Repositioning Victorian Sciences

Description

A fascinating study of the emerging marginal sciences of the nineteenth century.

'Sciences' were named and formed with great speed in the nineteenth century. Yet what constitutes a 'true' science? The Victorian era facilitated the rise of practices such as phrenology and physiognomy, so-called sciences that lost their status and fell out of use rather swiftly. This collection of essays seeks to examine the marginalised sciences of the nineteenth century in an attempt to define the shifting centres of scientific thinking, specifically asking: how do some sciences emerge to occupy central ground and how do others become consigned to the margins? The essays in this collection explore the influence of nineteenth-century culture on the rise of these sciences, investigating the emergence of marginal sciences such as scriptural geology and spiritualism. 'Repositioning Victorian Sciences' is a valuable addition to our understanding of nineteenth-century science in its original context, and will also be of great interest to those studying the era as a whole.

Notes on Contributors; 1. Margins and Centres; Section I: Shifted Centres: 2. 'Speakers Concerning the Earth': Ruskin's Geology After 1860; 3. Simming at the Edges of Scientific Respectability: Sea Serpents in the Victorian Era; 4. 'The Drugs, the Blister and the Lancet are all Laid Aside': Hydropathy and Medical Orthodoxy in Scotland, 1840-1900; 5. Anna Kingsford: Scientist and Sorceress; 6. A Science for One or a Science for All? Physiognomy, Self-Help, and the Practical Benefits of Science; Section II: Contested Knowledges: 7. 'Supposed DIfferences': Lydia Becker and Victorian Women's Participation in the BAAS; 8. A Fair Trial for Spiritualism?: Fighting Dirty in the Pall Mall Gazette; 9. 'This is Ours and For Us': The Mechanic's Magazine and Low Scientific Culture in Regency London; 10. How did the Conservation of Energy Become 'The Highest Law in All Science'?; 11. 'Scriptural Geology', Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and Contested Authority in Nineteenth-Century British Science; 12. 'This House is a Temple of Research': Country-House Centres for Late Victorian Science; Section III: Entering the Modern: 13. Fresnel's Particular Waves: Models of Light as Catalytic Modes of Worldmaking in Early Modern Times; 14. Re-imagining  Heaven: Victorian Lunar Studies and the Anxiety of Loneliness; 15. 'You Should Get Your Head Examined': Freudian Psychoanalysis and the Limits of Nineteenth-Century Science; 16. Scholars, Scientists and Sexual Inverts: Authority and Sexology in Nineteenth-Century Britain; 17. Unmasking Immorality: Popular Opposition to Laboratory Science in Late Victorian Britain; Notes; Select Bibliography

Sujets

• History of science

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2006
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781843317517
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 5 Mo

Extrait

REPOSITIONING VICTORIAN SCIENCES

Anthem Nineteenth Century Studies Series editor: Robert DouglasFairhurst

Ian St John,Disraeli and the Art of Victorian Politics(2005) John D Rosenberg,Elegy for an Age(2005) AnneJulia Zwierlein (ed.),Unmapped Countries(2005) Michael Diamond,Victorian Sensation: Or the Spectacular, the Shocking and the Scandalous in NineteenthCentury Britain(2004) Kirstie Blair,John Keble in Context(2004) David Clifford and Laurence Roussillon (eds),Outsiders Looking In: The Rossettis, Then and Now(2004) Simon James,Unsettled Accounts: Money and Narrative in the Novels of George Gissing(2003) Bharat Tandon,Jane Austen and the Morality of Conversation(2003)

REPOSITIONING VICTORIAN SCIENCES

Shifting Centres in NineteenthCentury Scientific Thinking

edited by David Clifford, Elisabeth Wadge, Alex Warwick and Martin Willis

Anthem Press London

Anthem Press An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2006 by ANTHEM PRESS 7576 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK and 244 Madison Ave. #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

©2006 David Clifford, Elisabeth Wadge, Alex Warwick and Martin Willis, editorial matter and selection; individual chapters © individual contributors.

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested.

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

ISBN 1 84331 212 3 (Hbk)

Cover illustration: From theIllustrated Police News, Saturday 20 May 1876; courtesy of the British Library.

