Science Serialized: Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals (Dibner Institute Studies in the History of Science and Technology)

S cie nce S e rial iz e d

DIBNER INSTITUTE FOR THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Dibner Institute Studies in the History of Science and Technology George Smith, general editor

Isaac Newton’s Natural Philosophy Jed Z. Buchwald and I. Bernard Cohen, editors Histories of the Electron: The Birth of Microphysics Jed Z. Buchwald and Andrew Warwick, editors Science Serialized: Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals Geoffrey Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth, editors Natural Particulars: Nature and the Disciplines in Renaissance Europe Anthony Grafton and Nancy Siraisi, editors The Enterprise of Science in Islam: New Perspectives J. P. Hogendijk and A. I. Sabra, editors Instruments and Experimentation in the History of Chemistry Frederic L. Holmes and Trevor H. Levere, editors Systems, Experts, and Computers: The Systems Approach in Management and Engineering, World War II and After Agatha C. Hughes and Thomas P. Hughes, editors Ancient Astronomy and Celestial Divination N. L. Swerdlow, editor

S cie nce S e rial iz e d Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals

edited by Geoffrey Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth

The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England

© 2004 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. Set in Bembo by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Printed on recycled paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Science serialized: representation of the sciences in nineteenth-century periodicals/edited by Geoffrey Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth. p. cm.—(Dibner Institute studies in the history of science and technology) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-262-03318-6 (hc. : alk. paper) 1. Science news—Great Britain—History—19th century. 2. Science—Great Britain—Periodicals—History—19th century. 3. Literature and science—Great Britain—History—19th century. I. Cantor, G. N., 1943– II. Shuttleworth, Sally, 1952– III. Series. Q225.2.G7S39 2004 070.4¢495¢094109034—dc22 2003061111 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Conte nt s

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Introduction 1 Sally Shuttleworth and Geoffrey Cantor

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“Let Us Examine the Flower”: Botany in Women’s Magazines, 1800–1830 17 Ann B. Shteir

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Science, Natural Theology, and the Practice of Christian Piety in Early-Nineteenth-Century Religious Magazines 37 Jonathan R. Topham

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Reporting Royal Institution Lectures, 1826–1867 Frank A. J. L. James

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The Physiology of the Will: Mind, Body, and Psychology in the Periodical Literature, 1855–1875 81 Roger Smith

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Sunspots, Weather, and the Unseen Universe: Balfour Stewart’s Anti-Materialist Representations of “Energy” in British Periodicals 111 Graeme Gooday

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“Improvised Europeans”: Science and Reform in the NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW, 1865–1880 149 Crosbie Smith and Ian Higginson

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The ACADEMY: Europe in England Gillian Beer

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Scientists as Materialists in the Periodical Press: Tyndall’s Belfast Address 199 Bernard Lightman

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Science, Liberalism, and the Ethics of Belief: The CONTEMPORARY REVIEW in 1877 239 Helen Small

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Victorian Periodicals and the Making of William Kingdon Clifford’s Posthumous Reputation 259 Gowan Dawson

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Grant Allen, Physiological Aesthetics, and the Dissemination of Darwin’s Botany 285 Jonathan Smith

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The Butler-Darwin Biographical Controversy in the Victorian Periodical Press 307 James G. Paradis

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Understanding Audiences and Misunderstanding Audiences: Some Publics for Science 331 Harriet Ritvo About the Author s Index

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S cie nce S e rial iz e d

1 Introduction Sally Shuttleworth and Geoffrey Cantor

“Reviews are a substitute for all other kinds of reading—a new and royal road to knowledge,” trumpeted Josiah Conder in 1811.1 Conder, who subsequently became proprietor and editor of the Eclectic Review, recognized that periodicals were proliferating, rapidly increasing in popularity, and becoming a major sector in the market for print. Although this process had barely begun at the time Conder was writing, the number of periodical publications accelerated considerably over the ensuing decades. According to John North, who is currently cataloguing the wonderfully rich variety of British newspapers and periodicals, some 125,000 titles were published in the nineteenth century.2 Many were short-lived, but others, including the Edinburgh Review (1802–1929) and Punch (1841 on), possess long and honorable histories. Not only did titles proliferate, but, as publishers, editors, and proprietors realized, the often-buoyant market for periodicals could be highly profitable and open to entrepreneurial exploitation. A new title might tap—or create—a previously unexploited niche in the market. Although the expensive quarterly reviews, such as the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly, have attracted much scholarly attention, their circulation figures were small (they generally sold only a few thousand copies), and their readership was predominantly upper middle class. By contrast, the tupenny weekly Mirror of Literature is claimed to have achieved an unprecedented circulation of 150,000 when it was launched in 1822. A few later titles that were likewise cheap and aimed at a mass readership also achieved circulation figures of this magnitude. The vast majority of periodical publications, however, were directed to highly specific audiences. Thus, almost every religious sect and denomination had its own periodical(s), as did local interest groups from Aberdeen to Yorkshire. The working-class press also mushroomed.3 Although women formed a sizable section of the general readership, they were also bombarded with their own periodicals, ranging from the Lady’s Magazine; or Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex (1770–1832) to Women’s Suffrage Journal (1870–1890).

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Juveniles constituted another large potential audience, which was often further differentiated by gender. The nineteenth century witnessed not only the substantial growth and differentiation of the general periodical press, but also profound changes in the nature and practice of all aspects of science. It is tempting to concentrate on such major innovations in scientific theory as Darwin’s theory of evolution and the conservation of energy; however, by so doing we are likely to overlook the crucial changes that were occurring in conceptions of science and in the way science was constructed for non-expert readerships. One indicator of this process was William Whewell’s coining of the word “scientist” in the mid 1830s to identify an increasingly selfconscious group who studied the natural world but sought to distance themselves from the outmoded term “natural philosopher,” with its connotations of dilettantism.4 Throughout the century science also underwent a slow process of increasing specialization and professionalization, although, as Jack Morrell rightly insists, we must recognize that in many areas, such as natural history and geology, the gentleman amateur still flourished.5 The specialist scientific press, which barely existed at the start of the century but had burgeoned and diversified by the century’s end, provides an indicator of the growth of scientific knowledge and of increasing specialization. However, by concentrating on specialist publications, which were mainly written both by and for members of the scientific elite, we ignore the main routes by which science was disseminated to the wider public. Although there were other paths, such as books and the scientific lectures delivered at both Mechanics’ Institutes and Philosophical Societies, the general periodical press was perhaps the most influential medium for spreading views and information about science. Not only did many general periodicals carry a significant proportion of articles specifically on science, but science often informed and infiltrated articles ostensibly devoted to other topics. For example, an article on political economy might appeal to organic evolution as the natural process for development. Again, writers of serialized fiction often incorporated contemporary theories of mind or exploited metaphors derived from botanical taxonomy or energy physics. Although each periodical had its own targeted audience and cultural agenda, where science might rank high (as in the Fortnightly Review) or low (as in the fiction-oriented Cornhill Magazine and Macmillan’s Magazine), one could still find articles devoted to science sitting side by side with the latest political report or serial fiction. Thus, in Graeme Gooday’s example, Balfour Stewart and Norman Lockyer’s speculations on energetic

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relations between sunspots and terrestrial weather are set alongside the latest novel by Charlotte Yonge and a review of George Eliot’s verse drama The Spanish Gypsy in the pages of Macmillan’s Magazine. It should not be assumed, however, that such articles are merely examples of lesser-order, “popular” science writing. As Cooter and Pumfrey have shown, the “diffusionist model,” which views science as the product of a discrete community of experts whose findings trickle down to the untutored hoi polloi via the popular press, is deeply flawed.6 The audience is portrayed as passive, merely receiving the truths generated by the scientific elite. The only active reshaping is assumed to be that of the journalist who simplifies and thereby distorts science in the process of molding it for the scientifically uneducated reader. Such a model fails to provide an adequate account of the active agencies involved in popularization; it ignores the engagement between reader, writer, and publisher, and the role of the scientific community itself, in the construction of science within the pages of the generalist nineteenth-century periodical press. This is not to deny, of course, the prevalence of the diffusionist principle within nineteenthcentury culture. In witnessing the increasing popularity, proliferation, and diversity of periodicals in the early 1810s, Josiah Conder also expressed concern about their impact on the book trade. Instead of reading books, he complained, most people seemed to be satisfied with reading only reviews—a habit (not unknown in our own day) “of which the indolent and the superficial are glad to avail themselves.”7 Conder’s comments are particularly applicable to science, since the non-scientific reader could glean, from summaries published in the general periodical press, as much science as an individual might require. Indeed, many nineteenth-century periodicals carried regular science columns for just this purpose. For example, the Athenaeum and the Literary Gazette carried reports of Friday evening discourses delivered at the Royal Institution. In his contribution to this book, Frank A. J. L. James argues that these two widely distributed weeklies further extended the general audience for science well beyond the relatively small numbers who crowded the lecture theater at the Royal Institution. Faraday, in particular, recognized the importance of spreading science through these press reports.The Royal Institution, which was often in financial difficulties, also benefited by gaining a higher public profile, which, in turn, helped boost the membership. Scientists were clearly not slow to appreciate the benefits of periodical publications in furthering their cause, but their involvement was more complex than the diffusionist model suggests.

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A more sophisticated variant on the diffusionist model is the “conduit model,” which takes account of the highly differentiated nature of the general periodical press and replaces the vague notion of downward diffusion by a process in which periodicals transmit science to specific audiences. According to this model, each periodical fashions its response to science in the light of the intended readership. Two periodicals may then offer contrasting reactions to what appears to be the same scientific development. This approach was brilliantly utilized by Alvar Ellegård in Darwin and the General Reader (1958), in which he surveyed the variety of responses to Darwin’s theory of evolution by periodicals that differed in their social, political, and religious orientations. Thus, for example, the evangelical press generally rejected Darwin’s theory as incompatible with the biblical narrative, whereas Unitarian periodicals considered that the theory offered further evidence of divine design.8 Whereas Ellegård’s approach laid the foundations for much subsequent work on periodicals and science, recent scholarship has introduced a more complex agenda and a further range of questions to consider. In undertaking his research, Ellegård examined only those articles that explicitly addressed Darwinism. If we are to understand how scientific ideas were woven into the texture of nineteenth-century cultural life, then we need to examine how scientific language and concepts permeated the entire range of periodical content, from glancing asides to elaborate fictional conceits. We also need to explore the effects of placement and to consider how reading and interpretation might have been affected by the interdisciplinary structure of each periodical. Articles, once restored to their original publishing context amidst a miscellany of other material, can often take on very different meanings. Furthermore, as Gillian Beer’s study of the founding of the Academy shows, the boundaries between the arts and the sciences were far more flexible in the nineteenth century. We must be careful not to impose anachronistic divisions in our analysis, but to accept actors’ categories. In the case of the Academy, for example, philology figured alongside physics and biology as an area of contemporary scientific development. Periodicals themselves also played a crucial role in the development of scientific thought itself. As Roger Smith reveals, the discipline of psychology was actively shaped in the public arena of debate offered by periodicals. The conduit model must be revised to take account of the ways in which science was not simply “transmitted” but was also given definition, to a greater or lesser degree, in the pages of the periodical press. Psychology was not the only field in which debate was informed by moral

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and epistemological issues that spread across the cultural spectrum. As the chapters by Bernard Lightman, Helen Small, and Gowan Dawson reveal, the physicist John Tyndall and the mathematician William Kingdon Clifford courted public notoriety in their attempts to place their subject fields within the wider frames of reference more commonly associated now with literature or philosophy. At the opposite end of the spectrum from diffusionist or conduit models lies the model of “textual economy,” which, drawing on Foucauldian ideas, allows scholars to trace the play of ideas and meanings across disciplinary frameworks.9 In many ways it would appear to offer an ideal critical framework for dealing with the multi-disciplinary structure of the periodical. Like the other models, however, it also has its drawbacks, most noticeably a general looseness and lack of a theory of transmission. The unstated notion of economy that seems to underpin the model is that of the free-market economy: free linguistic circulation is assumed between texts, and no thought is given to differential access or to limited circulation. The sheer diversity of the periodical press, however, militates against accepting such a general model. As the chapters in this volume show, we need to be highly sensitive to the politics of placement: to look at the target audience of each title with regard to political, intellectual, or religious orientation, and gender and class marketing. Furthermore, we need to take into account the individual predilections of editors, authors, and proprietors. At times these can coincide, but not always. As Small shows in her study of the publication history of Clifford’s essay “The ethics of belief,” there can be crucial interplay between intellectual argument and the very material politics of publication. Crosbie Smith and Ian Higginson’s study of the North American Review under the editorship of Henry Adams reveals how decisively an editor can shift the direction of a periodical: Adams sought to harness the review and its cultural and scientific coverage to his own agenda of progressive social and legislative reform. He was defeated, like so many editors, by the pressures of the marketplace and the literal economics of publication. As many of the chapters in this volume reveal, it is unsafe to assume that a periodical retained a uniform identity across its lifetime. The Academy, for example, witnessed a marked decline in the twentieth century, and its succession of editors during that period suggests that it lacked a sense of direction. Similarly, the North American Review carried a very different form of science article as soon as Adams resigned his editorship (although the proprietors felt compelled to publish the final volume he commissioned, while adding a disclaimer with regard to the views

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expressed). Publishers, writers, and editors could work in harmony—as when Macmillan offered Norman Lockyer and Balfour Stewart space to pursue their unorthodox theories of energy—but these relations were often characterized by conflict. Editors exercised a greater or lesser degree of control over the articles they published, but, even when one can trace an evident “party line,” there was still room for conflict, or divergence of opinion. Jonathan Topham, for example, compares attitudes to natural theology across a range of High Anglican, Evangelical, and Unitarian periodicals. Although, like Ellegård, he is crucially concerned with the religious positions adopted by these periodicals, he also rightly insists that we should not seek too much coherence within a single denominational periodical but rather should appreciate the range of positions articulated. Even within a particular denomination there may be considerable diversity of belief, thus engendering debate and controversy.Topham also shows that an analysis that focuses on the transmission of ideas might miss core elements in responses to science: in the religious magazines he examines, writers were interested in both the rational and the affective aspects of science—in the consequences for religious practice as much as for the structures of belief. The diffusionist and conduit models both assume relatively passive, pre-formed audiences, whereas theories of textual economy often leave the reader entirely out of account. The agendas of some of the periodicals examined here, however, actively set out to create their audience. Appleton, in founding the Academy, attempted to create a new kind of readership: European intellectuals in the land of John Bull.A readerly interest in the development of all aspects of science and culture, across the breadth of Europe, was simply taken for granted in the initial organization of the periodical (although the first publisher, Murray, had judged such ambitions suicidal). Very different assumptions were in place in the women’s magazines examined by Ann Shteir, each of which sought to tailor its representations of botany for a female audience. Did such magazines succeed, however, in constructing the audiences they desired? One can trace the rise and fall of periodicals themselves, but the nature of reception remains far more elusive. It seems unlikely that all readers read from cover to cover, so did they all construct their own forms of text? And were there many “resisting readers” who refused the steer offered by editorial construction of the text?10 As Harriet Ritvo’s exploration of audience misunderstandings of science reveals, the same words could have very different implications for different categories of audience. Even when James Cossar Ewart had managed to create widespread

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newspaper and periodical coverage of his experiments in hybridity, often based on his own press releases, reading and interpretation were still governed by individual expectation and interests. Virtually identical blocks of texts created different effects, according to whether they were placed, for example, in Polo Magazine or in the Lancet.Yet amidst all this variation of coverage, very few readers appear to have fully understood the scientific implications of Ewart’s work. Authorial or editorial intention cannot necessarily control readerly practice. Periodicals, as scholars in the field have recently argued, are by nature more open and multi-vocal than books.11 Readers engage more directly in dialogue with the overall text, in some cases quite explicitly. When invited by the British Ladies Magazine to vote on whether needlework patterns should be included as a part of the monthly format, nine readers confounded expectations by demanding instead a critique of “Corneille, Racine,Voltaire, and Moliere’s plays” (Shteir). Later in the century, Frances Power Cobbe’s Macmillan’s Magazine essay “Unconscious Cerebration: A Psychological Study” included a direct request to readers to send the author examples of their dreams. Cobbe’s next essay, “Dreams as Illustrations of Unconscious Cerebration,” draws on the contents of a capacious postbag, organizing analysis around readers’ own dreams.12 Readers and journalist here come together in the construction of science. Although Cobbe had no scientific training, it should be noted that her work was nonetheless taken seriously by major figures in the field. W. B. Carpenter cited Cobbe’s articles approvingly in his subsequent Contemporary Review articles “The Physiology of the Will” (May 1871) and “On Mind and Will in Nature” (October 1872), which then were incorporated into his major work, Principles of Mental Physiology (1874).13 As the essays in this collection demonstrate, there was often no sharp distinction between “serious” science and periodical publication during this period. Major figures such as Carpenter, or Henry Maudsley, as well as the better-known popularizers John Tyndall and T. H. Huxley, often chose to publish their scientific contributions first in the general periodical press. Likewise, as Gooday notes, Stewart chose to publish in Macmillan’s Magazine, rather than a more specialist technical periodical, when he wished to introduce a new theologically significant interpretation of his work with Lockyer. One can trace a clear targeting of audiences in science writers’ choice of publication outlet. Huxley chose to publish his notorious materialist lecture “On the Physical Basis of Life” in the radical Fortnightly Review (1869), but then answered the critical storm evoked in the more respectable and family-oriented Macmillan’s Magazine (1870).14

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Although each periodical tended to have its own stable of writers, they also ranged more widely, choosing to respond to articles in other periodicals and frequently fitting their materials to the particular format of each publication. Debates ranged within individual periodicals, but also across titles. Herbert Spencer opened his article “Morals and moral sentiments” in the Fortnightly Review with the observation that his attitude to morality had been grossly misrepresented by R. H. Hutton in Macmillan’s Magazine. He had ignored this misrepresentation until it had been repeated across a whole range of other periodicals, and then finally expressed, to his disgust, in the Fortnightly Review itself.15 Periodicals, as Shteir notes, are able to register changing cultural conversations more clearly than books. They also operate according to different temporal patterns and in response to a different range of external pressures. Editors must fill each issue, publish it on time, keep the periodical financially profitable, publish material that will attract readers, and yet be careful not to offend them too much by disseminating unacceptable opinions. A hard-fought controversy on a prominent issue could only boost sales. The early success of the Edinburgh Review, which was started by a group of young men keen to gain reputations in the wider world, was due primarily to the high level of critical analysis, which contrasted with the insipid reviews published in most contemporary periodicals.16 Although Josiah Conder, writing a decade later, undervalued the importance of hard-hitting criticism, it was one of the most important functions performed by the periodical press throughout the nineteenth century. Periodicals were often in conflict, the battle lines reflecting their social, political and religious alignments. Paradigmatically, the Edinburgh Review took up the Whig cause and opposed the Tory Quarterly. Periodicals not only published controversial articles but also participated actively in the affray. Although criticism and controversy were evident in many areas— most obviously politics—they possess particular relevance for science. As the philosopher Karl Popper has argued, criticism is essential for the growth of knowledge, especially scientific knowledge.17 In the nineteenth century, much of the criticism that provided the engine for progressive scientific change occurred in the periodical press. Although Popper was concerned primarily with the improvement of scientific theory by critical exchange between members of the scientific community, we should adopt a broader perspective and appreciate how general periodicals established both the platforms and necessary conditions for debate. Whereas historians have tended to highlight developments in science, technology

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and industry as causes and indicators of the sense of accelerating progress during the nineteenth century, we must also acknowledge the equally important role played by criticism in the general periodical press. In his study of the controversies provoked by John Tyndall’s 1874 Belfast address, Lightman highlights the centrality of periodicals to both the construction and the maintenance of debate. In the view of some of Tyndall’s opponents, the periodical press not only provided a platform for his uncongenial opinions, but also aided the spread of atheism and increased hostility to Christianity. Periodicals were responsible, in the words of one particularly vociferous critic, for propagating an “intellectual Black Death.”They had taken on the status of “sacred texts,” but they were unable to offer truth. Perceiving themselves outmaneuvered, however, opponents of scientific naturalism recognized that they would have to reclaim the periodical press if they were to win the battle with irreligion. Many of the main public skirmishes between the scientific naturalists and their Christian opponents thus occurred in the Victorian periodical press. Nonetheless, it is important to bear in mind that the relations between science and religion in the nineteenth century cannot simply be characterized as unmitigated conflict. As Topham and Roger Smith show, with reference to natural theology and psychology the controversies were not aligned neatly according to a straightforward division between supporters of religion and those of science.The overall picture of debate is both more subtle and more complex. Questions concerning the nature and operations of the human mind aroused intense controversy at this period. Firmly rejecting the internalist historiography that attributes the beginning of “psychology” to Wilhelm Wundt’s experimental program in the late 1870s, Smith turns instead to the British periodical literature of the previous 20 years to explore the ways in which psychology emerged as a specific subject, a scientific discipline, and a category in terms of which people make sense of their lives. At the heart of these debates lay the question of whether the workings of the mind could be approached using the methods and insights of physiology. Idealism clashed with empiricism, yet writers across the spectrum were divided on how far theology remained relevant in addressing these issues. Through the flux and collision of viewpoints expressed in the periodical press, the discourse of psychology started to take shape. Religion and psychology were not the only controversial subjects affecting science. In examining the diffusion of Darwinism within the public domain, James Paradis locates another axis of controversy. The Darwinian hegemony was attacked by Samuel Butler in a book in which

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he sought to demonstrate that Darwin’s ideas were not original but had been derived from his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin. In the ensuing David-and-Goliath confrontation, Butler—a sheep farmer turned popular writer—weighed in against the authority of the scientific elite who lionized Darwin. This controversy soon spilled onto the pages of the periodical press, where Butler could operate effectively and with impunity, scoring some telling points against Darwin. As Paradis’s case study suggests, the authority of the emergent scientific community remained a controversial issue throughout the nineteenth century and was particularly pertinent to the periodical press, which often functioned as an interface between the scientific community and a lay readership. Indeed, as Lightman notes, many of the periodicals that criticized Tyndall’s Belfast address considered that he had misused his position of president of the British Association by vesting the questionable philosophy of materialism with the authority of science. Controversy on scientific issues was not confined to scientific periodicals but permeated the general periodical press, ranging from the mainstream Edinburgh Review and Quarterly Review to the populist Leisure Hour, and from Punch to the strait-laced religious weeklies. Between the overtly scientific titles and those with more general coverage stood an extraordinary number of special-interest journals, as revealed in Ritvo’s exploration of the reception of Ewart’s experiments in breeding. In addition to general newspaper reports, journals as diverse as Field, Sketch, Live Stock Journal, and Land and Water covered Ewart’s 1899 Royal Institution lecture. Every significant development in science in the nineteenth century was aired in the periodical press, often drawing fire both from established scientists and from critics who, like Butler, possessed no recognized scientific credentials. Not only were there public controversies between periodicals; there were also intense struggles behind the scenes. Rivalries and overt clashes between authors, editors, and publishers—however permuted— were very common. Such disputes could affect a periodical’s scientific content, since scientists of standing often not only contributed to general periodicals but also played significant roles in their production. Gooday demonstrates the close personal connections between Balfour Stewart, Norman Lockyer, and the publisher Alexander Macmillan. Macmillan not only brought the two scientists together and encouraged their collaboration but also recruited them to his stable of writers. They contributed to Macmillan’s Magazine, to his textbook series, and to his new and important venture into science journalism: Nature. In collaborating and writing

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for Macmillan, Stewart and Lockyer advanced their own careers through publishing; in particular, Lockyer became editor of Nature. Moreover, having received Macmillan’s imprimatur, they published their own idiosyncratic and controversial views on the subject of energy in Macmillan’s Magazine. Keen to oppose the materialist and anti-religious ethos that was gathering around Huxley and others, they used their contributions to Macmillan’s Magazine to place before a wider public an anti-materialist and broadly Christian version of energy physics. In the cases of Lockyer, Stewart, and Macmillan, scientists worked in harmony with their publisher. Small’s chapter, by contrast, demonstrates how extraordinarily complex the politics of science publishing could become, leading to a prominent court case between two periodical publishers—a case in which editors, publishers, and financial backers became embroiled. At the heart of this controversy lay William Kingdon Clifford’s provocative 1877 essay “The ethics of belief,” published in the Contemporary Review (to the outrage of the new financial backer of the periodical, an ardent Evangelical). Clifford’s attempts to extend scientific method to the realms of philosophy and religion led to tempestuous debates in the periodical press. James Knowles, a progressive assistant editor who had been dismissed before the article’s publication, immediately set out to found a more liberal and explicitly non-sectarian organ, the Nineteenth Century. Scientific rationalism not only provided subject matter for periodical debate, but became closely woven into the material conditions of publication. Closely related to these questions of the cultural politics of publication are questions of language. How writers on science framed their arguments was as important as where they placed them. Lightman highlights the anger that was directed at John Tyndall for appropriating the language of the soul, while William Mallock objected to Tyndall’s and William Clifford’s use of language that was aglow with ethical fervor. In the rhetorical wars that framed scientific debate in the periodicals, opponents sought to police each other’s language. Literary texts themselves also became weapons in these battles; Shakespeare and Tennyson were often invoked by scientific writers to give cultural weight and dignity to their arguments. But, as Dawson shows, quotation of the wrong literary text—in this case Clifford’s quotation of Swinburne—could evoke moral opprobrium that might outlast a lifetime. Such swift and indignant connections demonstrate again how friable were the boundaries between the literary and scientific domains. Jonathan Smith, in tracking Ruskin’s outrage as he came to terms with the implications of Darwinian theory for his own aesthetic vision,

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similarly unveils a close connection between the two spheres. Not only did nineteenth-century science draw on the language and rhetoric of the literary sphere; in the writings of Grant Allen we find literary language deployed, in the service of physiological aesthetics, to undermine the visionary idealism that sustained much aesthetic writing. It is tempting to view Grant Allen, a prolific journalist and novelist, as an eminent example of the species “scientific popularizer.” We should be careful in this designation, however, since he also wrote, and published in the general periodical press, scientific articles that Darwin acknowledged as contributions to the field. The openness of the periodical form encouraged movement across what are now viewed as professional boundaries. One can trace the same openness in the willingness of scientists to write outside their field of expertise. The medical psychologist Henry Maudsley wrote on Hamlet, the astronomer Herschel on Dante’s Inferno. The physician Henry Holland produced articles on shooting stars and the physical geography of the sea.18 The career of George Eliot’s partner, G. H. Lewes, which embraced popular journalism, novel writing, and experimental work on physiological psychology, was not as unusual as is often assumed. In an era when the foundations of scientific status were still unclear, the willingness of scientists to move across disciplinary borders was mirrored in the work of non-scientific writers whose prose was permeated by the language and issues of scientific debate. Such flexibility raises interesting questions.Where writers offer articles on the same subject to a range of periodicals, from technical through to lowbrow, does their language vary? If so, in what ways? And does the article for the more technical or specialist press always precede the version designed for a more popular audience? As Jonathan Smith points out, Grant Allen’s technical article on color sense was published in Nature at the same time as his more popular version in the Cornhill Magazine, and indeed Darwin responded as positively to Allen’s Cornhill work as to his scientific texts.When Samuel Butler took advantage of the open format of the periodical press to challenge Darwin, Allen came to his defense, securing in the process a level of scientific recognition for himself. The flexibility of the periodical press made it possible for a writer to establish a scientific reputation irrespective of his previous career trajectory, although this pathway became harder as the century progressed. Yet, as Beer notes, in the 1870s it was actually easier for amateurs to write for Nature, than for the intellectually elitist Academy. For potential and established scientists, the periodical press offered a way of reaching a widespread audience, thus consolidating their intellectual and cultural standing. Tyndall, Huxley, and Clifford became household names as their

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contributions and the controversies they created fanned out across the press. As Dawson’s chapter on Clifford illustrates, the process of shaping and reshaping the image of the scientist could continue for decades after an individual’s death. As scientific publication and practice becomes ever more specialized, technical, and remote, it is refreshing to look back to an era when science writing, and scientists themselves, appeared culturally accessible. Although Darwin chose to write On the Origin of Species in book form, it would not have appeared out of place in the higher reaches of the periodical press. Dailies, weeklies, and monthlies, whether targeted at women, at religious audiences, or at liberal male readers, all assumed an appetite for science and an eager interest in its implications. At times such assumptions of interest could perhaps be stretched too far, as in the case of the Academy, and, as Ritvo reminds us, scientists could not always control how periodicals presented their work, or how readers chose to interpret and understand it. Yet the ensuing debates often fueled the development of science itself. Periodicals were not passive conveyers of scientific information but active ingredients in the ferment of science. Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of several of the following chapters were initially presented at a workshop on Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical held at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology in April 2001. We would like to express our sincere appreciation to the Dibner Institute, and especially to Jed Buchwald and Evelyn Simha, for generously hosting that meeting.The organization was skillfully accomplished by Carla Chrisfield, to whom we are indebted. The meeting provided an important focus for research arising from the SciPer (Science in the NineteenthCentury Periodical) project, which had commenced in January 1999 at the Universities of Leeds and Sheffield. We would like to record our gratitude to the Arts and Humanities Research Board, the Leverhulme Trust, and the Modern Humanities Research Association for funding the SciPer project. We would also like to express our thanks to Harriet Ritvo and to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for their support. Notes 1. J. C. O’Reid [Josiah Conder], Reviewers Reviewed; including an Enquiry into the Moral and Intellectual Effects of Habits of Criticism, and the Influence on the General Interests of Literature ( J. Bartlett, 1811): 7.

