"The Air Itself is One Vast Library": Reading the Influence of Motive Expression in the Victorian Imagination

Mathematician Charles Babbage famously wrote that “The air itself is one vast library on whose pages are forever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered.” His theory in The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (1837) that words and actions survive eternally by circulating in the atmosphere had a profound impact on Victorian authors of fiction that has not been sufficiently explored. This dissertation looks at the impact of his ideas on works by Charles Dickens, Edward Bulwer Lytton, and Margaret Oliphant. There is an ongoing critical trend in Victorian Studies of highlighting the efforts of Victorian writers to portray complex interconnection and influence in their fiction using scientific and technological discourses. This dissertation intervenes in such conversations by identifying a Babbagean discursive tradition of depicting human agency – e.g. speech, action, will, and emotion – as physical matter that moves, interacts, and exerts influence upon the material world and those who occupy it. This project analyzes the ways in which Dickens, Bulwer Lytton, and Oliphant wrote fiction reflecting and reshaping Babbage’s ideas into imaginary ecological systems of exchange and influence in which individuals have the power to affect – or be influenced by – natural spaces and the beings that occupy them. In doing so, they also model new ways of reading affect and causal relations that reflect how Victorians saw the individual’s capacity to exert and understand influence in an increasingly interconnected nineteenth-century world. The central claim of this dissertation is that Victorian writers saw the imaginative opportunities implicit in Babbage’s sound theory and created narrative Babbagean ecologies attuned to those living, reading, and listening in the nineteenth century.