In fiction, the scientific spirit is no less discernible; the problems of heredity and environment pre-occupy the attention of the novelists, like Hardy. “The Social problems of the earlier Victorians, of Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, Kingsley, and Reade, give place to points in biology, Psychology, Pathology.
The influence of Herbert Spencer and Cornet meets us in the pages of George Eliot; while the analytical methods of science are even more subtly followed in the fiction of George Eliot, the early writing of Mrs. Humphrey Ward and the Wessel studies of Thomas Hardy.” (Compton-Rickets):