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2. John S. North, The Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800–1900 (North Waterloo Academic Press, 1997–). 3. See, e.g., Josef L. Altholz, The Religious Press in Britain, 1760–1900 (Greenwood, 1989); Royden Harrison, Gillian B. Woolven, and Robert Duncan, The Warwick Guide to British Labour Periodicals, 1790–1970: A Check-List (Humanities Press, 1977). 4. S. Ross, “Scientist: The Story of a Word,” Annals of Science 18 (1962): 65–85. 5. J. B. Morrell, “Professionalisation,” in Companion to the History of Modern Science, ed. R. Olby et al. (Routledge, 1990). 6. Roger Cooter and Stephen Pumphrey, “Separate Spheres and Public Places: Reflections on the History of Science Popularisation and Science In Popular Culture,” History of Science 32 (1994): 237–267. 7. [Conder], Reviewers Reviewed, p. 7. 8. Alvar Ellegård, Darwin and the General Reader: The Reception of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in the British Periodical Press, 1859–1872 (University of Gothenburg Press, 1958; revised edition, University of Chicago Press, 1990). 9. The terms “textual economy” and “symbolic economy” are employed across a range of post-structuralist and new historicist approaches to literary texts. For an early usage that avoids some of the subsequent looseness of application, see Steve McCaffery, “Writing as a general economy,” in McCaffery, North of Intention: Critical Writings, 1973–1986 (Roof Books, 1986). 10. See Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Indiana University Press, 1978). 11. Margaret Beetham, “Towards a Theory of the Periodical as a Publishing Genre,” in Investigating Victorian Journalism, ed. L. Brake et al. (Macmillan, 1990). See also Laurel Brake, “Writing, Cultural Production and the Periodical Press in the Nineteenth Century,” in Writing and Victorianism, ed. J. Bullen (Longman, 1997). 12. Francis Power Cobbe, “Unconscious Cerebration: A Psychological Study,” Macmillan’s Magazine 23 (1870): 24–37; idem., “Dreams as Illustrations of Unconscious Cerebration,” Macmillan’s Magazine 24 (1871): 512–523. 13. William B. Carpenter, “The Physiology of the Will,” Contemporary Review 17 (1871): 192–217; idem.,“On Mind and Will in Nature,” Contemporary Review 20 (1872): 738–762; idem., Principles of Mental Physiology, with Their Applications to the Training and Discipline of the Mind, and the Study of its Morbid Conditions (Henry S. King, 1874). 14. Thomas H. Huxley,“On the Physical Basis of Life,” Fortnightly Review 5, n.s. (1869): 129–145. Huxley’s second article carried the disarming title of “On Descartes’ Discourse Touching the Method of Using One’s Reason Rightly, and of Seeking Scientific Truth,” Macmillan’s Magazine 22 (1870): 69–80. See pp. 24–25 of Gowan Dawson’s Ph.D. dissertation, Walter Pater, Aestheticism and Victorian Science (University of Sheffield, 1999).

Introduction

15

15. Herbert Spencer, “Morals and Moral Sentiments,” Fortnightly Review 52 (1871): 419–432. 16. J. L. Clive, Scotch Reviewers: The Edinburgh Review, 1802–1815 (Faber and Faber, 1957). 17. Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (Hutchinson, 1959); idem., Conjectures and Refutations: the Growth of Scientific Knowledge (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963). 18. Henry Maudsley, “Hamlet,” Westminster Review 83 (1865): 65–94; John Herschel, “L’Inferno of Dante, canto 1,” Cornhill Magazine 18 (1868): 38–42; Henry Holland, “Physical Geography of the Sea, the Atlantic Ocean,” Edinburgh Review 105 (1857): 360–390; idem., “Meteors, Aerolites, Shooting Stars,” Quarterly Review 92 (1852): 77–106.

2 “Let Us Examine the Flower”: Botany in Women’s Magazines, 1800–1830 Ann B. Shteir

Women readers with intellectual aspirations would have been heartened by an editorial statement that appeared in the newly founded British Lady’s Magazine in 1815: “An improved system of Education has now, for at least half a century, been gradually advancing the female intellect towards its natural standard . . . ; and it was evidently time, that . . . a Miscellany . . . should at once admit the female reader to a participation in all the important discoveries which Science and Philosophy are now almost daily unfolding to the human understanding.”1 In line with editorial policy, issues of the British Lady’s Magazine listed topics of lectures at the Royal Institution and new publications, and chronicled political events both in England and abroad; biographical essays focused on learned women and writers such as the eighteenth-century bluestocking Elizabeth Carter, and letters from female correspondents celebrated advances in female education. Topics like these had been common among magazines for women since the middle of the eighteenth century, when monthlies began to be a popular medium of amusement and instruction for genteel readers. Early in the new century, the British Lady’s Magazine joined the Lady’s Magazine, the Ladies’ Monthly Museum, and La Belle Assemblée in supplying the mix of biography, fiction, poetry, advice literature, fashion plates, and moral tone that established the formula for women’s magazines of the nineteenth century and beyond. References to science in a promotional statement for a British women’s magazine would not have been surprising in 1815, for this was a time of ferment about women’s education, and periodicals were seen as an excellent way to bring science into women’s lives as part of a culture of both improvement and leisure. In the recent study of the history of women’s magazines, Margaret Beetham argued that cultural tensions and contradictions about women and beliefs about femininity were enacted in the pages of periodicals, from early examples in the eighteenth century into Victorian domestic magazines and the new journalism of later times. In the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century she identifies particular tensions between aristocratic ideals of fashionable leisure and values

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associated with wives, mothers, and moral management within the bourgeois family.2 How might such tensions be apparent in the science content of women’s magazines? This essay approaches the cultural history of science in women’s magazines during the years 1800–1830 by focusing on botany, an area of natural knowledge that in England was widely promoted for, practiced by, and identified with women. Analysis of botanical material in four magazines for women shows that there were differences in levels and types of knowledge for gender-differentiated audiences. Women’s magazines gave elementary instruction in systematic botany and guided readers over the threshold into introductory knowledge but provided no access to more complex botanical material. In the spirit of the Romantic movement of the time, botany in women’s magazines also took a literary turn, and replaced plant taxonomy with emblems and mythology. By contrast, magazines for men or for a mixed-sex audience illustrate different formulas for presenting knowledge. A brief comparative look at botany in three magazines for men during those same decades indicates a higher intellectual threshold, more advanced or technical botany, and a climate for debate among those seeking new directions in the field. Taken together, these London-based magazines are a powerful lens onto intersections of science and gender during the early nineteenth century. Botany was in flux during the early nineteenth century, and so were ideas about women. Scientific study of plants, particularly Linnaean botany, had figured significantly in the culture of female improvement in England since the later Enlightenment. Although some commentators made fun of botanical pedantry among some women, no one really objected to women observing and naming plants. Across the middle and upper ranks of society, botany was promoted by and for women as part of polite culture and a fashionable pursuit. Botany also satisfied the general call that Alexander Pope had issued in his philosophical poem “An Essay on Man” (1733–34) to “look through Nature up to Nature’s God.”3 As a result, “Flora’s daughters,” as I have termed them, participated in many botanical activities, including the deployment of print culture.4 Authors, publishers, and readers shaped a lively scene for teaching and learning about plants. Instructional books abounded, directed to readerships differentiated by age, sex, class, and degrees of education. Elementary and introductory publications included conversational formats for children in the home schoolroom, books for young women pursuing informal learning, and formal university textbooks.

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Topics changed, however, as botanists in the early nineteenth century pursued new directions. The periodical Annals of Philosophy, reporting on developments in science in 1820, celebrated the move away from Linnaean systematics in botany: “. . . no one can avoid being struck with the rapid progress made by the natural system, and the continually increasing neglect of the sexual arrangement of Linnaeus. . . . This release from the fetters of authority cannot but augur good to the science; and we have no doubt, but that in a few years, botany will be able to regain the time which has been lost in the arrangement of plants by the mere number, proportion, and connexion of their sexual organs, to the total neglect of the study of their affinities, and the rising generation of botanists look back with astonishment at the exclusive reception of the Linnaean system, and the neglect of the systems of Rivinus, Tournefort, and Ray.”5 This gleeful statement dismissed Linnaean botany, a taxonomic style that was indeed superseded by the natural system associated with Continental systematists. Nevertheless, books about Linnaean botany continued to appear. Experienced botanists may not have read them, but other communities called upon them for information and instruction. Linnaean botany was taught by means of popular and introductory books for specific niche markets, including that comprising leisured women. Women cultivated interest in studying plants, and were themselves cultivated as an audience within print culture, popular culture, and the polite culture of botany.6 But what kinds of botany did they study, and how did a variety of social and cultural factors shape their access to botanical knowledge? Did the polite culture of botany embrace more than one female audience, one more attuned to fashion and others to moral improvement or to intellectuality? References to botany across the full print runs of the Lady’s Magazine, the Ladies’ Monthly Magazine, La Belle Assemblée, and the British Lady’s Magazine help to answer these questions. There were differences in content and emphasis among these women’s magazines, just as there were varieties of voices within individual issues, and across their histories. Yet commonalities emerge when this group is juxtaposed to contemporary publications for male readers or a mixed readership. The LADY’S MAGAZINE; OR ENTERTAINING COMPANION (1770–1832)

FOR THE

FAIR SEX

The Lady’s Magazine, founded in 1770, is a good register of the imprint of botany and its changing shape within early nineteenth-century culture.

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This lavishly illustrated monthly featured fiction and fashion, sewing patterns, recipes, and medical advice columns, and gave considerable room to female correspondents. Its blend of sentiment, morality, domesticity, and leisure “struck the right chord with an eager reading public.”7 Natural history was evidently congruent with gendered norms about women’s learning: birds, animals, and fish were popular and recurring topics across the life of the magazine. During the years 1805–1807, for example, a series entitled “The Moral Zoologist” set out information about “Every Genus and Species of Animals.” Botany was similarly popular. A series of articles that ran for two years during that same period provided short accounts of Linnaean botany, specifically about the parts of a flower, and the terminology being used to describe them. “Botany for Ladies” was written by Robert John Thornton, a botanical lecturer and writer who at this time was compiling The Temple of Flora, a sumptuous folio-sized illustrated work that combines Linnaean botany and poetry and situates plants in elaborate Romantically sublime landscape settings; one particularly well-known plate shows “Flora dispensing Her Favours on the Earth.”8 By way of welcome for female readers to botanical study, Thornton writes: “The science of Botany is rendered so extremely terrific by the use of hard and crabbed terms, of difficult pronunciation, and foreign origin, that many of the fair sex are, probably, from this cause frightened from a study the most congenial to their natures.”9 His intention, therefore, is to take away the sting from Latinized botanical terms so that female readers will more readily be able to employ a “scientific learned appellation” such as “pistillum.” “Botany for Ladies” aimed for accessibility, and the simple botanical plates that accompanied the articles, suitable for hand-coloring, were probably an alluring feature of the series. In the Lady’s Magazine botany appears in other guises and with other emphases as well. For example, an essay about forming a winter garden, entitled “Botanico-Hortensis,” catalogues a wide selection of flowering plants for readers to consider, replete with botanical names and their position in Linnaean categories of Class and Order: “As almost every one now arranges plants by their Latin botanic names, that method is here followed, but with the explanation of the classes and orders in English, to make them more intelligible.”10 Elsewhere, a short piece describes the botanical experiments and theories of Agnes Ibbetson, who formulated theories about plant physiology, and whose subsequent obituary highlighted her botanical contributions.11 Another series in the magazine entitled “Biography of Flowers” featured common garden flowers and their culture, but also offered “poetic sketches,” information about medical properties, and back-

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ground material about folk uses and historical customs associated, for example, with cowslips, primulas, and roses.These “floral biographies” draw on considerable botanical material from the Linnaean system about the parts of flowers. However, essays compare the Linnaean artificial system unfavorably to “the natural orders of Tournefort and his followers,” and the overall tone of the series is anti-Linnaean: “Without disparagement to the labours of that great man [Linnaeus], we would simply imply that his system ought to be the last instead of the first lesson of a botanical student.”12 From the opening years of the nineteenth century until the 1830s, the Lady’s Magazine brought botany to its readers as a topic worthy of independent study or as allied to floriculture and gardening. But there were unmistakable changes in the types of botany being showcased. Whereas the Linnaean series “Botany for Ladies” dates from 1805–1807, discussions of Agnes Ibbetson and plant physiology date from the 1820s, and the anti-Linnaean literary series “Biography of Flowers” belongs to the early 1830s. We can read these changes in several different ways. One might argue, for example, that the changes mirror sequential chapters in the “progress” of botany away from Linnaean systematics; by the 1830s, the Linnaean Sexual System had not disappeared, but it was sidelined in adult forums with intellectual standing or pretension. Or one might explain the differences between the Linnaean “Botany for Ladies” and essays celebrating the plant physiology of Agnes Ibbetson as illustrating diversification in topics of botanical interest, with systematics remaining a compelling topic for many botanists, while others pursued more “philosophical” directions. A third way to explain the change from the expository botany of 1805 to the exploratory and impressionistic discussions in “Biography of Flowers” after 1830 would be to cite an increased sophistication among women readers. When new editors took over the Lady’s Magazine in January 1820 they surveyed the cultivation of learning in areas such as natural philosophy, history, and poetry, and they commended work by women in natural history. One writer observed: “The Linnaean classification has been improved, and new light has been thrown upon the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms. A taste for botany is particularly prevalent; and though some of its fair votaries are chiefly influenced by an admiration of floral beauty, others attend to the science with more enlightened views, and have even given to the world the fruits of their researches.”13 Was this mere flattery of current and potential subscribers, or did a shift away from didactic formats reflect an understanding on the part of editors that instructional materials were too elementary in content, or too juvenile in association, to sit

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successfully within the pages of general interest magazines for women in the 1820s? The LADIES’ MONTHLY MUSEUM, OR POLITE REPOSITORY INSTRUCTION (1798–1828)

OF

AMUSEMENT

AND

The Ladies’ Monthly Museum began publication in 1798, focusing especially on young women. It advertised that its main contributors were literary women “whose avowed Works have always been calculated to inform the Minds and refine the Morals of the rising generation.”14 In short fiction, letters, essays about education, and advice columns, the magazine both reflected and promoted a world of modesty, domesticity, and decorum. Biographical sketches in every issue featured notable women as “beautiful and impressive patterns of female excellence.”15 Emphases on cultural accomplishments and moral bearing give this magazine a particularly prescriptive flavor. Indeed, the conduct book tone of articles is more explicit than one finds in the Lady’s Magazine. In this regard, and through various essays across its 30-year duration, natural history and botany were positioned as part of the magazine’s mission. The Ladies’ Monthly Museum did not use a format of didactic botanical lessons, but simply promoted botany as beneficial to young women, recommended books that were “introductory to the enchanting study of vegetable nature,”16 and incorporated a botanical agenda into various sections of the magazine. Advice columns under the persona of the “Old Woman,” for example, single out botany for attention as a rational and suitable amusement for young women; the “field of nature,” she writes, is far preferable to “the path of frivolity,” and the “loves of the plants” are superior to “the love of scandal and of cards.”17 The Old Woman cited letters in her columns from correspondents that detail their journeys from fraught circumstances to happy outcomes. One exemplary testimonial came from a young woman who was restored to health by botany. A “benevolent Clergyman” guided her toward the Linnaean System, gave her introductory lessons, books, and encouragement, and left her, she wrote, “to prosecute my farther investigations of vegetable Nature, under the guidance of my own taste and judgment.” Botanical activities drew her from incipient invalidism out into the garden, then onto the seashore, and soon thereafter farther afield in search of the pleasures and treasures of plant collecting. She registered her discoveries in a botanical pocket-book according to their Linnaean class and order, and learned to identify and distinguish plants; “. . . seldom now could I meet with a plant which gave me any great degree of trouble to ascertain its class, order,

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genus, and species. This was truly delightful to my mind; and combined with air, exercise, and unceasing avocation, became equally salutary to my frame. In a word, I was quite a renovated being.”18 Her “renovation” is notably physical, and it is striking that, although her mentor was a clergyman, her testimonial contains no religious language or tone. Although botany was a pillar of the Culture of Improvement in “The Old Woman” advice columns, botanical exhortations and object lessons in the Ladies’ Monthly Museum have a brief life span. When the advice format disappeared in 1810, the magazine’s focus shifted as well, veering away from plants and from direct instruction and toward fashion, history, fiction, and travel. Linnaean botany seems to have had its moment in magazines for women during the opening two decades of the nineteenth century, when writers hitched it to campaigns for improving female education. By the 1820s, that recipe had become problematic. Thus, in 1831 the writer of “Biography of Flowers” in the Lady’s Magazine weighed in against the “artificial quackery” in how botany is taught to girls, who, “wholly ignorant of the habits and culture of the flower which they hold in their hands,” can “define its botanical arrangement according to Linnaeus.”19 Worries about the type of botanical education that women should receive reveal an antipathy to formalized and scholastic education, and this may reflect the prevalence of Romantic attitudes toward both nature and women. LA BELLE ASSEMBLÉE, OR BELL’S COURT (1806–1832)

AND

FASHIONABLE MAGAZINE

Among magazines for women readers during the early nineteenth century, La Belle Assemblée was by far the most substantive in both literary and scientific topics. Addressed, according to its title page, “Particularly to the Ladies,” it is rich in intellectual content. Fashion plates were prominent, but the magazine also showcased biographies of exemplary women, communications from correspondents, literary extracts, and travel accounts.Two other regular features were entitled “Familiar Lectures on Useful Science and Elegant Accomplishments” and “Domestic Oeconomy and Botanical Miscellany.” Botany was featured in the first issue of the magazine and was a frequent topic in subsequent issues. A prospectus for 1812, for example, pledged that “BOTANY will be treated in a style at once elegant, familiar, and instructive; and the TREASURES OF FLORA, whether in the Garden or Green-House, will be described with all the accuracy, but without the austerity and pomp of Science.”20 Across the periodical as a

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whole, there were expositions of Linnaean botany as well as reviews of popular introductory books. A course of lectures delivered by Humphry Davy at the Royal Institution about “Vegetable Chemistry” was summarized, and a long discussion of plants draws connections between botany and horticulture. Analyzing longitudinally, we can see that expository pieces about Linnaean botany belong to the opening years of the journal, that revisionary Linnaean botany predominates during 1810–1816, and that markers of literary and physiological botany appear in later volumes. An extensive series of twenty letters “from a young lady to her friend” about Linnaeus’s classification system ran across the first two volumes of the magazine. This series directly recalls the familiar epistolary format that Priscilla Wakefield used in her popular and frequently reprinted Introduction to Botany (1796), an expository book that likewise taught young women about the Linnaean system.21 “Letters on Botany” belongs to the magazine’s “Familiar Lectures on Useful Sciences” because, as the writer explains, “some knowledge of botany . . . is thought necessary to complete the education of the fashionable female.”22 Early on, the correspondent explains to her friend about the principles behind Linnaean classes and orders. She acknowledges Jussieu’s recent “alterations” to the Linnaean system, but still chooses to follow a Linnaean route: “[Linnaeus’s] learned and profound system may offer difficulties; but the beginner, whose steps it directs, derives from it the most satisfactory result.”23 In the essays that follow, botanical names and forms of classification are less emphasized than the direct personal observation of plants. There is a slight aesthetic and religious flavor to the practices, but for the most part the task is scientific—the young lady collects native plants that are examples of Linnaean categories, and counts the numbers of their stamens and pistils. This is Linnaeus in the fields, with a dissecting pin in hand, not yet restrained by a Romantic ethic of empathy and holism. “Let us examine the flower,” she writes. “To know the flower well, we must always tear it.”24 The letters convey to the reader the friendship of a young lady who seems well versed in plants, and able to describe parts of flowers fluently. A few years later, another series on Linnaean botany in the magazine flags changes in botanical culture. The same Robert John Thornton who earlier had penned the series “Botany for Ladies” in the Lady’s Magazine wrote lectures for La Belle Assemblée that began to appear in 1810 under the title “A Full Explanation of the Science of Botany.” Here is how the magazine’s editor, John Bell, announced the new series: “Of late years the study of botany has become so necessary to the completion of Female Education, and has been considered, with reason, a branch of

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natural science so appropriate to the softness of the Fair Sex, that Mr. Bell conceives no Fashionable Magazine can be perfect without it. . . . Dr. Thornton [he continues] . . . has undertaken to execute this part of the Work on a Plan entirely New, excluding the Sexual System of Linnaeus, and thus avoiding that indelicacy of terms, and technical grossness of explanation, which have prevented many Ladies from engaging in the pursuit of this interesting Science.”25 Over the next six years, the magazine carried Thornton’s book-length series of articles for “the British Fair.” The essays meld botanical and horticultural information, and present poetic extracts drawn from Shakespeare; the material is set into picturesque mini-settings, and woodcuts are included in the early part of the series. Thornton locates botany in the lives of his ideal female readers: young ladies walking in their gardens or greenhouses, or perhaps sitting in the drawing room, at their “sofa-table,” reading the lectures in his series, and endeavoring thereby to comprehend the language of botany.The series opens with “lectures” about the botanical terms used to describe the parts and aspects of plants.Thornton credits the linguistic precision of Linnaeus, but allies himself with reforms then being made in botanical language. He moves away from Linnaean Latin terminology for the parts of plants, anglicizes descriptive terms, and simplifies phrases used by other botanists. The point is “to enable the young botanist fully to comprehend the language of botany.” Essays describe the first three Linnaean classes and list “some curious and interesting facts” about British plants in each category. There then follow more than twenty essays, each about four pages of doublecolumn, on “Practical Illustrations of the Philosophy of Flora.” The world of trees, flowering shrubs, the kitchen garden, and the greenhouse parades past, with Thornton highlighting one plant in each domain and then commenting on various ornamental, horticultural, and botanical features of plants. The articles are meant to be general, yet they contain a surprising quantity of taxonomic discussion, including information about how “modern classifiers” have formed specific new genera. A botanical popularizer and an ardent but realistic Linnaean, Thornton could not avoid sexual aspects of Linnaean botany, but for the most part he simply sidestepped the topic. He located botany in his own version of an appropriate female orbit, and wrote: “Who is there that can study the great book of nature without being wiser and better? Every tree, shrub, or flower is a lesson of morality.”26 The sequencing of botanical topics in La Belle Assemblée illustrates the turn from expository Linnaean botany during the opening decade into a diversification of botanies during the next. Young ladies found new

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aspects of vegetable nature now being offered to them. During 1816, essays in a second part of the series on “The New System of Botany” (perhaps under a different authorship) discuss topics in plant chemistry, physiology, and soil science. These pieces reveal a writer who is trying to find levels of language appropriate for explaining current theories about the chemistry of plant processes to women readers. The writer identifies the likely audience for this series as “fair readers . . . who are in the habit of attending the philosophical lectures at the Royal [Institution],” and goes on to explain that “chemistry has of late become such a fashionable study, that it is far from impossible that some fair botanist in the leisure of summer retirement may discover that which Linnaeus himself might have been proud of.” Perhaps the “fair botanist” can conduct experiments about gases as a “source of amusement when . . . cards disgust, and whenever books and music become tiresome.”27 Soon after this, there was a shift in the magazine’s material, and the “fair reader” of La Belle Assemblée found herself in the world of botanical emblems, where articles posed questions such as “May not we oppose the vain Narcissus to the modest violet? And the coquettish tulip to the simple field harebell?”28 The world of the naturalist and the chemist lost ground to that of the moralist. Articles now featured mythological and classical associations to plants, and claims to science faded. When La Belle Assemblée introduced a section on new publications in later years, a few books on popular and introductory botany were discussed briefly, but any further treatment of botany as a science for ladies was dropped. The BRITISH LADY’S MAGAZINE

