Anne DeWitt examines how Victorian novelists challenged the claims of men of science to align scientific practice with moral excellence.

Introduction; 1. The religion of science from natural theology to scientific naturalism; 2. Moral uses, narrative effects: natural history in the novels of George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell; 3. 'The actual sky is a horror': Thomas Hardy and the problems of scientific thinking; 4. 'The moral influence of those cruelties': the vivisection debate, antivivisection fiction, and the status of Victorian science; 5. Science, aestheticism, and the literary career of H. G. Wells; Epilogue.

Anne DeWitt is a lecturer in the Princeton Writing Program, Princeton University, New Jersey.