Gold, Barri J. 238 n. 13, 245 n. 17, 246 n. 22, 252 n. 13 Gossin, Pamela 124, 130, 132, 236 n. 5, 238 n. 13, 243 n. 28, 250 n. 2, 254 n. 4, 257 n. 26 Gray, Erik, 253 n. 29, 253 n. 42 Great Bear (constellation) 170–1, 178 Great Exhibition of 1851, 215 Greiner, Rae 261 n. 23 Gregory, Richard 25–6, 242 n. 12, 246 n. 27 Gubar, Susan 259 n. 3 Guillemin, Ame´de´e 149 Hallam, Arthur Henry, see Tennyson, In Memoriam Hallam, Henry 104 Haraway, Donna 264 n. 11 Hardy, Barbara 261 n. 19 Hardy, F.E. 255 n. 7 Hardy, Thomas 1–3, 5 , 15, 42, 89, 121–2, 190–5, 196–9, 205, 232–5, 255 n. 12, 256 n. 20 A Pair of Blue Eyes 147–8, 256 n. 22 “At Rushy-Pond” 256 n. 13 “By the Earth’s Corpse” 201 characters articulating narrative problems in 263 n. 3 stargazing as example of 147–9 characters compared to celestial bodies in 121, 124, 130, 137, 138, 140–3 compared to Dickens 205, 211–12, 222 compared to George Eliot 166–8 critique of comprehensiveness 198, 264 n. 11 distant views in 42, 151, 155–7, 264 n. 7 ethical and perceptual problems compared in 14–15, 136–45 faces in 256 n. 15 Far From the Madding Crowd 129, 153–4 “God-Forgotten” 200–1 imagination in 146–8, 151–3, 157

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Hardy, Thomas (cont.) “In Vision I Roamed” 1, 15, 147–8, 256 n. 13 Jude the Obscure 197–8 knowledge of astronomy 21, 131, 254 n. 4, 255 n. 7, 256 n. 17 knowledge of optics 255 n. 5 mental travel in 131, 146–7, 149, 153, 155–6, 160 mind, view of, compared to John Herschel’s 135–6 point of view, rapid changes in 156–7 Return of the Native 124, 129, 137–42, 148–9, 150, 155, 215 Tess of the D’Urbervilles 13–14, 15, 122, 142–3, 148, 154, 155, 196–7, 200, 205, 211 temporal scales in 258 n. 31 The Dynasts 6, 155–7, 196–8, 200, 201–4, 212–22, 225–30, 235, 264 nn. 7–9 chorus in 155–6, 196, 202, 224, 235, 264 n. 9 compared to War and Peace 221–9 Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in 212–15, 220 The Woodlanders 129, 137, 155 Two on a Tower 32, 44–6, 124, 129, 131–4, 151–4, 197, 218, 254 n. 4, 257 n. 26, 263 n. 2 Virginia Woolf ’s reading of 255 n. 8 Heidegger, Martin 231 Helmholtz, Hermann von 20, 31, 41, 134 Henderson, Thomas 24 Henry, Holly 255 n. 8 Herschel, Caroline 241 n. 9 Herschel, John 51, 54–5, 58, 63, 64, 65, 90, 165, 192, 199 on “apparent” versus “real” 8–9, 22 etching of the nebula in Orion 75–83, 249 n. 53 journey to the Southern hemisphere 246 n. 26 measurement of sunspot 101, 103 on optics 8, 20, 22–3, 31, 134–6 “tenacious hold” in 54, 136, 154 Treatise on Astronomy 8–9, 22–4, 55, 134 Herschel, Sir William 35, 51, 90, 113, 132, 199, 200, 241 n. 3, 241 n. 9, 251 n. 11 calculation of the solar system’s motion 28–9, 70 discovery of Uranus 20, 69–70, 250 n. 56 and nebular hypothesis 64 reliance on old astronomical data 246 n. 26, 247 n. 29 see also space, “deep” Hertz, Neil 159, 259 n. 3, 263 n. 38

