BOOK REVIEW

Victorian bodies in heat

Barri J. Gold: ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian literatureand science. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010,xi+343pp, $30.00 HB

Bruce Clarke

Published online: 27 October 2010

� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Barri J. Gold’s ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science joins

Rabinbach (1990), Clarke (2001), and Sagan and Schneider (2005) in offering

broad-based overviews of literature and discourse with a primary concern for the

cultural extensions of thermodynamic concepts and ideas. As Gold correctly points

out, however, despite significant attentions having been given to the topic, before

now, ‘‘there has never been a book-length treatment of the conversation between

Victorian literature and thermodynamics’’ (28). ThermoPoetics stands out by being

the first study to center a social reading of thermodynamics specifically on the

literary culture of its very time of emergence.

The new sciences of energy and entropy that coalesce in the mid-nineteenth

century become the pivot for the transition from Newtonian to Einsteinian science

altogether, as well as for the modern physics that fuses the sciences of matter and

energy to cybernetics and the information sciences. Professor Gold is right to insist

on the need for these developments to become better known, relative to the legacy

of evolutionary theory. Crucial too is her recognition that the story of energy science

provides an excellent view of the integral relations of humanistic and scientific

cultures at a time just before the separations wrought by modern disciplinary

divisions.

Gold is extending an important interdisciplinary discussion regarding the cultural

interrelations of literary and scientific discourses. ThermoPoetics demonstrates a

broad mastery of her period, expressed in a vigorous and confident as well as limpid

scholarly prose. Gold’s scholarship proceeds without theoretical fanfare or

ideological posturing. This is not to say that cogent positions on cultural matters

are not present in her choice of topics and critical approaches. It is to say, rather,

that her work is constructed at all points from the straightforward building up of

arguments based on patient and thorough knowledge of the primary and secondary

B. Clarke (&)

Department of English, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX 79409-3091, USA

e-mail: bruce.clarke@ttu.edu

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DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9489-x

literatures. It is elaborated on an empirical base firmly supporting her wide-ranging

arguments regarding the deep social reverberations of the Victorian sciences of

energy.

In its cultural inception, thermodynamics has a distinctly British, specifically

Victorian pedigree. It is mid- and later-nineteenth-century British letters that most

immediately prepare for and receive the forms and repercussions of energy

concepts. ThermoPoetics is well-positioned to exploit this historical situation. But

the effects of those concepts are almost instantaneously international as well, since

they are universal (not to say cosmological) in application. In the same way, the

social and practical implications of thermodynamics—‘‘energy and entropy’’—

reverberated at once throughout industrialized societies in a generalized societal and

engineering response to the ‘‘specter of entropy’’ that Gold’s study illuminates from

a literary angle.

The ‘‘Prologue: Physics for Poets’’ nicely begins the process of demystifying the

intricacies of thermodynamic science for a broad audience. The author reflects on

her classroom experiences team-teaching literature and science courses at the

college level and introduces the sort of pedagogy her book will provide its reader.

This appealing approach continues in the ‘‘Introduction: That Thing We Do,’’ as

more scholarly and creative voices are brought into the clarification of her

methodology, in light of the modern disciplinary divisions Gold hopes to put back

into conversation. She aptly places her book into its niche within previous literature

and science scholarship, establishing an effective discursive persona. This sort of

affable easing into the topic is not all that common in current scholarly writing, and

it is refreshing to see.

Her opening chapter, ‘‘Tennyson’s Thermodynamic Solution,’’ positions InMemoriam in relation to the rise of energy science in Maxwell and Thomson: ‘‘it is

Tennyson’s cognizance of what will become the first law of thermodynamics, in

many ways rooted in Romanticism, that enables his famous consoling gesture on

both the personal and the popular scales—for the loss of his friend as for the rift

between God and Nature, science and faith, produced by evolutionary and

geological concerns’’ (48–49). This opens an ongoing meditation of the cultural

resources of the first law—the conservation of energy—for providing a sense of

cosmic consolation. The first law has tended to be put in the shade by the starker

profile of the second law—the rule of entropy—with its specter of cosmic

dissolution. Gold’s treatment of Tennyson participates in a wider return of attention

to the cultural claims of thermodynamics’ first law.

