[This is the abstract of a talk I gave last weekend at "By the Numbers: The Victorian Quantification of Everything," the 2010 gathering of the Victorians Institute, held at the University of Virginia. It was a splendid conference, hosted by NINES, and featuring an inspiring keynote address in which Dan Cohen presented the early results of his work in data-mining the Google Books corpus to study Victorian intellectual history. For me, the conference was notable because it was the first time in twelve years that I gave a paper not on digital humanities or institutional issues in publishing and higher ed. Since the conference didn't publish a collection of abstracts, I thought I'd post mine (sans notes!) here. The paper itself goes into much greater detail on Hopkins' approach to observation and the scene of Victorian scientific amateurism, and is available upon request.]

In October 1884, a letter appearing in the scientific journal Nature enjoined readers to place their faith in the measurements of “exact instruments” rather than in “untrustworthy impressions of the eye” in attempting to draw conclusions about sunsets and other natural phenomena. Spectroscopy, the correspondent suggests, is to be preferred to the idiosyncratic response of a human observer: colors should be calculable. He dismisses the recently-published sunset-speculations of a fellow amateur contributor, the painter Robert Leslie, as being founded more on conjecture and faulty observation than on measured analysis, and sharpens his own critique of observational subjectivity by insisting that the issue is not merely “a question of terms,” but that unsystematic examination can become “a hazardous thing” capable of reversing scientific progress.

And then this disciplined scientist becomes Gerard Manley Hopkins: “If a very clear, unclouded sun is gazed at, it often appears not convex, but hollow; – swimming, like looking down into a boiling pot or swinging pail, or into a bowl of quicksilver shaken: and of a lustrous but indistinct hue.”

Personal observation is promptly revalued in Nature, both through Hopkins’ evocative prose and his admission that commonplace but previously-unremarked natural occurrences may be revealed, not by the use of spectroscopes and anemometers, but by individuals in whom the “untrustworthy eye” has been made “unusually observant.”

Victorian eyes were made unusually observant in late 1883, when an enormous volcano erupted on the island of Krakatoa in the Straits of Java, filling Earth’s atmosphere with a lasting cloud of ash and debris. The effects of the Krakatoa eruption were seen around the world in the form of sensational atmospheric events, including bizarrely-colored sunsets and strange hazes and coronas.

Richard Altick is right to assess the Krakatoa-influenced poetic output of Hopkins’ contemporaries – Swinburne, Tennyson, and Bridges – as failures. But the meeting of one peculiarly-sensitive observer with this strange and wondrous volcano-light seems beyond serendipity. Gerard Manley Hopkins promptly put his linguistic inventiveness in service of scientific record-keeping: his letters to Nature from this period are remarkable for their lyric quality and their observational rigor. Hopkins’ language contrives to reconstruct some of the most extraordinary solar phenomena ever witnessed, paradoxically projecting objectivity through his willingness to employ unconventional metaphors and heightened phrasing.

Part of the beauty in witnessing, for Hopkins, lay in the linguistic precision with which observations might be expressed. His interest and expertise in Victorian philology is well documented. Language itself was, for this poet, naturalist, and priest, both a spiritual and a scientific tool – and Hopkins identified a near-mystical union in moments of verbal specificity. The “call of the tall nun” in his Wreck of the Deutschland gains spiritual and poetic power, for instance, from observational accuracy. The embodiment into words of that which is witnessed by a “single eye” – in this case, the name of Christ – is the greatest of heroic acts. The tall nun easily succeeds in observing and voicing that for which Hopkins strains his sight:

But how shall I… make me room there:
Reach me a… Fancy, come faster –
Strike you the sight of it? Look at it loom there,
Thing that she… There, then! the Master!”
     Wreck of the Deutschland, 11.217-220

Powerful, emotional, and disjointed observation suddenly is made complete by precise utterance. The subjective heart and objective mind must both come into play: “But here was heart-throe, birth of a brain,/ Word, that heard and kept thee and uttered thee outright.”