AND

MONTHLY MISCELLANY (1815–1819)

Among the magazines for women discussed here, the British Lady’s Magazine was the most explicitly liberal and “feminist” in its support for female participation in new worlds of knowledge Stepping away from fashion plates, advice literature, moral tales, and other features that made magazines for ladies “vapid, uninteresting, and uninstructive,”29 it claimed to stake out different territory from other magazines for women. The magazine assumed a level of botanical activity among its readers, and provided no specific instruction. Linnaean botany was neither specifically earmarked, promoted, nor contested. An extract from a book about improvements in female education, for example, noted advances in women’s knowledge across “history and belles-lettres, chemistry, botany, natural philosophy,” and the author remarks: “Formerly, if a man knew enough of botany to observe, that the petals of a particular plant are cruciform and

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divarieated, he passed for a prodigy; but now, the lady turns short upon him, and adds, that it has been since discovered they are gash-serrated with peduncles in whirls round the stem.”30 This statement had no satiric edge, and was not meant as a jumping-off point for criticism of learned ladies and botanical pedantry. Support for science was, however, not uniform across the magazine’s readership. In 1816, one female correspondent claimed that women “seldom derive any real advantage” from studying the sciences. She argued that women fall too easily into ostentation: “I have heard several of our sex, with a surprising volubility, run over the names of half a hundred semi-barbarous [scientific] terms, without having a fixed meaning to any one of them; and . . . fancied they were really well acquainted with the sciences.” Her position echoes across many writings from that time about fears of female learnedness, many of which focused on matters of language and rote learning in science; botanical terminology was an easy and frequent target. The correspondent goes on to allow that she would gladly applaud the lady who would study a science “assiduously, “ but her basic position is that the “natural disposition of our sex” (including “extreme vacillation of temper” and “changeableness of mind”) stands in the way of women contributing to “the stock of scientific knowledge.”31 The male editor of the British Lady’s Magazine placed this letter as the lead communication for June 1, 1816, and evidently relished the opportunity to shape a reply. With revolutionary fervor, he called for women to disdain “the fetters of ignoble prejudice and self-conceit, with which the arrogance of man has hitherto aided to encircle you! burst them asunder:— why should not the female mind expand on the wings of Freedom?” He does not challenge assumptions about women’s minds as “patterns of modesty” and “generally the temples of virtue, delicacy, and taste,” but urges “the softer sex” to use their talents better. Instead of women “courting the goddess of Fashion, and paying . . . devoirs at the shrine of Folly,” he exhorts “the fair sex” to send in communications on many topics, including “works of science.”32 The editor’s rejoinder is as interesting as the female subscriber’s essentialist intervention. Yet when he goes on to introduce welcome models of female practice, he names literary figures, not botanists or chemists. In fact, the magazine did not fulfill its editorial promise to “admit the female reader to a participation in all the important discoveries which Science and Philosophy are now almost daily unfolding to the human understanding.”33 A gap between the editor’s goals and the direction of some subscribers was never bridged. Perhaps this is why the publication run was brief compared with other contemporary

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women’s magazines. Its direction became literary, particularly during its subsequent two-year incarnation as the New British Lady’s Magazine, or Monthly Mirror of Literature and Fashion. The GENTLEMAN’S MAGAZINE (1800–1830), The MONTHLY MAGAZINE (1796–1826), and BEAU MONDE (1806–1810)

How might the policies and practices in the magazines for women readers discussed thus far compare with magazines with similar élan and aspiration that were not shaped primarily for a female audience? Three brief juxtapositions are instructive here. They show that, while women’s magazines gave elementary access to Linnaean botany, and to science more generally, any sense of dispute or complexity there was thin when compared to what was available to aspiring general and male readers elsewhere. The Gentleman’s Magazine, established in 1731, had long prided itself on showcasing intellectual topics that would satisfy its comfortable and mainstream audience. In addition to historical chronicles, political commentary, and obituaries of notable individuals, this venerable monthly published reviews of new books and letters from correspondents that alerted readers to discoveries in philosophy, geography, astronomy, and natural history. The Gentleman’s Magazine opened the new century by pledging its “unremitted exertions to contribute to the public stock of ingenuous amusement” and its “ardour to preserve and perpetuate all that is venerable in science, useful to humanity, and accessary to intellectual improvement.”34 Botany was among many such nineteenth-century topics of interest, along with entomology, conchology, and geology. What would readers have learned about botany during the years 1800–1830? In the Gentleman’s Magazine, botany was a part of general gentlemanly knowledge, and the botany was Linnaean. A long and favorable review of Introduction to Physiological and Systematical Botany (1807) by James Edward Smith, president of the Linnean Society, traced the ongoing value of Linnaean ideas, even while pointing to new approaches from plant anatomy and physiology.35 A correspondent in January 1820 called the attention of readers to public lectures on Linnaean botany “delivered by Mr. Charles Whitlaw, Great Queen Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields,” and illustrated “with transparent Paintings” of the Linnaean system, “displayed on a magnified scale, so as to be seen by a large audience.”36 The Gentleman’s Magazine also specifically promoted local and British botany, and featured the world of native plants, including those to be found on herborizings.

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Issues carried reviews of various regional floras, and correspondents reported their observations about specific plants, based on their own work as collectors.There is no sense across any of these contributions that botanical study is in any way problematic for gentlemen. Rather, it fitted into lives of gentlemanly leisure, and also served as relaxation for professional men. It gave readers more information, and more depth of information, about botany than was found in any of the magazines “for the female mind,” but was not a forum for technical matters or for substantial controversies about botanical systematics. By contrast, the Monthly Magazine was a site of botanical discussion for readers in a more advanced stage of understanding. A spirited forum for information and critical exchange of a liberal and socially progressive kind, and a “celebrant of intellectual man,” it was shaped by a Dissenting and Unitarian spirit.37 From 1796 until its sale in 1824 to new proprietors who changed the tone, readers could count on meeting in the pages of this magazine new directions in thought and literature. Science spread across the issues in the form of ongoing series, and botany was a regularly featured topic. During the years 1806–1815, a “Monthly Botanical Report” surveyed material in the specifically botanical magazines and featured lively and critical discussion. In one case, a botanist was called to task for indulging in cumbersome and overly complex terms, producing a “macaronica latinitas” with descriptors such as “coriaceo-lentus.”38 Controversies spark from the pages, as when columns record vituperative disputes in 1808, for example, between botanists Richard Salisbury and James Edward Smith about terminology, nomenclature, and principles of systematics. Their exchanges pitted a rancorous proponent of Jussieu and continental taxonomies against the first president of the Linnean Society, and were as much personal as scientific.39 The Monthly Magazine itself weighed in with advice to Salisbury to “proceed more coolly and less dogmatically in matters of vegetable affinity,” and continued: “We are persuaded that Mr. S[alisbury]’s acumen and genius for observation, if guided by love of truth and science alone, will do much in rewarding the cause in which he is engaged as champion of the natural orders; but we also know, that a much safer way for him to obtain his end, and likewise a more honourable and lasting niche in the temple of flora, would be, to proceed more coolly and less dogmatically in matters of vegetable affinity.”40 Linnaeus’s champions found a hospitable venue in the Monthly Magazine, and the “progress” of Linnaean systematics can be traced through announcements of new translations, popular introductions, and

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county floras. Readers were informed that “Linnaeus had a mind so philosophically constituted, that he seemed almost intuitively, by a definitive application of the most familiar terms and signs, to bring light out of darkness,” and correspondents amicably disputed over the course of several issues whether the proper name for “the illustrious knight of the polar star” was “Linnaeus” or “Linné.”41 Physiological botany found its champions too, in reports about T. A. Knight’s experiments in plant anatomy that appeared throughout these years. And the natural system stepped more fully into center stage when the “Monthly Botanical Report” for June 1810 welcomed Robert Brown’s Flora of New Holland: “. . . in no book since the publication of Jussieu’s Genera Plantarum, is there displayed such a fund of botanical knowledge as in this.” At the same time, the writer stated that the utility of Brown’s work would be increased by adding “an artificial arrangement, by which every botanist can with ease find any plant contained in it, that he may wish to seek.”42 Throughout these years, therefore, the Monthly Magazine represented and mediated strands in the culture of botanical science for its readers. Women were among these readers, but the magazines was not explicitly directed to, or marketed for, “the female mind.” Le Beau Monde began in 1806 in imitation of La Belle Assemblée, or perhaps as an offshoot from it, under auspices of that publisher’s son. It followed the same format, but added features for men of leisure, notably horse racing, sporting activities, and gentlemen’s fashions. This magazine mapped an ambitious plan to reach a diverse audience, and one that included women. In an address to readers in July 1807, at the conclusion of the first volume, the editor described his object as “something that should give to every class of readers materials for the employment of a vacant hour; something that might show to the learned a few leading features in their favourite studies; something that might afford to the lovers of the bagatelle a trifle not beneath their observation; something that might amuse the female mind; and something that might arrest attention in the Votaries of Fashion.”43 In this inclusive spirit, the magazine carried biographical essays about royalty, as well as substantial literary and theatrical criticism. The scientific and technological content of Le Beau Monde was ample. During 1809–10, for example, there were essays on galvanism, communications about mathematics and astronomy, book reviews about mineralogy and chemistry, and an extended series “On Gas Lights” (about the “application of fossil or pit coal to the purposes of illumination of factories, streets, and even our residences”). A few articles about botany were included too. In July 1809 Le Beau Monde printed the text of William

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Roscoe’s famous address at the Liverpool Botanic Garden about the advantages to be derived from the study of botany, particularly “the extensive system of the vegetable kingdom, as arranged by that great father of the science, the immortal Linnaeus,”44 and the same Robert John Thornton who wrote expository Linnaean pieces for La Belle Assemblée contributed a series of essays about the history of botany. In addition, an extract from a French learned journal reported on experiments in plant physiology. Le Beau Monde staked an ambitious claim in trying to blend intellectual content and fashion for a readership that was both male and female. But the editor’s experiment did not succeed. At a time when gendered readerships were diverging, Le Beau Monde probably was trying to do too much, and it folded in April 1810. Nevertheless, for a short while women readers of Le Beau Monde encountered much more depth of material than could be found in any of the women’s magazines of the day—even in the British Lady’s Magazine, which trumpeted female liberty and intellectual possibility. What Would Agnes Ibbetson Have Read?

In 1816 the British Lady’s Magazine printed spirited exchanges among its readers about whether to include needlework patterns as a regular monthly feature of the publication. The editor took full commercial advantage of the controversy and invited readers to vote on the matter. Among the points of view expressed, nine women signed a succinct letter about the direction that they wanted the magazine to take: “No patterns for work; but a critique upon Corneille, Racine, Voltaire, and Moliere’s plays.”45 By a majority of three to one, the decision was made against needlework. Over the course of the early nineteenth century, popular magazines for women became less concerned with mental improvement, and more with amusement and recreation.They also carried less science and more fiction. Yet, as the vociferous readers of the British Lady’s Magazine demonstrate, female intellectual interests did not simply fade away. In recent years, historians have studied the dynamics of gender within scientific culture of the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century.46 Botanical culture has proved a fruitful site for analysis of this kind.47 As emancipatory ideas about women’s education and social roles collided around 1800 with politics, religion, and class mobility, tensions were inevitable. These were exhibited in contested gender norms for both women and men, at home and in public institutions. Popular publications such as general interest magazines are one way to bring such matters into

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visibility. Because they are particularly subject to fashion and modulations in audience tastes, magazines may register these changing cultural conversations even more clearly than books. During the opening decades of the nineteenth century, general interest magazines for women promoted botany, but, as we have seen, the emphases and aims of such study varied among the periodicals. At the least, the magazines encouraged women to read about botany, and instructional series and book reviews gave their audiences exposure to subject matter as well as food for thought. But what did actual readers glean from their reading? How well would a woman interested in Linnaean botany, other systematics, or new topics in plant anatomy and physiology be served by the Lady’s Magazine, the Ladies’ Monthly Museum, La Belle Assemblée, and the British Lady’s Magazine? One potential reader who can help us answer this question is Agnes Ibbetson (1757–1823). Born into a genteel merchant family with intellectual connections, Ibbetson began her botanical studies within the polite culture of botany. In the 1790s she collected plants, drew grasses, and described and identified specimens according to Linnaean categories. But her interests soon shifted from external to internal features of plants, and she embarked on studies in plant physiology. In the absence of any formal training and institutional linkages, she read books and magazines, “cut vegetables” and theorized about what she saw through her microscopes. She published her findings in a series of linked essays submitted to William Nicholson’s Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry and the Arts and the Philosophical Magazine, and she wrote about soil science in Annals of Philosophy.48 Might she have read general interest women’s magazines? Given her interest in new directions in plant physiology, she would have welcomed the turn away from Linnaean botany and from systematics. However, none of the women’s magazines of her day would have helped her extend her already significant store of botanical knowledge. Thornton’s essays in the Lady’s Magazine (1805–06) and in La Belle Assemblée (1810–1816) were for “young ladies” and presented botanical terminology and systematics at an introductory level. The British Lady’s Magazine avoided expository material altogether. All were mediated by beliefs about levels of learning that gave no support to the focus and expertise of Ibbetson’s studies. Women’s magazines of the early nineteenth century located botany, particularly Linnaean botany, within the polite culture of their subscribers. For nearly two decades, genteel readers could glean elementary

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knowledge from seeds sown there. Then the climate changed, and Linnaean traces, indeed traces of botanical science, largely disappeared from magazines for women. Why was this so? By the 1820s systematics may no longer have proved attractive to a genteel female readership, in part because female learning of a certain intellectual style was disparaged. Magazines instead featured new-style versions of nature, notably, floriculture, utility, and botanical emblems. Where they continued to promote science at a level of general improvement, they did not teach science directly. In fact, the higher the intellectual aspiration of a women’s magazine, the less likely that it would be the location for actual instruction. Perhaps the very absence of expository pieces about botany in the British Lady’s Magazine shows this periodical locating itself in an intellectual domain where elementary material would be inappropriate. Where, then, would a woman reader like Agnes Ibbetson go for knowledge of botany during these early decades? Agnes Ibbetson’s circumstances are fruitful for historians interested in cultural dimensions of science because they show a lack of fit for at least one avid woman reader between knowledge levels and publications available to satisfy her. Depending on her entry level, a woman reader in England with botanical interests could get her bearings in general interest magazines for a genteel and female audience, familiarizing herself with entry-level Linnaean systematics, and learning about new theories and methods that were emerging at home and on the Continent. But if she wanted material beyond the elementary level, she would have to go elsewhere. If she really wanted to learn about Linnaean botany, its critiques, or other systematics, and if she wanted more than an hors d’oeuvre, she would need to move away from women’s magazine into more intellectually inflected general interest periodicals such as the Monthly Magazine, or seek out material in a new general science magazine such as Annals of Philosophy. Her other choice would be to turn away from periodical publications altogether and stack her sofatable with books rather than magazines. Notes 1. British Lady’s Magazine 1 (1815), p. 432. 2. Margaret Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800–1914 (Routledge, 1996), chapters 1 and 2. 3. Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Man,” in Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. J. Butt (Yale University Press, 1963), part IV, line 333.

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4. Ann B. Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England 1760 to 1860 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 5. Annals of Philosophy 16 (1820), p. 130. 6. On women and science writing during the 18th and 19th centuries, see Ann B. Shteir, “Elegant Recreations? Reconfiguring Science Writing for Women,” in Victorian Science in Context, ed. B. Lightman (University of Chicago Press, 1997); Barbara T. Gates, Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the Living World (University of Chicago Press, 1998); Barbara T. Gates, ed., In Nature’s Name: An Anthology of Women’s Writing and Illustration, 1780–1830 (University of Chicago Press, 2002); Barbara T. Gates and Ann B. Shteir, eds., Natural Eloquence: Women Reinscribe Science (University of Wisconsin Press, 1997). 7. Ros Ballaster et al., Women’s Worlds: Ideology, Femininity and the Woman’s Magazine (Macmillan, 1991), p. 66. 8. See Robert John Thornton, The Temple of Flora (Collins, 1972); Charlotte Klonk, Science and the Perception of Nature: British Landscape Art in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Yale University Press, 1996), chapter 2. 9. Lady’s Magazine 36 (1805), p. 115. 10. Ibid., p. 462. 11. Lady’s Magazine, n.s., 2 (1822): 176; n.s., 3 (1823): 408–409. For additional information about Agnes Ibbetson, see Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science, pp. 120–135. 12. Lady’s Magazine, i.s., 3 (1831), p. 258. 13. Lady’s Magazine, n.s., 2 (1821), p. 282. 14. Ladies’ Monthly Museum 1 (1798), p. ii. 15. Ibid., p. 2. 16. Ladies’ Monthly Museum 10 (1803), p. 148. 17. Ladies’ Monthly Museum 12 (1804), p. 292. 18. Ladies’ Monthly Museum 9 (1802), pp. 13–15. 19. Lady’s Magazine, i.s., 3 (1831), p. 258. 20. La Belle Assemblée, n.s., 4 (1812), p. 335. 21. Priscilla Wakefield’s An Introduction to Botany, in a Series of Familiar Letters (London, 1796; tenth edition, 1841) was shaped as letters between two sisters. On the “familiar format” in early popular natural history writing, see Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Botany, chapter 4. 22. La Belle Assemblée 1 (1806), p. 42.

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23. La Belle Assemblée 1 (1806), p. 103. 24. La Belle Assemblée 1 (1806), p. 268. 25. La Belle Assemblée 5 (1809), p. i. 26. La Belle Assemblée, n.s., 3 (1811), p. 59. 27. La Belle Assemblée, n.s., 13 (1816), p. 212. 28. La Belle Assemblée, n.s., 19 (1819), p. 68. 29. British Lady’s Magazine 2 (1816), p. 2. 30. British Lady’s Magazine, n s., 1 (1817), p. 118. 31. British Lady’s Magazine 3 (1816), p. 361. 32. British Lady’s Magazine 3 (1816), pp. 362–363. 33. British Lady’s Magazine 1 (1815), p. 432. 34. Gentleman’s Magazine 91 (1802), p. ii; 105 (1809), p. iv. 35. Gentleman’s Magazine 106 (1809), pp. 1033–1038. 36. Gentleman’s Magazine 127 (1820), pp. 31–32. 37. Jon P. Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), p. 41. 38. Monthly Magazine 26 (1809), p. 610. 39. Margot Walker, Sir James Edward Smith, First President of the Linnean Society of London (Linnean Society of London, 1988), pp. 41–44. 40. Monthly Magazine 25 (1808), p. 381. 41. Monthly Magazine 28 (1808), p. 345; 29 (1810), pp. 123, 201–202, 336–338. 42. Monthly Magazine 29 (1810), pp. 516–517. 43. Le Beau Monde 1 (1807), p. 2. 44. Le Beau Monde, n.s., 1 (1809), p. 255. 45. British Lady’s Magazine 3 (1816), p. 296. 46. See Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Harvard University Press, 1989) and Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Beacon, 1993); Lorraine Daston, “The Naturalized Female Intellect,” Science in Context 5 (1992): 209–235; Ludmilla Jordanova, Nature Displayed: Gender, Science and Medicine 1760–1820 (Longman, 1999); James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation’ ” (University of Chicago Press, 2000); Jan Golinski, “Humphry

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Davy’s Sexual Chemistry,” Configurations 7 (1999): 15–41; Barbara T. Gates, Kindred Nature. 47. See Janet Browne, “Botany for Gentlemen: Erasmus Darwin and “The Loves of the Plants,” Isis 80 (1989): 593–621; Ann B. Shteir, “Gender and ‘Modern’ Botany in England,” Osiris 12 (1997): 29–38. 48. On Agnes Ibbetson, see Ann B. Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science, pp. 120–135.

3 Science, Natural Theology, and the Practice of Christian Piety in Early-Nineteenth-Century Religious Magazines Jonathan R. Topham

In his seminal analysis of the place of science in early-nineteenth-century periodicals, Robert M.Young argued that a “common intellectual context” in early-nineteenth-century Britain, reflected in the periodical literature, was held together by a “relatively homogeneous and satisfactory natural theology,”1 found paradigmatically in the Bridgewater Treatises. Young’s assertion concerning the homogeneity of natural theology in this period is now generally rejected, and his notion of a “common context” questioned, as historians have taken cognizance of a wider range of reading audiences.2 It nevertheless remains a commonplace that, both in the periodicals and more generally, natural theology fulfilled a decisive role in mediating the natural sciences to a wider public.3 In what follows, I critically examine this view in relation to a range of early-nineteenth-century religious magazines, demonstrating that natural theology was a far more contested form of theological discourse than this suggests. Having thus cleared the ground, I then consider some important aspects of the way in which science was presented in such magazines, which have hitherto been obscured by the undue emphasis on natural theology. It is widely considered that scientific natural theology experienced an Indian summer between the publication of Paley’s Natural Theology in 1802 and the publication of the last of the Bridgewater Treatises in 1836.4 Yet such an assertion relies on conceptual and linguistic ambiguities in the definition of the term “natural theology.” As the reviewer of Thomas Chalmers’s treatise in the leading Church of Scotland monthly observed: There are few subjects on which a wider variety of opinion has prevailed than natural theology. While some have held it up as allsufficient, others have denied its existence, or pronounced it to be pernicious. It is true that this variety of opinion has been much increased by men differing as to what natural theology really is, so that what one man has condemned as natural theology, has often been a very different thing from that which another has defended under the same name.5

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Then, as now, the theologically exact definition of natural theology referred to the attempt to procure religious truths about God and his relation with humans by the exercise of natural reason, and without recourse to any kind of revelation.6 By contrast, historians of science have often followed less theologically exact writers of the early nineteenth century in using “natural theology” to refer more generally to assertions of divine design. Such conceptual and linguistic inexactitude obscures distinctions which were important to many in the period. Passing references to the evidence of design were often clearly intended to stop far short of any form of inductive inference. Instead, they merely expressed a theology relating to the created universe which was based on a prior commitment to the truth of the Christian revelation (a biblical theology of nature). Such references are more accurately described as a discourse of design, than as natural theology, and their pervasiveness should not be taken as demonstrating the pervasiveness of natural theology. The point is epitomized by the Bridgewater Treatises, which are generally viewed as the most prominent works of scientific natural theology of the early nineteenth century. This series of eight works was published between 1833 and 1836 by seven leading men of science and one theologian, in accordance with the terms of a bequest of the eighth earl of Bridgewater, who had left £8,000 to fund the publication of a work “On the Power,Wisdom, and Goodness of God, as manifested in the Creation.”7 As some contemporaries noted, however, these terms did not require the development of a natural theology as such.8 Bridgewater might easily have insisted that the manifestation of divine attributes in the creation should be made independently of the evidence of revelation. That is, he could have commissioned a natural theology, properly defined. Instead, the question of epistemology was left undetermined. The bequest made no pronouncement in regard to the capacity of unaided human reason to discover evidence of divine attributes in the creation without recourse to revelation. It was left to the authors to decide the question for themselves. Moreover, as I and others have shown, most of the Bridgewater authors were extremely cautious about the extent to which they were prepared to endorse such a natural theology, in some cases relying merely on a discourse of design, and in others dwelling explicitly on the low epistemological status of natural theology.9 This ambivalence toward natural theology was echoed, or rather accentuated, in many of the reviews of the Bridgewater Treatises which appeared in both general and religious periodicals. What is particularly suggestive, however, is that many of the same reviewers nevertheless

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recommended the series, which achieved unprecedented sales among the wealthy middle classes, and was bought by a wide variety of libraries.10 This raises a critical question: if such works were not, in many cases, valued as providing an epistemological foundation or apologetic justification for Christianity through natural theology, why were they valued at all? John Brooke, who first addressed this issue in his seminal 1977 article, has subsequently done much to elucidate the non-epistemological functions which could be fulfilled by “natural theology” broadly defined, both for religious practitioners, and more especially for scientific practitioners. In religious contexts in particular, he has shown that “natural theology” could be significant to those wishing to elaborate a systematic theology or to establish a means of analyzing conceptions of God, and that it was sometimes found useful in evoking a sense of awe and wonder at divine activity in nature or in providing a means of combining scientific study with Christian devotion.11 However, Brooke’s analysis tends to maintain the focus of attention on natural theology, or at least on what I have called a discourse of design. It is the object of this essay to explore more widely the attitudes to science in a number of religious traditions by focusing on the way in which the Bridgewater Treatises were treated in the religious periodicals of the period. The proliferation of periodicals for increasingly diversified reading audiences was one of the defining characteristics of the first quarter of the nineteenth century. “[E]very little sect among us,” Thomas Carlyle protested in 1829, “Unitarians, Utilitarians, Anabaptists, Phrenologists, must have its Periodical, its monthly or quarterly Magazine;—hanging out, like its windmill, into the popularist aura, to grind meal for the society.”12 Moreover, the highly divided and diversified nature of earlynineteenth-century religion meant that the magazines of the various religious denominations and parties were particularly tightly wedded to identifiable readerships. Furthermore, the most successful religious magazines far outsold other titles, including the highbrow monthlies and quarterlies, until the inception of mass circulation weeklies in the 1820s and the 1830s.13 These magazines provide valuable evidence of attitudes to science in the various religious traditions. However, it is essential to question how such references were intended to function within the original periodical frame, rather than abstracting them as mere records of opinion. The book reviews discussed here are examined not merely as records of the individual reactions of their authors. For thousands of contemporary readers such reviews constituted significant guides to reading practice—