Printed in Singapore

CONTENTS Notes on Contributors 1. Margins and Centres ALEX WARWICK SECTION I: Shifted Centres 2. ‘Speakers Concerning the Earth’: Ruskin’s Geology After 1860 CAROLINE TROWBRIDGE 3. Swimming at the Edges of Scientific Respectability: Sea Serpents in the Victorian Era SHERRIE LYONS 4. ‘The Drugs, The Blister and the Lancet are all Laid Aside’: Hydropathy and Medical Orthodoxy in Scotland, 1840–1900 ALASTAIR DURIE 5. Anna Kingsford: Scientist and Sorceress ALISON BUTLER 6. A Science for One or a Science for All? Physiognomy, SelfHelp, and the Practical Benefits of Science LUCY HARTLEY

SECTION II: Contested Knowledges 7. ‘Supposed Differences’: Lydia Becker and Victorian Women’s Participation in the BAAS SUSAN DAVID BERNSTEIN 8. A Fair Trial for Spiritualism?: Fighting Dirty in thePall Mall Gazette ELISABETH WADGE 9. ‘This is Ours and For Us’: TheMechanic’s Magazineand Low Scientific Culture in Regency London JAMES MUSSELL 10. How did the Conservation of Energy Become ‘The Highest Law in All Science’? TED UNDERWOOD

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11. ‘Scriptural Geology’,Vestiges of the Natural History of Creationand Contested Authority in NineteenthCentury British Science JOHN M. LYNCH 12. ‘This House is a Temple of Research’: CountryHouse Centres for Late Victorian Science DONALD L. OPITZ

SECTION III: Entering The Modern 13. Fresnel’s Particular Waves: Models of Light as Catalytic Modes of Worldmaking in Early Modern Times BERND KLÄHN 14. Reimagining Heaven: Victorian Lunar Studies and the Anxiety of Loneliness DAVID CLIFFORD 15. ‘You Should Get Your Head Examined’: Freudian Psychoanalysis and the Limits of NineteenthCentury Science PETER NACCARATO 16. Scholars, Scientists and Sexual Inverts: Authority and Sexology in NineteenthCentury Britain HEIKE BAUER 17. Unmasking Immorality: Popular Opposition to Laboratory Science in Late Victorian Britain MARTIN WILLIS Notes Select Bibliography

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Notes on Contributors

Heike Baueris a lecturer at Nottingham Trent University, having previously completed her doctorate on sexology at Birkbeck College, London. She is the editor ofWomen and CrossDressing, 1800–1939(Routledge, 2006) and has published articles inThe Yale Journal of Criticism(on sexology and translation), Critical Survey(on Radclyffe Hall) and theAustralasian Victorian Studies Journal (on Walter Pater).

Susan David Bernsteinis a professor of English and women’s studies at the University of WisconsinMadison. She has published on evolutionary theory and Victorian sensation fiction, including ‘Ape Anxiety: Sensation Fiction, Evolution and the Genre Question’ inJournal of Victorian Culture(Autumn, 2001). Her article on Lydia Becker appears inThe Dictionary of Nineteenth Century British Scientists(2004).

Alison Butleris a Fellow of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and of the Rothermere Foundation. She completed her doctoral thesis at the University of Bristol on Victorian ritual magic. Her research areas include the history of magic and nineteenthcentury occultism.

David Cliffordis a Fellow and college lecturer in English at Homerton College, Cambridge. His bookReform, The Novel and the Origins of NeoLamarckismis due to be published by Ashgate Press next year. His previous publications include Volume V of Pickering and Chatto’s Literature and Science 1660–1834 series, an annotated anthology of primary texts onFauna(2004). He was also a coeditor of an earlier collection of essays with Anthem Press,Outsiders Looking In: The Rossettis, Then and Now(2004).

Alastair Duriecurrently teaches at the University of Stirling, having previously been at Aberdeen and at Glasgow, where he was a senior lecturer in the Department of Economic and Social History. His initial research interests lay in Scottish textile history, and resulted inThe Scottish Linen Industry in the Eighteenth Century(1979). Work on the archive of the nineteenthcentury photographer George Washington Wilson provided an entry to the study of Scottish tourism: his bookScotland for the Holidays: Tourism in Scotland 1780–1939appeared in 2004, and a related

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study,Water is Best: Hydropathy and Health Tourism in Scotland, 1840–1940, will be published by Birlinn in 2006.

Lucy Hartleyis a senior lecturer in English at the University of Southampton. She is the author ofPhysiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth Century Culture(2001), and is currently completing a book onThe Democracy of the Beautiful, 1843–93: ‘The Sense of the Common’.

