Microscopy and semiotic in Middlemarch

Nineteenth-Century Literature

Volumn 50, Issue 4, 1996, Pages

  Wormald, Mark ^a  

^a PEMBROKE COLLEGE   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 63149163817     PISSN: 08919356     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/ncl.1996.50.4.99p0191f     Document Type: Article

References (26)

1. See, for instance, Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984)
2. and David Carroll, George Eliot and the Conflict of Interpretations: A Reading of the Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992)
3. See J. Hillis Miller, "Optic and Semiotic in Middlemarch," in George Eliot, "Middlemarch": New Casebook, ed. John Peck (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992), p. 72
4. See also Karen Chase, Eros and Psyche: The Representation of Personality in Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot (New York: Methuen, 1984): "Mrs Cadwallader almost disappears as an independent human agent; she simply emanates from the 'play of minute causes' " (p. 153)
5. See Olivia Brown, "Microscopes and The Amateur," in Stella Butler, R. H. Nuttall, and Olivia Brown, The Social History of the Microscope (Cambridge: Whipple Museum, 1986), p. 5
6. See Marilyn Butler's introduction to her Oxford World's Classics edition of the 1818 Frankenstein (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994)
7. See "The Romantic Programme and the Reception of Cell Theory in Britain," Journal of the History of Biology, 17 (1984), 13-48
8. See Robert Brown, "A Brief Account of Microscopical Observations . . . on the Particles Contained in the Pollen of Plants; and on the General Existence of Active Molecules in Organic and Inorganic Bodies," which first appeared in the New Philosophical Journal in 1828 and was collected in Miscellaneous Botanical Worrks of Robert Brown, ed.John J. Bennett, 2 vols. (London: Robert Hardwicke, 1866-68), I, 463-86
9. See Brian J. Ford, Single Lens: The Story of the Simple Microscope (London: Heinemann, 1985), p. 138, for an account of Brown's discussions with Charles Darwin
10. On the symbolic significance of this exchange, see Robert A. Greenberg, "Plexuses and Ganglia: Scientific Allusion in Middlemarch," Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 30 (1975), 33-52
11. See W. H. Brock, "Patronage and Publishing: Journals of Microscopy, 1839-1989," Journal of Microscopy, 155 (1989), 249-66
12. For this material, but not a discussion of its relevance to Middlemarch, see Diana Postlethwaite, Making it Whole: A Victorian Circle and the Shape of Their World (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 113, 118, 138-40
13. Given my own discussion of Carpenter's and the periodical culture's contribution to Middlemarch, it is worth noting that immediately preceding Carpenter's essay in the Quarterly Review, 93 (1853), 462-500, is a review of the diary of Isaac Casaubon
14. For information on the rise of the microscope, see Brian J. Ford, The Revealing Lens: Mankind and the Microscope (London: Harrap, 1973), pp. 99ff
15. See William Benjamin Carpenter [attrib.], "The Scientific Value of the Microscope," Prospective Review, 6 (1850), 1-47
16. Frederick B. Churchill, "Rudolf Virchow and the Pathologist's Criteria for the Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics," Journal of the History of Medicine, 31 (1976), 122
17. See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 129-31
18. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 2 vols., vols. 4 and 5 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), II, 536
19. William Benjamin Carpenter, The Microscope and Its Revelations (London: John Churchill, 1856), p. vi
20. For details about the careers of both men, see Adrian J. Desmond, Huxley: The Devil's Disciple (London: Michael Joseph, 1994)
21. and Nicolaas A. Rupke, Richard Owen: Victorian Naturalist (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1994)
22. J G. H. Lewes, "Only a Pond!" Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 85 (1859), 586
23. Henry Lawson, "Progress of Microscopical Science," The Monthly Microscopical Journal: Transactions of the Royal Microscopical Society, and Record of Histological Research at Home and Abroad, 4 (1870), 107-8
24. Edwin Lankester and E. Ray Lankester, "Quarterly Chronicle of Microscopical Science," The Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science, 11 (1871), 308-9
25. See Lewes, "Goethe as a Man of Science," Westminster Review, 58 (1852), 261
26. See also Postlethwaite, p. 166