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suggesting not only what to read, but how and why it should be read.14 Moreover, since religious magazines were targeted primarily at bounded audiences, the impact of their reading advice was likely to be particularly significant. My approach in this account is to use the religious reviews of the Bridgewater Treatises to explore the place of scientific reading in the main Christian traditions. The analysis draws on an examination of eighteen leading religious monthlies and quarterlies, which for the sake of clarity I have grouped under three broad headings—High Church, evangelical (including evangelical dissent), and Unitarian. The most notable omission here is what has been termed “liberal Anglicanism”; however, this was not a clearly defined religious party with its own periodical organ analogous to the High Church and Evangelical parties in the Church of England. The Quakers, too, had no magazine at this period, and other, less dominant, Christian traditions (notably Roman Catholics), have also been omitted on pragmatic grounds. Despite their numerical inferiority, Unitarians have been included, partly because of their cultural significance, but also because as the most rationalist Christian tradition, they represent an interesting marker for attitudes toward natural theology. The first part of the essay attempts to redress the emphasis of Young and others, by examining the assessments of natural theology made in the religious reviews of the Bridgewater Treatises and other contemporary works (notably the widely debated 1835 Discourse of Natural Theology of the controversial Whig Lord Chancellor, Henry Brougham). I focus in particular on the extent to which the idea of natural theology was contested across the Christian traditions, highlighting the fact that, where a discourse of design was considered to have value, it was usually for nonepistemological and non-apologetic reasons. Having shown that the historical emphasis on natural theology is problematic, I argue in the second part of the paper that other themes emerge when the religious periodicals are approached on their own terms. In particular, I suggest that science was often discussed in such magazines in relation to religious sentiments or sensibility, rather than in relation to religious doctrines or reasoning, and in relation to the practice of Christian piety, rather than with the practice of Christian evangelism. Natural Theology and the Religious Magazines

Periodicals have sometimes been read by historians as unproblematic registers of the opinions of the audiences they represent.15 However, as

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Margaret Beetham has observed, the periodical genre is unusually open in significant respects, inviting readers and contributors to engage in debate. Whether in the interplay of different paid contributors or in letters pages, periodicals present a space which, however tightly bounded, allows for a variety of opinions to be expressed. The most that one can ask of a periodical is what the limits of acceptable opinion are and where the positions in the debate lie.16 This is particularly apparent in regard to the attitudes toward natural theology expressed in the religious magazines. As recent scholarship concerning the status of natural theology in the religious culture of early-nineteenth-century Britain has shown, the legitimacy, the value, and even the definition of natural theology were the subject of sometimes very vigorous debate both within and between the different Christian traditions.17 The existence of such a debate indicates that several important interests were at stake in the issue of natural theology. Perhaps the most obvious of these was the question of apologetic strategy. The apologetic usefulness of natural theology depended heavily on the strategies of the apologists’ adversaries. In convicting the Unitarian or the Deist—common targets in early-nineteenth-century apologetics—natural theology was likely to be of little value, and might indeed be seen as the problem.18 Yet the period also saw a pronounced increase in atheism, both among radical artisans, and among “philosophical radicals,” and against such opponents natural theology might be found to be of apologetic value. According to Pietro Corsi, this development lay behind Baden Powell’s shifting apologetic stance between writing his Rational Religion Examined (1826) and his Connexion of Natural and Divine Truth (1838). Whereas in the former Powell criticized natural theology as “an insufficient and to some extent dangerous exercise,” in the latter he made it the foundation of his apologetic scheme, largely because of his assessment of the changing apologetic imperative.19 Moreover, what in Powell amounted to a diachronic shift, often appeared in the religious parties and denominations as a synchronic debate. Indeed, apparently contradictory apologetic strategies could subsist in a single individual who was concerned to address different audiences. Sometimes this was expressed in a self-conscious apologetic opportunism. More often, however, it was expressed in rather tortured discussions which frequently unwittingly contained internal inconsistencies. Another reason for the religious debate over natural theology was that it did not serve only one function. As we have seen, the apologetic function of natural theology was by no means its sole, nor even

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necessarily its primary use within Christian traditions. To add to the complexity of the debate, the non-apologetic functions sometimes served by natural theology might equally be served by a theology of nature in which the legitimacy of natural theology was denied. Thus, an author denying the epistemological validity of natural theology with respect to the clouded eye of natural reason, might elsewhere be found apostrophizing on the devotional value of tracing the design evident—to the eye of faith—in nature. Furthermore, there was no comprehensive agreement, especially among evangelicals, about whether or not the phrase “natural theology” should be made to apply to the former, the latter, or both. All of these issues emerge in the reviews of the Bridgewater Treatises that appeared in the religious periodicals during the 1830s. Yet, while most of the periodicals incorporated debate regarding natural theology, the most striking feature of these discussions from the perspective of the history of science is the very limited extent to which natural theology was considered to be either epistemologically valid or apologetically useful. Very often, moreover, even where natural theology was granted some epistemological legitimacy, it was seen as useful chiefly for the sorts of non-apologetic reasons which John Brooke has identified. High Anglicans

The ambivalence toward natural theology is certainly exhibited by the three leading High Church periodicals, which reviewed the Bridgewater Treatises extensively. The opposition of the Tractarians to natural theology is well known, but in the early 1830s the emerging High Church party of Newman and Pusey had yet to establish a periodical voice.20 However, as Pietro Corsi has shown, High Churchmen had over several decades been critical of the “weak epistemological status” of natural theology, stressing instead the limitations of reason in religious matters and the importance of revelation.21 Corsi argues that in the 1820s the Hackney Phalanx in particular was preoccupied with the Unitarian intellectual revival, and thus effectively disregarded natural theology as being tangential to their apologetic concerns, instead placing the evidence for revelation at the heart of their apologetic strategy. This is borne out by the reviews of the Bridgewater Treatises in the main Hackney organ, the highbrow quarterly British Critic. The British Critic’s most startling critique of natural theology appeared in its review of the first treatise,William Whewell’s Astronomy and General Physics (1833). Written by one of the journal’s leading reviewers, the mathematical professor at the East India Company’s college at Haileybury, Charles Le

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Bas, the review discussed Whewell’s book in company with John Abercrombie’s immensely successful Philosophy of the Moral Feelings (1833), a book which presented a relatively unsophisticated, but studiously pious, exposition of the moral philosophy of the Scottish “common-sense” school.22 Starting from Abercrombie’s assertion of the existence of certain “first truths” of morality, “which admit of no demonstration and which need none,” the reviewer turned the same principles to religion, suggesting that belief in the being and attributes of God was similarly “instinctive” (pp. 76, 77). Moreover, he contended that argument on the subject would never convince those who disputed these conclusions.To reach such a skeptical state, the reviewer asserted, their minds must have “gone through a course of unnatural and artificial discipline,” the result of which was the “banishing of moral sentiment and emotion from their philosophy” in favor of “mere speculative reason.” Here the analysis took on openly Kantian terms, as the reviewer ascribed the instinctive belief in divine existence and divine attributes to the “Practical,” as opposed to the “Speculative” reason (p. 90). Like Kant, he argued that the belief in a morally perfect God arose from the natural tendency to “hunger and thirst after what is benevolent and good,” a tendency founded on the proper development of the instinctive “moral powers and perceptions” of humans (p. 81). Like Kant, too, he suggested that, to the speculative reason, the phenomena of the universe could never demonstrate the existence of a morally perfect God (p. 80). The British Critic’s reviewers could also be found employing some of Hume’s arguments respecting the epistemological status of the design argument. The British Critic’s reviewer of Lord Brougham’s Discourse of Natural Theology (1835) was a prominent minister in a small Calvinist Methodist sect, the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion. In response to Brougham’s claim that the design argument was an inductive science as certain as any of the physical sciences, he acknowledged that the existence of “an intelligent all-wise Being” could legitimately be inferred from the physical and mental phenomena in the visible universe, but used Humean arguments to deny that reasoning could “establish either the unity, or the omnipotence, or the omniscience of the ruler of that portion of the universe which is visible to us.”23 To the question whence one might ascertain knowledge of the divine attributes, the reviewer answered that “Revelation, and Revelation only, gives us the information” (p. 221). Like Thomas Chalmers, the reviewer thought that his restricted natural theology was of use only in raising questions, the answer to which lay in revelation (pp. 223–224).

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This view was echoed in the British Critic’s review of Chalmers’s Bridgewater Treatise, which likewise acknowledged fears about rationalist threats to revealed religion. The reviewer frankly admitted that there was an “objection to the whole scheme of [the] Bridgewater Treatises,” suggested by “an honest solicitude, lest the majesty and supremacy of Revelation should be compromised, by all this bustling indagation throughout the regions of Natural Theology.” The whole project of natural theology was, the reviewer asserted, “in the estimation of many a pious and exemplary Christian, . . . well nigh an obsolete thing”—an objection he claimed to have heard urged “not only with much gravity, but with deep anxiety, and even with no little indignation.”24 Yet, to the fear that confronting atheists with natural theology might lead to deism rather than Christianity, the reviewer answered that natural theology was “a bridge constructed, not by way of a foundation whereon men are to erect their dwelling-places, but merely as a pathway along which they may travel in safety to the realms of a higher theology” (p. 241). Even then, however, its use was compromised. Asserting that the conviction that design demands a designer is a matter of “intuition” (Thomas Reid’s “common-sense” doctrine), the reviewer admitted that argument could never persuade those who refused to admit the intuition (pp. 250, 252). He continued: “And this being so—what, it may be asked, is the profit of heaping up a mountainous induction, in order to overwhelm the Titans? Since there is no crushing their belief out of them, why should we rise early, and rest late, and eat the bread of toil and carefulness, and construct a battery of Boyle Lectures, or Bridgewater Essays, for the purpose of breaking them to pieces?” It was here that the non-apologetic functions of “natural theology” came to the fore, meaning that it was “not without use.” It may, the reviewer observed, at least “serve to brighten the hope and to confirm the faith, of those who feel that, to seek after God, is the main object of their creation. It may impress a salutary horror of the hardihood which exalts itself against a fortress of testimony, of such awful length, and breadth, and depth, and height. It may, perchance, recall from their outrageous folly many a disciple of the Godless School before he shall have become an irreclaimable adept in the mysteries of impiety” (p. 253). Although lacking the same degree of theological and philosophical sophistication, other organs of the older High Church reflected the party’s ambivalence toward natural theology. In addition to the British Critic, the Hackney Phalanx was also responsible for producing a monthly magazine, the Christian Remembrancer, intended to reach a wider middle-class audience. The Christian Remembrancer reviewed all the Bridgewater Treatises,

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mostly in very favorable terms, and, while clearly stating the “true defects” of natural theology, reviewers seemed to allow its arguments limited epistemological validity, and some were even prepared to admit its utility in the “subversion of Infidelity, and the promotion of true religion.”25 Yet, when the reviewer of Buckland’s treatise referred to it as an “interesting, able, eloquent, and learned addition to the evidences of Natural Theology,”26 one “Constant Reader” found it necessary to state that, “notwithstanding all the labours of writers in the department of natural theology,” it was “a matter of great doubt whether any infidel has ever been converted by them.”27 Moreover, the reviewer made no attempt to dispute this claim, merely noting: “It is ‘the fool’ only that ‘saith in his heart there is no God;’ and even if atheism still remains rampant upon earth, it is not less the duty of the man of science to attempt ‘to vindicate the ways of God to man;’ if not to convert the infidel, at least to confirm and strengthen the faith of the young and unestablished believer.”28 Another High Church monthly, Hugh Rose’s British Magazine, provided a link between the more traditional High Church and the Tractarians. The journal again reviewed all eight of the Bridgewater Treatises favorably and at unwonted length.Yet the reviews were largely silent on the epistemological status of natural theology, and, when a reviewer was finally spurred into more explicit comment by the controversy surrounding Brougham’s notoriously rationalist Discourse, he took what he thought of as a “via media” between extreme positions, stating that “previous to revelation, although there was a knowledge of a creating God, it was quite an uncertain and doubtful knowledge, very often wholly rejected, and always considered uncertain.”29 Moreover, the British Magazine’s reviewers were, like other High Anglicans, occupied with the extent to which the arguments employed appealed not only to the reason, but also to “the heart”; they were concerned with the “feelings” as well as the “views” which the pursuit of science could produce.30 Evangelicals

The emphasis on religious sentiment found in the High Church periodicals is, perhaps not surprisingly, echoed in many of the evangelical periodicals both of the established churches in England and Scotland, and of old and new dissent. Indeed, it is so common to portray evangelical religion as a “religion of the heart” that Boyd Hilton has sought to redress the balance by emphasizing the extent to which what he calls “moderate” evangelicals sought to construct a religion that combined religious feeling with rational thought.31 Focusing on the “moderate” evangelicals

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in the established churches of England and Scotland, Hilton concludes that natural theology was a key part of their theological thinking (pp. 8, 22). He points in particular to the manner in which the cultured leaders of the Clapham sect, gathered around William Wilberforce, sought not to supplant but to revise the analysis of Paley’s Natural Theology in accordance with a more pessimistic, post-lapsarian outlook (pp. 21–22). Yet, as Hilton admits, the Evangelical party in the established (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland, which came to new prominence during the early nineteenth century under the leadership of a similar group of learned churchmen, showed itself to be distinctly ambivalent about the status and value of natural theology.32 Moreover, he asserts that those whom he describes as “extreme” evangelicals—”the pentecostal, pre-millenarian, adventist, and revivalist elements”—tended to oppose rational approaches to religious truth (pp. 10, 21–23). Indeed, only five of the thirteen evangelical magazines examined here reviewed any of the treatises.33 There thus existed a lively debate among evangelicals about the status and value of natural theology, with various different positions being adopted even within the same party. Moreover the debate clearly shifted over time. Under Wilberforce’s influence, 30 years earlier, the Claphamite monthly Christian Observer had embraced Paley’s Natural Theology with some enthusiasm.34 The fact that it remained silent on the appearance of the Bridgewater Treatises seems to reflect a diminishing sense of the importance of presenting Anglican Evangelicalism as a rational religion, distinct from Methodist enthusiasm.The Christian Observer’s lengthy review of Brougham’s Discourse certainly indicated a growing ambivalence about the logical status of natural theology. The scriptural authority of the declaration in Romans 1: 20 weighed heavily with all evangelicals, and the reviewer admitted that certain “primary truths” of divine existence and moral judgment might be known by natural reason. Yet, with Hume, the reviewer believed that there was no sure foundation in natural reason for such fundamental attributes of the Christian God as his unity or benevolence.35 Thus, like many evangelicals, the reviewer suggested that much in the “natural religion” of the ancients resulted from the corruption of a primeval revelation delivered to the “forefathers of the human race,” and he viewed “the system which modern philosophers call natural religion” as “almost entirely . . . an unacknowledged plagiarism upon Christianity” (pp. 687, 691). Once this was acknowledged, the reviewer believed, there was value in “what is called—whether rightly or not—Natural Theology.” He echoed the British Critic’s analysis of the functions of such a biblical theology of nature: “ . . . although, even to the most intelligent, the

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testimony of the Sacred Volume is of superior cogency to any laboured reasoning . . . yet it is useful for the silencing of gainsayers, and the repulsion of sceptical thoughts which may sometimes harass the minds of sincere believers, to perceive, that, after Revelation has proved a point, human investigation often seconds or supports it, or at least establishes no contrary position.” (p. 689) Nevertheless, while conceding that this socalled “natural theology” was of value “chiefly as a step in the evidences for Divine Revelation,” the reviewer refused to allow Brougham’s claim that it was necessary to establish the truth of revelation (pp. 738, 815–818). This statement elicited two letters written to the Christian Observer arguing that natural theology was the logical prerequisite of revealed theology.36 In response, the reviewer reiterated his distinction between the discovery and “corroboration” of divine knowledge from the created universe, and pointed to St. Paul’s assertion (1 Cor. 1: 21) that “the world by wisdom knew not God” (pp. 400–401). In addition to severely restricting the epistemological validity of natural theology, the Christian Observer’s reviewer sought to restrict the use of reason in religious faith. Brougham, he asserted, had forgotten that merely giving mental assent to the truth of the evidences of Christianity was not what was required: “it is forgotten, that it is with the heart that man believeth unto righteousness” (p. 696). Moreover, the strongest evidence of Christianity to the believer was the consciousness that the gospel had “diffused its influence in his heart” (p. 697). The evangelical monthly of the Church of Ireland, the Christian Examiner, endorsed a similar analysis in its review of Chalmers’s treatise, suggesting that the conviction of the divine being and attributes owed more to the realm of sentiment than of reason. With the man who had closed his ear to the voice of conscience, the “demonstrations of the schools” were ineffectual: “We do not think that the Most High God ever intended that His existence should be made out by the demonstrations of Natural Theology; nor can we persuade ourselves that those demonstrations ever had any other effect upon a bold and intelligent atheist, than to confirm him in his impious daring.”37 As in the Anglican communion, the leadership of the Evangelical party in the Church of Scotland sought in the early nineteenth century to create and present a more rational form of evangelicalism which would appeal to the cultured middle classes, combining evangelical feeling with sound reason. Thomas Chalmers is often taken as the archetype of this movement, and there can be little doubt that his influence was profound. However, as Paul Baxter discovered on surveying the periodicals of

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Scottish evangelicalism, it is clear that the Evangelical party had nothing like an agreed position regarding the validity or utility of natural theology.38 Indeed, as Baxter observes, the main party journal, the Edinburgh Christian Instructor, greeted Chalmers’s treatise with the observation that natural theology could not discover “either the existence or the character of God,” and that it was only after the existence of God had been “announced to us” by revelation, that what was called “natural theology” could furnish us with “solid arguments in proof of his existence, and . . . his character.”39 A somewhat similar position was enunciated in the Instructor’s review of Chalmers’s Natural Theology (1835)—an expansion of his treatise. In terms strikingly reminiscent of those used in the Christian Observer, the reviewer suggested that the “theology natural to man is Polytheism,” and that it was only by recourse to the Bible—even if treated merely as a “record of primeval tradition” rather than a revelation—that anything resembling modern natural theology could be constructed.40 Having thus established that “to discover a truth, and to prove it after it has been discovered, are very different processes,” the reviewer was happy to ascribe to “natural theology” so defined the same important role as the Christian Observer as “an auxiliary to the evidences of revelation, and as an introduction to the study of it” (pp. 361, 364). A markedly more positive approach to natural theology was taken by the less populist Presbyterian Review which, untypically among the evangelical journals, reviewed in complimentary terms all eight of the Bridgewater Treatises.Yet even here, the widespread unease about the legitimacy or value of natural theology was evident. The reviewer of Prout’s treatise began by noting that he had heard the Bridgewater bequest “by some ridiculed, by others blamed,” in consequence of its having been “misrepresented as an attempt to teach natural religion to the exclusion of revealed,—to demonstrate through the works of creation, that there is a God, and there to leave men to seek, as they best may, for a Saviour.”41 Noting that belief in the being of a God was too deeply rooted in an innate principle to “require the aid of argument for its support,” the reviewer argued that the Earl of Bridgewater had intended his authors to provide proofs from nature of the attributes, rather than the existence of a God. “He intended to teach men, not the science of natural religion, but the religion of natural science” (p. 1). The reviewer concluded that “the religious illustration of natural science” had the “great advantage” of “making Christians more intelligent, of increasing their capacities for enjoyment, and rendering them better prepared, when called upon, to give a reason for the hope that is in them.” In this way Bridgewater had been

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“made an instrument in the hand of God for good, by enlarging men’s ideas respecting the Divine attributes and ways, and thereby leading them more fervently to love, more humbly to adore” (pp. 2–3). The same ambivalence regarding natural theology found in the evangelical magazines of the established churches was also to be found in the magazines of evangelical dissent. The periodicals of “new” dissent, such as the Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, were more uniformly critical of natural theology,42 but the same range of concerns appeared in the periodicals of the more rationalist denominations of “old” dissent. Of these, only the Congregational Magazine and the Eclectic Review (written and read chiefly by Congregationalists and Baptists) gave space to the Bridgewater Treatises. Even then, they reviewed only Buckland’s treatise, chiefly because of their concern for intellectual freedom in the pursuit of geology.43 Yet, while reviewers in the Congregational Magazine expressed a high estimate of the epistemological status of natural theology,44 the Eclectic Review gave voice to a sophisticated version of the common evangelical view that natural reason was almost completely powerless to discern anything concerning God, and that what passed for natural theology was in fact dependent upon revelation rather than prior to it.45 Moreover, the reviewer pointed to the limits of reason in producing Christian faith, observing that faith was “dependent upon the state of the heart,” and asserting that this was a doctrine at which “the proud reasoner stumbles” (p. 173). Unitarians

Of all religious denominations in early-nineteenth-century Britain, the Unitarians—at this period still largely in intellectual thrall to Priestley— would perhaps be most expected to be unswervingly committed to a foundational natural theology.46 This view is certainly borne out by the main Unitarian magazine, the Christian Reformer, which reviewed six of the Bridgewater Treatises in terms which suggest belief in both the validity and apologetic usefulness of the a posteriori arguments for the divine existence and attributes. Yet the 1830s saw a new development in English Unitarianism—partly inspired by the American Unitarian leader William Ellery Channing—which modified, and ultimately supplanted Priestley’s rationalism with an emphasis on religious sentiment.This movement found its outlet in the less populist Christian Teacher, which reviewed both of the Bridgewater Treatises published subsequent to its foundation in 1835.47 While the Christian Teacher’s reviewers viewed the treatises with somewhat mixed feelings—one considering that they “must on the whole be pronounced a failure”48 —several contributors to the magazine asserted the

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epistemological validity of a scientifically based natural theology.49 Yet in an article on “The Study and Spirit of Natural Theology,” the emerging emphasis on sentiment is clearly seen. Affirming the valid reasoning of the a posteriori arguments, the writer continued: “The idea of Deity has not its proper influence until it ceases to be a matter of analysis, and becomes a principle of inspiration. The fact is, that only a single step lies between the heart and God, or an unfathomable chaos. The spirit clings at once to him or it revolts altogether, and no argument in that case, can conciliate.”50 The same point was made with respect to the natural arguments for the immortality of the soul, regarding which the reviewer affirmed: “We are led by every day’s experience, to dispute it less as a point of logic, and to realize it more as a sentiment of feeling. . . . The only change we would be for making in the discussion would be, to bring it nearer to the spirit, to make it more humble, and more homely. We would lay less importance on science, and more on emotion.” (p. 391) Thus, while retaining a Priestleyan commitment to the epistemological status of natural theology, the writer effectively undermined its apologetic value, supplanting it with an approach based on sentiment. Science, Sensibility, and the Practice of Christian Piety

In the first part of this chapter we have seen that the epistemological status and apologetic value of natural theology, strictly defined, were not only profoundly contested and frequently denied in the religious magazines of early-nineteenth-century Britain, but that much of what passed under the name of natural theology, or which, on first inspection, might appear to be a natural theology, was in fact something less ambitious. Moreover, many of the same criticisms of natural theology also appeared in the reviews of the Bridgewater Treatises in the general literary magazines.Thus the perception articulated by Young and others—that natural theology fulfilled a decisive role in mediating the natural sciences to a wider public at this period—requires major revision, at least as far as many religious audiences were concerned. This raises the question of how science functioned in the religious magazines, if it did not do so primarily through the arguments of natural theology. Such a question can only be answered fully when the several periodicals have been subjected to detailed analysis beyond the scope of this account. However, the reviews of the Bridgewater Treatises in the religious magazines suggest some important avenues for exploration. Of these, I will select two which seem to me to be particularly suggestive. Firstly,

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it is striking how often the focus of the reviews was on the place of science in engendering correct religious sentiments or sensibility, rather than in inculcating correct religious doctrines or reasoning. This was so with regard both to apologetics and to the devotional life of the Christian practitioner, and clearly suggests an important departure from a more rationalist view of the nature of religious belief. In this context, John Brooke and Geoffrey Cantor’s recent work on the rhetoric of “natural theology” is of particular relevance. Brooke and Cantor argue that works of natural theology, rather than being dismissed on the grounds of the logical inadequacy of their arguments, should be recontextualized as works in a particular genre, the object of whose rhetoric was to appeal to the imagination and emotions, as well as to the faculty of reason. It is clear that this view resonated with the expectations of many of the reviewers of the Bridgewater Treatises.51 Secondly, it is notable that the reviews were frequently concerned with the practice of Christian piety, rather than with the practice of Christian evangelism. This is perhaps not surprising, given that religious magazines were expected to be read primarily by practicing Christians, but it has nevertheless been obscured by the focus on natural theology. The steadily increasing prominence of science in British culture in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century undoubtedly raised new problems and possibilities for the use of natural knowledge in a devotional context. Firstly, there was from the eighteenth century a burgeoning trade in books on science intended initially for the rapidly growing middle-class leisure market. Moreover, as the nineteenth century progressed the publication of cheap works on science increased at a rapid pace, providing a growing range of literature at prices which lowermiddle-class and even working-class readers might afford. These developments were accompanied by the emergence of an ever wider range of libraries, starting with middle-class subscription and circulating libraries, but rapidly encompassing mechanics’ institute libraries, chapel libraries, and working-class book clubs. By the 1830s education was also becoming an increasingly critical issue, especially following the emergence from the 1820s of avowedly secular and scientific mechanics’ institutes and with the increasing parliamentary attention being given to the possibility of state intervention in the provision of secular elementary education. All of these developments brought science more prominently to the attention of religious practitioners and, in particular, directed attention to the question of its place in religious practice. It is clear that, in responding to the emergence of a mass scientific culture, religious activists were concerned to protect readers from the

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incursion of what they viewed as incorrect or anti-religious ideas, and there was no shortage of literature designed to counteract the spread of mental materialism, or to neutralize the threat posed by modern geology to “scriptural” ideas of earth history. Yet it is also important to appreciate that science which avoided supposedly erroneous ideas might not necessarily be considered “safe” for recommendation to religious readers. On the contrary, religious commentators were generally agreed that science which was correct in point of doctrine could still profoundly undermine religious faith because of its effect on religious sensibility. The point was well appreciated by William Whewell, who, in a widely applauded section of his treatise, provided analysis of the different impressions produced on men’s minds by “inductive” and “deductive” habits of scientific thought.52 His objective was in part to explain how it was that “the growth of piety” had not always been “commensurate with the growth of [scientific] knowledge”—a trend which was apparently growing, and which he acknowledged had recently been of increasing concern to Christians (p. 323). In explanation he suggested that “deductive reasoners,” habitually occupied with “tracing the consequences of ascertained laws,” rather than with the discovery of new laws, were vulnerable to a “delusive feeling” that the logical processes of deduction can lead to “all the knowledge and all the certainty we need” (p. 335). Such people might thus, Whewell suggested, lose the “common instinctive convictions and feelings” of humankind: they might become “insensible to moral evidence and to poetical beauties,” and might possess in a “feeble and imperfect degree only, some of those faculties by which truth is attained”—especially those required for the apprehension of religious truth (pp. 338–339). Although Whewell’s analysis was untypical in its sophistication, he identified an issue of wide concern. As numerous commentators in the religious magazines pointed out, science might serve to foster religious sentiments, but presented in certain ways it might equally dim religious sensibility and might thus ultimately destroy faith. Thus, to be “safe,” science needed not only to be free from erroneous doctrines, but it needed to be capable of protecting the religious sensibility, and of fostering the religious sentiments that were at least as important for faith. In this context a discourse of design was sometimes considered valuable. Yet this was not uniformly the case and, from the perspective of some reviewers, a discourse of design by itself was dangerous. For many evangelicals, in particular, science could only be rendered “safe” by its explicit association with scriptural sentiments. Without such associations, they considered that

