Reading the mind of a Victorian
Issued: Fri, 29 Jul 2011 11:43:00 BST
Alice Jenkins wants to be able to think like a 19th-century mathematician. Considering that she's a professor of Victorian Literature, this may seem surprising but, according to her, understanding a method of learning geometry as first explained by the ancient Greek mathematician Euclid is central to being able to explore the mind of a typical Victorian writer.
'It seems to me that although we know plenty about what the Victorians thought about things, we don't know an awful lot about how they thought,' Professor Jenkins explains. 'We can never really find that out, but we can ask the question: how were they trained to think? And I think that Euclidean geometry is one of the key ways in which 19th- century writers and readers were trained to think.'
'The reason why Euclidean geometry is so important,' she begins, 'is that every educated Victorian person learned it. Obviously, the most privileged layer of society: those men who were to study in Oxbridge; learned it in order to go to university, but then far less privileged people started to get in on the act too. There were lots of 19th-century textbooks for enthusiasts to teach themselves geometry, and so people of all kinds: including women and girls, and the working class; were trying to catch up on education of this kind in between work and family.'
According to Professor Jenkins, George Eliot thought that geometry was so important that when she moved to London as a young woman, she stopped getting her laundry done to pay for her lessons. 'Thomas Carlyle's first publications were mathematical, they were about geometry,' she says. 'And Ruskin said that even as a man in late middle age, Euclidean geometry remained imprinted on his psyche. And those are just examples from the really canonical figures. Many Victorian writers on theology and politics and law and history and education had views on Euclidean geometry.'
For the past three years, Professor Jenkins has been reading and researching hundreds of writers and texts that prove this to be the case. Funded by the European Research Council, she is working on a book that seeks to understand how writers of all kinds: journalists and politicians, novelists and poets, atheists and religious figures; thought in the 19th century, by examining what they wrote about geometry.
Euclidean geometry, for anyone not in the know, is the science of space. It doesn't involve counting things up: there are no numbers, but rather it focuses on forms, or shapes. 'The point is that it doesn't really matter whether it's this particular triangle, or a different one of the same shape, or a triangle that would cover the entire surface of the earth,' says Professor Jenkins. 'It's about discovering what is true for one shape and for any shape like it. So it's not about particulars. It's about generalities. And the point about Euclid's way of doing geometry is that it is as purely rational as it can be.'
But how can a literature specialist begin to research a topic like geometry?
Professor Jenkins explains: 'I started by working my way through the first six books of Euclid, which took a long time, because it was entirely unfamiliar to me. Euclidean geometry disappeared out of most British schools at least a generation ago, so for us as British Victorian literary specialists, it is a completely new set of skills. The discipline of doing geometry is unlike anything else that I have ever learned, so it took a while.'
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