Nineteenth-century men of science aligned scientific practice with moral excellence as part of an endeavor to secure cultural authority for their discipline. Anne DeWitt examines how novelists from Elizabeth Gaskell to H. G. Wells responded to this alignment. Revising the widespread assumption that Victorian science and literature were part of one culture, she argues that the professionalization of science prompted novelists to deny that science offered widely accessible moral benefits. Instead, they represented the narrow aspirations of the professional as morally detrimental while they asserted that moral concerns were the novel's own domain of professional expertise. This book draws on works of natural theology, popular lectures, and debates from the pages of periodicals to delineate changes in the status of science and to show how both familiar and neglected works of Victorian fiction sought to redefine the relationship between science and the novel.

This article uses network analysis to explore the reception of theological novels in periodicals during the 1880s. It seeks to redress the neglect of readers shown in arguments for distant reading and to contribute to a growing field of scholarship that applies digital methods to Victorian periodicals. By using data visualization, I analyze how periodical writers drew connections among theological novels. This approach teaches us to see genre not as genealogy but as a means of classification used by readers seeking to make sense of a literary field.

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This essay sets Thomas Hardy's novel Two on a Tower (1882) in the context of the astronomy and thermodynamics contemporary to it, focusing specifically on coverage of the transits of Venus in 1874 and 1882 and associated discussions of interstellar distance, as well as on the growing awareness of the implications of entropy for the life span of the sun and stars-developments that made the universe seem hostile to human existence and beyond human ability to understand. Investigating how Hardy incorporates and reshapes this scientific material in his novel, I argue that Two on a Tower participates in a reevaluation of the potential of science to fulfill humanity's moral and spiritual needs. Hardy uses his novel to explore whether literature has the ability-as Matthew Arnold, in "Literature and Science" (1882) claims it does-to reconcile or relate science to human experience. In the course of Two on a Tower, however,Hardy discovers this reconciliation to be impossible, and the novel's final chapters recognize both a formal and a moral need to choose the human view of life over the scientific one.

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