The cutting edge : science and satire in the romantic period

Cole, Sara and Ruston, Sharon and Bainbridge, Simon (2025) The cutting edge : science and satire in the romantic period. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

This thesis examines Romantic-period satires of science and argues that science provided a major subject for satire to an extent not previously acknowledged. The period saw the start of popular science: people encountered new discoveries in newspapers or journals and attended scientific demonstrations and lectures, while satirists engaged with science due to its popularity, novelty and appeal to the imagination. Like satire, science challenged accepted ideas and theories and provided new ways of thinking about the world. Satirists transformed scientific ideas in entertaining and imaginative ways, but they also asked the big questions of science, technology and medicine: how to tell the difference between the genuine and the fraudulent, the useful and the dangerous, and how to describe and negotiate the modern world. Satires about science enrich our modern perception of the period and help us to reimagine a culture that has been lost or over-simplified in the intervening years. I begin with a chapter that traces the origins of satires on science in the period. Then, in four author-focused chapters, I explore the symbiotic relationship between science and satire in Romantic-period texts: poetry, drama and fiction. Each author is an important satirist: Anna Letitia Barbauld drew on her extensive scientific knowledge for her poetic satires; Elizabeth Inchbald wrote Animal Magnetism, a successful farce on a contested medical therapy; Thomas Love Peacock deployed science as both vehicle and target in his satirical attacks on contemporary society in his novel Melincourt; and in Don Juan, Lord Byron both considered science the equivalent of poetry in terms of its ability to make sense of the human condition and satirised the impact of science, technology and medicine on mankind. I use cross-disciplinary methods: close reading and analysing literary and scientific texts and considering them in their scientific, literary and historical contexts.