Seeing Further by Bill Bryson Read Free Book Online Page A

a good example of an obsessive scientist blind to all else as he seeks to prove his theories by creating a perfect man out of dead bodies. The first to suffe from his blindness and single-mindedness is his fiancée, murdered by the creature on Dr Frankenstein’s wedding night in revenge for Frankenstein’s refusal to love and acknowledge the living being he himself has created. Next came Hawthorne’s various obsessed experimenters. There’s Dr Rappacini, who feeds poison in small amounts to his daughter, thus making her immune to it though she is poisonous to others, and is thus cut off from life and love. There’s also the ‘man of science’ in ‘The Birthmark’, who becomes fixated on the blood-coloured, hand-shaped birthmark of his beautiful wife. In an attempt to remove it through his science – thus rendering her perfect – he takes her to his mysterious laboratory and administers a potion that undoes the bonds holding spirit and flesh together, which kills her.
    Both of these men – like Dr Frankenstein – prefer their own arcane knowledge and the demonstration of their power to the safety and happiness of those whom they ought to love and cherish. In this way they are selfish and cold, much like the Lagadan projectors who stick to their theories no matter how much destruction and misery they may cause. And both, like Dr Frankenstein, cross the boundaries set for human beings, and dabble in matters that are either a) better left to God, or b) none of their business.
    The Lagadan projectors were both ridiculous and destructive, but in the middle of the nineteenth century the mad scientist line splits in two, with the ridiculous branch culminating in the Jerry Lewis ‘nutty professor’ comic version, and the other leading in a more tragic direction. Even in ‘alchemist’ tales like the Faustus story, the comic potential was there – Faustus on the stage was a great practical joker – but in darker sagas like
Frankenstein
this vein is not exploited.
    In modern times the ‘nutty professor’ trope can probably trace its origins to Thomas Hughes’ extraordinarily popular 1857 novel,
Tom Brown’s School Days.
There we meet a boy called Martin, whose nickname is ‘Madman’. Madman would rather do chemical experiments and explore biology than parse Latin sentences – a bent the author rather approves than not, as he sees in Madman the coming age:
    If we knew how to use our boys, Martin would have been seized upon and educated as a natural philosopher. He had a passion for birds, beasts, and insects, and knew more of them and their habits than any one in Rugby … He was also an experimental chemist on a small scale, and had made unto himself an electric machine, from which it was his greatest pleasure and glory to administer small shocks to any small boys who were rash enough to venture into his study. And this was by no means an adventure free from excitement; for besides the probability of a snake dropping on toyour head or twining lovingly up your leg, or a rat getting into your breeches-pocket in search of food, there was the animal and chemical odour to be faced, which always hung about the den, and the chance of being blown up in some of the many experiments which Martin was always trying, with the most wondrous results in the shape of explosions and smells that mortal boy ever heard of.
    Despite the indulgent tone, the Lagadan comic aspects are in evidence: the chemical experiments that blow up, the stinky substances, the mess, the animal excrement, the obsession.
    The tragic or sinister mad scientist evolutionary line runs through R.L. Stevenson’s 1886 novel,
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,
in which Dr Jekyll – another of those cross-the-forbidden-liners, with another of those mysterious laboratories – stumbles upon, or possibly inherits from Hawthorne, another of those potions that dissolve the bonds holding spirit and flesh together. But this time the potion doesn’t kill the drinker, or not at