Abstract
The subject of this chapter is that characteristic nineteenth-century endeavour, the ‘Key to all Mythologies’. As all readers will know, in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, the ‘Key to all Mythologies’ is Casaubon’s great project and life’s work:
he had undertaken to show … that all the mythical systems or erratic mythical fragments in the world were corruptions of a tradition originally revealed. Having once mastered the true position and taken a firm footing there, the vast field of mythical constructions became intelligible, nay, luminous with the reflected light of correspondences.1
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Notes
George Eliot, Middlemarch, introduction by E.S. Shaffer (London: Everyman, 1991), p. 19.
For the account of the Second Law of Thermodynamics on which I draw here, see Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edn (1984), Macropaedia 8: 704. For a cultural examination of the implications of the second law, which covers rather different ground from my own though it overlaps in certain places, see Gillian Beer, ‘The Death of the Sun: Victorian Solar Physics and Solar Theory’, in Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), pp. 219–41.
William Thompson, Lord Kelvin, ‘On the Age of the Sun’s Heat’, in Laura Otis, ed., Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 60.
Hermann Von Helmholtz, ‘Observations on the Sun’s Store of Force’, in A.J. Meadows, ed., Early Solar Physics (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1970), pp. 100–2.
Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (London: Macmillan, 1928), p. 74.
Thomas Hardy, Two on a Tower, ed. F.B. Pinion (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1975), pp. 57, 55.
For a discussion of Hardy and astronomy, see Anne DeWitt, ‘“The Actual Sky is a Horror”: Thomas Hardy and the Arnoldian Conception of Science’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 61 (4) (March 2007), 479–506.
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine, Introduction by Marina Warner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005), p. 85.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 136.
Charles Dickens, Bleak House (London: Everyman, 1991), p. 1.
Wells, The War of the Worlds, ed. Arthur C. Clarke (London: Everyman, 1993), p. 5.
For these figures and this analysis, see the Hon. R. Russell, F.M.S., London Fogs (London: Edward Stanford, 1880), pp. 19–28.
William Delisle Hay, The Doom of the Great City, in I.F. Clarke, ed., British Future Fiction, 1700–1914, Vol. 8, The End of the World (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2001), pp. 26, 32.
Robert Barr, ‘The Doom of London’, The Idler, 2 (2) (November 1892), 397–409; The Face in the Mask (New York: F.A. Stokes, 1903), pp. 65–78.
Sam Moskowitz, Science Fiction Stories by Gaslight: A History and Anthology of Science Fiction in the Popular Magazines (Westport, CT: Hyperion Press, 1974), p. 69.
James Stanford Bradshaw. ‘The Science Fiction of Robert Barr’, Science Fiction Studies, 16 (2) (July 1989), 201–8.
Barr, ‘The Idler’, The Idler, 26 (1) (April 1905), 360–4, p. 361.
For the fogs of 1901–02 and 1902–03, see [W.N. Shaw], London Fogs: Report of the Meteorological Council upon an inquiry into the occurrence and distribution of fogs in the London area, during the winters of 1901–2 and 1902–3 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1904). For reference to Fred M. White’s The Doom of London, see, for example, Clarke, British Future Fiction, Vol. 8, p. 69.
Fred M. White, ‘The Four White Days’, Pearson’s Magazine, XV (January–June 1903), 103–13.
Fred M. White, ‘The Four Days’ Night’, Pearson’s Magazine, XV (January–June 1903), 167–78, p. 174.
Fred M. White, ‘The Dust of Death’, Pearson’s Magazine, XV (January–June 1903), 416–25.
Fred M. White, ‘A Bubble Burst’, in Pearson’s Magazine, XV (January–June 1903), 554–64.
Fred M. White, ‘The Invisible Force’, Pearson’s Magazine, XV (January–June 1903), 653–64, p. 656.
Fred M. White, ‘The River of Death’, Pearson’s Magazine, XVII (January–June 1904), 612–25, p. 613.
C.J. Cutcliffe Hyne, ‘London’s Danger’, in A.K. Russell, ed., Science Fiction by the Rivals of H.G. Wells (Secaucus, NJ: Castle Books, 1979), pp. 339–48.
M.P. Shiel, The Purple Cloud (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2000). First published in The Royal Magazine, V: 27–30, VI: 31–2 (January–June 1901).
William Hope Hodgson, The Night Land, in The House on the Borderland and Other Novels (London: Gollancz, 2002).
See Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, Empire and the Sun: Victorian Solar Eclipse Expeditions (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).
H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines, ed. Dennis Butts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 186.
James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, ed. Robert Fraser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 46.
H.G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1934), pp. 161–2.
Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 142.
Ibid, pp. 806–7. In a way that recalls the radical political agenda typically invoked by the image of the ‘Ruins of Empire’, Frazer closes his musings by paraphrasing a celebrated passage from The Communist Manifesto. It’s worth noting in passing that by the mid-twentieth century, the dialectics of history had effected a reverse in the political valence of the image of the dying sun, as it animated one of the great anti-Communist novels of the period, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940), first written in German, as Sonnenfinsternis [‘Solar Eclipse’].
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Jones, D. (2013). ‘Gone Into Mourning … for the Death of the Sun’: Victorians at the End of Time. In: Ferguson, T. (eds) Victorian Time. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137007988_10
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