Manlove, Colin. “Charles
Kingsley, H. G. Wells, and the Machine in Victorian Fiction,” Nineteenth-Century
Literature Vol. 48, No. 2 (Sept. 1993): 212-239.
Manlove declares that apart from Samuel Butler in his Erehwon,
the only important Victorian writers who focus on the central role the
machine plays in life and nature are H. G. Wells, in The Time Machine
and The War of the Worlds, and Kingsley, in The Water-Babies.
He argues that though The Water-Babies may appear to be a marine
pastoral, machines and engines are mentioned over and over again and the
animals themselves are treated as in part machines. He considers
that The Water-Babies reflects Kingsley's view that the whole order
of nature functions as one great engine. In fact, the content and
the style of the novel renders it a type of organic engine itself.
"The Water-Babies is an amazing diversity of contexts, characters,
and apparent irrelevancies, all bound together by secret principles that
make it a machine without being a monolithic one -- indeed, it manages
to fuse all the variety that Kingsley saw in nature with the purposiveness
of the engine."
Dickens;
Machine, The;
The
Water-Babies. |
