The opium-eating journalist Thomas De Quincey was one of several nineteenth-century writers
struck by the radical new accounts of the universe as far larger and far less stable than imagined in the 18th
century. For writers such as De Quincey and Thomas Hardy, the study of astronomy provides a unique forum for exploring
the contradictions between abstract truths and individual perception, precisely because of the vast distances astronomical
study involves. As De Quincey points out, the
account of the universe in which our solar system is but a "subordinate province" is radically different
from the sky as it presents itself to the human eye. The sun appears to rise on one side and set on the other side
of a flat stretch of land; the stars look like tiny jewels of light embedded on a rotating dome of blue.
What strikes both De Quincey and Thomas Hardy is that these two radically different accounts of the universe--the
subjective and the objective--are both equally valid. They use literature as a way to tease out these contradictory
accounts of truth, holding both up as unreconcilable versions of the same physical fact. Both writers delight in
the power of the human mind to grasp these dueling realities without privileging one over the other. The phrase
"nocturnal reconnoitre," with its connotation of learning again, describes perfectly the problem the
universe presents us with: only momentarily can we hold on to the idea that the earth is a tiny ball moving at
great velocity rather than the static body the earth appears to be to its inhabitants.
These perceptual and conceptual disjunctions are found everywhere in Hardy and De Quincey. Hardy's young astronomer
Swithin St. Cleeve describes the universe as "a vast formless something that only reveals a very little of
itself" (63), and explains that the fact that "all fixed stars [are] moving with inconceivable velocity;
but no magnifying will show that velocity as anything but rest." Astronomical study works metaphorically in
these texts; they become useful ways of looking at the contradictions inherent in everyday human relations and
perception. By showing both the subjective and the objective to "true" though contradictory, these writers
can present a critique of nineteenth-century conceptions of verifiable truths. They use their knowledge of astronomy
to explore the tension between conceptual and perceptual truths and purposely to leave that tension unresolved.
In this paper, I will sketch out these authors' considerable awareness of contemporary astronomical debates, and
explain why these questions are particularly relevant to nineteenth century thinkers in Britain. I will conclude
by gesturing towards some of the more human implications of the tension between perception and conception, focusing
on De Quincey's intensely subjective rhapsody on the nebula in Orion, and Hardy's exploration of characters relentlessly
attached to beliefs that are not borne out by empirical evidence.