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scientific reading tended to deaden religious sensibilities, regardless of whether it contained a discourse of design. High Anglicans

The reviewers in the High Church magazines generally believed that a discourse of design could be used with great effect to elicit appropriately pious sentiments from scientific matter. Strikingly, C. W. Le Bas, who argued in the British Critic that natural theology was utterly powerless against the skeptic, nonetheless welcomed Whewell’s treatise as showing— in Whewell’s own words—”how admirably every advance in our knowledge of the Universe harmonizes with the belief of a most wise and gracious God.”53 This was the more valuable, Le Bas noted, since “physical researches” had not always been “signally favorable to the development of moral and religious sensibilities.”The efforts of those who, like Whewell, sought to “show the goodness of God, by an exposition of the contrivances and arrangements with which creation abounds” were to be applauded because of the emotional rather than the intellectual impact of their writings (pp. 78, 79). Indeed, the effectiveness of such illustrations was to be judged on the basis of their capacity to “take captive the affections” (p. 95). Not surprisingly, Le Bas warmly commended Whewell’s analysis of the effects of different scientific habits of mind on devotion as being perhaps “the two most powerful and original chapters of the book” (p. 107). Interestingly, the British Critic was prepared to publish a review of Buckland’s treatise by the liberal Anglican geologist, W. D. Conybeare, which was much more positive in its assessment of natural theology. Nevertheless, Conybeare also considered that the primary value of the series was in making science subservient to religious sensibility. Commenting on the sublimity of Buckland’s scientific findings, he concluded: “When, as throughout these treatises, we are directed to look still higher, and to see in all these things proofs of the unity and attributes of the great designer of universal nature, we are convinced that the greatest benefit to the best discipline of the mind must result from the habit thus impressed of giving a religious association to our most interesting intellectual speculations; and this, we are persuaded, will be found to be the principal advantage arising from the application of the Duke [sic] of Bridgewater’s bequest, far more than even supplying any additional force to the great argument from final causes.”54 The same point, though not always explicitly made, clearly lay behind reviews of the Bridgewater Treatises in the other High Church periodicals, where the “religious spirit” in which the

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works were written rendered them religiously appropriate vehicles of popular science, melding accurate exposition with suitable references to divine agency in the natural world. Thus, while the Christian Remembrancer and the British Magazine rarely contained reviews of more secular scientific books, they gave the treatises wide recommendation. Evangelicals

Whereas a discourse of design might render science safe and wholesome for High Church readers, many evangelical reviewers provided a widely differing assessment of the role of science in fostering pious sentiments, a point reflected in the fact that three High Church organs between them carried nineteen reviews of the Bridgewater Treatises, while thirteen evangelical magazines carried only twelve reviews, eight of which appeared in one journal, the Presbyterian Review.55 The Christian Observer was prompted by Brougham’s Discourse to state the problem in bald terms. Brougham had argued that natural theology formed a distinct branch of every science, and that each science therefore consisted of three divisions: “1. The truths which it teaches relative to the constitution and action of matter or of mind;—2. The truths which it teaches relative to [natural] theology; and 3. The application of both classes of truths to practical uses, physical or moral.” The “moral” uses of science which Brougham included under the third heading consisted of the manner in which “the contemplation of the Divine wisdom and goodness inculcates piety, patience, and hope.”56 While applauding this analysis, the Christian Observer ‘s reviewer wanted to know why Brougham had not included revealed theology under the second heading, as well as natural theology, claiming that “all science ought to be made to bear upon the matters contained in Revelation, so far, that is, as they can legitimately be adduced to that purpose”57 If it were philosophical for Lord Brougham to refer to the design exhibited in nature, he argued, so would it be “if some field-preacher, as the feathered seeds of the humble dandelion floated around him, were to remind his rustic auditors of the primeval curse, which condemned the ground to thorns and briers for man’s transgression” (pp. 810–811). The reviewer went even further, arguing that a discourse of design which made no reference to revealed truth was effectively deistical, largely because of its effect in dulling Christian sensibility. It is not unlikely that he had the Bridgewater Treatises at least partly in mind when he expressed a fear that the “high eulogies so often of late pronounced on Natural Religion” were intended as part of a deliberate program to make people become “too philosophical to be religious, too liberal to be Christian”

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(p. 691). This secularizing program he not surprisingly associated most closely with Brougham, whose activities in promoting secular, and largely scientific education in the mechanics’ institute movement, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and at the University of London, marked him out as a particular target. Yet, Brougham only presented an extreme case of “the general spirit of the age, as shewn in a spurious liberality, a passion for generalizing in religious sentiment, a desire to amalgamate all creeds in simpler elements, the deification of Knowledge as man’s chief good, and a disposition to concede the most important points of religious doctrine and sentiment for the fancied interests of science” (p. 691). Such “generalized religion” was to be encountered in the new leisure activities of the growing middle classes. In particular, as the book trade sought to take advantage of the emergence of new reading audiences, the reviewer lamented, commercial imperatives inevitably came into play: “The grand views of external creation are beyond question beautiful and sublime, and poets and romance writers find them more convenient instruments of description and sentiment than the mysterious doctrines of the Gospel. Romance writers therefore generally, and poets too often, are Deists in their writings; and it well suits such authors, and their mercenary booksellers, that there should exist a generalized religion, which may embrace purchasers without restriction of sect; while lukewarm readers will covet the luxury of books which interest or amuse them, without the interruption or perplexity of religious topics, which they consider but the bigotry of Saintship or Evangelism.” (p. 810) In this context, the effect of a discourse of design on religious sensibilities was arguably as dangerous as, and yet more insidious than any deistical argument. These comments in the Christian Observer were evidently in part amplified by the extraordinary status of Brougham’s Discourse.58 Yet similar views were repeatedly expressed in the evangelical magazines during the 1830s. The ever-expanding scope of popular education, and the growing demand for and availability of scientific publications, were issues widely canvassed.59 Aware that other denominations had stolen a march on them in the provision of elementary day schools, for instance, contributors to the Wesleyan Methodist Magazine were conscious of the need to provide suitable, scripture-based schooling for Methodist children.60 Yet the provision of such schooling immediately created further problems in regard to the provision of appropriate reading matter, and commentators recognized that even their efforts in providing Sunday-school instruction had already created an “appetite for knowledge” which it was necessary to supply “with intellectual food, at once wholesome and agreeable.”61 In this

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context works of scientific natural theology like the Bridgewater Treatises were certainly of some use, and while the Wesleyan Methodist Magazine did not review any of the series, the titles were listed in the magazine’s “Select List of Books Recently Published, Chiefly Religious,” and extracts were published from two of the treatises.62 Yet it is significant that the extracts from William Kirby’s treatise related to scriptural natural history, and involved the sort of “Methodistical” moralizing referred to by the Christian Observer. Moreover, most of the science books recommended by the magazine incorporated both scriptural and moralistic aspects. One such book, Henry Duncan’s widely commended Sacred Philosophy of the Seasons (1837–38), drew heavily on the Bridgewater Treatises for its materials.63 However, Duncan explicitly designed his work to counteract a dangerous tendency which he clearly considered some of the treatises manifested: “The attention of scientific men, while it has of late been very successfully, has, perhaps, been too exclusively, directed to the book of Nature, in illustration of the Divine perfections; and those, who peruse their writings, may be induced to overlook the highly important truth, that, after all, natural religion affords but an imperfect glimpse into the moral attributes of the Eternal” (p. xvi). It was only under the illumination of the “celestial light” of revelation, Duncan observed, that the study of creation was “calculated to expand the understanding, enlighten the judgment, and improve the heart.” He consequently combined his exposition of “the various marks of divine wisdom and goodness, with occasional references to the peculiar doctrines of holy Scripture.” In this respect, the Wesleyan Methodist Magazine noted with an obvious eye to the Bridgewater Treatises the work was “better adapted to general use than are several modern works of much higher pretensions.”64 The contrast was made more explicitly in the Edinburgh Christian Instructor. The reviewer of Duncan’s work warmly welcomed the “great improvement of late years in works of science, in so far as the illustration of the great doctrines of natural religion is concerned,” arguing that the Bridgewater Treatises had been “eminently beneficial” in this regard. Yet Duncan’s object was more important: “to lead his readers forth amidst the scenes of nature which lie spread around them, to seize on striking facts and phenomena as they occur; to bring the light of science to bear upon them, and to consecrate them by applying them to the purposes of an enlightened and scriptural piety.”65 Like most of the evangelical magazines, the Edinburgh Christian Instructor was keen to establish that, while scientific knowledge was not inherently evil, great care had to be taken to ensure that it engendered pious sentiments. For, the heart might be

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“carried away from God, and from the feeling of its own natural wretchedness and helplessness, by a keen taste for the pleasures of science and literature,” and a man might be “warmly alive to the beauties and the wonders of creation, while he thinks not of, nor feels the slightest desire to have any communion with, or even any knowledge of [the creator].”66 For this to be avoided, a discourse of design was not enough: “revealed religion should be the light of all the sciences.”67 Another reviewer put the point succinctly: “There are two ways of connecting religion and science; the one is by making religion scientific, and the other is by making science religious.” The only safe way of connecting the two was to insist upon science “being made to assume the garb and speak the language of religion.”68 Although it is clear that the evangelical magazines held much in common in their approach to scientific reading, there were evidently subtle differences, most of which are beyond the scope of this essay. One point, however, stands out, which is that “rational” dissenters appear to have been more inclined to regard a discourse of design as adequate for fostering religious sensibility and sentiments. The writer in the Eclectic Review, who effectively dismissed natural theology as a form of theistic inference, nevertheless saw it as useful in counteracting the evils consequent from the “tacit exclusion of religion from scientific and useful knowledge.”69 Once again, the analysis rested on the effects of mental habits on religious sensibility: “Knowledge can exert no practical influence upon us, except as it changes or determines our habitual considerations. . . . Hence, to the anatomist or physiologist, exclusively occupied with the mechanism of the human frame, that study which would seem peculiarly adapted to lead to religious belief, proves too often the means of stripping the mind of all belief in spiritual existence, and of extinguishing all religious feeling.” This was, the reviewer continued, the true “intellectual cause of irreligion” (p. 178). Unitarians

Views similar to those of the more rationalist dissenters were promulgated by Unitarians. While the reviewer of Whewell’s treatise in the Christian Reformer had been happy to endorse the epistemological validity of natural theology, he felt it necessary to point out that the “logical sufficiency” of the argument could hardly be added to by science. For him, the value of such works as the Bridgewater Treatises was that “the attention is more forcibly drawn to the subject, a deeper and more lasting impression is made, and the student of nature is led more distinctly to perceive and

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practically to acknowledge the intimate connexion of his favourite pursuit with the most noble and worthy object to which the human faculties can be directed.”70 This devotional role was also emphasized in the Christian Teacher. Clearly convinced of the necessity of pursing science independently of theology, one writer was nevertheless deeply concerned by the effect of secular scientific language on Christian piety. Not being framed for a religious purpose, such language served religion very ill, failing to “throw into relief the constant action of God—to make lively the impression of the universality of His operation and His presence—and to present him prominently to the awakened heart of devotion.”71 Moreover, he continued, it tended to lead to a semi-deistical view of general providence which was “unfavourable to piety, because it is alien to our belief in God’s spiritual omnipresence, and destroys the quickness and awe of the devotional feelings that gather serenely around that faith; because it throws an air of coldness over his administration, and represses the sentiment that we are the objects of his personal care” (p. 396). The scientific study of nature could be useful in engendering such pious sentiments, but only when approached with the correct sensibility in the first place.72 Conclusion

Twenty years ago, John Brooke observed that there existed a “stylized picture of natural theology which has been drawn from a backward projection of the Darwinian antithesis between natural selection and certain forms of the design argument”—a perception which he has done more than anyone to correct.73 However, Darwin may have led historians astray in a yet more fundamental respect: the historical interest generated by Darwin’s role in turning Paley on his head has perhaps led historians to overemphasize the place of natural theology, Paleyan or otherwise, in British culture during the early nineteenth century.74 Certainly, a recent study suggests that, in reading Paley’s Natural Theology, Darwin was not quite as typical of Cambridge undergraduates in the 1820s as might be supposed.75 In any case, approaching the issue, if not from the pew, at least from the devout parlor of early-nineteenth-century Britain, indicates a far more contested role for natural theology than we have come to expect from our relatively narrow focus on a central group of scientific practitioners who have been supposed to share a similar, “liberal Anglican” theology.

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Having established that natural theology was not the primary means by which the sciences were framed in the religious magazines, the historian is free to explore the manner in which they were framed. In this account I have focused on two points which I consider to have been hitherto rather neglected. Firstly, in many religious magazines the affective aspects of science were at least as important as the rational aspects. While it has certainly not been my object to suggest that the reviewers who wrote for religious periodicals were uninterested in the place of reason in relating science to religion, I suggest that we should not focus almost exclusively on reason in such discussions.76 Secondly, in many religious magazines, the pressing need in the face of an encroaching scientific culture was to find a place for science in the practice of Christian piety. Once again, I do not mean to suggest that the role of science in religious belief was unimportant, but an almost exclusive focus on beliefs is clearly insufficient. Indeed, historians of science have increasingly over recent years become interested in the question of scientific practice, and several studies have clearly demonstrated the fruitfulness of exploring the interconnections between religious and scientific practices as well as between religious and scientific beliefs.77 It has been my argument in this essay that such an approach needs to be extended to the readers of scientific publications, as much as to scientific practitioners themselves. Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the conference “Science in Theistic Contexts,” held in July 1998 at the Pascal Centre for Advanced Studies in Faith and Science, Redeemer College, Ancaster, Ontario; at the conference “John Ray and His Successors: The Clergyman as Biologist,” jointly organized by the John Ray Trust, the Institute of Biology History Committee, and the Society for the History of Natural History, and held in March 1999 at Braintree Essex; at the Centre for Science and Religion, University of Leeds, April 1999; and at the Modern History Faculty, University of Oxford, November 2001. I am grateful for helpful discussions on those occasions, and more especially for the comments on earlier drafts of John Brooke, Geoffrey Cantor, Jonathan Hodge, Jack Morrell, Jim Secord, and Sally Shuttleworth. The research on which this chapter is based was generously funded by the Leverhulme Trust, through their program of Special Research Fellowships, and the Arts and Humanities Research Board, through their program of Institutional Research Fellowships.

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Notes 1. Robert M. Young, Darwin’s Metaphor (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 127–128. 2. See John Brooke, “Natural Theology and the Plurality of Worlds: Observations on the Brewster-Whewell debate,” Annals of Science 34 (1977): 221–286; Brooke, “The Natural Theology of the Geologists: Some Theological Strata,” in Images of the Earth, ed. L. Jordanova and R. Porter, second edition (British Society for the History of Science, 1997); Richard Yeo, Defining Science: William Whewell, Natural Knowledge and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 42, 43; Jonathan R. Topham, “Beyond the ‘Common Context’: The Production and Reading of the Bridgewater Treatises,” Isis 89 (1998): 233–262. 3. See, e.g., Steven Shapin, “Science and the Public,” in Companion to the History of Modern Science, ed. R. Olby et al. (Routledge, 1990). Barbara Gates has claimed that for half a century after the publication of Paley’s Natural Theology women “took the substance of Paley’s work as the stuff of their popularizations of natural history, producing narratives of natural theology” (“Retelling the Story of Science,” Victorian Literature and Culture 21, 1993, p. 291). 4. See, e.g., Nicolaas Rupke, The Great Chain of History: William Buckland and the English School of Geology (1814–1849) (Clarendon, 1983), pp. 233–234. 5. “Dr. Chalmers’ Bridgewater Treatise,” Edinburgh Christian Instructor, second series, 2 (1833), p. 767. 6. The OED gives “theology based upon reasoning from natural facts apart from revelation.” 7. On the Bridgewater Treatises, see Charles Coulson Gillispie, Genesis and Geology: The Impact of Scientific Discoveries upon Religious Beliefs in the Decades before Darwin (Harper & Row, 1959), pp. 209–216; W. H. Brock, “The Selection of the Authors of the Bridgewater Treatises,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 21 (1967): 162–179; John M. Robson, “The Fiat and the Finger of God: The Bridgewater Treatises,” in Victorian Faith in Crisis, ed. R. Helmstadter and B. Lightman (Macmillan, 1990); Jonathan R. Topham, “An Infinite Variety of Arguments”: The Bridgewater Treatises and British Natural Theology in the 1830s, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Lancaster, 1993; idem., “Science and Popular Education in the 1830s: The Role of the Bridgewater Treatises,” British Journal for the History of Science 25 (1992): 397–430; idem., “Beyond the ‘Common Context.’ ” 8. See, e.g., “Prout’s Bridgewater Treatise,” Presbyterian Review 6 (1834), p. 1. 9. See Topham, “An Infinite Variety of Arguments,” chapter 4. See also John H. Brooke,“Indications of a Creator:Whewell as Apologist and Priest,” in William Whewell: A Composite Portrait, ed. M. Fisch and S. Schaffer (Clarendon, 1991); Robson, “The Fiat and Finger of God,” esp. pp. 91ff. An interesting confirmation of this point is provided by Baden Powell’s criticism of the contemporary natural theology literature in The

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Connexion of Natural and Divine Truth; or, The Study of the Inductive Philosophy Considered as Subservient to Theology (John W. Parker, 1838). As Pietro Corsi has shown, Powell considered that recent authors on natural theology, including the Bridgewater authors, had focused almost exclusively on listing instances of design in nature, neglecting the underlying questions concerning the philosophy of natural theology. See Pietro Corsi, Science and Religion: Baden Powell and the Anglican Debate, 1800–1860 (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 180–182, 185. 10. See Topham, “Beyond the ‘Common Context’ ”; idem., “An Infinite Variety of Arguments,” chapter 5. 11. Brooke, “The Natural Theology of the Geologists.” See also Brooke, “Why Did the English Mix Their Science and Their Religion?” in Science and Imagination in XVIIIth-century British Culture, ed. S. Rossi (Unicopli); Brooke, “Indications of a Creator”; Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 192–225; Brooke and Geoffrey Cantor, Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of Science and Religion (Clark, 1998), pp. 141–175. Historians have tended to neglect these insights in favor of Brooke’s equally important claim that “natural theology” could also serve as a “mediating agent between different theological positions, when the object was to avoid religious and political discord”—a function of particular importance to socially vulnerable scientific practitioners in the tumultuous early years of the century. Brooke, Science and Religion, p. 211. The argument was first expounded in Brooke, “Natural Theology of the Geologists.” For applications of the argument, see especially Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray, Gentlemen of Science: Early Years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Clarendon, 1981), esp. pp. 224–245. 12. [Thomas Carlyle], “Signs of the Times,” Edinburgh Review 49 (1829), p. 443. 13. See Josef L. Altholz, The Religious Press in Britain, 1760–1900 (Greenwood, 1989). 14. See James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation” (University of Chicago Press, 2000), esp. p. 164; Jonathan R. Topham, “Periodicals and the Making of Reading Audiences for Science in Early-Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Youth’s Magazine, 1828–37,” in Culture and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Media, ed. L. Henson et al. (Ashgate, 2004). 15. See, e.g., Alvar Ellegård’s Darwin and the General Reader: The Reception of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in the British Periodical Press, 1859–1872 (1958; reprint, with a foreword by David L. Hull, University of Chicago Press). Ellegård sought to use the opinions expressed concerning Darwinism in 115 periodicals and newspapers as a tracer of public opinion, basing his whole procedure on the assumption that “periodicals can be taken, by and large, as representative of the ideas and beliefs of their readers, and thus, with some qualifications, of the population at large” (p. 21). He also sought to codify public opinion by a statistical analysis of press reaction, classifying according to five possible positions on each of what he identified as three “parts” of Darwinism: “the evolutionary theory as such,” “the descent theory in its application to man,” and “the theory of natural selection” (p. 341).

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16. Margaret Beetham, “Towards a Theory of the Periodical as a Publishing Genre,” in Investigating Victorian Journalism, ed. L. Brake et al. (Macmillan, 1990). See also Jonathan R. Topham, “Evangelicals, Science, and Natural Theology in EarlyNineteenth-Century Britain: Thomas Chalmers and the Evidence Controversy,” in Evangelicals and Science in Historical Perspective, ed. D. Hart et al. (Oxford University Press, 1998). 17. John Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment: Science, Religion and Politics from the Restoration to the French Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 1989); Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement:The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785–1865 (Clarendon, 1988); Paul Baxter, Science and Belief in Scotland, 1805–1868: The Scottish Evangelicals, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 1985, especially pp. 108–111; Baxter, “Deism and Development: Disruptive Forces in Scottish Natural Theology,” in Scotland in the Age of the Disruption, ed. S. Brown and M. Fry (Edinburgh University Press, 1993); Corsi, Science and Religion. 18. Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Enlightenment, especially pp. 238, 301–303. 19. Corsi, Science and Religion, p. 192. 20. See, e.g., Rupke, Great Chain of History, pp. 267–274; Susan Faye Cannon, Science in Culture: the Early Victorian Period (Dawson and Science History Publications, 1978), pp. 11–14. Cannon is surely wrong when she claims that “in nothing did Newman depart [from the older Anglican tradition] more definitely than in his opinion of natural science and natural religion” (p. 12). The natural theology of the Bridgewater Treatises found an able Tractarian critic in William Josiah Irons, whose On the Whole Doctrine of Final Causes: A Dissertation in Three Parts, With an Introductory Chapter on the Character of Modern Deism (J., G., & F. Rivington, 1836), provides a thorough-going critique of the subject. See Corsi, Science and Religion, pp. 179–180. 21. Corsi, Science and Religion, p. 68. 22. [Charles Webb Le Bas], “Abercrombie on the Moral Feelings—Whewell’s Bridgewater Treatise,” British Critic 14 (1833): 72–113. On Le Bas, see the DNB. The identity of the reviewer is given in unpublished papers of the Wellesley Index, which are lodged in the Wellesley College archives. I am grateful to the archivist Wilma R. Slaight for providing me with this and other references from the archive. On the British Critic see also Esther Rhoades Houghton and Josef L. Altholz, “The British Critic, 1824–1843,” Victorian Periodicals Review 24 (1991): 111–118. 23. [Joseph Sortain], “Brougham’s Natural Theology,” British Critic 18 (1835), pp. 218–219. See Bridgit Margaret Sortain, Memorials of the Rev. Joseph Sortain ( J. Nisbet, 1861), p. 226. 24. [John Hume Spry], “Chalmers’s Bridgewater Treatise,” British Critic 14 (1833), p. 240. Corsi (Science and Religion, p. 180n.) tentatively attributes the review to William Sewell. 25. “Literary Report,” Christian Remembrancer 15 (1833), p. 402. See also “Bell’s Bridgewater Treatise,” Christian Remembrancer 15 (1833), p. 471; “Prout’s Bridgewater

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Treatise,” Christian Remembrancer 16 (1834), p. 414. The magazine’s review of Brougham’s Discourse of Natural Theology is particularly illuminating, since it prompted a more explicit statement respecting natural theology. Contending, like Brougham, that natural theology provided an indispensable logical foundation for belief in revelation, the reviewer repudiated Brougham’s claim that it was an inductive science, according it only the status of a doubtful inference. See “Lord Brougham’s Natural Theology,” Christian Remembrancer 17 (1835), pp. 515–516, 522–524. 26. “Buckland on Geology and Mineralogy,” Christian Remembrancer 19 (1837), p. 97. 27. A Constant Reader, “Geology,” Christian Remembrancer 19 (1837), p. 354. 28. “Geology,” Christian Remembrancer 19 (1837), p. 435. 29. “Notices and Reviews” [Thomas Turton’s Natural Theology Considered with Reference to Lord Brougham’s Discourse], British Magazine 9 (1837), p. 419. Other references endorse this assessment of the weak epistemological status of natural theology. The reviewer of Chalmers’s Bridgewater Treatise referred to arguments which would “go as far as we can go to prove a benevolent Designer” (“Notices and Reviews,” British Magazine 4 (1833), p. 193). 30. “Notices and Reviews” [Whewell’s Bridgewater Treatise], British Magazine 3 (1833), p. 589. 31. See Hilton, Age of Atonement, pp. 19–26. See also David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (Unwin Hyman, 1989), pp. 57–60. 33. Hilton, Age of Atonement, pp. 24–26. See also Topham, “Evangelicals, Science, and Natural Theology”; Baxter, “Science and Belief,” pp. 19–42; Ian D. L. Clark, “The Leslie Controversy, 1805,” Records of the Scottish Church History Society 14 (1960–1962): 179–197. 33. The evangelical periodicals consulted were the Baptist Magazine, the Christian Examiner (which reviewed Chalmers’s Bridgewater Treatise), the Christian Guardian, the Christian Lady’s Magazine, the Christian Observer, the Congregational Magazine (which reviewed Buckland’s Bridgewater Treatise), the Edinburgh Christian Instructor (which reviewed Chalmers’s Bridgewater Treatise), the Eclectic Review (which reviewed Buckland’s Bridgewater Treatise), the Evangelical Magazine, the Gospel Magazine, the Presbyterian Review (which reviewed all eight Treatises), the Primitive Methodist Magazine, and the Wesleyan Methodist Magazine. 34. “Review of Paley’s Natural Theology,” Christian Observer 2 (1803): 162–166, 240–244, 369–374. The review may actually have been by Wilberforce. See Topham, “Evangelicals, Science, and Natural Theology.” 35. “Review of Lord Brougham’s Discourse of Natural Theology,” Christian Observer 35 (1835), pp. 687, 691–696. 36. “B.,” “Importance of Natural Theology to the Proof of Revelation,” Christian Observer 36 (1836): 274–276; G. M., “On Natural and Revealed Religion,” Christian Observer 36 (1836): 399–402.