Holmes, Richard 35, 94, 236 n. 5, 241 n. 3, 247 n. 30, 248 n. 41, 250 n. 56 Homans, Margaret 163, 260 n. 13 horizon 6, 7, 22, 95, 96, 158, 179, 190–5, 191, 193, 242 n. 11 Hubel, David 242 n. 12 Huggins, William 65, 95 Hughes, Merritt Yerkes 105 Humboldt, Alexander von 165 Iliad 202 illustration, scientific, 247 n. 33 see also astronomy, illustration in instability, see flux; stability Jaffe, Audrey 198, 211, 263 n. 4, 264 n. 15 James, Henry 5, 219 Janowitz, Anne 51, 246 n. 19 Jenkins, Alice 37–8, 168, 238 n. 13, 243 n. 30, 265 n. 19 Jordanova, Ludmilla 163, 250 n. 13 Joyce, James: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 180–1 Ulysses 98–100 see also Kenner, Hugh Kant, Immuanuel 33, 241 n. 3, 248 n. 40 and De Quincey 48–9, 69 and the nebular hypothesis 64 comparison of with Copernicus 33–4, 69 Critique of Practical Reason 33 Critique of Pure Reason 33, 69 prediction of discovery of Uranus 69–70 Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens 50–1, 69–70 “What is Orientation in Thinking?” 36, 71–4 Keats, John 97, 240 n. 28 see also Shelley, Percy Bysshe, “Adonais” Kenner, Hugh 8, 98–100 Kentridge, William 237 n. 7 knowledge: comprehensive, see comprehensiveness divine, see comprehensiveness; God instability of 41, 49, 60; see also De Quincey, Thomas; flux of other minds 5, 14–15, 124–5, 130, 135–7, 146, 157 sensory versus theoretical 21, 26, 31–2, 168 in astronomy 8–11, 40, 66–8, 89, 97, 110, 112, 114–15, 129–30, 136, 146, 147, 152, 153, 167, 192, 233, 235 of death 111, 114 of double stars 62–3 of earth’s rotation 13, 23, 34–5, 67 of earth’s shape 12 in Thomas Hardy 13–15, 32

index John Herschel on 8, 22–3, 55 of nebulae 64–5 of optical effects 13–14 of ordinary shapes 31 of other minds 137 as productive perplexity 39, 41, 46 of stars 112 in Tolstoy 13 see also refraction, parallax spatial models of 37–9, 243 n. 30 see also cosmological conception; Nagel, Thomas Korg, Jacob 250 n. 2 Krasner, James 255 n. 5 Kreilkamp, Ivan 257 n. 29 Kurnick, David 259 n. 8 Lambert, Johann Heinrich 197 landing places 44–6, 48, 73, 122, 181 see also Ptolemaic model Landy, Joshua 254 n. 11 Laplace, Pierre-Simon 20, 51, 64, 90, 251 n. 11 Law, Jules 259 n. 3 Leaska, Mitchell 6 Leavis, F. R. 262 n. 33 Levine, George 159, 238 n. 13, 258 n. 1, 260 n. 15 Lewes, George Henry 165, 262 n. 28 Sea-side Studies 185, 238 n. 13 Lexell, Anders 241 n. 3 light, see perception; refraction; spectroscopy; telescopes; vision Lightman, Bernard 237 n. 5, 244 n. 3 Lindop, Grevel 50, 69, 245 n. 5 Lloyd’s list 59–60, 246 n. 23 Lockyer, Norman 90, 165, 252 n. 17 Lockyer, Winifred Lucas 252 n. 17 Lubbock, Percy 5 265 n. 18 Lucka´cs, Georg 2 Marey, Etienne-Jules 220 Masklyne, Neville 246 n. 26 Masson, David 36–8, 71 see also cosmological conception McTaggart, J.M.E. 232 Meadows, A.J. 250 n. 2, 253 n. 45 Messier, Charles 165 meteorites, see stars, shooting microscope 93, 167, 183, 185, 261 n. 20 Milky Way 51–2 Miller, Andrew H. 264 n. 15 Miller, D.A. 210, 264 n. 15 Miller, J. Hillis: on consciousness in the novel 5, 125, 130, 166, 211 on Dickens 264 n. 15

