First, I spent a few weeks reading through the archives of the Oxford University Museum, and looking closely at the museum itself. When the leading Oxford scientists finally persuaded the University to build them a science faculty (as we’d now call it) in the 1850s, they held a competition for the building. They ended up making an audacious, eccentric and ultimately brilliant choice, opting for Gothic architecture as the best style for their modern science museum and laboratories. The architects they chose were the Irish firm of Deane and Woodward, who had been inspired by the ideals of John Ruskin. The scientist who gave the project its momentum, Henry Acland, was an old friend of Ruskin’s, and a friend and patron of Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Lizzie Siddal. Ruskin introduced Woodward to Rossetti, and Rossetti put him in touch with the Pre-Raphaelite sculptors Thomas Woolner, John Lucas Tupper, and Alexander Munro, who went on to carve the dynamic statues of scientists who surround the museum’s main court. Meanwhile, Woodward’s stone-masons who had come over from Ireland – the brothers James and John O’Shea, and their nephew Edward Whelan – were carving some of the most beautiful, vibrant and intricate decorative stonework done since the middle ages. Between them, Woodward, the Pre-Raphaelites, the O’Sheas and the Oxford scientists created not only a rich and continually surprising building, but one of the most original and imaginative symbolic representations of the natural world and the scientific project ever created. (I’ll be giving a talk on the Oxford University Museum as a Pre-Raphaelite museum in a couple of weeks – click here for the flier if you’d like to come: Pre-Raphaelite Museum talk).

The second building where Pre-Raphaelite ideals came into play in representing science and nature was the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. Another triumph of Victorian Gothic (or more precisely Romanesque) architecture, the Natural History Museum was the brainchild of the great comparative anatomist Richard Owen and the architect Alfred Waterhouse. In the 1850s, when the Pre-Raphaelites had been arguing for an art modelled on science in its close observational accuracy and commitment to truth, Owen had become keen on Holman Hunt’s paintings in particular. While Owen went on to become friends with Hunt and his fellow Pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais, Waterhouse employed Woolner and the O’Sheas to carve the sculptures and decorations for the Manchester Assize Courts and Ford Madox Brown to paint the murals for the Manchester Town Hall. When they came to design and build the Natural History Museum, Owen and Waterhouse had the Pre-Raphaelite ideal of an art grounded in science and giving a true image of nature in their minds. The result is another building that is at once fantastic in its richness and decorative exuberance, and meticulous in the accuracy with which it depicts the animals and plants that adorn its walls, windows, roofs and arches.

Both museums look to represent nature, both are masterpieces, and both were born from a combination of Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics and Natural Theology (the view of science as revealing God’s work in Nature). Even so, they offer very different aesthetic experiences and even intellectual experiences. What I am moving on to think about now is why this should be, and how, in particular, the different materials, plans, styles and techniques of the two buildings give us subtly but very significantly different interpretations of the natural world.

A recent book, which came out of a conference on epic in Poitiers in France in 2010, contains essays from both Dr John Holmes and Professor Simon Dentith. The book is The Epic Expands: Rereading & Widening the Epic Corpus, ed. by Vincent Dussol (Brussels: P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2012).

John Holmes’ essay is on ‘Pagan Epic in Contemporary British Poetry: Hughes and Logue, Ovid and Homer’. Simon Dentith’s essay is entitled ’Overcoming Historical Distance in the Homeric Versions of Derek Walcott and Michael Longley’.

 

 

I have been working for just over a year now on science and the Pre-Raphaelites, and I’ve just been awarded an AHRC Fellowship under the heading of ‘Science in Culture’ to spend next year working on this project. Critics have often remarked that the Pre-Raphaelites said that they modelled their art on science in some of their early writings, but no one has really taken this claim very seriously. I want to pursue it across the full range of their work in painting and sculpture, poetry and art theory, even architecture and museum design, to see what difference it makes to how we look at a Pre-Raphaelite painting, for instance, and to see what difference the Pre-Raphaelites made to Victorian science itself.

 

From October I am going to be working with the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and the Natural History Museum in London, looking at how Pre-Raphaelite principles of truth to nature in art shaped the buildings where we still go to learn about the science of life and to wonder at the natural world. In the case of the Oxford University Museum, the Pre-Raphaelites were directly involved, especially in the sculptures, including Thomas Woolner’s brilliantly alert and animated statue of Francis Bacon.

 

In the new year I am going to start work too with a team from the Manchester Art Gallery and the Manchester Museum to explore how we might be able to draw out the scientific underpinnings of Pre-Rpahaelite painting through public events and exhibitions. And next summer I am going to spend some time in the Anthropological Institute. The Pre-Raphaelite poet Algernon Swinburne was the enfant terrible of Victorian poetry, infamous for his erotic poetry which explored sexuality from all angles, including sado-masochism, homosexuality and hermaphroditism, and also for his defiant attacks on Christianity and his uncompromising revolutionary politics. At the same time, he was a member of the Anthropological Society, alongside his friend the famous explorer Richard Burton. By reading through the Anthropological Society papers, I hope to find out how far Swinburne’s radical poetry was shaped by the more risky, less respectable side of Victorian anthropology. For now I’ve got to get my head down and start reading more Victorian art theory and criticism, rereading the Pre-Raphaelites’ poetry, and getting up to speed on the most recent scholarship in the field, but it is the collaborations with these outstanding partners, and the chance to work on these magnificent buildings, paintings and archives, that I am really looking forward to.

What does the poetry of a leading immunologist and a Nobel-Prize-winning chemist tell us about how poetry can engage with science? Scientific experiments aim to yield knowledge, but what do the linguistic and formal experiments of contemporary American poets suggest about knowledge in their turn? How can universities help to bring these different experimental cultures and practices together? What questions do literary critics need to ask themselves when looking at poems that respond to science? How did developments in biology between the wars shape modernist poetry? What did William Empson make of science fiction, Ezra Pound of the fourth dimension, Thomas Hardy of anthropology? How did modern poets from W. B. Yeats to Elizabeth Bishop and Judith Wright respond to the legacy of Charles Darwin? This book aims to answer these questions and more, in the process setting out the state of the field and suggesting new directions and approaches for research by students and scholars working on the fertile relationship between science and poetry today.