ABSTRACT
The realist novel is well established as a significant category of Victorian literature, and its name links it to a plethora of connected philosophical and natural philosophical debates stretching back into the eighteenth century and beyond. This chapter demonstrates that the Victorian novel may be understood as a space in which contemporary scientific claims were rehearsed and trialled. They were a space in which observation could be pursued and recorded and in which experiments could be essayed. One of the most interesting recent excavations of the complex relations between historical writing and the novel is Cregan-Reid's Discovering Gilgamesh, which like Martin Rudwick's work relates history with deep time but in this case is refracted through the epic. Another nineteenth-century tradition of historical narrative that is relevant to science treated industrial progress and invention. One specific connection between historical narrative – Walter Scott's in particular – and science, is the matter of dialect.
