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POETRY AND PARALLAX IN MARY SOMERVILLE'S ON THE CONNEXION OF THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2017

Michelle Boswell
Michelle Boswell*
Affiliation:
Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology
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Extract

During the first astronomy lesson shared by the two protagonists of Thomas Hardy's Two on a Tower (1882), Lady Viviette Constantine and Swithin St Cleeve share a decidedly gloomy interpretation of human insignificance in the face of a vast universe:

“We are now traversing distances beside which the immense line stretching from the earth to the sun is but an invisible point,” said the youth. “When, just now, we had reached a planet whose remoteness is a hundred times the remoteness of the sun from the earth, we were only a two thousandth part of the journey to the spot at which we have optically arrived now.”

“Oh, pray don't; it overpowers me!” she replied, not without seriousness. “It makes me feel that it is not worth while to live; it quite annihilates me.”

“If it annihilates your ladyship to roam over these yawning spaces just once, think how it must annihilate me to be, as it were, in constant suspension amid them night after night.” (28-29; ch. 4)

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 45 , Issue 4 , December 2017 , pp. 727 - 744
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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References

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