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22 - Science and literature

from PART IV - MATTERS OF DEBATE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2012

Kate Flint
Affiliation:
University of Southern California
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Summary

H. G. Wells opens his satirical, visionary novel The Food of the Gods, published at the turn of the twentieth century in 1904, with a backward glance at a singular novelty that has emerged in the previous fifty years:

In the middle years of the nineteenth century there first became abundant in this strange world of ours a class of men, men tending for the most part to become elderly, who are called, and who, though they dislike it extremely, are very properly called ‘Scientists’. They dislike the word so much that from the columns of Nature, which was from the first their distinctive and characteristic paper, it is as carefully excluded as if it were – that other word which is the basis of all really bad language in this country.

Wells nips at the heels of this new class of ‘men’, so unworldly, but so insistent on each his own achievement that they dislike being classed in the gross – and, with a sly refusal to name it, he imports his own gross allusion to that ‘other word’ that asserts the body. Scientists, he suggests, see themselves as all intellect, but are trapped in their shuffling mediocre bodies and their anxious self-assertion.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

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  • Science and literature
  • Edited by Kate Flint, University of Southern California
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Victorian Literature
  • Online publication: 28 March 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521846257.024
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  • Science and literature
  • Edited by Kate Flint, University of Southern California
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Victorian Literature
  • Online publication: 28 March 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521846257.024
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Science and literature
  • Edited by Kate Flint, University of Southern California
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Victorian Literature
  • Online publication: 28 March 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521846257.024
Available formats
×