In the opening paragraph of his novel Bleak House, Charles Dickens envisages meeting “a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill”. It is a startling image, one that depicts Victorian London as a place of mud, corruption and disease.
Prehistoric concerns and scientific interests are not normally connected with this author, who is known best for his depictions of social injustice, eccentric characters and occasional bouts of sentimentality. Indeed, Dickens is generally thought today to have been suspicious of science.
But experts believe this reputation in undeserved, and argue that Dickens used scientific imagery throughout his writing. He also believed passionately in the use of science to improve child health, sanitation and human understanding. These themes will be outlined in an exhibition, Charles Dickens: Man of Science, opening this month at the Charles Dickens Museum, at his former home on Doughty Street in London.
“For 150 years, it has been thought that Dickens was uninterested in or actually hostile to science,” said Frankie Kubicki, a curator at the museum. “That is a misunderstanding, and a travesty. He was one of the most influential scientific communicators of the Victorian age.”
Among the exhibits in the forthcoming exhibition will be the travelling bag that Dickens took on foreign trips. These included a visit to Vesuvius from which he returned “burnt from head to foot”, he later wrote. Also on show will be facsimile notes of Michael Faraday’s public lectures at the Royal Institution, which Dickens subsequently edited and published in his weekly magazine Household Words. His aim with the magazine was to provide a blend of fiction, social campaigning and the science – as described by Faraday in his lectures – behind such everyday matters as making tea, fermenting beer and burning candles.
The exhibition will also include a recreation of Pepper’s Ghost, a display of optical illusions created by chemist John Pepper. This used angled glass to create transparent ghostly figures, including some from Dickens’s novella The Haunted Man. By showing how easy it was to deceive the senses, Dickens and Pepper wanted to help reveal the fraudulent claims of spiritualists, who used this kind of equipment at seances at the time.
For his part, Dickens was much admired by several scientists, and his associates included the palaeontologist Richard Owen, the mathematician Ada Lovelace (who on her deathbed asked Dickens to read to her from Dombey and Son) and Florence Nightingale, who prescribed his novels to wounded soldiers as a form of “treatment-by-reading”.
However, the most intriguing display at the exhibition will be that of a small wax figure of Joe, the “fat boy” from The Pickwick Papers. These wax figures were the 19th-century equivalent of the models of the heroes and villains from Star Wars or Harry Potter films – though they have since earned a special scientific significance that his latter-day equivalents lack, according to the exhibition’s curators. Scientists writing in the American Journal of Medicine in 1956 said the “fat boy” character – who is constantly hungry and prone to falling asleep at every opportunity – defines a particular medical syndrome. Severely overweight individuals can be prone to breathlessness and daytime sleepiness, and the condition has since been given the name Pickwickian Syndrome.
Perhaps the most telling example of Dickens’ scientific writing and his interest in social concerns is found in The Uncommercial Traveller, a collection of sketches and reminiscences. In one of these, the author speculates about the inferences scientists make about extinct creatures from the remains they have left behind – and what future generations would deduce about his society. In particular, he speculated whether or not they would be able to use ancient remains to sense “the existence of the polished state of society that bore with the public savagery of neglected children in the streets and never used its power to seize and save them”.
The remark underlines Dickens’s belief that, above all, science should serve society, and explains his commitment to the use of medical knowledge to improve lives. For example, the depictions of sick and dying children in his novels helped change attitudes to childhood disease, and led to his campaigning for the building of the world’s first children’s hospital – a few blocks away from his Doughty Street home – at Great Ormond Street.
Charles Dickens: Man of Science runs 24 May to 11 November at London’s Charles Dickens Museum
