The Enchantress of Numbers and the Magic Noose of Poetry: Literature, Mathematics, and Mysticism in the Nineteenth Century

Notes

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• C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (London: Cambridge University Press, 2001 [1959]). George Levine describes this concept as ‘not a very helpful cliché,’ and Gillian Beer as a ‘misleading polariz[ation].’ George Levine, ‘One Culture: Science and Literature,’ in One Culture, ed. George Levine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 3. Gillian Beer, ‘Problems of Description in the Language of Discovery,’ in One Culture, ed. George Levine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 36.
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• Alice Jenkins, ‘George Eliot, Geometry and Gender,’ in Literature and Science, ed. Sharon Ruston (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), 72.
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• Ian Stewart, ‘The Third Culture: The Power and Glory of Mathematics,’ in The New Statesman (12–15 April 2013): 62.
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• See Tom Zaniello, Hopkins in the Age of Darwin (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 1988); George Levine, Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); and Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983).
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• Cited in Joan Richards, ‘God, Truth and Mathematics in Nineteenth-Century England,’ Theology and Science 9 (2011): 65.
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• E. F. Bromhead, cited in J. M. Dubbey, The Mathematical Work of Charles Babbage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 93.
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• Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Marginalia, Vol. II, ed. George Whalley (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 962.
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• E. A. Milne, cited in Gillian Beer, ‘Wireless,’ in Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention, ed. Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow (London: Faber, 1996), 159.
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• Stephen Rose, Leon Kamin, and R. C. Lewontin, cited in Gillian Beer, ‘Problems of Description in the Language of Discovery,’ in One Culture, ed. George Levine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 45.
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• Ada Lovelace, cited in Betty Toole, Ada: The Enchantress of Numbers (Mill Valley: Strawberry Press, 1998), 235.
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• Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. V [hereafter CN, V], ed. Kathleen Coburn and Anthony John Harding (London: Routledge, 2002), 5522.
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• Ada Lovelace, ‘Notes by the Translator: Sketch of the Analytical Engine,’ in Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines: Selected Writings, ed. Phillip Morrison and Emily Morrison (New York: Dover Publications, 1961), 251. Unless specifically marked ‘Toole,’ all citations from Lovelace are from this source.
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• Charles Babbage, Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, 2nd edn (London, 1838) <http://www.victorianweb.org/science/science_texts/bridgewater/b1.htm> [accessed 16 May 2013]; Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, ed. Martin Campbell-Kelly (New Brunswick: IEEE Press, 1994).
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• Edgar Allan Poe, Eureka (New York: Putnam, 1848), 120.
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• All references to Coleridge’s poetry are from The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 1, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912).
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• Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures 1795 on Politics and Religion, ed. Lewis Patton and Peter Mann (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), 339. See also ‘The Omnipotent has unfolded to us the Volume of the World, that there we may read the Transcript of himself’ (94) and ‘to the pious man all Nature is thus beautiful because its every Feature is the Symbol and all its Parts the written Language of infinite Goodness and all powerful Intelligence’ (158).
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• Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins [hereafter S], ed. Christopher Delvin (London: Oxford, 1959), 129.
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• All references to Hopkins’ poetry are from The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, revised 4th edn, ed. W. H. Gardner and N. H. MacKenzie (London: Oxford University Press, 1970).
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• John Kerrigan, ‘Writing Numbers: Keats, Hopkins and the History of Chance,’ in Keats and History, ed. Nicholas Roe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 292.
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• Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins [hereafter J], ed. Humphry House (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 89.
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• Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon [hereafter LII], ed. Claude Colleer Abbott (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), 71.
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• J. Hillis Miller, The Linguistic Moment from Wordsworth to Stevens (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 245.
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• For a numerological analysis of Mallarmé’s poem, see Quentin Meillassoux, Le Nombre et la Sirène: Un Déchiffrage du Coup de dés de Mallarmé (Paris: Fayard, 2011).
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• James Joseph Sylvester, ‘Preface’ to Fliegende Blätter, cited in Daniel Brown, The Poetry of Victorian Scientists: Style, Science and Nonsense (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 222.