291

on Hardy 6, 254 n. 3, 255 n. 5, 255 n. 12 on “optical placement” 166, 229 Millgate, Michael 255 n. 6 Millhauser, Milton 250 n. 2, 252 n. 14 Milton, John 68, 81, 83, 105, 111, 202 Minard, Charles 220, 221 Moffatt, John M. 131 moon 13–14, 109, 149, 150, 257 n. 24 Moretti, Franco 125, 238 n. 13 motion: attribution of 20, 22, 23–4, 34, 46, 62–3, 68, 73, 135, 146, 213 of the eye 41 imperceptible 28, 46, 73–5 perpetual, see flux reference point needed to detect 74–5 relative 23, 62, 71–3 see also motion, attribution of; parallax see also point of view, movement in Mussell, James 136, 244 n. 3, 247 n. 33 Nagel, Thomas 10–11, 35, 39–46, 158, 180–1, 233 Napoleonic wars, see Hardy, The Dynasts; Tolstoy, War and Peace; suffering, representation of narrative, large-scale, see novels, multiplot narrative space 196–9, 204–11, 230 narrative technique, see free indirect discourse; point of view narratology 239 n. 17 narrator: omniscient 4, 47, 122, 128, 194, 198, 211–12, 265 n. 18 overseeing: in Dickens 204–10 in Hardy 211–22 see also comprehensiveness; God Nasmyth, James 149, 257 n. 24 nebulae 51, 61, 63 in Orion 53, 64–5, 75–84 nebular hypothesis 64–5, 94–5, 113, 165, 251 n. 11 history of 247 n. 31, 248 n. 44 term coined by Whewell 91 networks of regard, see point of view neuroscience 240 n. 27, 243 n. 21, 258 n. 30 Newton, Sir Isaac 20, 56–7 Nichol, John Pringle 49–50, 63, 90, 94, 159, 165, 246 n. 24, 251 n. 11 etching of the nebula in Orion and 75–8 on progress 53–5 Novak, Daniel 261 n. 25 novels: compared to lyric 5 multiplot novel 1–2, 5, 121–8 as systems 1–2, 46, 122, 123, 169

292

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novels: (cont.) compared to star systems 5, 125, 127, 204–30 see also astronomy, comparisons; character systems; Gold, Barri J.; Gossin, Pamela; Jenkins, Alice; Moretti, Franco; narrative space; point of view; Woloch, Alex objectivity 12, 42, 162–3 distant views associated with 4, 46 mechanical, 65, 249 n. 54 see also Daston, Lorraine; Nagel, Thomas observation, see astronomy, observation in; telescopes Observatory, The 136 Olson, Barbara K. 211 optics 19–32, 46–7, 241 nn. 4–5, 241 n. 9 in Eliot 166–7 in Hardy 13–14, 130, 134–5, 232, 241 n. 6 see also parallax; telescopes; vision orbing 89, 97, 100, 101, 103–9, 126, 253 n. 39 orbit 3, 19, 25, 28, 43, 39, 124, 132, 234, 235, 246 n. 19 in character systems 2, 124–5, 128, 129, 142 in Eliot 159, 166, 168, 186–7, 190 in Hardy 124, 129, 142–3, 257 n. 26 in In Memoriam 86, 99, 114 in orrery 45, 123 in stellar parallax 27, 86, 100 see also earth, revolution around the sun of; Ptolemaic model of Uranus 241 n. 3 orientation 4, 48–9, 197 bodily 36, 71, 149 epistemological 36, 71, 75 geographical 36 Kant’s essay on 33, 36, 48–9, 68–74 loss of 48, 72–3, 75, 93, 197 solar 72–3 Orion, see nebulae orrery 45, 123 Otter, Chris 241 n. 5 panorama 215 parallax 88, 89, 98–100, 101, 103, 110, 116, 125, 128, 142, 158 in astronomy 24–31, 242 n. 17, 242 n. 19 caused by one’s own movement 26, 31 Hugh Kenner’s concept of 8, 98–100 in literature 5, 8, 86–7 in stereoscopic vision 22, 25–31 see also Bessel, Friedrich; orbing; Tennyson, In Memoriam Parsons, William, see Rosse, Lord (3rd Earl of )

Pater, Walter 3–4, 132 pathetic fallacy 91 Paulin, Tom 255 n. 5 perception: contradicting theoretical knowledge, see knowledge, sensory versus theoretical; optics; vision of depth, see vision, stereoscopic of distant objects 20, 22, 23–4, 61–3, 95–6, 139 invisibility of one’s own perceptual mechanisms 8, 19–20, 34 Perini, N. 234, 235 perspective, see point of view; knowledge, sensory versus theoretical Pettitt, Clare 257 n. 27 Phillips, Sir Richard 149 photography 249 n. 54, 261 n. 25 see also astronomy, use of photography in Pico della Mirandola, see Pater, Walter Pinch, Adela 262 n. 34 planetarium 216–17, 217, 234 planets 19, 187 Plotz, John 52–3, 259 n. 5 Poe, Edgar Allan 39, 55 point of view 1, 6–8, 37, 98, 121, 154, 156, 173, 175, 184, 205, 222, 229 from above, see narrator, overseeing in astronomy 12 close-up 5, 86, 101, 102, 156 comparisons in networked 139 object seen at different points in time 25, 102, 103–5 object seen from different distances 126 object seen from different positions 107 see also parallax person imagined in two places at once 109–11 self to other 146–7, 154–5, 175, 185 see also Scarry, Elaine sightlines used to illustrate 7, 9, 27, 28, 29, 87, 88, 89–90, 191 distance in 5, 12, 86, 104–5, 138, 223, 264 n. 11 embodiment in 3, 12, 15, 147 ethics of 13–15 see also Eliot; Hardy; Tennyson; Tolstoy of God 3, 11, 15 see also narrator, overseeing movement in 2, 8, 101–9, 127 confusion between observer’s and object’s 23–4, 62–3, 72–3, 106, 146 from earth into space 3, 103–5, 108 imperceptibility of 73–5 lateral 100, 220, 225–7

