Science and Periodicals Category
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 […]
Victorian Science in Context
Posted on February 4, 2014 Leave a Comment
“Victorians of every rank, at many sites, in many ways, defined knowledge, ordered nature, and practiced science.” This introductory remark, in Bernard Lightman’s Victorian Science in Context (1997), unveils the aim of the volume as a whole. Presented as a series of connected vignettes, it focuses on the local and the contingent. Situating a range […]
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 […]
Sites of Speech at the British Association for the Advancement of Science
Posted on January 27, 2014 Leave a Comment
Earlier this month I mentioned Ciaran Toal’s “Preaching at the British Association for the Advancement of Science,” which argued that there was a “vast homiletic literature preached during the British Association meetings throughout the nineteenth century.” Narrowing his focus, a more recent essay by Toal, “Science, Religion and the Geography of Speech at the British […]
Victorian Periodicals and Victorian Readership
Posted on December 28, 2013 Leave a Comment
A couple of other things I read over the holidays were J. Don Vann and Rosemary T. VanArsdel’s (eds.) Victorian Periodicals and Victorian Society (1994), and Alvar Ellegård’s short essay “The Readership of the Periodical Press in Mid-Victorian Britain” (1957). Don Vann and VanArsdel have calibrated before, and Victorian Periodicals happens to be the third […]
John Tyndall and the “War” between Science and Religion
Posted on December 14, 2013 Leave a Comment
While scanning Linda Woodhead’s (ed.) Reinventing Christianity: Nineteenth-Century Contexts (2001) yesterday, I found Gowan Dawson’s “Contextualizing the ‘War’ between Science and Religion” particularly enlightening. Dawson explores Victorian materialism as it was exemplified by polemicists like John Tyndall. While the confrontation between T.H. Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce at the British Association for the Advancement of […]
Book History and the History of Science
Posted on December 13, 2013 4 Comments
This morning I began reading the “special section” collection of articles published in The British Journal for the History of Science, entitled “Book History and the Sciences” (2000). Jonathan R. Topham provides an introduction explaining why historians of science have been not a little skeptical about the value of the book history approach. “It is […]
Wresting with Nature – Science and Place
Posted on December 12, 2013 Leave a Comment
David N. Livingstone once again wraps things up with his “Science and Place.” Imagining science in the singular has been used by progressivists in the service of “philosophical argument or social policy in order to provide grounds for investment in such cultural capital as intellectual advancement, technical control, and instrumental progress.” But a “geography of […]
Wrestling with Nature – Science and the Public
Posted on December 12, 2013 1 Comment
The other essay I found particularly interesting is Bernard Lightman’s “Science and the Public.” It was in reviewing Mary Somerville’s popular work, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1834), when English polymath William Whewell (1794-1866) first coined the word “scientist,” used as a umbrella term to avoid the “endless subdivision of the physical sciences.” In […]