Science, Women, and the Mother Tongue: Translating Knowledge for 19^th-Century Readers

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Notes

¹ Both Barbara Gates in Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the Living World (1999) and Patricia Fara in Pandora’s Breeches: Women, Science & Power in the Enlightenment (Pimlico, 2004) address the challenges faced by intellectual women motivated by science and interested in publication.

² For more about Murry and her influence, see my essay “Mentoria: Women, Children, and the Structures of Science” (Nineteenth Century Contexts, vol. 27, no. 4, December 2005, pp. 335–351).

³ Bernard Lightman, in his chapter “Redefining the Maternal Tradition” in Victorian Popularizers of Science (University of Chicago Press, 2007, pp. 95–165) suggests that the figure of the instructional mother is less common in popular books in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the instructional mother was perhaps the most recognizable feature of instructional books for children for close to a century.

⁴ One can think of several exceptions, perhaps most notably Aphra Behn’s (1640–1689) 1688 translation of Fontenelle’s (1657–1757) Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds. The work remained an important contribution to astronomy in Britain for well over a century.

⁵ See Moyra Haslett’s “Bluestocking Feminism Revisited: The Satirical Figure of the Bluestocking” (Women’s Writing, vol. 17, no. 3, 2010, pp. 432–451) for an analysis of “the crude attacks” on the bluestockings.

⁶ For a consideration of how the so-called “Blues” were able to earn intellectual and social credibility, see Mary Poovey’s The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 35–47. See also Elizabeth Eger’s more comprehensive overview, Bluestockings: Women of Reason from Enlightenment to Romanticism (Palgrave, 2010).

⁷ For more on Elizabeth Carter’s remarkable life and intellect, see Carolyn Williams’s “Poetry, Pudding, and Epictetus: The Consistency of Elizabeth Carter” (Tradition in Transition: Women Writers, Marginal Texts and the Eighteenth-Century Canon, edited by Alvaro Ribeiro and J. G. Basker, Oxford University Press, 1996, pp 3–24).

⁸ See Patricia Fara’s observation about Algarotti’s text in Newton: The Making of a Genius (Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 57.

⁹ Patricia Phillips, in her Scientific Lady (St. Martin’s, 1990), suggests that Carter “allowed” Newton for Ladies to “slip into oblivion” as she became known as a classical scholar, but it remains true that Carter – through her “many references to Continental and European women, who studied science,” as well as through her own distinctive translation – was clearly asserting a female intellectual connection with the study of science (152).

¹⁰ For the impact that Somerville had on Eliot, see Selma Brody’s “Mary Somerville’s Influence on George Eliot” (George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies, vols. 34–35, Sept. 1998, pp. 1–12).

¹¹ Cited in The English Mechanic and World of Science, no. 403, December 13, 1872, p. 326, as well as throughout “Somerville” sources.

¹² One of the most significant figures to be influenced by Somerville was Ada Lovelace. See Benjamin Wooley’s The Bride of Science (McGraw-Hill, 1999, pp. 138–139).

¹³ Whewell lavishes great praise on Somerville in his review of The Connexion of the Physical Sciences, comparing her with the great Italian mathematician Maria Agnesi (1718–1799) and the legendary figure of Hypatia of Alexandria (c. 355–415 CE). He is even willing, amusingly enough, to overlook her Scottish birth. “We are obliged to confess,” concludes Whewell in his review, that Somerville is “Scotch by her birth, though we are very happy to claim her as one of the brightest ornaments of England” (68).

¹⁴ Somerville’s legacy, even from her own perspective, was complicated, as Claire Brock notes in “The Public Worth of Mary Somerville” (BJHS vol. 39, no. 2, June 2006, pp. 255–272). Somerville’s translation of Laplace was still far too difficult for the common reader, but the fact that she was writing for a narrow elite of scientific minds was actually a source of great pride for her.

¹⁵ This sentiment is echoed in Hester Chapone’s Letters on the Improvement of Mind (Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1820). “As to the learned languages,” Chapone writes, though I respect the abilities and application of those ladies who have attained them, and who make a modest and proper use of them, yet I would by no means advise you – or any other woman who is not strongly impelled by a particular genius – to engage in such studies. The labor and time which they require are generally incompatible with our natures and proper employments: the real knowledge which they supply is not essential, since the English, French, or Italian tongues afford tolerable translations of all the most valuable productions of antiquity, besides the multitude of original authors which they furnish: and these are much more than sufficient to store your mind with as many ideas as you will know how to manage. The danger of pedantry and presumption in a woman – of her exciting envy in one sex and jealousy in the other – of her exchanging the graces of imagination for the severity and preciseness of a scholar, would be, I own, sufficient to frighten me from the ambition of seeing my girl remarkable for learning. Such objections are perhaps still stronger with regard to the abstruse sciences (156–157).

¹⁶ Interestingly, these female translators receive only scant attention in two of the newest and most engaging works about Humboldt, Laura Dassow Walls’s The Passage to Cosmos (University of Chicago Press, 2009) and Andrea Wulf’s The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World (Vintage, 2015).

¹⁷ See Mary Brück, Women in Early British and Irish Astronomy: Stars and Satellites (Springer, 2009), p. 103.

¹⁸ To be sure, many were also seeking to earn a living from their work.

¹⁹ By the latter part of the nineteenth century, some women, for example Margaret Howitt, who translated the works of Fredrika Bremer, including The Butterfly’s Gospel (1865), and Margaret Gatty, whose popular translation of Jean Macé’s History of a Mouthful of Bread (Harper & Brothers, 1864), were able to capitalize on their own status as writers in scientific areas to enhance the value of their translations.

²⁰ From an advertisement in a later edition of Cobwebs to Catch Flies (Crosby and Lockwood, 1885).

²¹ Randal Keynes in Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution (Riverhead Books, 2002) notes that Annie Darwin’s Aunt Sophy Wedgwood read Cobwebs out loud to her cousins. Vaughn Williams recalls enjoying Cobwebs (around 1900) in his correspondence (Ralph Vaughn Williams, Letters 1895–1958, Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 537).