What I've got here is one of the objects
from our exhibition Charles Dickens Man of
Science - Colossal Vestiges of the Older
Nations by the artist William Linton and
it's a presentation copy given to Charles
Dickens and it says Charles Dickens Esquire
with the author's compliments. This book
was written by an artist and it's about
Stonehenge, the Egyptian pyramids, a wide variety of ancient monuments and it
seems at first glance to simply be an
artistic book but as you read it it
takes in geology, archaeology, 
evolutionary science, mechanical sciences
and what it shows us is that if we're
looking on Dickens's bookshelves for
scientific books we need to be
open-minded about what they might be
they might include books that look to us
like artistic books but in the Victorian
period covered a wide range of subjects. This is very typical of publishing in the
19th century and it opens up Dickens's bookshelves to a much wider range of
scientific interests than he's been
credited with. He was also friends with a
wide variety of scientific figures of
his day and this isn't always captured
on his bookshelves. He might have owned
books by Faraday or by Charles Darwin
and he certainly did read many of those
books but he also had friendships that
aren't captured on the bookshelves and
that reveal a much greater interest or
depth of interest in science than he's
often been credited with. So just to take
a few examples Dickens was friends with
Richard Owen who was the president of
the Hunterian Museum at the Royal
College of Surgeons and who later set up
the Museum of Natural History Dickens in
fact helped publicise his aim for a
National Museum of Natural History by
publishing ideas about it in his journal
All the Year Round. He was also friends
with the mathematician Ada Lovelace and
he read at her request passages of
Dombey and Son to her on her deathbed.
They may have debated on holiday in
Brighton their visions for a poetical
science that would capture the
imagination and produce visionary
results that might transform people's
lives.
He knew Jane Marseilles the most widely
published
chemist of the period and he was read by
many leading men and women of science
including Charles Darwin. Dickens's science is interesting because it's not
just about what he read it's also about
what he did so for instance in 1853
Dickens climbed Vesuvius with the
archaeologist Austen Henry Layard. There
they may have discussed archaeological
remains because Layard was one of the
most well known archaeologists of the
period. Dickens also attended soirees at
the homes of famous men and women of
science like Charles Babbage who
frequently exhibited his Difference
Engine. What this means I think is that
if we want to really capture and
understand Dickens as a man of science
we need to be prepared not only to look
on his bookshelves but also to think of
this kinds of science that men and women did in the Victorian period - going out on
geological fieldwork, climbing Vesuvius,
debating things at dinner parties,
attending scientific shows and
spectacles. Everywhere we look when we
think of science in this way we can find
Dickens there.
