Thomas Hardy, Provincial Geology and the Material Imagination

Abstract

Victorian geology was 'a ubiquitous and emblematic science', and it was characterised perhaps more than any other Victorian science by its vibrant material culture. 1 Though literary criticism has almost exclusively focused on nineteenth-century geology's production of 'narratives' of the history of the earth (in the shape of 'progression', 'uniformitarianism', 'catastrophism' and 'evolution', for example), in fact historians of science have demonstrated that the 'central business' of the science for its elite practitioners was not the formulation of laws of change or causation, but stratigraphy, the determination of the order and structure of the layers of rocks and fossils beneath the earth's surface. 2 This project was rooted in the material objects of the science, often guided by the need to accurately predict the locations of lucrative coal-bearing and other mineral-rich sections of the strata. Furthermore, not only did the Geological Survey (f. 1835) direct important attention and resources to the practices of surveying and mapping, but in the early-to-mid-nineteenth-century the science was also integrally associated with palaeontology, and with the building of museums, collections, and exhibitions. It was in its focus on the material structure of the earth, rather than on its story, that geologists most radically reconfigured the Victorians' apprehension of their position within time and space.Given the intimate interrelationship between the history of evolutionary thought and the history of geology, it is perhaps unsurprising that literary critics have often considered geology using tools of analysis largely drawn from such influential studies of evolutionary biology and the novel as Gillian Beer's Darwin's Plots (1983) and George Levine's Darwin and the Novelists (1988). Beer and Levine's considerations of the ways in which literary narratives may have reflected, or drawn upon, or extended, or disconfirmed the shapes and structures of the world described by Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species (1859), while appropriate to the study of evolutionary science, occludes many of the key differences between geology and evolutionary biology in this period. While Levine, Beer, Sally Shuttleworth, Jonathan Smith, and a host of other critics focus on the narratives of earth history geology may have contributed to

Introduction: Victorian Fiction and the Material Imagination

“…Without those texts, networks and practices, these objects would remain blank, mute and meaningless'. 19 According to Buckland, a novel's rendering of a real object goes part way to creating its meaning, a point also relevant to the debates on digitisation. As Laura Mandell states in her forum contribution, 'putting an object anywhere is always an act of interpreting or representing it', whether it be the digital rendering of a 'real' object on a website or the literary representation of a fossil.…”