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Essay Review

(Stop) Talking About Victorian Science

Pages 93-100 | Published online: 21 Apr 2008
 

Notes

1Donald Cardwell, The Organization of Science in England (London, 1972); Colin Russell, Science and Social Change, 1700–1900 (London, 1983); Marie Boas Hall, All Scientists Now: The Royal Society in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1984).

2A particularly fine recent overview is Bernard Lightman (ed.), Victorian Science in Context (Chicago, 1997).

3Susan F. Cannon, Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period (New York, 1978) and Walter F. Cannon, ‘Scientists and Broad Churchmen: an early Victorian Intellectual Network’, Journal of British Studies, 4 (1964), 65–88; Robert M. Young, Darwin's Metaphor: Nature's Place in Victorian Culture (Cambridge, 1985).

4Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray, Gentlemen of Science: The Early Years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Oxford, 1982); Ian Inkster and Jack Morrell (eds), Metropolis & Province: Science in British Culture, 1750–1850 (London, 1983); Roger Cooter, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 1984); Pietro Corsi, Science and Religion: Baden Powell and the Anglican Debate (Cambridge, 1988). More recently, Iwan Rhys Morus, Frankenstein's Children: Electricity, Exhibition and Experiment in early Nineteenth-Century London (Princeton, NJ, 1998).

5Robert Kargon, Science in Victorian Manchester: Enterprise and Expertise (Manchester, UK, 1977); Morris Berman, Social Change and Scientific Organization: The Royal Institution, 1799–1844 (London, 1978); Peter Alter, The Reluctant Patron: Science and the State in Britain, 1850–1920 (Oxford, 1987).

6David P. Miller, ‘Between Hostile Camps: Sir Humphry Davy's Presidency of the Royal Society of London, 1824–27’, British Journal for the History of Science, 16 (1983), 1–47; idem, ‘Method and the Micropolitics of Science: The early Years of the Geological and Astronomical Societies’, in The Politics and Rhetoric of Scientific Method, edited by John Schuster and Richard Yeo (Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 1986); David P. Miller, ‘The ‘Hardwicke Circle’: The Whig Supremacy and its Demise in the 18th Century Royal Society’, Notes & Records of the Royal Society, 52 (1998), 73–91; Roy McLeod, ‘Whigs and Savants: Reflections on the Reform Movement in the Royal Society, 1830–48’, in Inkster and Morrell (note 3); Iwan Rhys Morus, ‘Correlation and Control: William Robert Grove and the Construction of a New Philosophy of Scientific Reform’, Studies in History & Philosophy of Science, 22 (1991), 589–621.

7Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (Oxford, 1993).

8Exemplary case-studies in this respect are Martin Rudwick, The Great Devonian Controversy: The Shaping of Scientific Knowledge among Gentlemanly Specialists (Chicago, 1985); James Secord, Controversy in Victorian Geology: The Cambrian–Silurian Dispute (Princeton, NJ, 1986).

9Roger Cooter and Stephen Pumfrey, ‘Separate Spheres and Public Places: Reflections on the History of Science Popularization and Science in Popular Culture’, History of Science, 32 (1994), 237–67.

10Morus, (note 3); Aileen Fyfe, Science and Salvation: Evangelical Popular Science Publishing in Victorian Britain (Chicago, 2004).

11Samuel Alberti, ‘Placing Nature: Natural History Collections and their Owners in Nineteenth-century Provincial England’, British Journal for the History of Science, 35 (2002) 291–311; Anne Secord, ‘Science in the Pub: Artisan Botanists in early 19th-century Lancashire’, History of Science, 32 (1994), 269–315.

12Thomas W. Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England (London, 1983); A. J. Engel, From Clergyman to Don: The Rise of the Academic Profession in 19th Century Oxford (Oxford, 1984).

13Books (and periodicals), as objects as well as texts, have received renewed attention not only by historians of Victorian science, but of science more generally. An important case-study is James Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago, 2001). For a recent overview, see Jon Topham, ‘Scientific Readers: A View from the Industrial Age’, Isis, 95 (2004), 431–42.

14Harold Perkin, ,The Rise of Professional Society: Enland since 1880 (London, 1989).

15Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848–1914 (Cambridge, 1991); idem., Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-century England (Cambridge, 1994); Dror Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, 1780–1840 (Cambridge, 1995).

16Cooter and Pumfrey (note 8).

17Adrian Desmond, ‘Redefining the X Axis: ‘Professionals’, ‘Amateurs and the Making of Mid-Victorian Biology—A Progress Report’, Journal of the History of Biology, 34 (2001), 3–50.

18An exemplary early example is Martin Rudwick, ‘Charles Darwin in London: The Integration of Public and Private Science’, Isis, 73 (1982), 186–206. For discussions of science and space, see Jon Agar and Crosbie Smith (eds), Making Space for Science: Territorial Themes in the Making of Knowledge (London, 1998); David Livingstone, Putting Science in its Place (Chicago, 2003).

19Interesting and important in this respect is Andrew Warwick, Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise of Mathematical Physics (Chicago, 2003) and idem., ‘Exercising the Student Body: Mathematics and Athleticism in Victorian Cambridge’, in Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge, edited by Christopher Lawrence and Steven Shapin (Chicago, 1998), pp. 288–326.

20Simon Schaffer, ‘Late Victorian Metrology and its Instrumentation: A Manufactory of Ohms’, in Invisible Connections: Instruments, Institutions and Science, edited by Robert Bud and Susan Cozzens (Bellingham, WA, 1992), pp. 23–56; Simon Schaffer, ‘Where Experiments End: Tabletop Trials in Victorian Astronomy’, in Scientific Practice: Theories and Stories of Doing Physics, edited by Jed Z. Buchwald (Chicago, 1995), pp. 157–89; Simon Schaffer, ‘Accurate Measurement is an English Science’, Values of Precision, edited by Norton Wise (Princeton, NJ, 1995), pp. 135–72.

21John R. R. Christie, ‘Aurora, Nemesis and Clio’, British Journal for the History of Science, 26 (1993) 391–405.

22See James Secord, ‘Knowledge in Transit’, Isis, 95 (2004) 654–72.

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