index oscillation: between character and narrator 5, 122, 127–8, 140, 144 see also free indirect discourse between earth and “view from nowhere” 46–7, 140 between local and universal 159 spatial positioning of reader 2, 6, 8, 117, 127 speed of 48, 105, 156–7 vertiginous 48, 105, 156 zooming in 42, 101, 108, 156, 218–19 zooming out 101, 108, 156, 219 see also orbing; parallax; Hardy, mental travel in multiplicity of 46 in narrative theory 5–6 networks of 121, 124, 129, 138–142 positioning of observer through 99–100 explicit versus implicit 37 see also parallax polycentrism: of the multiplot novel 2, 121 of the solar system 123 of the universe 2, 4, 35, 91, 197, 200, 203 Woloch, Alex on 236 n. 2 see also centrality; character systems; novels, as systems Popular Educator, The 21, 131, 134–5 Postlethwaite, Diana 258 n. 3, 260 n. 15 Price, Leah 260 n. 11 Prince, Gerald 239 n. 17 Proctor, Richard A. 3, 131, 165, 199, 207, 232, 245 n. 3, 254 n. 4, 256 n. 17 Proust, Marcel 66, 127, 232, 254 n. 11 Ptolemaic model 42–4, 105, 112, 125, 190, 197–8, 199–200, 205 see also centrality; solar system rainbows 262 n. 37 Rayner, Olive Pratt, see Allen, Grant refraction 95–6, 139 relativity, theory of: see Einstein, Albert; motion, attribution of Richardson, Alan 240 n. 27 Richter, Jean Paul 244 n. 1 Ricks, Christopher 180 Robertson, Frances 257 n. 24 Romanticism 2, 21 Rosse, Lord (3rd Earl of ) 64, 75, 244 n. 3 56-foot telescope of, 49, 50, 53–4, 65 Royal Astronomical Society 136, 234 Rubery, Matthew 246 n. 23 Ruskin, John 226 Ryan, Vanessa L. 238 n. 13 Rzepka, Charles 245 n. 16

293

Sacks, Peter 250 n. 1, 253 nn. 43–4 Sallaert, Antoine 215 scale, changes of 152–3, 157, 158, 164, 167, 177, 188, 193, 196, 215 see also microscope; point of view; telescope Scarry, Elaine 98, 146, 148, 154–5, 198, 240 n. 27, 244 nn. 36–7, 254 n. 3, 256 nn. 20–1, 257 n. 28 Schaffer, Simon 65, 75, 236 n. 5, 247 n. 31, 249 n. 49, 249 n. 53 Schmitt, Cannon 263 n. 2 Schweber, Silvan S. 248 n. 44 Secord, James A. 251 n. 6, 251 n. 11 self: compared to earth 15, 33–4, 178–9, 191–2 compared to planet 19, 95, 106 compared to star 95 expansion and contraction of 3, 4, 158–61, 169, 182–3, 187, 195, 231 see also Hardy, mental travel in rootedness of 160–1, 169–173, 232 ruptures in 99, 106 self-knowledge 93 “weight” of 146–7 see also centrality; egoism; point of view Sellars, Wilfrid 167 Sellwood, Emily 96, 104 Shelley, Percy Bysshe knowledge of astronomy 113, 253 n. 45 “Adonais” 97, 111–16 “To a Sky-Lark” 66–7 ships 7, 22, 59–60, 73, 104, 109–10, 157, 191, 192, 219, 246 n. 23 see also motion, relative Shires, Linda M. 243 n. 30, 262 n. 37 Shuttleworth, Sally 164, 192, 252 n. 18, 255 nn. 6–7, 260 nn. 9–10, 261 n. 27 Smith, Adam 57–8, 246 n. 19 Smith, Asa 9, 10 Smith, Jonathan 244 n. 2, 245 n. 4, 247 n. 33, 249 nn. 49–50 Snyder, R. L. 69 solar system 20, 29, 132 many centers of 123 motion of within universe 68, 70, 72–3 see also centrality; Herschel, William; orrery; polycentrism Somerville, Mary 20, 90, 95–6, 101, 241 n. 8, 252 n. 26 space: conceptualization of 37–8 “deep” 35, 67 narrative, see narrative space undifferentiatedness of 73–5 spectroscopy 65, 90, 94, 109, 140–1, 247 nn. 34–5, 256 n. 17 Spencer, Herbert 165

