Nineteenth-Century Periodicals Category
Visions of Science: Thomas Carlyle
Posted on January 5, 2015 Leave a Comment
Scottish doctor and chemist Andrew Ure (1778-1857), in his The Philosophy of Manufactures (1835), proclaimed his era as “distinguished from every preceding age by an universal ardour of enterprise in arts and manufactures.” And of all the nations, “Great Britain may certainly continue to uphold her envied supremacy, sustained by her coal, iron, capital, and […]
Signs of the Times
Posted on November 20, 2014 2 Comments
Thomas Carlyle’s (1795-1881) review essay, “Signs of the Times,” first appeared in the Edinburgh Review in 1829. Rather than reviewing the books listed—namely, William Alexander MacKinnon’s On the Rise, Progress, and Present State of Public Opinion (1829), Edward Iriving’s The Last Days: A Discourse on the Evil Character of These Our Times (1829), and the […]
Contesting Mosaic Geology
Posted on October 31, 2014 Leave a Comment
In the April, 1824 issue of the British Critic—a popular quarterly journal, founded in 1793 by conservative and High Churchmen, and supported by the Anglican orthodox group known as “Hackney Phalanx”—there is an anonymous and blistering review of Granville Penn’s A Comparative Estimate of the Mineral and Mosaical Geologies (1822) and A Supplement to the […]
Reading the Magazine of Nature
Posted on February 22, 2014 2 Comments
“For the Victorian reading public, periodicals played a far greater role than books in shaping their understanding of new discoveries and theories in science, technology, and medicine.” Indeed, not only were many notable nineteenth-century scientific texts first published in magazines and journals, the periodical press also provided an important source of income for many of […]
Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability
Posted on February 20, 2014 1 Comment
When Richard Owen (1804-1892) denounced T.H. Huxley’s (1825-1895) paleontological methods at the Geological Society of London in 1856, he did so on peculiarly moralistic grounds. But this should come as no surprise, for Owen “drew upon a long, well-worn tradition connecting materialism and unbelief with moral corruption and debauchery, including the entwinement of pornography and […]
Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science
Posted on January 31, 2014 Leave a Comment
“Science,” writes Nicolaas Rupke, “is not just a collection of abstract theories and general truths but a concrete practice with spatial dimensions.” It is, indeed, “situated knowledge.” Rupke comes to this conclusion in an Afterword for David N. Livingstone and Charles W.J. Withers’ (eds.) Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science (2011). The essays in this volume “situate […]
Preaching at the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the Secularism of George Jacob Holyoake
Posted on January 5, 2014 1 Comment
Wrapping up a series of essays I have been reading from The British Journal for the History of Science, I now come to two interrelated and complimentary essays by Ciaran Toal, “Preaching at the British Association for the Advancement of Science: Sermons, Secularization and the Rhetoric of Conflict in the 1870s” (2012), and Michael Rectenwald, […]
Huxley, Agnosticism, and the X-Club
Posted on January 2, 2014 6 Comments
In assessing the “climate of opinion” in Victorian Britain, and more specifically the context of the evolution debates and narratives of conflict between science and religion that bolstered them, I have been engaging with a number of articles and books about prominent nineteenth-century dramatis personae, including Charles Darwin, Richard Owen, Thomas Henry Huxley, John Tyndall, […]