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• Numerology formed an important part of the construction of poetry in the Renaissance, and has been explored by critical works such as Alastair Fowler’s Triumphal Forms: Structural Patterns in Elizabethan Poetry—most of the scholarly literature devoted to numerology, however, is concentrated in the early modern era, with Meillassoux’s Le Nombre et le Siren being a notable recent exception.
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• William Hazlitt, cited in Tim Fulford, Coleridge’s Figurative Language (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), 132.
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• Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. II [hereafter CN, II], ed. Kathleen Coburn (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 2623.
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• Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. III [hereafter CN, III], ed. Kathleen Coburn (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 3308.
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• Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. IV [hereafter CN, IV], ed. Kathleen Coburn (London: Routledge, 1990), 4536.
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• Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (London: Constable, 1911), 26.
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• Melanie Bayley, ‘The Mathematical Meaning of Alice in Wonderland,’ New Scientist 204·2739 (12 September 2009): 38–41.
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• Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Philosophical Lectures, ed. Kathleen Coburn (London: Pilot Press Limited, 1949), 200.
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• Gottfried Leibniz, cited in Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress (London: Fontana, 1997), 277, 281.
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• Daniel Brown, Hopkins’s Idealism: Philosophy, Physics, Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 321.
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• ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland,’ 59; ‘The Windhover,’ 13; ‘The Caged Skylark,’ 2; ‘Wreck,’ 180; ‘The Windhover,’ 2.
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• David Shaw, The Lucid Veil: Poetic Truth in the Victorian Age (London: Athlone, 1987), 229.
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• Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977); Jay Clayton, Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of the Nineteenth Century in Postmodern Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 37.
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• John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London: T. Tegg and Son, 1936), 364.
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• Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, in Selected Poetry and Prose of Coleridge [hereafter BL], ed. Donald A. Stauffer (New York: Random House, 1951), 176.
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• Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Literary Remains,’ in BL, 579.
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• Oscar Wilde, ‘The Decay of Lying,’ in Complete Words of Oscar Wilde, Vol. III (London: Heron Books, 1966), 275.
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• ‘La parole humaine est comme un chaudron fêlé où nous battons des melodies à faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les étoiles’: Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Paris: Nelson, 1940), 269.
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• Dylan Thomas, ‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,’ The Norton Anthology of Poetry (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2005), 1572.
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• W. H. Auden, ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats,’ in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 1472–74, l.36.
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• Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Thomas Common (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2006), 63–65.
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• Daniel J. Cohen, Equations from God: Pure Mathematics and Victorian Faith (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 16.
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• Charles Babbage, ‘Calculating Engines,’ in Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 322.
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• See, for instance, Coleridge: ‘the medium of articulate Speech, which is so peculiarly human that in all languages it is the ordinary phrase by which Man and Nature are contra-distinguished—it is the original force of the word brute—and even now mute, and dumb do not convey the absence of sound, but the absence of articulate sound’ (CN, III: 4397).
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• Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 1, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 626.
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• Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 On Literature, Vol. I, ed. R. A. Foakes (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 429.
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• Gerard Manley Hopkins, Early Poetic Manuscripts and Notes, ed. Norman H. MacKenzie (New York: Garland Publishing, 1989), 243.
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• See Gerard Manley Hopkins, Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins Including His Correspondence with Coventry Patmore (hereafter LIII), ed. C. C. Abbott (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), 373. Hopkins describes how the ‘essential and only lasting thing’ in a poem is the ‘inscape, that is species or individually-distinctive beauty of style.’
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• Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Power of Words,’ in Poetry and Tales, ed. Patrick Quin (New York: Library of America, 1984), 285.
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• Dante expressed a remarkably similar idea by suggesting, according to Umberto Eco, that ‘God was able to move the air in such a way that it resonated to form true words’ (Eco 41).
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• The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, ed. Claude Colleer Abbott (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), 51–2.
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• Jason Rudy, Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poetics (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009), 2–3.
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• William Blake, ‘To the Public: Jerusalem,’ in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 146.
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