The desire to serve as an inspired witness, and therefore for “wording” observations perfectly, is as evident in Hopkins’ scientific writing as it is in his poetry. Henry Marchant, a science instructor from his days of Jesuit training at Stonyhurst Seminary, wrote of Hopkins: “He had a keen eye for peculiarities in nature, and hunted for the right word to express them, and invented one if he could not find one.” Hopkins himself, in a letter to the poet Robert Bridges, described a projected treatise on rhythm as “full of new words without which there can be no new science.”

It is, therefore, no surprise that when the astonishing atmospheric effects of the Krakatoa eruption began to make themselves felt in late 1883 – when, as Ruskin put it, the “ashes of the Antipodes” began to “glare through the night” – Gerard Manley Hopkins put linguistic inventiveness in service of his keen perceptive skills. His letters to Nature from this period are remarkable for their lyric quality and observational rigor. Hopkins’ language contrives to reconstruct, for a burgeoning popular science audience, some of the most extraordinary solar phenomena ever witnessed. One neglected indication of his poetic power is this willingness to use unconventional metaphors and heightened phrasing to achieve a paradoxically objective effect.

My essay examines Hopkins’ private journals and correspondence alongside his neglected scientific writing in the context of Victorian amateurism and a highly public debate – contemporary to the atmospheric phenomena of the Krakatoa eruption – on the relationship of quantification and precision to artistic or painterly (and, above all, perspectival) appreciation of form and color. This debate takes place in the context of what Patricia Ball defines as a Ruskinian “collaboration between scientific curiosity and aesthetic appreciation of colours, forms and relationships, and a verbal facility” common to writers in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It was a scene, she holds, in which “both the professional and the amateur in science respect the activity of the sensitive observer; and that observer counts as part of his equipment the literary skill to do justice to the niceties of his visual sense.”

It was, however, also a scene in which Hopkins could only conceive of a planned “popular account of Light and the Ether” as meeting an audience “who will read carefully so long as there are no mathematics and all technicalities are explained.” Therefore, instead of drafting scientific studies based on laws of physics and statistical abstractions, Hopkins wished to make his readers more conscious of materiality – more thoroughly embedded in the natural world, and therefore more capable of poetic observation:

The study of physical science has, unless corrected in some way, an effect the very opposite of what one would suppose. One would think it might materialise people… but in fact they seem to end in conceiving only of a world of formulas – it being properly speaking in thought, towards which the outer world acts as a sort of feeder, supplying examples for literary purposes. (Letter to Dixon, 7 August 1886)

I present some aspects of the poetic and scientific writing of Hopkins and his contemporaries related to color and to Krakatoa dust-clouds, rainbows, and other atmospheric phenomena. Among these are rayons du crepuscule – striped beams of light only visible at twilight to those looking eastward, and therefore away from the beauty of a sunset. Hopkins posed a provactive question to the readers of Nature in 1882, two full years before his published Krakatoa observations: “But who looks east at sunset?” Consideration of shifted perspective (even extending to what Hopkins called a “perverse overperspectiveness of mind”) will help to delineate a brand of agency he proposes for subjective onlookers in situations where quantified, instrumental surveillance fails to capture the “inscape” of observed reality.

This letter — addressed to the wife of Confederate General William B. Taliaferro in October of 1863 — was found hidden away in a bit of architecture during the demolishment, some 20 years ago, of an old stagecoach inn on the Kanawha River in West Virginia. My grandfather, Vic Stallard, a history buff, recognized it for its interest and offered the finder a pretty good trade. He swapped an old outboard motor for this record of family life and friendship at the height of the Civil War, and of the reaction of Tidewater Virginia to Lincoln’s first Emancipation Proclamation, issued only a few weeks before.

What follows is a quick-and-dirty transcript and (for me) a few fun questions. Did Sallie Lyons Taliaferro ever receive this message from Mary C. Jackson Mann (wife of Rev. Charles Mann of Ware Church)? Why was it hidden on a mail route hundreds of miles away from sender and recipient? Now that we’ve re-discovered it in Gran’s dresser drawer and he has asked me to look into its preservation, to which of a couple of logical Special Collections libraries might we offer it? And is Mary Mann really calling the Yankees “pumpkin-heads” in her botantical meditation, below?

Taliaferro, seated.

