The Scientist in Victorian Literature: Archibald Thorpe, Geologist (Wooers and Winners, 1879)

PDF eBook, 310 pages
Published 1880 (originally 1879)
Read December 2018
 

Wooers and Winners; or, Under the Scars: A Yorkshire Story, Vols. I–III
by Mrs. G. Linnæus Banks

Allan's letter had set the scientific enthusiast thinking for the time being; but the lines of thought crossed and diverged, and soon his fears for his stepson were lost in the reminder of his other promise to Honest John, and in the gathering up of ideas and the marshalling of facts for the lectures to be written. (1: 226-27)

I've set a goal for myself this winter break of reading all the Victorian scientist novels I've never got around to, or discovered after reading for my exams and dissertation, because my aim is to submit a book proposal soon, and I want to make sure I haven't missed anything important before I do my revisions. That leads me to this clunkily titled novel, which was serialized in 1879 and published in three volumes in 1880.

Mostly it's a tale of a cluster of connected characters with, as the use of "wooers" indicates, some emphasis on who is engaged to whom. One character, Mr. Archibald Thorpe, is a man of science, specifically an amateur geologist; he's not a focal character, but his children and step-children are (he's the "scientific enthusiast" in the above quotation). To be honest, it's all terribly tedious. I didn't care about any of these characters or who they married or who they stole from or where they went to school. Like a lot of mediocre novelists, Banks manages to spin very little incident out into hundred of pages.

My own interests didn't even find very much to work with, because Mr. Thorpe's scientific perceptions very rarely entered into the book at first, until all of a sudden at the end of the first volume, where someone tells him something about his stepson Allan he really ought to have noticed before: "Mr. Thorpe, who had more knowledge of plants and stones than of humanity, opened his eyes in amazement" (1: 219). The narrator later amplifies this by saying, "why should a man, pondering the occult secrets of creation, be expected to note the actions or development of young people, even though one should be his own? The fossilized past had a more intelligent voice for him than had the human present" (1: 301). Like Swithin St. Cleeve in Hardy's Two on a Tower (published three years later), Thorpe's focus on cosmic immensities makes it difficult for his vision to alight upon particularities, only in this case, it's deep time, not deep space, that has trained his vision.

Mr. Thorpe is kind of your typical abstracted scientist who cares little for day-to-day matters (his stepdaughter basically has to raise his daughter for him when his wife / their mother dies), though when he's recruited to give geological lessons to the general public, he actually acquits himself fairly well. (Unlike Margaret Hale's father in the television version of North and South, also set in the North.) But speaking to and understanding the general public is a very different thing from his own children: "intent on the enlightenment of the masses, his mental vision had so wide and comprehensive a range, it is small wonder the inconsiderable individual on his own hearthstone were overlooked" (1: 301-02). So three hundred pages and nearly one volume in, I finally got excited by the book.

PDF eBook, 300 pages
Published 1880 (originally 1879)
Read December 2018
 

Unfortunately, that's pretty much it for interesting things done by Archibald Thorpe. He largely sits out the second volume, which focuses on his boring children and stepchildren. He does pop up at its end again to be chastised by his stepdaughter for the fact that he is a bad candidate for sitting vigil at the bedside of his dying stepson: "Your mind would be lost among the stalactites and stalagmites of our caverns… in search of something rare and fresh for your collection, when Allan might want his pillow eased, or his shoulders covered, or his physic administered" (2: 205). But that's about it, and don't we know how bad men of science are at dealing with people by now?

Allan's near death (he's about to be buried when his sister realizes he's still breathing, very faintly) is the highlight of volume II, but again it's a small chuck of a large stretch. Volume III is the dullest part of the whole novel, focusing more than any other volume on "wooing" (I'm not sure where "winning" comes in), though we do learn than a man of science makes a better mine owner than someone trained in classical literature, because as Martin (Mr. Thorpe's ward) tells us, literature "foster[s] the romance in my nature" too much (3: 108).

PDF eBook, 286 pages
Published 1880 (originally 1879)
Read December 2018
 

By this point, Mr. Thorpe himself has pretty much vanished. And then he does so literally; one day he goes off on a geological expedition into a cave he's discovered, and he just never comes back! (3: 242-43) This seems like it could be exciting-- how far will a man's devotion to science take him?-- but it's told to us in retrospect without any detail. So much for a guy who had been a principal character.

So, all in all, not a particularly good novel, and from my perspective, not a particularly interesting one, either. Archibald Thorpe definitely fits into my general theory of the vision of the Victorian scientist, but he's so generic that he doesn't tell us anything new that we couldn't find in better novels by better authors.