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  • Chapter 3 - George Eliot, the Westminster Circle, and Karl Ernst von Baer’s Embryological Germ Theory

  • Edited by Gail Marshall, University of Reading
  • Book:
    Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1850s
    Published online:
    02 January 2025
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025, pp 69-89

  • Summary

    Andrew Mangham analyses the importance of narrative for the German embryologist Karl Ernst von Baer, and its influence on George Eliot’s early fiction. This chapter evidences the way in which knowledge from Europe was acquired, debated, and adopted in London soirées. Van Baer’s work was welcomed by the circle of radicals, including Thomas Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and Marian Evans, who congregated around John Chapman’s Westminster Review. Newly available in a partial translation by Huxley and the botanist Arthur Henfrey, von Baer’s Uber Entwickelungsgeschichte der Thiere (1828) specifies a theory of growth based on early differentiation of individuals, which seemed to chime with the period’s investment in industry, but also insisted on the importance of narrative. The early work of George Eliot, specifically Scenes of Clerical Life (1857) and Adam Bede (1859), bears the imprint of von Baer’s models of individuation in the secularism that we find in her work.