Envelope:
Gloucester Co.House Va
Octbr 18^th

Miss Lizzi J. Mann

Mrs William B Taliaferro
Care of Hon^ble James Lyons
Richmond
Va

Letter:
October 18^th 1862

I return your sheet thus promptly my dear friend, in order to thank you for your last, which was received by Wednesday’s Mail; & also to allay any apprehensions you may have with regard to the safety & quiet of our County.

We have neither seen, or heard of a Yankee since you left; every one is bright, & cheerful, & I may say hopeful for the future. The Servants all quiet, indeed I am inclined to believe the Stampede over.

Lincoln’s Proclamation was certainly vile in the extreme, but it seems to have made no impression here, excepting that of increased disgust & hatred for the writer, his Anathemas are powerless, & will return with vengeance upon himself. I assure you I have not heard of an individual who thought of leaving their home, to escape the evil to come.

D^r W^m has been obliged to postpone his visit to Richmond for the present, he has been quite an invalid, has had several Chills; day before yesterday I walked over to enquire after him, & found him, looking interesting in Gown, & Slippers; he missed the Chill yesterday, & I hope the attack is over. Our sympathies have been excited for several of our friends; Mr George Tabb has lost his youngest Daughter from Diptheria, she died at Aubrun.

Mrs D^r Coleman, formerly Miss Tucker, also lost a Child, indeed her only Child from the same awful, & apparently unmanageable disease; she had been in Richmond for some Months, & had left her Child with Martha Page, she reached here however ten days before its death; Mr Mann buried it at Eagle Point; & Georgia Tabb at Auburn, I have heard of no other cases, so must regard these as not indigenous, but rather isolated.

Mr Mann met with Mrs Bryan at the Court House on Wednesday, she reports George recovering, & says “he is a splendid fellow, so patient, & cheerful”, & many other encomiums, all of which I knew, but could not refrain from repeating, that you too might appreciate my Boy.

We hear almost every week from William, his last near Charlestown, contained quite an exciting account of a brush he had with the Yankee Picket in which two of our Men were killed, & a Lieutenant taken Prisoner, he does not give their names.

We have been quite busy for the last day or two, securing our Apples, — a Month since the Trees were loaded, & if they had matured, we should certainly have had twenty Barrels, they have decayed, & fallen however — in such quantities, that we have given Cartloads to the Hogs, & now have only three or four Barrels for the Winter, but these are splendid, the finest green Pippins. I hope many a cold Winter’s day may find us enjoying a pleasant chat over a good fire, & with a plate of the same fine Apples between us my dear friend.

The Elmington household sat the morning with me yesterday, they are unusually bright, & all look well.

I am glad to report your little ones well, it was my purpose to ride down to see them this week, but Mr Mann has had such frequent calls upon his Horse, that I have not had an opportunity of going out for more than two weeks.

Mrs Lloyd with Jane, & Minnie are to spend the Winter in Richmond, they informed me they would occupy the House opposite Mrs Hubards; Miss Sally Lee, & Cornelia intend making an effort to return to Alexandria, which I suppose they can accomplish by attaining a leave from our Yankee Masters at the Point.

It begins to look quite like Winter, the leaves are falling, and each night a frost threatens us, it is quite cold enough, but I am glad it is deferred, for our garden is so gay with Flowers that it would be a pity to have them nipped, the Dahlias, Verbenas, &c are in full blosson: we still have an abundance of Vegetables & are now enjoying Sweet Potatoes — and every thing around us is as quiet, & peaceful as if there were neither sin, sorrow, or Yankees in the World, we have one thing to remind us of the latter, & that is a Fine Pumpkin patch.

It was particularly kind in you my dear Mrs T- to give me the means of holding another talk with you, ’tis true, as you perceive, I have nothing worth saying, but I do not yet assume to have the wisdom to keep silent, except when important things are to be uttered.

Please give my love to the Gen^l & tell him we most highly appreciate his kind efforts in George’s behalf. Kiss the Children for me.

I hear Mr Warner T- is at home, but we have not seen him — the D^r is greatly amused at his Brothers report of their drinking Coffee at Sue’s, costing $2.50 per lb — we Country folks have learned to do without such luxuries.

Good bye my friend, with much love from us all
Ever yours truly.
Mary C Mann