Yesterday's reading.

Haynes, Roslynn D.  From Faust to Strangelove: Representations of the Scientist in Western Literature.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

Haynes breaks down the latter half of the nineteenth century into three pieces - realist novels of the 50s and 60s, adventure novels of the 80s, and the fin de siecle novels of the 90s. Her argument basically identifies historical shifts in how scientists were represented on two poles, positive and negative.  In the romantic period they were romanticized, in the realist novels after that they were bleakly represented, in adventure novels after that they were idealistic heroes, and then towards the turn of the century they were scrutinized once again. H.G. Wells appears as a significant portion of this last chapter as an author who, along with Stevenson, portrays scientists as villains or morally compromised. 

Haynes chooses to give "the scientist as adventurer" a separate chapter from characters created by Wells and Stevenson.  The Time Traveller is certainly an adventurer, and despite having his hopes for humanity dashed upon seeing the future, he still starts out as an idealist.  

Haynes has a very reductive and anachronistic conception of realism, as she actually makes the argument that since so few authors practiced science, they could not identify with a scientist's "concerns, motivation, and language" (Haynes 108) and therefore could not realistically represent scientists in literature.  Haynes goes on to say that unfortunately "most novelists were quite ignorant of what scientists did or said when they were not present at social gatherings or giving public lectures" (Haynes 108).

Haynes does, however, compare realism to scientific materialism, albeit briefly.  The only definition of realism provided, however, is one sentence in a footnote, saying that "As Zola argued in his Roman Experimental (Paris 1880) realism is essentially concerned with the study of man's relation to the material world, that is, with his physical, social, and psychological interactions rather than with an idealist, transcendental or allegorical picture" (Haynes 341).

Other important factoids that can go into my introduction of the scientist figure:
-Within the scientific community, biology and astronomy became favored over chemistry and physics.  So even though the scientist as a learned profession would have come into its own and gained legitimacy by the 1890s (a legitimacy it did not enjoy a few decades before), the scientist figures studied here still might be seen as radical or on the fringes of the field, with Griffin being a chemist and the Time Traveller being a physicist.  
- The term scientist was first coined by William Whewell in a review he wrote for the Quarterly Review in 1834, but the budding profession, despite becoming more legitimate halfway through the century, would continue to be considered derogatory or ill-favored (much like the contemporary use of dentists as inferior to medical doctors) because practicing science for money was considered tacky or of lower class. 
-Science was not recognized by institutions, governmental or educational, but rather developed as a popular form, via scientific societies and public lectures sponsored by them.