extra credit post for late Victorians response– Kaitlin
This is my extra credit post for missing the deadline for first Ganges reading post back in February. After watching The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, I’ve been thinking about what chemistry meant in the Victorian imagination. Chemistry had existed for centuries when you consider alchemy. Witches had weird concoctions and love potions even in the plays of Shakespeare. In the Victorian era, however, this seems to be a slightly different picture than the witches and sorcerers making magical herbal brews. The magical properties seem to have moved to the laboratory instead. This is particularly evident in M’s desire for the chemicals of league members’ abilities—Mina’s blood, Skinner’s skin, and Dr. Jekyll’s potion. Even in the source material, chemistry is evident. Even in The Portrait of Dorian Gray, chemicals play an important role. Gray’s portrait isn’t aging because of some magical elixir, but the woman he is courting poisons herself when Gray rejects her.
Potions and weird brews were a part of Victorian medicine. There was little regulation, and quacks could sell just about anything. Some of these potions were based on long existing knowledge of herbal remedies, but others were just odd solutions thrown together. The “Homeopathic Case” pin shows us a typical case of medicines (https://www.pinterest.com/pin/183521753550623636/). This case is not unlike the one that Dr. Jekyll uses in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
You can also see this mixture of the magical and scientific with Victorian scientific instrumentation, particularly in the “Under the Victorian Microscopes, an Enchanted World” pin (https://www.pinterest.com/pin/183521753551155770/). Both the general public and some members of the scientific community use fantastical language to describe what they were seeing when using a microscope. Microscopes were even called “magic glasses” by some (https://daily.jstor.org/victorian-microscope-enchanted-world/). As late as 1917, the Cottingley Fairies hoax convinced many people. This was achieved through camera trickery. The Punch magazine pin shows a similar trick (https://www.pinterest.com/pin/183521753550623862/). A boy is holding a paper star in front of an older man’s telescope.
I think that this mixture of beliefs—both magical and scientific—is one of the most interesting parts of the aesthetic we imagine when we think of the Victorian era. It was a time of industrial advancement, but also a time when people still thoughts fairies might exist or that scientists who went too far might those their soul.
Did you guys also notice this mixture of magic and science in the film?
Excellent connections here between what we’re collecting on Pinterest and Victorian chemistry.
Your post makes me consider that alchemy itself was an active aspect of Victorian science. Though discredited due to its focus on turning base metals into gold, the knowledge of Paracelsus was not lost among Victorian scientists. I agree there was a magical aspect to the use of chemicals – certainly that’s also a focus of The Invisible Man.
At the Museum of Science in Cambridge, there is a recreated Victorian “game” room. On the table is a stereoscope and pictures, a zoetrope, and a microscope. People would buy slide sets and sit around looking at slides of insects and cells, for entertainment.
Lisa,
That game room sounds interesting. I recently received my results from one of those mail away ancestry DNA kits. I realized that what I was doing is really no different than the Victorians who looked through microscopes just for entertainment but entirely divorced from the science behind the process.
Gabby, since your future field is going to be genetics, what do you think about these kits and science as entertainment in general?
Really fascinating post! I think the Victorian age was such an interesting and unique time because science and chemistry existed within a wildly inspired and fanciful sphere. I think this able to happen because see science was in an advanced enough stage to explain universal laws ( ie. how matter is composed) but not yet so advanced that many ideas and hypothesis had already all been disproven.
During experimentation, scientists always start with a null hypothesis. A hypothesis in the “negative”that they hope their research will disprove. The Victorian Age was an age of hypothesis and questioning.
I think you’ll really enjoy this video about the Victorian age and fairies and science novels for children. https://youtu.be/F6EY0Bd-xfg