Synopses & Reviews
Victorian Scientific Naturalism examines the secular creeds of the generation of intellectuals who, in the wake of The Origin of Species, wrested cultural authority from the old Anglican establishment while installing themselves as a new professional scientific elite. These scientific naturalistsand#151;led by biologists, physicists, and mathematicians such as William Kingdon Clifford, Joseph Dalton Hooker, Thomas Henry Huxley, and John Tyndalland#151;sought to persuade both the state and the public that scientists, not theologians, should be granted cultural authority, since their expertise gave them special insight into society, politics, and even ethics. and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; In Victorian Scientific Naturalism, Gowan Dawson and Bernard Lightman bring together new essays by leading historians of science and literary critics that recall these scientific naturalists, in light of recent scholarship that has tended to sideline them, and that reevaluate their place in the broader landscape of nineteenth-century Britain. Ranging in topic from daring climbing expeditions in the Alps to the maintenance of aristocratic protocols of conduct at Kew Gardens, these essays offer a series of new perspectives on Victorian scientific naturalismand#151;as well as its subsequent incarnations in the early twentieth centuryand#151;that together provide an innovative understanding of the movement centering on the issues of community, identity, and continuity.
Review
and#8220;A sterling set of essays that lifts the lid on T. H. Huxleyand#8217;s propagandist network in the Victorian afternoon. Out goes the old paradigm of a monolithic group of professionalizers; in its place we have a probing study of disparate characters, for whom nature was the new source of cultural authority. The authors enhance our understanding of and#8216;scientific naturalismand#8217; as it was pushed into the curriculum, into pulpit-replacing Sunday lectures, and even into the moral bedrock.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;As a rule, books about -isms are boring: bloodless, spectral accounts of impalpable abstractions. Victorian Scientific Naturalism breaks that rule decisively. It lifts the curtain on a cast of hundreds, with their ideas fleshed out in committees, clubs, and ad hoc coalitions. Positivists and theists, agnostics and idealists, Broad Churchmen and Broad Scientists, dissenters and Dissenters, freethinking ladies among themand#8212;genial antagonists and cobelligerents, all united in spurring liberal and secular trends. As in good theater, the characters develop through their relationships as well as their beliefs, actors arrayed in shifting tableaux before a noisy popular chorus. Art, politics, literature, and religion are integral to the unfolding drama, not just backdrop. The authors of Victorian Scientific Naturalism, like their subjects, do not always speak with one voice, but for this reason alone, in their multiple fresh perspectives, we have our best guide yet to the roles of the and#8216;scientificand#8217; in Victorian culture.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;If they are to stay useful, historiansand#8217; categories require constant vetting. In this outstanding volume, and#8216;Victorian scientific naturalismand#8217; gets the probing analysis it has long deserved. The resultsand#8212;sometimes surprising and always engagingand#8212;will be obligatory reading for anyone interested in Victorian science, Victorian religion, and their complex interactions and legacies.and#8221;
Review
andquot;Dawson and Lightman have assembled twelve probative contributions that reveal how scientific naturalism was more (and less) than a label for secular commitments among intellectual elites who seized cultural authority from the Anglican establishment under the aegis of professionalized science. The community of adherents was forged from sublime experiences during Alpine mountaineering, political maneuvering for unfettered science funding, battles over foundational principles in paleontology, and a system of education by standardized examination. . . . These analyses are significant for problematizing scientific naturalism as a historiographical category and showing how variations on the theme illuminate the Victorian period. Recommended.andquot;
Review
andquot;Succeeds wonderfully in fleshing out the idea of scientific naturalism. . . . Taken together, this volumeand#39;s essays provide a valuable overview of scientific naturalism and, even more so, a winning introduction to the movementandrsquo;s charismatic personalities and their relationships with one another. The book will prove profitable reading for historians of science and for students of Victorian culture.andquot;
Synopsis
Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817and#8211;1911) was an internationally renowned botanist, a close friend and early supporter of Charles Darwin, and one of the firstand#8212;and most successfuland#8212;British men of science to become a full-time professional. He was also, Jim Endersby argues, the perfect embodiment of Victorian science. A vivid picture of the complex interrelationships of scientific work and scientific ideas, Imperial Nature gracefully uses one individualand#8217;s career to illustrate the changing world of science in the Victorian era. By focusing on scienceand#8217;s material practices and one of its foremost practitioners, Endersby ably links concerns about empire, professionalism, and philosophical practices to the forging of a nineteenth-century scientific identity.