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37. “Dr. Chalmers, on the Moral Constitution of Man,” Christian Examiner n.s. 2 (1833), p. 675. 38. Baxter, “Science and Belief,” esp. pp. 108–111. 39. “Dr. Chalmers’ Bridgewater Treatise,” p. 767. 40. “Chalmers on Natural Theology,” Edinburgh Christian Instructor, third series, 1 (1836), pp. 359, 360. 41. “Prout’s Bridgewater Treatise,” p. 1. 42. See, e.g., “Select List” [Brougham’s Discourse of Natural Theology], Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, third series, 14 (1835): 547–548; “Natural Religion,” Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, third series, 16 (1837): 107; James Dean, “Design Shown in the Arterial System,” Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, third series, 16 (1837): 511–515. 43. “Dr. Buckland’s Geology and Mineralogy Considered,” Congregational Magazine 13 (1837): 42–47; “Geology and Natural Theology,” Eclectic Review, fourth series, 1 (1837): 23–37. 44. See “Dr. Buckland’s Geology and Mineralogy Considered” (ibid.); “Works on Natural Theology,” Congregational Magazine 13 (1837): 242–251. 45. “Lord Brougham on Natural Theology,” Eclectic Review, third series, 14 (1835): 165–185. 46. On the role of natural theology in the dominant Priestleyan Unitarianism of early-nineteenth-century Britain, see R. K. Webb, “The Faith of Nineteenth-Century Unitarians: A Curious Incident,” in Victorian Faith in Crisis, ed. Helmstadter and Lightman, pp. 126–130; John David Yule, The Impact of Science on British Religious Thought in the Second Quarter of the Nineteenth Century, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1976, pp. 255–258. 47. See Altholz, Religious Press in Britain, pp. 73–74. 48. [John Hamilton Thom?], “Lord Brougham’s Natural Theology,” Christian Teacher 1 (1835): 411–417. The attribution is given in Yule, “Impact of Science,” p. 255. The reviewer of Kirby’s Bridgewater Treatise was distinctly disappointed, while that of Buckland’s was much more positive about its contribution to natural theology. See “Critical Notices,” Christian Teacher 1 (1835): 507–509; L., “Professor Buckland’s Bridgewater Treatise,” Christian Teacher 2 (1836): 664–671. 49. See “General and Particular Providence,” Christian Teacher 1 (1835), pp. 393–394; “Lord Brougham’s Natural Theology,” pp. 413–415; H. G.,“On the Study and the Spirit of Natural Theology,” Christian Teacher 3 (1837): 384–392, esp. pp. 384–385, 388. It is, however, notable that the reviewer of Brougham’s Discourse of Natural Theology thought that he had gone too far in arguing that the truths of natural theology were the subject of “strict demonstration,” arguing instead that it admitted “of nothing higher than moral probability” (p. 414). See also “Critical Notices,” Christian Teacher 1 (1835): 566–567.

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50. “On the Spirit and Study of Natural Theology,” p. 388. 51. See Brooke and Cantor, Reconstructing Nature, pp. 176–206. See also Robson, “The Fiat and Finger of God.” 52. William Whewell, Astronomy and General Physics Considered with Reference to Natural Theology (William Pickering, 1833), pp. 303–342. 53. “Abercrombie on the Moral Feelings—Whewell’s Bridgewater Treatise,” p. 93. The quotation is from Whewell, Astronomy and General Physics, p. vi. 54. [William Daniel Conybeare], “Buckland’s Bridgewater Essay on Geology,” British Critic 20 (1836), p. 328. 55. The three High Church periodicals are the British Critic (which reviewed Whewell’s, Chalmers’s, and Buckland’s Bridgewater Treatises), the British Magazine (which reviewed all eight Bridgewater Treatises), and the Christian Remembrancer (which reviewed all eight Bridgewater Treatises). 56. Henry Brougham, A Discourse of Natural Theology, Showing the Nature of the Evidence and the Advantages of the Study, third edition (Charles Knight, 1835), pp. 158, 159. 57. “Review of Lord Brougham’s Discourse of Natural Theology,” p. 810. 58. In dealing with the reactions to Brougham’s Discourse it is important to appreciate—as some contemporaries noted—that Brougham’s prominent position in national affairs, taken together with his rationalist approach to religion, on some occasions prompted rather exaggerated, if not disingenuous comments from reviewers. See, e.g., “Works on Natural Theology,” pp. 249–250. For a useful survey of reviews of Brougham’s work, see Yule, “Impact of Science,” pp. 200–235. 59. On evangelical concern about the advancement of secular “useful knowledge,” see Topham, “Science and Popular Education,” pp. 423–429. 60. See, e.g., M. D., “Remarks on Popular Education,” Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, third series, 16 (1837): 342–344; “Review of Works on Education,” Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, third series, 16 (1837): 764–770; Edmund Grindrod and Robert Newton, “The Annual Address of the Conference of the Methodist Societies in Great Britain,” Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, third series, 16 (1837), p. 777. 61. “Select List,” Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, third series, 13 (1834): 378. 62. “The Eagle,” Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, third series, 14 (1835): 760–761; “Adaptation of the Earth to Supply Springs of Water,” Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, third series, 15 (1836): 915–918. See also Topham, “Science and Popular Education.” 63. Henry Duncan, Sacred Philosophy of the Seasons; Illustrating the Perfections of God in the Phenomena of the Year, fifth edition (Edinburgh:William Oliphant and Sons; London: Hamilton, Adams, and Co., 1848), p. xv. Another of the most frequently reviewed scientific authors in the evangelical periodicals during the 1830s was the Scottish evangelical schoolteacher Thomas Dick, who, as William Astore has shown, rejected natural

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theology, strictly defined, advocating instead a “doxological” or God-praising theology of nature based upon knowledge of God derived from Scripture . . . and elaborated by examining the natural world” (William Joseph Astore, Observing God, Ashgate, 2001, p. 46). 64. “Select List,” Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, third series, 16 (1837): 518. 65. “Duncan’s Sacred Philosophy of the Seasons,” Edinburgh Christian Instructor, third series, 2 (1837), pp. 464, 465. 66. “Turner’s Sacred History of the World,” Edinburgh Christian Instructor, second series, 4 (1835), pp. 107, 108. 67. “Duncan’s Sacred Philosophy of the Seasons,” Edinburgh Christian Instructor, third series, 1 (1836), p. 688. 68. “Dr. Dick on the Diffusion of Knowledge,” Edinburgh Christian Instructor, second series, 2 (1833), p. 709. 69. “Lord Brougham on Natural Theology,” p. 185. 70. “Review—Bridgewater Treatises on Natural Theology,” Christian Reformer, n.s., 1 (1834), pp. 391–392. 71. “General and Particular Providence,” p. 395. 72. “On the Study and the Spirit of Natural Theology,” pp. 389–390. 73. Brooke, “Plurality of Worlds,” p. 221. 74. On this point see David Kohn, “Darwin’s Ambiguity: The Secularization of Biological Meaning,” British Journal for the History of Science 22 (1989): 215–239, especially p. 219. 75. Aileen Fyfe, “The Reception of William Paley’s ‘Natural Theology’ in the University of Cambridge,” British Journal for the History of Science 30 (1997): 321–335. 76. I have discussed this further in “Not Thinking about Science and Religion,” Minerva 40 (2002): 203–209. 77. See, e.g., Geoffrey Cantor, Michael Faraday: Sandemanian and Scientist. A Study of Science and Religion in the Nineteenth Century (Macmillan, 1991).

4 Reporting Royal Institution Lectures, 1826–1867 Frank A. J. L. James

The expansion of the periodical press during the nineteenth century meant that the Royal Institution could gain considerable press coverage as journals sought to fill their columns. This chapter will examine the way in which the Royal Institution took advantage of the expansion of the press and of the changing pattern of reporting over the years. Founded in 1799, the Royal Institution has survived on the basis of attracting large numbers of people to its lectures. When Humphry Davy lectured there as Professor of Chemistry between 1801 and 1812, large and appreciative audiences helped keep the Royal Institution in a reasonable financial state. After Davy’s retirement in 1812, the Royal Institution carried on with William Thomas Brande as the new Professor of Chemistry. By all accounts Brande was a good lecturer; however, he seems not to have had the inspirational quality possessed by Davy, and audience numbers seem to have fallen. To help increase audience sizes, it was agreed that Brande would move his chemical lectures for medical students from the Windmill Street Medical School to the Royal Institution. But these were morning lectures delivered by Brande for the students, who, over the years, increasingly came from nearby St. George’s Hospital. Though they helped financially, these lectures did little for the general audience level and the overall reputation of the Royal Institution. By the mid 1820s, the Managers (the committee, elected from the Members, that used to run the Royal Institution) had evidently decided that more needed to be done and a major program of reinvigorating the lectures was commenced.1 The key person here was Michael Faraday,2 who had been appointed assistant in the laboratory in 1813. In his original position his main task was to help in the preparation of lectures, including those of Brande. In 1821 he had in effect been appointed Acting Superintendent of the Royal Institution (when Brande was absent, but under his general direction), and four years later Director of the Laboratory. It was in this capacity that he took charge of invigorating the lectures at the Royal Institution, especially

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for Members. This was particularly important: if new Members could be attracted, then finances would improve. To this end, “events” for Members were commenced on Friday evenings in 1825: “Three or four Evenings were given in the Laboratory” as Faraday put it in his notebook.3 The word “event” was used since they were not just lectures and it seems likely that Faraday had to explore his way toward finding what would constitute a mixture that would attract an audience. Not all Friday evenings in the early days had lectures, but in general most evenings included a talk in the lecture theater, more often than not accompanied by experimental demonstrations. It is possible that Faraday initially modeled these on the morning lectures for medical students that were also held in a small basement lecture theater that opened out onto the laboratory, rather than in the large lecture theater on the first floor to which the Friday events soon moved. In addition, displaying a wide variety of objects in the library became a standard feature of the Friday evenings. With such a new initiative it is not surprising that the early lecturers and suppliers of illustrative material were drawn from those already connected with the Royal Institution, but Faraday’s own connections can be seen with a few of his friends whom he had made while a member of the City Philosophical Society a decade or so earlier.4 These included the architect Alfred Ainger and the chemist Samuel Solly, who provided what came to be known at some point as Friday Evening Discourses.5 Faraday may have started these Friday evenings on his own initiative, since it was not until the end of the 1825 season that they were first noted in the Managers’ minutes. It was decided that in future one Manager in rotation would be present at each evening.6 The establishment of the Friday evenings during 1825 became part of a broader review of the lecture program by the Managers of the Royal Institution, and it was agreed “that the weekly meetings of the Members and their Friends in the Library be resumed on Friday the 3rd of February at 1/2 past Eight o’Clock in the Evening.”7 Although no reference was made as to who would run the program, evidently it was assumed that Faraday would undertake the task. He dealt with most of the administration for the Discourses and from the end of the 1826 season was appointed secretary of the Friday evening committee which the Managers then formed.8 He undertook this task until 1841 when John Barlow, later Secretary of the Royal Institution, was appointed to this position. In 1860 Henry Bence Jones became Secretary of both the committee and the

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Royal Institution. During the period covered here nineteen Discourses were normally delivered during the first six months of each year.To maintain an attractive program Faraday, Barlow, and Bence Jones not only had to retain the most popular speakers, but they also had to refresh the program with new speakers; both of these objectives all three achieved successfully. Discourses did not originate in the form they finally took, but evolved over the following two decades to become the very formal events which they remain. Indeed in the opening Discourse for 1827, Faraday stressed their informality “agreeable—easy—meeting—where members have the privilege of bringing friends and where all may feel at ease . . . relieved from all formalities” as he put it in his lecture notes.9 What turned the Discourses into formal events was their popularity, which necessitated that methods of audience control be developed. From the beginning of 1826 until Faraday’s death in 1867, a total of 799 Discourses were delivered by 263 individuals.10 Twenty-six men were responsible for just over half of the Discourses delivered, of which Faraday accounted for 126. Others closely connected with the Royal Institution also contributed a significant number of Discourses: Brande (28) and his successor John Tyndall (29) were the most prolific after Faraday. But others such as Barlow (12), William Ritchie (13), Edward Frankland (10), and the Fullerian Professor of Physiology Thomas Huxley (12) also made their mark. Others who delivered a significant number, but who were not particularly closely connected with the Royal Institution included Edward Cowper (18), William Brockedon (13), William Robert Grove (13), Richard Owen (12), and Charles Lyell (10). We do not have attendance figures for Discourses until 1830, and one does have to say that the figures for that year only just achieve respectability. The average audience size was 269, most were under 300, with only five (out of 19) climbing above that, although Faraday did achieve 400 with a lecture on Charles Wheatstone’s acoustical work. One lecture (by Ainger on heat) did particularly badly with the lowest recorded figure of 135 in the audience, although he did better the following year.Yet it is clear that the overall figures during the early years of the Discourses were highly gratifying. As Faraday commented to the Arctic explorer John Franklin during the first full season of the Discourses: “We have been very active in our institution this season and have established converzatziones on Friday Evenings which have been numerously and well attended.”11 Faraday was clearly pleased with the success and

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comments made by him and others of the need to “establish it [the Royal Institution] firmly” do suggest that in the mid 1820s the Institution had passed through a major crisis, which the reordering of the lecture program overcame.12 The audience size did increase overall during the period, but with some interesting fluctuations that occur at the changeover of the secretaries of lectures committee. After Faraday had built up the average audience to nearly 550 in 1834, it gradually fell back to just over 300 in 1841. Barlow reversed the trend and by 1851 it had reached just over 565, only for it to fall away again to 373 in 1860, when Bence Jones began to build it up again. There were two features that made Discourses a unique activity within the Royal Institution. First, they were open only to Members and their guests. From Morris Berman’s study of the Royal Institution, it is clear that membership of the Institution increased dramatically from their founding. Between 1821 and 1825 the number of new members averaged 10.6 per year; in the following five years that number rose to 65.13 Presumably the reason behind this increase was that only Members could attend the Discourses and therefore gain admission to events that were, according to George Eliot, “as fashionable an amusement as the Opera.”14 Second, there was a deliberate aim to publicize the lectures in the general press. Knowledge of Discourses was extended beyond the walls of the Royal Institution by publishing accounts of them of varying length. Of course it was easy to publish such reports in the Quarterly Journal of Science, edited by Brande, and to a lesser extent in the Philosophical Magazine. These were fairly similar journals aimed at the same type of scientific readership. Their reports of the lectures tended to be in the form of scientific papers and did not convey the immediacy of the experience of attending a Discourse in the way that general newspaper accounts did. The Royal Institution did its best to ensure that there was coverage of Discourses in a number of general journals and newspapers. In this chapter I shall compare reports published in the Literary Gazette and the Athenaeum. The reason for selecting these two Saturday weeklies, which had circulations of approximately 4,000 and 18,000 respectively, is that both reported Discourses for the major part of the period and they seem to be aimed at the same readership. Yet, as we shall see, their approaches to reporting the Royal Institution were significantly different. Furthermore, both these periodicals had a similar structure starting with reviews of the latest books and then moving on to the reports of meetings, plays, and concerts, with occasional pieces of original

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writing and verse.They also filled a significant amount of their pages with regular reports of scientific meetings. In addition to the Royal Institution, reports of meetings of the Royal Society, the Geological Society, and the Royal Geographical Society were published frequently, as well as less frequent reports of smaller organizations such as the Western Literary and Scientific Institution, and the short lived London Electrical Society. During the summer extensive reports of the Annual Meetings of the British Association managed to fill pages that would otherwise have been desperately short of material. The Literary Gazette began publishing reports of Discourses in 1827, while the Athenaeum commenced reporting two years later. The publication of lectures delivered at the Royal Institution in the general press was a novel development that does not seem to have happened on a regular basis before; possibly this was to do with Davy’s generally poor relations with the press. The Literary Gazette early in its reporting picked up on the efforts of the Royal Institution to improve itself: “This meritorious and valuable institution has fortunately been raising itself, during the last two or three years, from a state of some depression, into which circumstances, and some little want of energy, had conspired to throw it. The lectures now in the course of delivery, are, and deserve to be, numerously attended; and the Friday Evening Meetings are at once the most rational and pleasurable assemblies which are to be found in London.”15 Although other lecture courses continued to be delivered at the Royal Institution, the Discourses quickly emerged as the events that the press liked to report. In many ways Discourses made an ideal story for the weeklies. Such reporting would help increase membership and may have been intended to do so. In 1827, the first year of reporting in the Literary Gazette, a record 88 new members joined.16 To have reports of Discourses published required work, and in the early years this meant the work of Faraday. At some stage he had become acquainted with William Jerdan, who edited the Literary Gazette from its foundation in 1817 until 1850; an early issue had reported some of Faraday’s work published in the Quarterly Journal of Science on the sounds of flames.17 Three letters written to Jerdan in 1828 show how involved Faraday was in ensuring that reports of Discourses appeared in the Literary Gazette. When he sent Jerdan an account of a lecture by Brockedon on gunpowder, he asked whether the accounts were “too long or too numerous.”18 Faraday sent a report of one of his lectures, giving Jerdan permission to correct it; he also sent an account of a lecture by John Harrison Curtis with some editorial comments; all these reports were duly

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published.19 Letters dealing with such editorial matters are very rare in Faraday’s correspondence, but these three letters must represent only a very small fraction of the correspondence that would have passed between him and Jerdan. Faraday’s relationship with Jerdan was sufficiently close for him to invite Faraday to the coming of age dinner for the Literary Gazette in 1838 and to refer to Faraday in his Autobiography as a contributor to the magazine.20 After recovering to some extent from his illness in the early 1840s, when he could not perform his duties, the Literary Gazette “rejoiced to see Faraday once again occupying his old place on the end of the bench to the right of the illustrator.”21 Such a personal tone again illustrates Faraday’s closeness to this particular periodical. Faraday’s relationship with the Athenaeum is less clear than with the Literary Gazette. No correspondence has been found with any of its editors, and the Athenaeum was less keen in reporting the Royal Institution than the Literary Gazette. It is not until 1836 that we have any evidence that Faraday invited the editors of both periodicals to Discourses; they are listed for that year in the lecture committee minute book and for the following four years.22 By the mid 1840s it is clear that the Literary Gazette was sending a reporter since he or she failed to hear Faraday’s Discourse on “Magnetism and Light” on January 23, 1846, the first discourse to achieve an audience of over a thousand: “We were among the unlucky number of visitors who were too late to get in with the crowd.”23 A Discourse delivered one Friday would, most typically, be reported eight days later. As time went on this pattern became less rigid, with perhaps a report held over to be included with another lecture in single piece, or very occasionally a report would be spread over two issues. Nor indeed were all lectures reported, and the reasons for some omissions are very clear. For instance the Discourse on June 8, 1832 by the French surgeon Henri Milne-Edwards on apparatus for breaking calculi was not reported by the Literary Gazette on the grounds that this “painfully interesting” subject was fit only for the medical journals.24 Faraday himself thought that lecture “may perhaps be a little too surgical for ladies.”25 On one occasion the Athenaeum stated its policy regarding reporting Discourses: “We do not report fully and regularly the evening lectures at this Institution, because, as suited to a mixed assembly, they are necessarily in a degree elementary and merely popular.Whenever there is anything really new or important brought forward, we take care to submit it to our readers; but such matters are usually addressed to another kind of audience, ‘fit though few,’ at one or other of the Societies.”26 This came after

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Figure 1 Faraday delivering his Friday Evening Discourse “Recent Researches into the Correlated Phenomena of Magnetism and Light,” January 23, 1846. Source: Illustrated London News 8 (1846), p. 77. Reproduced with permission of Brotherton Collection, University of Leeds.

a period of two years when only three Discourses had been reported in the Athenaeum. An examination of the program does suggest that it was indeed a bit uninspiring (Faraday talking on the bow and arrow for example) and, furthermore, this was also a period when the average audience was in decline. The Literary Gazette’s coverage of the same period was also not complete, but it did carry more reports than the Athenaeum (figure 2). In total the Athenaeum published 258, while the Literary Gazette published 410, which is all the more striking since it ceased publication in 1862. The sudden drop in the number of reports in the Literary Gazette in 1851, after a generally increasing, though fluctuating, upward trend for more

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Figure 2 Number of reports per year. Solid line: Athenaeum. Broken line: Literary Gazette.

than a decade, can be accounted for by the replacement of Jerdan as editor by Lovell Reeve. Reeve soon started publishing more reports, but the trend had clearly turned into a downward one ending with the demise of the periodical. The trends in the Athenaeum are harder to discern and account for. After swinging about wildly in the early years, by the mid 1830s until 1843 no more than two Discourses were reported each year. However, in 1844, for no obvious reason, all the Discourses were reported. For the next few years, apart from a fluctuation in 1846, possibly caused by Charles Wentworth Dilke being replaced as editor by Thomas Kibble Hervey, reporting remained at a high level with all Discourses being reported in 1848. Thereafter ensued a fairly steep decline, so that by 1865 the Athenaeum ceased reporting the lectures altogether. Furthermore from about 1851 the Athenaeum started simply to list the titles of Discourses, and these have not been included in the statistics. Under Faraday, the publicizing of the Discourses was a major concern. In this way Faraday was at the same time able to promote science, the Royal Institution, and its lecturers, and not least himself, to a large section of the educated middle classes. By the early 1850s membership was growing beyond 800,27 to a level where the Royal Institution became self-sustaining. Thus the need to publicize the lectures was no longer as pressing as before and some slackening in proactive publicity efforts seems to have occurred under Barlow and Bence Jones. But by then the periodicals were in the habit of sending reporters to the lectures, and so reporting continued for a while. Furthermore, from 1851 the Royal

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Institution commenced publication of its own Proceedings containing fairly extended summaries of the Discourses, so that Members, at least, could have easy access. All this probably contributed to the decline of reporting that started in the 1850s and continued into the 1860s. Of course not all accounts were of the same length, but, on average, a Literary Gazette Discourse report would occupy 31.8 column centimeters while the Athenaeum devoted on average 28.7 column centimeters; the normal column length for both periodicals was between 22 and 22.5 cm, each centimeter containing on average 30 words.28 But on occasion reports of particular Discourses might be spread over two or three pages. The longest report in the Literary Gazette was that on “Big Ben” on March 6, 1857 by Edward Beckett Denison, which ran to 285.5 cm, but since that was published over two issues in August one does suspect that they needed to fill space. In all the Literary Gazette published fifteen reports longer than a meter. The longest report in the Athenaeum (112 cm) was George Biddell Airy’s Discourse (May 24, 1851) on a total solar eclipse; there was only one other report that exceeded a meter. As well as on the basis of the number of reports, the Literary Gazette overall did better than the Athenaeum in the space it devoted to them (figure 3). In total, during the period covered here, the Literary Gazette devoted 391,000 words to reporting lectures at the Royal Institution while the Athenaeum published 222,000. During the heyday of their reporting, both the Athenaeum and the Literary Gazette came to be seen as journals in which lecture reports

Figure 3 Average length (in centimeters) of reports per year. Solid line: Athenaeum. Broken line: Literary Gazette.

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were not only published, but also where advanced information about scientific discoveries might be found. For example, Thomas Colby wrote to Faraday to say that the Professor of Chemistry at the Apothecaries Hall in Dublin, Robert Kane, had looked unsuccessfully in the Athenaeum for an account of Faraday’s work on fluorine. Clearly Kane must have heard something of Faraday’s work on this element and expected to find out more in the weekly press; unfortunately Faraday had not lectured on the subject.29 More successfully, Faraday first reported his discovery of the magneto-optical effect, made in 1845, to a General Meeting of the Members of the Royal Institution. This was reported in the Athenaeum in a short paragraph, but it was sufficient to attract the interest of a number of members of the scientific community including John Herschel, William Whewell, Jane Marcet, and even Auguste De La Rive in Geneva, all of whom wrote to Faraday on the basis of this piece asking for further details.30 One effect of this coverage of the Royal Institution and the other scientific societies was to make science seem, at least to us, more a part of general culture then than it is today. It is clear that such reporting served the interests both of the press and of the Royal Institution. The latter was willing to cooperate closely with the general print media, and the various periodicals believed that reports of lectures at the Royal Institution were what a significant part of their readership wished to read. However, this mutuality of interest broke down; the Royal Institution continued to provide the same type of lecture program as before, but since it had solved its immediate problems by the 1840s, it did not devote as much effort to ensuring that reports of its lectures appeared. Thus, there was a long-term decline in reporting, and ultimately reports ceased to appear. On the evidence presented here of this marked decline in the reporting of the Royal Institution, it would appear that the general print media were also losing interest in reporting scientific lectures. It is perhaps not too surprising that with the demise of the Literary Gazette in the early 1860s, the Athenaeum quickly decided that there was no need for it to report the Discourses. The Athenaeum may also have reduced other parts of its scientific reporting at this time, as a dissatisfied letter that Joseph Hooker wrote in 1869 suggests.31 Is it merely a coincidence that what was seen as the decline in the reporting of science in the 1860s occurred at the same time as the rise of a specialized weekly scientific press? Indeed this press began with The Chemical News in 1859 and, of course, the same year that Hooker

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complained about the Athenaeum, the weekly Nature was founded to provide coverage of scientific matters alone. For there to be a connection of some sort between the decline of science in the general weekly periodicals and the rise of the new science only periodicals, it seems that at least two related things needed to have happened. First, there had to be a large enough market for the new science-only weeklies; second, we need to be clear that the general printed press had indeed reduced its science coverage significantly and was therefore not in competition with the new periodicals. So far as reporting the Royal Institution is concerned, the evidence presented in this chapter does point to a decline in science coverage in the 1860s. But before we can make the general case, the overall science content of these weeklies would need to be examined carefully. Acknowledgment

I am grateful to the Royal Institution for permission to study Faraday’s papers. Notes 1. The Managers’ minutes were published in facsimile under the title Archives of the Royal Institution, Minutes of the Managers’ Meetings, 1799–1903 (Mansell, 1971–1976). Minutes will be hereafter cited as RI MM followed by date of meeting, volume number, and pagination. 2. On Faraday, see Geoffrey Cantor, David Gooding, and Frank A. J. L. James, Faraday (Macmillan, 1991; reprinted as Michael Faraday, Humanities Press, 1996). 3. RI MS F4 F, f. 7r. 4. Frank A. J. L. James, “Michael Faraday, the City Philosophical Society and the Society of Arts,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 140 (1992): 192–199. 5. Although it is not clear when the term “discourse” came into general use, it will be used in discussing all these lectures.The most widely used actors’ terms were Friday evening or Friday evening meeting. 6. RI MM, June 13, 1825, 7: 30–31. 7. RI MM, January 9, 1826, 7: 58. 8. RI MM, May 8, 1826, 7: 79. 9. RI MS F4 C, p. 229. 10. This figure excludes a few special lectures delivered in the style of Discourses.