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stability 13, 28, 34, 41, 49, 51–3, 55–9, 66, 68, 73, 83, 91, 97–9, 113, 125, 133, 154, 171, 194, 196–9, 206–10, 228 see also flux; self, rootedness of; stars, fixed stars: fixed 3, 20, 24, 62, 71–2, 135, 263 n. 6; see also Ptolemaic model double 62–3, 142, 257 n. 26 magnitude of 62 as permanent 111 shooting 73 stellar decay 58, 90–5, 131–2, 200, 240 n. 28, 252 n. 13 see also nebular hypothesis stellar evolution, see stellar decay stellification 111 stereopsis, see vision, stereoscopic Struve, Friedrich Wilhelm 24 subject positions, see point of view sublime, the 33, 51–2, 57, 69, 245 n. 16, 259 n. 3 suffering, representation of 201, 212, 217–18 sun 6, 91–2, 126, 133, 217 see also stellar decay, sunspots sunspots 6, 101–3 Swan (constellation) 20, 24 sympathy 246 n. 19, 257 n. 29, 261 n. 23 Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine 49 telescopes 44, 57, 135, 142, 167, 184, 261 n. 20 William Herschel’s 20, 200 Tennyson’s 90 see also Rosse, Lord (3rd Earl of ) Tennyson, Alfred, Lord 1–2, 5, 13, 42, 132, 166, 180 “God and the Universe” 3, 93 In Memoriam 5, 39 and “Adonais” 111–16 alternate title for 86 consolation in 86, 93, 97, 111–15 and elegiac tradition 86, 93, 111 discontinuities of perception in 87, 89 imagination in 109, 116 nebular hypothesis in 91, 94–5, 113, 252 n. 17 optical placement in 99–100 orbing in 89, 97, 100, 101, 103–9 parallax in 85–7, 97–101, 110–11, 116 refraction in 95–6 relation of science and subjectivity in 91–2 stellar decay in 90–95 as system 92–3 knowledge of astronomy 89–90, 250 n. 2, 250 n. 5, 251 n. 6, 251 n. 8, 251 n. 11 letters to Emily Sellwood 96–7 “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After,” 108–9 “The Moon” (fragment) 108 Tennyson, Emily: see Sellwood, Emily

Teukolsky, Rachel 247 n. 33 Thackeray, William 11 time: “deep time,” see geology; space, “deep” multiple times 3 spatial metaphors for 86, 93, 98, 103, 176 see also Tennyson, In Memoriam; point of view, comparisons in Tolstoy, Leo 2, 122, 196, 198 Anna Karenina 13, 24, 86, 233 War and Peace, 121, 124–5, 202, 222–8 totality, see comprehensiveness tragedy, Greek 202, 264 n. 9 Tucker, Herbert 202, 264 n. 8 Tufte, Edward 220 Underwood, T. L. 252 Uranus 20, 69–70, 250 n. 56 Ursa Major, see Great Bear Venus 25, 89, 94, 95, 101, 105–9, 126, 217 “view from nowhere” 183, 264 n. 11 see also Nagel, Thomas vision: distinguishing magnitude and distance in 63–4 flattening out of distant objects in 24, 44, 246 n. 27 as metaphor for self-knowledge 93 see also parallax; stars, fixed importance for imagining 36–7, 41 physiology of 8–9, 22, 134 stereoscopic 22, 26, 27, 89, 93, 135, 242 n. 12, 242 n. 15 subjectivity of 21 unconscious activity as part of 19, 30, 32 see also microscopes; optics; perception; point of view; telescopes Westminster Review, The 165 Wheatstone, Charles 20, 26, 242 n. 12 Whewell, William 20, 34–5, 58–9, 90–1, 199, 241 n. 4, 243 n. 24, 251 n. 6, 251 n. 11 On Astronomy and General Physics (Bridgewater Treatise) 34–5, 58–9 White, R. J. 228 Willis, Martin 20, 241 n. 10, 261 n. 20 Woloch, Alex 2, 125, 236 n. 2, 254 nn. 8–9 Woolf, Virginia 255 n. 8 Wordsworth, William 240 n. 28 Wyld, James 215–16 Yeazell, Ruth 241 n. 6 Young, Edward 159 Zimmerman, Virginia 250 n. 2 Zunshine, Lisa 256 n. 13