and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; and#8220;A refreshing record of how scientists worked. . . . The practice of science provides the context necessary for understanding how theories advanced; without this background, scientific progress looks too simple, and leaps seem extraordinary.and#8221;and#8212;Nature
and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; and#8220;Imperial Nature adds significantly to our understanding of the multifaceted and far from inevitable ascendancy of the professional scientist in Victorian culture.and#8221;and#8212;Isisand#160;
Synopsis
Over the years questions have been raised about the cohesiveness and the cultural status of scientific naturalism, and this book brings together the latest scholarship, offering a series of new perspectives that produce a radically different understanding of the movement. Well known scientific naturalists, such as Thomas Henry Huxley, John Tyndall, Herbert Spencer, and Leslie Stephen are considered, but so are less well-known members of the group and figures who are not often thought of as scientific naturalists but who made significant contributions to the movement.and#160;Victorian Scientific Naturalismand#160;makes plain that scientific naturalism had a second generation of followers who both venerated and simultaneously critiqued their celebrated forebears, maintaining certain aspects of their agenda into the early twentieth century, even while markedly transmuting others.
Synopsis
Beginning with the discovery of a curious plot wherein science became the handmaiden of white-collar crime, Anthropology and the Stock Exchange by economic historian Marc Flandreau tracks a group of Victorian gentlemen-swindlers as they shuffled between the corridors of the London Stock Exchange and the meeting rooms of learned societies. It explores how the commodification of scientific truth became every bit as integral as financial engineering to the profitability of foreign investment and speculation in foreign government debt. Flandreau underscores the crucial role of finance (what he calls andldquo;the Stock Exchange Modalityandrdquo;) in shaping the contours of human knowledge and vice versa in an age of mercantile expansion. He further argues that a new brand of imperialism, born under Benjamin Disraeliandrsquo;s first term as British Premier, built on the multiple covert links between the birth of social sciences and novel mechanisms of financial revenue creation and extraction. As anthropologists advocated the study of Miskito Indians or stated their views on a Jamaican Rebellion or Abyssinian Expedition, for example, they responded and catered to the impulses of the Stock Exchange. The marriage between anthropological science and finance, Flandreau asserts, formed the foundational structures of late 19th century British Imperialism, which in turn produced essential technologies of globalization.
About the Author
Gowan Dawson is a senior lecturer in Victorian studies at the University of Leicester, UK, and the author of
Darwin, Literature, and Victorian Respectability. He lives in Leicester.
Bernard Lightman is professor of humanities at York University in Toronto and the author or editor of numerous books, including
Victorian Popularizers of Science, also published by the University of Chicago Press. He lives in Thornhill, Ontario.
Table of Contents
Introduction,
Gowan Dawson and Bernard LightmanForging Friendships
1 and#147;The Great O. versus the Jermyn St. Petand#8221;: Huxley, Falconer, and Owen on Paleontological Method
Gowan Dawson
2 Evolutionary Naturalism on High: The Victorians Sequester the Alps
Michael S. Reidy
3 Paradox: The Art of Scientifi c Naturalism
George Levine
Institutional Politics
4 Huxley and the Devonshire Commission
Bernard Lightman
5 Economies of Scales: Evolutionary Naturalists and the Victorian Examination System
James Elwick
6 Odd Man Out: Was Joseph Hooker an Evolutionary Naturalist?
Jim Endersby
Broader Alliances
7 Sunday Lecture Societies: Naturalistic Scientists, Unitarians, and Secularists Unite against Sabbatarian Legislation
Ruth Barton
8 The Conduct of Belief: Agnosticism, the Metaphysical Society, and the Formation of Intellectual Communities
Paul White
9 Where Naturalism and Theism Met: The Uniformity of Nature
Matthew Stanley
New Generations
10 The Fate of Scientifi c Naturalism: From Public Sphere to Professional Exclusivity
Theodore M. Porter
11 The Successors to the X Club? Late Victorian Naturalists and Nature, 1869and#150;1900
Melinda Baldwin
12 From Agnosticism to Rationalism: Evolutionary Biologists, the Rationalist Press Association, and Early Twentieth-Century Scientific Naturalism
Peter J. Bowler
Acknowledgments
Bibliography of Major Works on Scientific Naturalism
List of Contributors
Index