ThermoPoetics proceeds to a consideration of the interplay between Herbert

Spencer’s First Principles and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s redoubtable contribution to

the emergence of science fiction, The Coming Race, over the cultural extension of

the physical concept of equilibrium. The economic and political metaphors spawned

by the closed-system accounts of classical thermodynamics have been fertile, as the

matter of energy budgets in physical systems is easily carried over into figures for

balances of trade and power. The researches of Faraday and Tyndall also enter into

the imagery of The Coming Race. Its master race, the Vril-ya, presents quite a neat

encapsulization of the entanglements among scientific concepts, their harnessing in

technological developments, especially weaponry, and the imperial anxieties of

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‘‘mastery’’ at all levels: ‘‘Both Spencer and the Vril-ya devise a carefully qualified

equilibrium… Spencer’s reminds us that the laws of thermodynamics obtain only

within a closed system—even if that system is as large as the universe. Energy is

always conserved; entropy, always increasing, as long as nothing is getting in or out.

Only then must Spencer’s equilibration bring us to complete rest. Thus we find a

loophole in the law of entropy: open the system, and dissipated energy may be

refueled from without’’ (110).

After a chapter tracking the gradual phasing out of the concept of force in favor

of the new understanding of energy, Gold puts the first and second laws of

thermodynamics together in Chapter 4, on ‘‘Equilibrium and Entropy in A Tale ofTwo Cities.’’ Dickens’s novel ‘‘is manifestly more interested in social systems and

their decay than in natural ones. But the narrative nonetheless alludes to natural

systems with surprising frequency’’ (158). Working the resources of literary desire

upon the newfound Victorian sense of cosmic predicament, Dickens’s characters

will participate in a trend that indeed continues into the modernist period, the

evocation of energy and entropy precisely in order to imagine an escape hatch from

their universal application. In A Tale of Two Cities, Gold argues, ‘‘Carton becomes a

small but consolatory loophole in the law of entropy… [His] judicious use of his

remaining energies drives the increase in order in a system larger than himself, as he

restores the order of the family he cares about’’ (181–182).

This is followed by provocative chapters on ‘‘Bleak House: The Novel as

Engine’’ and ‘‘Bodies in Heat: Demons, Women, and Emergent Order,’’ which reads

Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and, at greater length, Bram Stoker’s

Dracula. Maxwell’s Demon as the avatar of a counterentropic sorting process

makes a return appearance in Gold’s treatment of the clerical genius of Stoker’s

vampirized females, who vanquish their demonic agent of dissolution by ordering

his informatics traces. In this context, Gold engages the work of Bruno Latour on

fact construction, and literature scholars including Katherine Hayles and Geoffrey

Winthrop-Young, to deepen a reading that seizes the thermodynamic implications

of Dracula’s star-crossed bloodlines: ‘‘As Dracula, the vampire hunters, and all the

text’s readers engage in a struggle to control its flow and its meanings, blood

attaches to race and nation, reproduction and nutrition, energy and information’’

(256).

In conclusion, for all her rigor, I very much like Gold’s informality of approach,

her efforts toward accessibility without sacrifice of subtlety. The author’s literary

and scientific erudition is worn lightly, but deployed skillfully, for instance in this

passage, where the cosmic implications of Tennyson’s energic considerations are

linked suggestively to more recent scientific developments: ‘‘The critical shift from

waste to vastness—etymologically linked words sharing the Latin source vastus—

marks a rethinking of the universe, not as waste space, but as a very large, closed

system in which things are never actually lost, but merely diffused…. Tennyson’s

vastness [proves] not only conservative, but also productive, as ‘star and system

rolling past,/A soul shall draw from out the vast/And strike his being into bounds’—

a counterentropic development hardly conceivable in science until the advent of

chaos theory’’ (57). ThermoPoetics will appeal to a broad audience ranging from

general readers of Victoriana, to scholarly readers of cultural studies and dedicated

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literature and science specialists, to Victorianists and nineteenth-century literature

scholars, in general and across national divisions. This work of responsive and

responsible scholarship is an important contribution to the field of literature and

science.

References

Clarke, Bruce. 2001. Energy forms: Allegory and science in the era of classical thermodynamics. Ann

Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Rabinbach, Anson. 1990. The human motor: Energy, fatigue, and the origins of modernity. Berkeley:

University of California Press.

Sagan, Dorion and Schneider, Eric. 2005. Into the cool: Energy flow, thermodynamics, and life. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press.

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