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11. Faraday to Franklin, May 17, 1826, in The Correspondence of Michael Faraday, ed. F. James (Institute of Electrical Engineers, 1991–), vol. 1, pp. 406–408. 12. Faraday to Lardner, October 6, 1827, Correspondence, vol. 1, pp. 441–443. 13. Morris Berman, Social Change and Scientific Organization: The Royal Institution, 1799–1844 (Heinemann, 1978), p. 126. 14. Eliot to Bray and Bray, January 28, 1851, in Gordon S. Haight, The George Eliot Letters. Volume 1, 1836–1851 (Yale University Press, 1954), pp. 341–344. 15. Literary Gazette, February 24, 1827, p. 123. 16. Berman, Social Change and Scientific Organization, p. 126. 17. Faraday to the Proprietors of the Literary Gazette, August 24, 1818, Correspondence, vol. 1, p. 165. 18. Faraday to Jerdan, May 30. 1828, Correspondence, vol. 1, pp. 453–454. 19. Faraday to Jerdan, March 12, 1828 and June 5, 1828, Correspondence, vol. 1, pp. 452, 455. 20. Jerdan to Faraday, January 23, 1838, Correspondence, vol. 2, p. 487; William Jerdan, The Autobiography (London, 1852–1853), vol. 2, p. 234; vol. 3, p. 282. 21. Literary Gazette, May 28, 1842, p. 366. 22. RI MS F4 F, f. 128; RI MS F4 E, 309, 307, 305, 303. These also list editors of other journals (Magazine of Natural History, Medical Gazette, Morning Gazette, Lancet, Observer, Globe, Gardeners’ Gazette, the Medical Times, Records of General Science) to be invited. 23. Literary Gazette, January 31, 1846, p. 107. 24. Literary Gazette, June 16, 1832, p. 378. 25. Faraday to Brayley, June 5, 1832, Correspondence, vol. 2, p. 57. 26. Athenaeum, February 17, 1838, 128. 27. Sophie Forgan, The Royal Institution of Great Britain, 1840–1873, Ph.D. thesis, University of London (Westfield College), 1977, p. 88. 28. Every report in the Literary Gazette or the Athenaeum has been measured to the nearest half-centimeter. Where only a title was reported, this has not been included in the statistics. 29. Colby to Faraday, March 16, 1834, Correspondence, vol. 2, pp. 168–169. Harold Goldwhite,“Faraday’s Search for Fluorine,” Bulletin of the History of Chemistry 11 (1991): 55–60.

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30. Athenaeum, November 8, 1845, p. 1080. Herschel to Faraday, November 9, 1845; Whewell to Faraday, November 20, 1845; Marcet to Faraday, November 24, 1845; De La Rive to Faraday, November 28, 1845, Correspondence, vol. 3, pp. 423–425, 431, 432–434, 435–436. 31. Hooker to Macmillan, July 27, 1869, quoted in A. J. Meadows, Science and Controversy: A Biography of Sir Norman Lockyer (Macmillan, 1972), p. 25. I am grateful to Ruth Barton for drawing my attention to this reference.

5 The Physiology of the Will: Mind, Body, and Psychology in the Periodical Literature, 1855–1875 Roger Smith

The Subject of Psychology

Victorian language linking mind and body was awkward, opaque, and unsettled. There were references to mental science, mental physiology, the physiology of the will, unconscious cerebration, the physiology and pathology of the mind, moral insanity, and lesion of the will.1 Such clumsiness owed something, we may suspect, to an attempt to defend individual human agency and the sacredness of personality even while welcoming a new science of physiology which, many feared, had the potential to undermine these values. If, indeed, “the existence of the will in man . . . is alone sufficient to distinguish him from the lower animals and to constitute him a religious and responsible agent,” then a science that described “will” as the outcome of nervous processes is a provocation.2 This new science, much in evidence in the periodicals, detailed the intimate mutual dependency of mind and brain.3 Two philosophical questions, the mind-body relation and the freedom of the will, attracted much anxious comment. These questions were not narrowly technical but moral or ethical in the widest sense: the relevant literature debated the foundation of values. There were no clear dividing lines between science and the wider culture in this writing. The literature on mind and body at one and the same time formed a public discourse about science and reflected on central moral questions of human identity and agency. In this chapter, I characterize the periodical literature linking physiology and psychology over two decades. No precise significance is attached to the timing, but between the mid 1850s and the mid 1870s nearly all writers were impressed by the importance of a physiological approach to human mental life and conduct. As one mental philosopher noted: “The physiologist is plainly in the ascendant.”4 There was widespread agreement that it was no longer possible to think about human nature without taking fully into account the vicissitudes of the brain. But beyond this vague accord, there was a babble of voices. If it could be

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agreed that understanding the will required both physiology and psychology, since “will, as voluntary motion, is plainly neither exclusively a physical nor psychical property, but a result of their combination,”5 this did not go very far. What I shall suggest, therefore, is that, during these two decades, there was a shaping of an area of discourse, known as psychology, rather than the popularization of knowledge of brain and mind. By the middle of the century, the word “psychology” was in common use—which it had not been half-a-century earlier—but it was a generous term: it did not describe any delimited area of knowledge, let alone refer to a specific science.6 Writers debated the nature of, and possibilities for, psychological knowledge, a debate as much moral as epistemological. The debate was not conducted esoterically and then transferred to a public domain; rather, the shaping of psychology took place in the domain of the periodicals themselves. There was no well-defined area of inquiry for any journal or author to colonize or lay claim to, and the question of boundaries around topics or specialist expertise was up for debate at least at much as content. This ensured that there was no agreement about what constituted an authoritative voice.7 By the mid 1870s, however, the literature was beginning to change: the physiological arguments about human nature had become familiar, even conventional; the mind-body debate had become more focused and specialized—notably in the new journal Mind (founded 1876); and the center of religious anxieties about science lay elsewhere, concentrating at least for a while on John Tyndall’s 1874 “Belfast Address,” which is discussed in Lightman’s chapter, as well as on evolution. Nevertheless, what psychology was remained almost as open at the end of the period as at the beginning. This chapter describes physiological psychology as it appeared in the periodicals, and there are limitations. First, the description is of the general “thick” journals—mainly monthlies or quarterlies—for educated and middle-class readers. It is obvious that there was a much larger periodical literature, and this may have had a different character. Second, there is no space to consider the medical press, though this was certainly a medium of prime importance for articulating notions of psychology. Third, the approach does not analyze readership, the structuring effects of the periodical medium itself, or the role of editorship and authorship.8 Instead, the subject is the psychological discourse of the journals. Lastly, while I focus on the periodicals, a larger study would need to draw in an analysis of books.9 Books and articles belonged to one world, in the simple sense that many articles were book reviews, but also in the

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richer sense that authors, and presumably readers, carried on a dialogue which did not differentiate statements in books and in articles. All the same, the periodicals provided a particularly dynamic and responsive medium for debate, and in this sense were the social setting—public and not academic—in which the shaping of the very notion of psychology went on. In what way did psychology originate as a subject area, a science discipline, and a category in terms of which people make sense of their lives? Any answers are going to be very partial. This chapter starts from the observation that articles in the mid-Victorian period take the existence of “psychology” for granted, and that writers unselfconsciously used the words “psychological” and “psychologist.” It is, however, not obvious what authors meant by the words, or whether they meant the same thing. There were articles on “Biblical psychology” as well as on “cerebral psychology.”10 The Edinburgh medical professor, Thomas Laycock, cited the “Is this a dagger” scene as “an exquisite piece of psychological painting.”11 There was, even where this was not explicitly addressed, a complex negotiation about what the word “psychology” referred to. J. R. Mozley, who wrote much for the periodicals and was not in any sense a specialist psychologist, in 1870 stated simply: “Not only is psychology most certainly a real science, but it is a most assiduously and successfully cultivated science; and the welfare of the world depends on its successful cultivation.”12 This is, to say the least, a challenge to the historiography of psychology, preoccupied as the literature has been with how psychology became a natural science, which, most historians suppose, happened largely after 1870.13 In response, in this chapter I suggest that psychology, far from becoming a science as a result of the academic institutionalization of experiment, or as a consequence of a revolution in knowledge, existed earlier as a scientific discourse of non-academic writers and readers. This discussion suggests that psychology in Britain was shaped in a public arena, not through the specialization or differentiation of academic life; and it suggests that the periodicals played a major part in this. Psychology was first and foremost a discourse of lived experience, of religion, human relations, agency and responsibility, and such like. Only secondarily was it an academic subject area. I must immediately note, however, that we do not know how psychology achieved this standing in Britain: in 1800 the word rarely appeared; in 1860 it was common and unremarked in the periodical literature. Clearly, there is need for research on the spread of psychology in the first half of the century. The present topic is therefore the formation and molding, not the

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creation or origin, of psychology. Indeed, the search for the latter may be simply misguided. There is also a question about the relationship of the mind-body literature to the debates on evolution. As Robert M.Young noted long ago, British writers advanced a physiological approach to mind just when Darwin and others advanced an evolutionary approach to human nature.14 Considered abstractly, the physiologists of mind, at least as much as the evolutionists, argued for the continuity of man and nature, and for the universality of natural law.15 Physiological approaches to the will and the soul, as well as evolutionary theory, questioned traditional assumptions about the sacred. All the same, the evolution debates did not, in the early years, make the origin of the mind the center of polemics. Similarly, the mind-body literature sometimes mentioned Darwin’s work in passing, but more often it did not. Between about 1868 and 1875, however, the two areas in the literature did become much more closely connected. This would be the subject for another paper, but in the animated debates of those years, debates about scientific naturalism and materialism and about the grounding of ethics, writers integrated the mind-brain issue and the theory of evolution.16 Physiological Psychology and Two “Schools” of Thought

The basic terms and framework for discussion of mind and brain came from religious and moral preoccupations. This was the case even where authors set out to show that new, scientific knowledge upset existing beliefs: it was existing beliefs that gave meaning and significance to new argument. The point requires emphasis since much writing on the history of psychology is hamstrung by the assumption that its growth must be at the expense of a religious view of human being. Many Victorians, and even such a devoted advocate of Herbert Spencer’s naturalistic philosophy as James Collier, did not agree: “The mother of all the sciences [i.e., theology], it gives birth to Psychology first of the sciences of mind; all the great problems, the discussion of which carries the science through its subsequent revolutions, are raised by it. . . .”17 There were important ways in which psychological forms of understanding developed within, rather than in opposition to, religious literature. This is a theme being developed by the historian of theology, Thomas Dixon, especially in relation to the language of the emotions.18 The prime example may be “personality,” a term which developed in discussion of the relation between human nature and the nature of God and Christ. The mid-Victorian writer T. S. Osler

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referred to “the personality of Christ.”19 And when writers described human personality they alluded to something sacred. William Smith, for example, a writer on philosophical topics, referred to “this very self, this personality, this I that rings for ever through human speech, [which] belongs essentially to consciousness.”20 But even if psychological language had religious roots, there is no mistaking the expressions of antagonism to a natural science of psychology and the defense of the soul, free will, and reason as God-given in some of the periodical literature. For example: “The rarity of books which treat scientifically on the functions of the organic brain as the instrument of the soul, without more or less identifying the soul with that instrument, is a fact as deplorable as it is well known.”21 Such religiously inspired writers frequently adopted a tone of obvious rightness and righteousness.They took the moral high ground and implied that anyone who attacked socially embedded values had in some sense to be perverse. One swipe at “materialism” described it as “a confusion of ideas perfectly juvenile.”22 This question of tone is important. A number of authors could not, or did not care to, hide their bitterness, bad-temper, and even contempt when they made “materialism” the whipping boy. The reiterated use of this word shows the extent to which metaphysics, science, ethics, religion, and politics were undifferentiated in contemporary discourse. The word was notably common and notably undefined. Down to the polemics over Tyndall’s “Belfast Address” and Thomas Henry Huxley’s lecture on automatism at the same British Association meeting where Tyndall lectured, critics wielded the label “materialism” as the most convenient weapon to hand in resisting new approaches to mind.23 Periodical editors may also have expressed antagonism to naturalistic views of human nature by simply ignoring the area. Certainly, for whatever reasons, the periodicals did not systematically and comprehensively review physiological and psychological literature. A further sign of the importance of materialism as an issue for periodicals and their readers was the flourishing interest in mesmerism and, from the middle of the century, spiritualism. This was another aspect of the literature, which we might call psychological, that a full study would have to assimilate.24 Richard Simpson, the author of an essay published anonymously in the Rambler in 1856, lumped together scientists, technologists, journalists, and philosophers, calling them all “materialists,” and contrasted them with soldiers, statesmen, and ecclesiastics who get on with the work of actually building the higher forms of human life. His politics were clear. Referring to the upheavals of 1848, he wrote: “It was not long before every

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honest man appealed from the pen to the sword.” Simpson emphatically opposed the utilitarian consciousness and anything that might follow from it; instead, he praised “the man of action [who] spends himself for others.”25 It was this sort of attitude that Spencer sought to expose in his articles on sociology, where he indicted politicians and historians alike for their willful ignorance of regularities in the life of men.26 Such a conservative outburst used “materialism” as an umbrella term for anything in the modern world that appeared to devalue what was held dear. On other occasions, with a touch more specificity, the word denigrated utilitarian criteria of all kinds. It certainly bludgeoned intellectual innovators. As Sheldon Amos, an anonymous and sympathetic reviewer of the republication of James Mill’s work on the mind in 1869 observed: “What makes philosophers shrink from this obvious truth [that mind and body ‘reciprocally affect each other’] is the dread of being landed in Materialism.”27 George Henry Lewes, writing after the polemics of the early 1870s around Huxley’s and Tyndall’s claims for science, noted: “Thus for years Materialism has been a term of reproach; and most men have been eager to disavow their sympathy with an opinion at once so ‘shallow’ and so ‘despicable.’ ”28 The literature on mind and body provides ample evidence of the ease with which critical authors slid between reference to modern science and reference to materialism. This was an extremely important part of the public context of science.29 When “psychology” or “mind and brain” appeared in the title of an article, authors usually gave the subject respectful attention, even if they were opposed to a natural science of mind. Authors engaged in debate over what kind of science of mind was right, not whether a science of mind, understood as true and systematic knowledge, was a proper goal. Modern commentary has by and large concentrated on authors who proved important to later scientific psychology—Alexander Bain, Spencer, and the physiological psychologists Laycock, William Benjamin Carpenter, and Lewes. Nevertheless, there were also mid-Victorian attempts to provide a different kind of psychology, a “science” appropriate for the immaterial essence in man. A clear-cut case is that of John Bernard Dalgairns, a Catholic apologist for a rational science of the soul. Prompted by the challenge of natural science, he argued for an alternative neoAristotelian science, founded on “natural reason” and with its subject the immortal and “omnipresent, co-ordinating, formative principle” of human nature. He thought that the arguments which he opposed had long been embedded in empiricist accounts of mind—accounts in which, as he wrote, the mind “may be called a receptacle, a sort of cloak-room

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for labelled luggage brought in by sense.” But he also recognized that new views in physiology and evolution contributed to “the struggle, the agony and the fierce white heat of modern thought.” For his part, Dalgairns reasserted belief, at once religious and philosophical, in the soul as an independent agent: “the object of consciousness is the soul’s own action. . . .”30 Such articles provide evidence in support of John Stuart Mill’s judgment that two “schools of philosophy,” of psychology, and of ethics in Britain—the idealist and the utilitarian, the a priori and the a posteriori— continued, in the 1850s and the 1860s, to structure public debate and divide opinion.31 It was not so much writing for or against the content of a science, whether it was physiological psychology or evolutionary theory, that guided public discussion, but irreconcilable differences over what sort of science or truth did justice to the purposes of man’s being. These debates did not separate out epistemology and moral philosophy, and writers perhaps generated the greatest heat in defense of ideal as opposed to utilitarian criteria of judgment. A number of authors in the periodicals found it natural to orient themselves by the coordinates of the two “schools” of thought. Indeed, the ready availability of these coordinates suggests that “conflict” is a historically accurate way of describing significant parts of the periodical debate. For example, a reviewer in the Catholic Dublin Review judged J. S. Mill’s thought tantamount to “nihilism” and “philosophically speaking—flippant.”32 Another kind of philosophical critique, or, rather, claim to demolish the whole enterprise of a naturalistic science of mind, appeared in the work of the Scottish metaphysician J. F. Ferrier. As Osler, the anonymous reviewer of Ferrier’s Institutes of Metaphysic, noted in 1855, the book “is one long chase of ‘psychology,’ which is finally done to death in an attempt to leap the chasm between Epistemology and Ontology [that is, in the attempt to derive an idealist metaphysics from the conditions of knowledge].” Though neither the book nor the review could have been very accessible to many, the reviewer’s key point, that knowledge of mind must begin with the “facts of consciousness,” and hence in some sense begin with psychology, was widely stated. As Osler observed, Ferrier’s “starting point is a true proposition, and one the truth of which he owes entirely to the Psychology he is hunting down. It is this, that there is no knowledge without self-consciousness;—that the object of knowledge is always the apparent object plus self.”33 This was the idealist position, which treated something called “self ” as known a priori, and it was the position which Mill and those who thought like him so opposed. All the same,

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acceptance of the definition of psychology as “the observation and generalisation of the facts of consciousness” cut across the two “schools.”34 Division of opinion was not usually about whether there could be a science of psychology, based on the facts of consciousness, but about whether this science must accept a “self ” preceding experience. One writer rightly noted that, “while all alike agree that the witness of consciousness must be received as final, there is a never ending dispute as to the facts to which it bears witness.”35 The discussion was philosophical but not necessarily remote, as language expressed emotive, concrete values. Thus, in the midst of dry language there was often a lively hint that viewing the mind in its physiological relations somehow shifted the balance against the self and repudiated the self ’s responsibility. Amos captured a sense of this: “Consciousness is a great word in the philosophy of Reid and Hamilton; in the eyes of Mr. James Mill it is a very little thing.”36 When philosophy referred to the moral will and the self, everyone, at some level, grasped that the very identity of what it is to be human was at stake. The writer in the highbrow literature who was most at pains to refute the underpinnings of the new physiologically informed science of mind was Unitarian rather than Catholic or Anglican. James Martineau’s anonymous 1860 article “Cerebral Psychology: Bain” was the occasion for a critique of the very principle of continuity in knowledge between natural and mental science. Martineau (whose authorship at least the cognoscenti recognized, and who was known to be an editor and a principal writer for the National Review, in which the article appeared) argued that the conditions of knowledge impose a division in bodies of knowledge: “Mental Science is Self-Knowledge: Natural Science, the knowledge of something other than Self.Their spheres are of necessity mutually exclusive. . . .” This argument presupposed an essentialist, religious view of the person, a view offended by intrusive physiological language in mental science, “a language of materialistic description, at once unphilosophical and repulsive.” Asking himself “What is ‘Psychology’?,” Martineau replied that, if articles currently appearing in the journals are right, it is to all intents and purposes identical with physiology. As a result, he complained, “we find ourselves entangled continually in mere quasi-psychology, which does not in the least speak to any thing within. . . .”37 His judgment, and something of his stridency, appeared in other articles. Everyone noted that medical writings led the way in identifying psychology with physiology. If it was Bain whom Mill and then later psychologists complimented for bringing the associationist science of

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mind into connection with new knowledge of the nervous system,38 it was medical writers, as earlier it had also been phrenologists, who provided the accessible, popular evidence. If there was truth in Martineau’s view that Bain’s “cold-blooded dissecting” did not really address the language and experience of the real struggling man, the same could not be said of the medical literature, which showed with graphic illustrations how drink, mesmerism, insanity, habit, and many, sometimes very strange, workings of the body affected mind and will.39 Writers repeated anecdotes about bizarre human conduct, suggesting that they thought this literature had a wide appeal. In earlier decades, the phrenologists had created a large audience for the view that minds, and especially individual mental capacities, are dependent on brains, and the mid-century medical literature re-expressed this basic theme. Interest in phrenology itself was also still evident in the late 1850s (and its influence clear, not least on Bain himself), but it was no longer at the center of reviews of mind and brain.40 The workings of body on mind was very much a preoccupation of the 1850s and the 1860s, prompted in the periodicals both by Bain’s books, which implied, in Mozley’s words, that “Psychology is the science of mind considered as a function of the material world,” and by the flood of medical works picturing the dependency of mind on body.41 As one anonymous reviewer of this medical literature observed: “Physiologists are encroaching on the domain of Psychology so fast that, if philosophers do not wake up and reform, they will soon find the best part of their science stolen from them, and themselves left behind by the age.”42 There was a sense of physiology advancing fast, not so much because a specific body of knowledge had become overwhelmingly authoritative, but because the new knowledge so obviously and colorfully challenged conventional representations of mind, spirit, will, and self. There was sometimes an extremely conservative response—like Simpson’s—but more typical was a temperate articulation of middle ground. The literature of this middle ground shaped psychology by debating the nature and possibility of knowledge of mind. Developments in physiology of the nervous system in the 1850s and the 1860s did not replace the analysis of mental content, however much physiology directed comment. Indeed, in many respects, the language of psychology continued to be much closer to the language of philosophy than to the language of physiology. Physiology, after all, was at this time little able to give a concrete empirical account of the relation between any particular psychological event and any particular nervous process. As

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the career of the journal Mind indicates, the separation of philosophy and psychology belongs to a later period.43 A Literature of Reassurance

Mid-Victorian philosophy of mind in the periodicals perpetuated the debate between idealists and empiricists in British culture. The new nervous physiology did not overthrow the idealist arguments or, at this time, add decisively to the authority of empiricist methods in the science of mind. Though many writers raised the bogey of materialism, they also, by and large, welcomed new scientific knowledge. Few writers thought, however, that a physiology of the brain could or would replace the science of mind. Indeed, in the periodical literature there was a great deal of what I will call expressive reassurance: a welcome for new truth framed as a claim that it makes no fundamental difference to values. This reassurance took a number of different forms. It is as if editors and their authors took it for granted that the public would welcome being told that, though knowledge changes, values do not. To a degree, what is here called reassurance, might, from a more critical perspective, be called complacency; after all, the new knowledge, as the twentieth century was to show, had the potential for some very radical arguments about human nature. For the Victorians, the implications of the reassurance were sometimes straightforwardly religious—that science does not question Christian truths— while at other times they appear to have been moral and social—that science does not threaten, let alone precipitate changes in, the established patterns of obligation and responsibility. The reassurance was another expression of the issues at stake in the rhetoric about materialism. How much periodical editors actively encouraged this theme of reassurance, fearing for reputation and sales, remains a question. The philosophical center of reassurance was the claim that a change of view about the origin of a value does not change the value.This became one of the tenets of positivism as a theory of knowledge. In the 1870s, it was scientific naturalists who honed the argument that new beliefs about evolution or physiology do not undermine morality. Leslie Stephen’s review, “Darwinism and Divinity,” gave it classic expression in 1872, but it also surfaced on a number of occasions where the physiological underpinning, rather than the evolutionary origin, of mind was the issue.44 It appeared, for example, in the published version of W. K. Clifford’s lecture to working men on “Body and Mind,” an aggressive attack on religious sensibility. His position appeared simple and uncompromising: “mind is the

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reality or substance of that which appears to us as brain-action. . . . [There] is no room for ghosts.” He also asserted:“It seems to me that I find nothing in myself which is not accounted for when I describe myself as a stream of feelings such that each of them is capable of a faint repetition, and that when two of them have occurred together the repetition of the one calls up the other, and that there are rules to which the resuscitated feeling calls up its fellows.” To many readers, this must have sounded as if Clifford straightforwardly denied any notion of self as an entity and hence of self as a value. But Clifford went on immediately to deny that science destroys values or sensibility. He concluded, moreover, that science makes for ethical progress not dissolution: “healthy emotions are felt about facts and not about phantoms.”45 The naturalistic view described “healthy” emotions and moral views as facts of nature not facts of a transcendent self. There were real differences of opinion about this—about the constitution of personality. Neither Stephen nor Clifford showed any sensitivity to the possibility that changing the account of the origin of facts or values changes the facts or values. To put it another way, they did not imagine that the stories told about the origin of values were part of those values. It was not that there was a general blindness to the symbolic content of language, since it could be understood that the “words materialism and spiritualism . . . [are] the symbolism of party creeds, round which all kinds of prejudices and malignant feelings . . . found it convenient to rally.”46 Assuredly, symbolism was more often seen in the writing of others than in the author’s own writing. Scientific naturalists like Stephen or Clifford, however, by virtue of the very point they wished to make about the authority of facts, became less sensitive to the extra-empirical reference of language. There are other examples. A writer on “Knowledge and Feeling,” William Smith, who defended the practice of psychology as a form of mental philosophy, observed: “The sentiment of moral responsibility is safe enough whatever betides. Let us look at the facts of which it springs.”47 Amos, aiming to refute the accusation of “cold-blooded” leveled against the associationist analysis of mind, wrote: “This absolute character of the feelings is, or is supposed to be, taken away, if they are resolved into simpler elements. But nothing appears plainer than that describing the origin of a feeling cannot take it away or destroy its distinctive peculiarities.”48 A second pattern of reassurance appeared where writers welcomed everything that scientists or medical men were able to show as true about the physiological relations of mind, but claimed that, the deeper the new science went, the more it confirmed the untenability of materialism.

