ABSTRACT
The scientific revolutions that dominated the nineteenth century shook people’s views of the world around them and made them question their views of their place in that unstable world. The competition between science and belief and between science and the occult were the intellectual and dogmatic symptoms of the intellectual and theological transition of the Victorian period. This chapter is a survey of the scientific revolutions that dominated Victorian intellectual history. As each innovation in science peeled back different layers of understanding, Victorians were confronted with a crisis: of faith, of belief, and of knowledge itself. Each new scientific premise gave way to pseudo-scientific reveries, of the occult, mesmerism, physiognomy, or vivisection. This chapter is a socio-historical examination of the impact of scientific discovery in the age of Victoria. Within the context of scientific enquiry, Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights has often been relegated as a difficult, even “strange” text. This chapter surveys the author’s unique interest in the nihilist aesthetics of apocalyptic landscape artist John Martin and his impact on her own literary output. In the author’s depiction of monstrous natures, hellish characters, and magical sciences, she depicts the apocalyptic monstrosity of a world in scientific transition.
