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@article{184712,
        author = {Mr. Ravindra Singh and Dr. Deepa Sehrawat},
        title = {Victorian Science and the Imperial Imagination: Dickens, George Eliot, and Tennyson from Mid-Century Realism to the Fin de Siècle},
        journal = {International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology},
        year = {2025},
        volume = {12},
        number = {4},
        pages = {2957-2964},
        issn = {2349-6002},
        url = {https://ijirt.org/article?manuscript=184712},
        abstract = {The Victorian imagination was forged amid contradictions: telescope and scripture, imperial cartography and parish life, machinery and soul. This paper argues that literature was not a passive reflection of these tensions but their primary site of negotiation, where epistemological shocks were transformed into the frameworks of modern consciousness. In Dickens, the city becomes a socio-biological organism, legible through sanitation, statistics, and reform. Bleak House portrays London as both dependent on and resistant to the machinery of social engineering. Eliot, by contrast, develops a novelist’s anthropology: Middlemarch grafts Comtean positivism and evolutionary thought onto provincial life, turning realism into a mode of empirical moral inquiry that links private struggle to collective destiny. For Tennyson, the crisis was metaphysical rather than social. In Memoriam enacts a lyric struggle between contemporary geology and biology’s materialist conclusions, and a need for spiritual assurance, or a negotiation later refracted through imperial mission in his public verse. Tracing these strategies into the fin de siècle, the paper contends that aestheticism and decadence extended, rather than repudiated, the mid-Victorian confrontation with science, empire, and belief. Victorian literature thus surfaces as a site on which Britain’s scientific modernity and global dominance were debated, celebrated, and contested, and where the imaginative and discursive construction of the modern world was shaped.},
        keywords = {Victorian Studies, Literature and Science, Imperial Imagination, Modernity and Empire, Fin de Siècle Culture},
        month = {September},
        }