Bernd Klähnhas studied theoretical physics, philosophy and English philology. He is an associate professor at the University of Bochum (Germany) and a guest professor at the University of Dortmund (Germany), teaching English philology and American studies. His book publications includeMaterialistic Theories of Art and Dialectical Models(Cologne, 1984) andPostmodernist Prose: Pynchon, Hawkes, Coover(Munich, 1999). He has published a number of articles and essays in the field of postmodernism, aesthetics, literary theory and history of science, and is focusing his attention on interdisciplinary studies, including literature and ethics, postmodernism, ecocriticism and narrative constructions of nature (including versions of early modern physical theories, especially optics and gravitation).

Sherrie Lyonsteaches at Empire State College SUNY New York. She has a BA in genetics from Berkeley and a PhD in the history of science from the University of Chicago. She is the author ofThomas Henry Huxley: The Evolution of a Scientist. Her current research examines some modernday controversies in evolutionary theory and she is finishing a second book that examines three cases of marginal science and evolutionary theory in the Victorian period to explore issues of scientific marginality and legitimacy.

John M Lynchis an Honors Faculty Fellow at the Barrett Honors College at Arizona State University, where he is also affiliated with the Center for Biology and Society, the History and Philosophy of Science Program, and the Center for Law, Science and Technology. Specializing in religious and cultural responses to evolutionary ideas, he is the editor of a number of multivolume facsimile reprints, includingBritish Responses to Natural Selection, 1859–71(2001) andCreationism and Scriptural Geology, 1817–57 (2002). He is currently editing a twovolumeEncyclopaedia of Evolutionary Thoughtfor publication in 2007, and ongoing primary research examines Catholic responses to evolutionary thought and modern intelligent design creationism.

James Mussellis currently a postdoctoral research assistant for the NineteenthCentury Serials edition and is based at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is interested in the relationship between scientific practice and nineteenthcentury printed objects. His recent work has

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

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explored the role of science in the late nineteenthcentury periodical press, and he is preparing a monograph on the subject. Peter Naccaratois an associate professor of English at Marymount Manhattan College, where he teaches British literature, with special emphasis on modernism. He earned his PhD in English from The State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he completed his dissertation, ‘Making Literature in the Age of Science: Woolf, Freud and Disciplinarity’. He is coeditor with Kaite LeBesco ofEdible Ideologies: Representing Food and Meaning(SUNY Press). Donald L Opitzis currently a teaching specialist in mathematics at the General College, University of Minnesota. After receiving a degree in physics at DePaul University, Chicago, he obtained an MA and PhD in history of science and technology from the University of Minnesota in 1998 and 2004, respectively. His dissertation examines the significance of ‘coun tryhouse science’ in late nineteenth and early twentiethcentury move ments for professionalizing British science. He has published a number of articles on this and related subjects, and he is presently engaged in a book based on his dissertation. Caroline Trowbridgegrew up in New York City and did her undergraduate work at Yale University. As a student at Balliol College, Oxford, she did an MPhil and DPhil in English literature, writing her thesis on the geology of John Ruskin. She is currently back in the United States and is in the midst of a juris doctor programme at Yale Law School.

Ted Underwoodis an assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois, UrbanaChampaign. He studies eighteenth and nineteenthcentury British literature, as well as natural philosophy, political economy and engineering the ory. He has published articles on the chemistry and poetry of Humphry Davy and on the social resonance of the word ‘energy’ at the end of the eighteenth century. His book,The Work of the Sun, traces the history of analogies between work and natural force before thermodynamics.

Elisabeth Wadgeis a writer and editor at the University of Cambridge, where she completed her doctoral dissertation on the influence of psychical research upon models of personality and narration, as expressed in lateVictorian literature. Her research since then has encompassed the public reception of science though periodicals, ghost stories and the Gothic. Her article on Victorian psychical researcher Frank Podmore appeared inThe Dictionary of NineteenthCentury British Scientists(Thoemmes, 2004); she has also contributed articles and reviews to the Victorian section of Blackwell’s Compasswebsite. She continues to supervise students in English literature.

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Alex Warwickis the head of the Department of English and Linguistics at the University of Westminster. Her research interests are mainly in the field of late nineteenthcentury studies and the Gothic, though she has also published more diverse work in areas of fashion and modernity. Her current work is on archaeology and the Victorian imagination.

Martin Willisis a senior lecturer in English literature at the University of Glamorgan. His research interests lie in the intersections between nine teenthcentury fiction and marginal sciences, in which area he has published widely. He is presently completing a monograph – entitledHoodwinked: The Power of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science– on fictional responses to the ways in which scientific developments altered how the Victorians looked at their world.