In this engaging work, Anna Henchman argues that Victorian authors (and readers) took imaginative stimulus from the shock of the new and frighteningly vast perspectives opened by nineteenth-century astronomical science, using these in literary fiction to illuminate and destabilize their presentation of human relations. Astronomical concepts, theories, and practices were taken as images, analogies, and indeed techniques by novelists such as Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and George Eliot in their handling of grand scale narratives with multiple characters, in which a “splitting and fracturing of point of view … resonates powerfully with the problems of representing a viewer's changing position in astronomy” (1). This insight allows an exploration of various “under-recognised” factors: the multiplot novel's focus on the persistent misperception of one's own centrality; the spatial disjunctions of character and narrator in free indirect discourse; the ways in which character relations are often figured as orbiting celestial systems; and, finally, the reader's radical imaginative leaps, moving constantly from overview into various individual subject positions. In the second half of The Starry Sky Within, Henchman invites the reader to examine the ways in which astronomical models permeate the narrative spaces, character relations, and moral problems of such works as Daniel Deronda, Bleak House, and Tess of the d'Urbervilles. We ourselves leap from the mysterious, dark, vasty panorama of Egdon Heath in The Return of the Native, with its encircling bonfires, its “extended scene of different observers” (141), to the often malignant sense in Dickens of a constant watching consciousness of the stars, of the glaring sun of midday, and of characters such as the lawyer Tulkinghorn in Bleak House creating a surveilled sphere in which “there is not enough unwatched space for a secret like Lady Deadlock's to remain undiscovered” (209).

Henchman carefully establishes her contextual and theoretical framework in the first half of the book, using testimonies such as those of Thomas De Quincey and Lord Tennyson or men of science such as William Herschel and William Whewell, all attempting to convey the many changes in concepts of the cosmos at the start of the nineteenth century—in particular, the displacement of Newtonian order with the anxiety of “deep space,” where nothing is at rest, with no fixed observation points “outside.” What strategies could observers use to understand what they were seeing while they and everything around were in motion (3–4)? She notes the perceptual and intellectual discrepancies in the mind of an educated individual, feeling a sensation of stability on the earth, watching the sun “rise” and “set,” while knowing theoretically we are hurtling and spinning through space (8). This double vision informed representational strategies where “subjective” and “objective” viewpoints started to cascade through literature. Henchman introduces various concepts such as the technique of parallax in astronomy and then, in the chapter “Grief in Motion,” shows Tennyson's use of “literary parallax” as a structural device for In Memoriam. In De Quincey's “disoriented universe” (48–84), we see how his language becomes ludicrous, anomalous, grotesque, as he embraces the possibilities in contemporary astronomy for prompting the imagination to wrestle with the unknown. Henchman links these resulting unstable subject positions to the “moral problem” voiced in many nineteenth-century novels, namely of one character's inability to perceive another's interior world, and illustrated movingly by the example of the drunken villagers in Tess of the d'Urbervilles, so preoccupied with their illusory moon haloes as they stagger home that they do not see their companion Tess is in danger (13–15).

The Starry Sky Within contributes to the energetic interdisciplinary field of inquiry into the history of knowledge of recent decades embracing science, literature, and visual culture. Just as in Darwin's Plots by Gillian Beer (1983), this text awakens in the reader the urgency of the “imaginative consequences shared by writers and first readers” in their thinking through of the “acquired cultural language of science” (Beer, 150). Alongside literary texts, Henchman also invokes the surrounding visual culture of the nineteenth century and includes images from popular works on astronomy to support her argument. She reminds us of Eliot's own immersion in contemporary scientific writing in her editorial work for the Westminster Review (165) and of Hardy's reading in popularizing magazines and publications on astronomy (131), while showing glimpses of the public culture of scientific lectures and exhibitions encountered by Victorian “first readers.”

Nevertheless, and in contrast to my own understanding of popular scientific inquiry in the nineteenth century from the standpoint of visual practices, or from the work of writers such as Jennifer Tucker or Jonathan Smith, The Starry Sky Within felt somewhat locked within the experiences of the solitary and indeed high-minded reader (as implied by the subtitle). Despite the moral emphasis on the problem of other minds in this text, some social and cultural dimensions did not feature in this book, in part because Henchman's somewhat present-minded focus on more progressive, mind-stretching, and secular scientific theories of the infinite and complex universe tended to exclude or downplay the vulgar, the collective, and the evangelically religious aspects of astronomical concepts and metaphors in the nineteenth-century writing. But I would be happy to concede that this drawback is in its realization the chief strength of this book, as Henchman recreates for each of her contemporary readers (such as this reviewer) the stages of attention, the puzzles, and the contradictions encountered by authors and of their first readers travelling out of their own “subject position” to grasp the power of this analogy as “literature becomes the astronomy of other minds” (157). Astronomical analogies have if anything only become more embedded, if less considered, since the nineteenth century, and in fact this is an argument that I felt this book also conveyed fairly strongly, if more unconsciously. Henchman does indeed support some of her points with future examples from James Joyce and other modernists, and the energizing sense of multiple observations, of interdisciplinary construction of knowledge, and of delayed perceptions and reception also evokes, pleasurably, the revived imaginative interchange that we owe to recent “second readers” of nineteenth-century literature and science, such as Henchman herself.