The Poetry of Victorian Scientists

by Brown, Daniel

• ISBN13: 9781107023376
• ISBN10: 1107023378
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-03-31
• Publisher: Cambridge Univ Pr

Summary

A surprising number of Victorian scientists wrote poetry. Many came to science as children through such games as the spinning-top, soap-bubbles and mathematical puzzles, and this playfulness carried through to both their professional work and writing of lyrical and satirical verse. This is the first study of an oddly neglected body of work that offers a unique record of the nature and cultures of Victorian science. Such figures as the physicist James Clerk Maxwell toy with ideas of nonsense, as through their poetry they strive to delineate the boundaries of the new professional science and discover the nature of scientific creativity. Also considering Edward Lear, Daniel Brown finds the Victorian renaissances in research science and nonsense literature to be curiously interrelated. Whereas science and literature studies have mostly focused upon canonical literary figures, this original and important book conversely explores the uses literature was put to by eminent Victorian scientists.

Table of Contents

Professionals and amateurs, work and play

Edinburgh natural philosophy and Cambridge mathematics

Knowing more than you think: James Clerk Maxwell on puns, analogies and dreams

Red Lions

Popular science lectures: 'A Tyndallic Ode'

John Tyndall and 'The Scientific Use of the Imagination'

'Molecular Evolution': Maxwell, Tyndall and Lucretius

James Joseph Sylvester: the romance of space

James Joseph Sylvester: the calculus of forms

Science on Parnassus

Bibliography

Index

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