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A reviewer of Henry Maudsley’s book The Physiology and the Pathology of the Mind, which unambiguously promoted medical physiology as the route to psychology, responded with simple skepticism: “. . . all that we have so far learned does not put us into a position to make any assertion whatever as to the intimate or essential nature of mind.”49 This clearly left open the possibility of belief in an essential nature. Another observer even claimed that progress in science, far from supporting materialism, was leading to a reassertion of mind-body dualism: “What is within consciousness, physiology cannot account for; what belongs to physiology, consciousness cannot account for.”50 When this was written in 1870, the author, the Edinburgh philosopher Henry Calderwood, had to hand passages from Huxley and Tyndall that revealed that, whatever their reputations as enfants terribles, they too recognized limits to what science can explain.51 Calderwood therefore confidently and optimistically asserted “the high place of mental philosophy, as an agent for dealing with the great problems of existence,” alongside and in tandem with mental physiology.52 In a comparable way, Mozley professed to find philosophy liberated by science since, as he argued, once people have got used to the idea that “there is no such single secret of nature [e.g., the secret of life] . . . philosophy is free again” to return to its true calling, our search for the unity in existence. Philosophy should not be distracted, he claimed, by particular empirical problems, such as whether the brain relates to mind in this or that way. Rather, since philosophers search for unity, they will transcend the mind-body question: “All true philosophy seeks . . . to be universal, and to contemplate the universe as a whole possessed of an intrinsic unity. Hence all true philosophy must assume that the dualism of mind and matter is only an apparent dualism. . . .”53 The end of his article pointed in the direction of his hopes, toward the reassertion of the innate character of personality, implicitly identified with a soul. As Mozley’s conclusion indicates, this pattern of argument, which welcomed physiological approaches to mind because they freed philosophy for its proper tasks, often had idealist and religious roots. The emerging agreement in these relatively broad-minded reviews, that mental science could and would investigate the facts as it found them, was also an agreement that natural science, by itself, presents a one-sided view of the world. This is evident in the repeated use of what may be the most serviceable of all expressions in the English language for doubting that science can ever fully satisfy: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” David Masson’s praise for Bain’s work, which led him to quote what was already a cliché, hinged

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around his view that Bain had not ignored major dimensions of the mind. “The author is the very man to reply on the spot, by requesting to have one of these things [i.e., these ‘more things’] named. . . .”54 He and others thought it was precisely Bain’s contribution to the progress of psychology to have shown that the empiricist analysis of mind could deal with aspects of human nature—the body, or the spontaneous activity of mind—which it had previously ignored. Masson, whose primary interest was literature, had the opportunity to contribute to the shaping of psychology in the periodicals. His anonymous 1856 review of Bain showed willingness to take a long and sober look at new approaches to mind and not to be afraid of empiricist argument about human nature. But when, in 1859, he became the first editor of Macmillan’s Magazine, a shilling monthly publishing on a broad range of topics, there was no special emphasis on psychological topics, though he did publish on laughter, dreams, and character.55 Indeed, though the question needs more research, no periodical or editor appears to have picked out psychological issues for special emphasis. If this is the case, it may confirm the view taken in this chapter, that “psychology” did not denote a subject in its own right but rather an open-ended set of themes and sensibilities, which the periodicals were, only to a degree, shaping into definable areas of interest. Authors commonly used Shakespeare’s lines to express support for science while intimating that the conditions of knowledge point to something beyond, something in harmony with intuitions of the sacred:“Inductive science . . . will never be able to put its finger on that which is before, and above, and beyond all induction, viz., the mind of the human investigator, with all its innate and ineradicable instincts, and the kindred mind of the Divine Creator, with its exhaustless riches of primordial types.”This comment, we may note, appeared in a highly positive review of Laycock’s Mind and Brain, a book systematically developing mental science in the form of a physiological psychology. The same anonymous reviewer, adding a populist tinge, referred to “a higher wisdom than mere professional acuteness and dexterity”—a rejection of deference to expertise could also be read into Shakespeare. The reviewer praised Laycock because, though a doctor and arguing from physiological knowledge, he also acknowledged the higher feelings and the aspirations that sustain a search for “Final Causes.” In the reviewer’s opinion, “the agreeableness of this doctrine [of Final Causes] to the natural instincts of a healthy human mind is obvious.” The reviewer dismissed science as “dreary” only when scientists fail to start “with a full faith in their own soul and its God-begotten instincts. . . .”56

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Reassurance was the explicit theme of Francis Power Cobbe’s study of “unconscious cerebration” in Macmillan’s Magazine, published under Masson’s successor, George Grove. Drawing extensively on Carpenter’s ideas, she cited many colorful instances of unconscious mental life in order to draw as sharply as possible the distinction between voluntary and involuntary action. She cultivated “a vivid sense of the separation” which, she believed, exists between the unconscious dimension and our “conscious personality.” Thus science, she concluded, confirms the existence of the soul: “we may attain the certainty that whatever be the final conclusions of science regarding our nature, the one which we have most dreaded, if reached at last, will militate not at all against the hope, written on the heart of the nations, by that Hand which writes no falsehoods. . . .”57 Similarly, though some years earlier, a review of a popular book on physiology and psychology carefully concluded that knowledge of the brain does not infringe “on the prerogatives of the immaterial spirit.”58 Such literature involved setting science in a framework of spiritual truth.The ways were legion. Sometimes an article embraced an apparently secular discourse of mental science only to return at the end, and in a different voice, in order to signal a higher truth. Smith’s long study of “Knowing and Feeling” in the early 1870s was at pains to reject belief in the will as an essential force of the soul. It included a description of the will as a relation between different elements of consciousness to which the most committed supporter of J. S. Mill could not have taken exception: “My position as a psychologist is clear. If we are speaking of action, will is the relation between thought and feeling, between a state of consciousness and some movement. To describe this relation as being free is unintelligible language.” Nevertheless, Smith concluded by asking the reader: “Do you wish that this ever-varying and progressive movement of thought and feeling wells forth arbitrarily from your own mind?” And he answered: “It seems that all our lines of thought bring us from the natural to the supernatural, bring us to that Absolute Being and Power on which all nature rests.”59 To ask for an understanding of the body’s capacity for thought, he wrote, “is to approach the problem of creation.”60 He did not reconcile an empiricist psychology and faith in a transcendent power, but, at the end of his study, simply changed voice. In a similar way, a much less intellectually ambitious review of medical anecdotes about the amazing ways body and habit regulate the mind launched without warning into an argument for the immortality of the soul, based on the claim that “none of our acquisitions [to memory] are ever lost.”61 The evidence is that many authors on mind and brain accepted a religious sensibility as the starting

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point, and they assumed their readers did the same. Dalgairns even observed an uneasy tone in attempts by scientists confidently to assert the advance of knowledge over the soul, and he claimed that “the modern sceptic in philosophy always writes like a man whose conscience is not quite at rest.”62 The 1850s and the 1860s were especially rich in the articulation of a religious natural philosophy of mind and brain drawing on a language relating mental and physical “forces.” The intellectual background to this was that physical scientists demonstrated what the periodical literature (and initially some physical scientists themselves) knew as “the correlation of force” just when liberal opinion came to an agreement that mental science could not continue to ignore the relation of mind to brain. A number of authors took the step of asking what the new physical insights meant for understanding mind and brain.63 Some even aspired to show, in a way intended to sustain rather than undermine faith, that the science of forces explained how mind relates to brain. The arguments cut more than one way, however, as the variety of discussion in the journals makes clear. One source of this variety was the vagueness of the notion of force in the general periodicals, even in articles by scientifically educated authors.64 The physicists’ precise articulation of the principle of the conservation of energy did not begin to reach non-specialist audiences till the end of the 1860s, and even then it transferred very imperfectly.65 But at least one writer noted that the principle of conservation appeared to rule out mental agency as a cause in the physical world, and that this put reference to the relationship between states of mind and body in a most awkward position. Thomas Martin Herbert, the anonymous reviewer of “Mind and the Science of Energy” in 1874, emphasized that the principle of conservation allows of no exceptions. The notion that mind is a “force” or that a non-material mind can interact with a material body must, he thought, therefore be false. But, far from reaching materialist or determinist conclusions, Herbert expressed confidence that the question of mind and brain was leading to the demise of “the coarser theories of materialism entertained in the past.”66 The source of this particular confidence, or reassurance, was a widely held conviction about the condition of all knowledge: “our knowledge even of the material world is a knowledge of states of consciousness.”67 Like Calderwood earlier, Herbert pointed out that not even Huxley or Tyndall claimed to make the passage from a physics of the brain to the facts of consciousness. Moreover, he went on, in those passages where

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Huxley did appear to provide a materialist account of mind—as in his statement that “consciousness . . . is an expression of the molecular changes which take place in the nervous matter which is the organ of consciousness”—his expression was actually extremely vague.68 Thus, Herbert felt free to argue that scientists as well as their critics accepted that we know states of consciousness not material entities. What the review did not then go on to say was that, whereas Mill or Huxley left the epistemological argument there, using it to escape from the accusation of materialism or from the bottomless pit of metaphysics, other writers used it to slip into an idealist and indeed religious conception of nature. There was a literature lending support to idealist conclusions drawn from the facts of consciousness. It pointed out to readers that what they knew as the external, material world, they first experienced as external in the sensation of resistance to touch or movement. It described this sensation as the consciousness of a force. Empiricists like Spencer and Bain, as well as idealists, argued that force not matter is primary in our knowledge of externality. Some authors, like the physiologist Carpenter and the philosopher Martineau (both of whom were Unitarians), went further. They argued that not only do we have consciousness of the resisting force of the external world as a response to our own activity, but that the primary consciousness which makes knowledge possible is consciousness of “will force.” The argument re-asserted the absolute centrality in being human of the agency of an essential self. It also drew on a rich tradition in natural philosophy comparing the activity of the human will in achieving its purposes with the Will of God in sustaining the order of nature. Carpenter, in particular, thought that new developments in the physical science of forces, which indicated the unity and integration of nature, suggested new ways to unlock the puzzle of the “correlation” of mind and body. Significantly, both Carpenter and Martineau expounded their views, in the early 1870s, in direct response to the furor about materialism in science.69 They were determined to show that a science aware of the conditions that make its own knowledge possible could not be materialistic. Elements of the same natural philosophy cropped up elsewhere, even in such a dry and noncommittal review as “Mind and the Science of Energy.” The article’s conclusion hinted at belief in a universe of energy guided by intelligent law: “Are psychical phenomena special manifestations of the unseen energy which we cannot help thinking indispensable to every physical change?”70 This was not writing to thrill a religious sensibility. In other hands, however, this kind of natural philosophy opened up the exciting prospect

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of links between natural science, intuitions of a higher nature, and belief in a God-given self or “personality.”71 In one of his early discussions of the correlation of mind and brain, Carpenter, even though in this case writing in a medical journal, treated the consciousness of active will as crucial to our sense of the personality of God and man in equal measure.72 When Martineau accused Bain of the “forfeiture of all fineness and sharpness in . . . delineations of spiritual facts,” he thought that the crucial mistake lay with Bain’s account of activity. Whereas Bain located in the nervous system the source of activity through which we learn of the external world, Martineau determined that this activity is itself mind: “call it volition, or call it spontaneous energy, it is the putting forth of personal causation,” and, he indicated, this energy is “Self.”73 If the epistemological argument, which traced the idea of externality to consciousness of force, was to some degree esoteric, the link that it sustained between an enchanted view of the self and an enchanted view of nature was not. As Martineau wrote: “The universe, it is admitted, appears to men in simple times, to young eyes still, to poets in all times, as Living Objective Will. But it is supposed that, with the aids of Science, we learn something better. . . . But no fresh way of access to the cognition of Power is opened to us.”74 The periodical literature on science was replete with a language of “force,” “energy,” and “will,” which conjured up a feeling for correspondence between the life and purposes of self and of the eternal embedded in nature. One of the points in Simpson’s attack on materialism was that human existence would be meaningless without belief in a spiritual world, without something beyond material civilization: “unless we believe that each soul is treasured up in the world of spirits . . . we must own that the whole world in retrospect has been a failure. . . .”75 But many of the writers on the sciences he attacked equally fervently believed that man does not live by bread alone. In their more liberal view, however, they concluded that as the conditions of knowledge become properly understood, so people will find reassurance that the science of mind does not destroy a religious sensibility. In a review of theological literature, Osler wrote: “In its psychological essence, cause means Will . . . the notion of force is an artifice made by expelling the spiritual element, or neglecting it, for mere purposes of computation and prediction of phenomena.”76 Though the gratuitous “mere” revealed some condescension toward science, this was a noteworthy assertion of the extent to which a language about “force” sustained a discourse reconciling the universal truth of religion and the particular truths of science. Mozley made a similar point:

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“For the essential characteristic of science is, that it submits to be partial for the sake of clearness,” and he went on to give “force,” which he thought has only a “partial” meaning in science, a spiritual meaning in the fullness of experience. The end result was that he characterized matter as spirit’s means of communicating with spirit.77 Conclusion

In the first half of the century, physiology, phrenology, mesmerism, and the study of insanity had greatly heightened the consciousness of a wide range of people that brain is the organ of mind. Social, political, ethical, and religious concerns colored this consciousness. The emotional tone of the literature was strongly affected by allusion to materialism. All this continued in the decades after 1850, when the periodicals gave space to a wide range of articles on the connection of physiology and psychology. A reference to materialism often remained in the background of discussion of psychological topics, confirming the extent to which “materialism” was the heading under which public disquiet about science found expression. Authors for, as well as against, empiricist accounts of mind had this disquiet in mind. While it is certainly right that almost no one writing in the periodicals, and certainly not Huxley or Tyndall, accepted the label “materialist’ as a self-description, the label did not go away.78 As Adrian Desmond suggested in relation to Darwin’s distancing of himself, in public, from materialism in the 1830s and the 1840s, this had a lot to do with radical politics; this distancing, it appears, continues to be relevant to the periodical literature in the 1850s and the 1860s.79 At the same time, I would suggest, writers on new approaches to the mind rightly sensed that these approaches contained the intellectual potential for unsettling views far beyond anything that they themselves wanted to countenance. Authors debated the nature of a science of psychology, shaping a discourse about psychology as part of a public, non-specialist culture. This was not a debate about the effects of a new science on values. It was, rather, an open-ended debate, which did not reach closure, on the relation of facts and values, of the relation of knowledge to judgment. Authors debated psychology as a debate about the nature of science itself. If many Victorians wrote about what they called “mental science,” the “science” in what they wrote was a combination of new physiology and old moral philosophy. Physiology, medicine, mesmerism, and phrenology pushed to the forefront of the literature the puzzle of the mind-body relation, a puzzle

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for writers and readers of all levels of sophistication and of all persuasions. Opinion lay somewhere between the extremes of support and antagonism to science, represented at one end by Clifford’s claim that science “is all human knowledge which can rightly be used to guide human conduct,” and at the other end by Simpson’s accusation about “these men of the pen, these journalists and scientific persons . . . [each of which] in place of the banished god . . . endeavours to set up a hero-worship, and adroitly essays to smuggle himself and his friends into the vacant throne.”80 The bulk of the periodical literature welcomed science—for who, committed to writing a coherent article, would deny what all admitted was a search for truth? But the welcome was for a science understood in the right way. This was the crux of the matter. What understanding science aright meant divided opinion into the two “schools” of thought that Mill and his opponents discerned. This division was conspicuous in the literature shaping a science of psychology, since the presumption, or denial, of “self ” anterior to consciousness, went straight to the core of feeling about the nature, value, and meaning of human existence. Writers struggled with these great issues as they reacted to the evidence that brain is the organ of mind. There are limits, however, to analysis of the periodical literature in terms of the two (a priori, a posteriori) schools of thought. Although many natural scientists lauded empiricist forms of argument in relation to their expert scientific work, they also accepted a priori conceptions of the “self ” and idealist views about the conditions of knowledge. Carpenter, a prominent scientist and writer on mind and body, is an example. The debate about psychology created division by focusing attention on different views about the origins of “self.” In the periodicals, these divisions ramified into inconclusive discussion of the nature of psychology as an area of knowledge. All participants, however, responded to a pressing realization that physiology and medicine were saying something about the mind that would not go away and could not be ignored. The result was a large literature of reassurance: writers fell over themselves to uphold the view that fundamental values would remain the same. The reassurance achieved particularly distinctive expression in the representation of “will force” as the irreducibly active self, the core of the personality of man and of God alike. The articles prompt other, perhaps speculative, reflections. Literature on mind and brain lay along a line between extremely abstract discussion—which it is hard to believe more than a few specialists digested— and colorful anecdotes of individual cases. Who actually were the readers

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of different kinds of text? This is a general problem for any historian of the periodical press, but there seems to be a special problem in finding answers, which we cannot prejudge, to the question as to whether and how readers read what may now seem long, technical and dry texts. Certainly, readers bought periodicals containing these texts. Some articles appear to have functioned as the means of communication between specialists, confirming that this period did not have much of the academic specialization that was later evident. In retrospect, it is possible to see the periodicals as having a function which academic disciplinary journals later took over. Other articles showed some awareness of just how dull mental philosophy might be and strove to bring topics alive. This reached an extreme in a review, in epistolary form, of some highly difficult topics in mental philosophy, where the author wrote: “I frantically demand what is what? I turn a mental somersault to clear my vision.”81 Many readers must surely have felt some sympathy with this sentiment and found relief in stories about individuals. But yet other authors simply went ahead and wrote as if there was no question that readers would want to digest a serious and lengthy analysis. Of course, to take this further, a much more refined appreciation of the audience for particular journals is needed. “Psychology” proved its value as a heading under which writing with all manner of content, and with every degree of accessibility, could proceed as part of a common debate. This debate, which was a discourse in the periodicals and not some defined area or discipline, formed psychology. As a periodical literature, psychology existed equally as an invitation to readers to reflect on their own mental world and conduct and to familiarize themselves with new knowledge. In this sense, psychology was not just the most accessible of sciences, it was a science constituted in the selfunderstandings of readers. Writers sometimes sharply disagreed about the intellectual grounding of knowledge of human nature. There were ways, even so, in which a shared rhetoric bound them, and their readers, into a community. It is striking, for example, that the periodical literature on psychology, as on science more widely, related forms of thought to national character and tradition. Several authors began reviews with observations about what was distinctively English and what was distinctively Scottish or German in ideas.82 Clichés about national character and culture came readily to hand: “Atheism . . . is a monstrosity which is produced, to any considerable extent, only in France,” while to have “written intelligible books, [is] a somewhat rare thing in Germany.”83 From Mill’s famous opening welcome

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to Bain—”the sceptre of Psychology has decidedly returned to this island”—through to Dalgairns—”I do not think that the science of England has as yet committed itself to the view that the body is a machine”—there was a marked preoccupation with national intellectual identity.84 Perhaps this was in part a simple, conventional way for author to identify with reader and hence to persuade reader to identify with author. The widespread use of the topos, however, makes it clear that the Victorians took questions of science, ethics, and religion, however abstractly formulated, to be part of a national political life. The subject matter of mental science, or psychology, was ostensibly universal, yet writers used a language implying that success in reaching truth was local (or, as they might have said, national or racial). The literature made claims about the universals of the human mind, often on the basis of claims about what could in principle be observed within each and every human consciousness. Yet language differentiated rather than unified peoples. Writers clung to causal stories about the national character of claims to truth, even while they held that truth transcends the conditions of its origin. This leads to a final observation: the periodical literature discussed here was largely empty of attempts to think using social categories. There was, to be sure, a general and heart-felt concern with what science implied for individual moral responsibility and social order, but this did not foster sociological, as opposed to psychological, ethical, and religious, ways of thought. It was rare for authors on physiology and psychology to point to the social dimension as a factor in what they were seeking to explain. One apparent exception, as I have indicated, was national character, but writers described even this character, more often than not, as if it were “natural” rather than “social.” There were, to be sure, some particular exceptions, for example, Smith’s observation on freedom of the will: “That sentiment of freedom we have to act upon in relation to our fellow creatures has a social origin. It did not spring from any theory about the freedom of the will. It sprang from [the child’s] resistance to control.”85 He did not, however, develop this assertion. The overall result was that the shaping of psychology in the periodicals contributed to an extremely individualistic culture. Expression constituted questions of truth and moral judgment as questions to be decided by individual minds thinking rightly.86 Equally, discussion of psychology assumed that the subject was individual minds. It was given to “science” to transmute the work of individual minds into the work of communal truth. The alembic of this transformation for psychology was the periodicals themselves.

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Acknowledgments

Warm thanks to Geoffrey Cantor and Rhodri Hayward, who helped me obtain sources and stimulated many ideas. The chapter was written with support from the EU INTAS project 9-30361. Notes 1. Asylum Journal of Mental Science (1856–57, thereafter Journal of Mental Science); Henry Holland, Chapters on Mental Physiology (Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans, 1852); William Benjamin Carpenter introduced “unconscious cerebration” in Principles of Human Physiology, with Their Chief Applications to Psychology, Pathology, Therapeutics, Hygiene, and Forensic Medicine, fourth edition (John Churchill, 1853), p. 811; W. B. Carpenter, “The Physiology of the Will,” Contemporary Review 17 (1871): 192–217; Henry Maudsley, The Physiology and Pathology of the Mind (Macmillan, 1867); J. C. Prichard introduced “moral insanity” in A Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind (Gilbert & Piper, 1835), p. 4; for “lesion of the will,” J.-E.-D. Esquirol, Mental Maladies: A Treatise on Insanity, Eng. transl. 1845 (reprint: Hafner, 1965), p. 320. 2. [ J. M. Capes], “Noble on the Mind and the Brain,” Rambler 21 (1858), p. 354. 3. On mid-Victorian physiological psychology, see M. J. Clark, “The Rejection of Psychological Approaches to Mental Disorder in Late-nineteenth-Century British Psychiatry,” in Madhouses, Mad-doctors, and Madmen, ed. A. Scull (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981); E. Clarke and L. S. Jacyna, Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts (University of California Press, 1987); Kurt Danziger, “MidNineteenth-Century British Psycho-Physiology: A Neglected Chapter in the History of Psychology,” in The Problematic Science, ed.W.Woodward and M. Ash (Praeger, 1982); Anne Harrington, Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought (Princeton University Press, 1987); L. S. Hearnshaw, A Short History of British Psychology 1840–1940 (Methuen, 1964); L. S. Jacyna, “The Physiology of Mind, the Unity of Nature, and the Moral Order in Victorian Thought,” British Journal for the History of Science 14 (1981): 109–132; idem., “Somatic Theories of Mind and the Interests of Medicine in Britain, 1850–1879,” Medical History 26 (1982): 233–258; idem., Lost Words: Narratives of Language and the Brain 1825–1926 (Princeton University Press, 2000); Roger Smith, “The Background of Physiological Psychology in Natural Philosophy,” History of Science 11 (1973): 75–123; idem., Inhibition: History and Meaning in the Sciences of Mind and Brain (University of California Press, 1992); Robert M.Young, Mind, Brain, and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century: Cerebral Localization and Its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier (Clarendon, 1970). None of these sources focus on the literature in the general periodicals; for this see, Rick Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture 1850–1880 (Oxford University Press, 2000). 4. William Smith, “Knowing and Feeling: A Contribution to Psychology [Part I],” Contemporary Review 14 (1870), p. 342.

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5. William Smith, “Knowing and Feeling. Part II.—Some Further Discussion of the Will,” Contemporary Review 15 (1870), p. 425. 6. The identity of psychology is not seriously questioned in Rylance, Victorian Psychology, and coverage is partial. Edward S. Reed, From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Psychology from Erasmus Darwin to William James (Yale University Press, 1997), is open to the view that we do not know what psychology was at the beginning of the century, but his notion of the shaping of the field is also idiosyncratic and incomplete. Neither Rylance nor Reed take into account, for example, the argument that psychology originated in administrative, disciplinary practices: Nikolas Rose, The Psychological Complex: Social Regulation and the Psychology of the Individual (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985). Studies of literature and psychology interpret psychology as primarily concerned with the shaping of personal identity or selfhood, and accordingly they have focused on medical psychology and phrenology: Roy Porter, ed., Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (Routledge, 1997); Sally Shuttleworth, Charlotte Bronte and Victorian Psychology (Cambridge University Press, 1996); Helen Small, Love’s Madness: Medicine, the Novel, and Female Insanity, 1800–1865 (Clarendon, 1996); Jenny Bourne Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of the Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology (Routledge, 1988), pp. 27–70; Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth, eds., Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts 1830–1890 (Clarendon, 1998). Psychology and selfhood are also linked in histories of mesmerism and spiritualism. 7. Gillian Beer’s comments about Charles Edward Appleton’s search to make the Academy inclusive of intellectual culture are relevant here. Authority remained hard to establish precisely where boundaries were ill defined. See Beer’s chapter in the present volume. 8. These desiderata are spelled out in Jonathan R. Topham, “Scientific Publishing and the Reading of Science in Nineteenth-Century Britain: A Historiographical Survey and Guide to Sources,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 31 (2000): 559–612. 9. Harriet Ritvo (this volume) emphasizes this point. Also, many periodical articles subsequently appeared in books of collected essays (not infrequently from the periodical’s publisher), which often had multiple editions. For reasons of economy, I do not reference these reprints here. 10. “Biblical psychology,” the translated title of a book by F. Delitzsch, appeared in a brief literary notice in a Methodist journal: [W. B. Pope], London Quarterly Review 29 (1867): 225; “cerebral psychology” in [James Martineau], “Cerebral Psychology: Bain,” National Review 10 (1860): 500–521. 11. [Thomas Laycock], “Body and Mind,” Edinburgh Review 103 (1856), p. 444. There is a large but scattered literature on Laycock, including the following: M. Barfoot, ed., “To Ask the Suffrages of the Patrons.” Thomas Laycock and the Edinburgh Chair of Medicine, 1855 (Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 1995); Danziger, “MidNineteenth-Century British Psycho-Physiology”; A. Leff, “Thomas Laycock and the

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Cerebral Reflexes: a Function Arising from and Pointing to the Unity of Nature,” History of Psychiatry 2 (1991): 385–407; Smith, “Physiological Psychology.” 12. J. R. M. [Mozley], “Philosophy, Psychology, and Metaphysics,” North British Review, n.s., 14 (1870), p. 127. 13. The historiography of psychology is a complex topic which I do not propose to review here. For background and different views: Kurt Danziger, Naming the Mind: How Psychology Found Its Language (Sage, 1997); Gary Hatfield, “Remaking the Science of Mind: Psychology as Natural Science,” in Inventing Human Science, ed. C. Fox et al. (University of California Press, 1995); G. D. Richards, Mental Machinery. 1: The Origins and Consequences of Psychological Ideas from 1600 to 1850 (Athlone, 1992); Roger Smith, The Norton History of the Human Sciences (Norton, 1997). 14. R. M. Young, “The Role of Psychology in the Nineteenth-Century Debate on Man’s Place in Nature,” first published 1973, in Darwin’s Metaphor (Cambridge University Press, 1985); Mind, Brain, and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century. 15. For a particularly clear argument for continuity as opposed to dualism, in the same year as Darwin published, see [George Henry Lewes], “Voluntary and Involuntary Actions,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 86 (1859): 295–306. 16. Gillian Beer, “Parable, Professionalization, and Literary Allusion in Victorian Scientific Writing,” in Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford University Press, 1996); Alan Willard Brown, The Metaphysical Society: Victorian Minds in Crisis, 1869–1880 (Columbia University Press, 1947); F. M. Turner, “The Victorian Conflict between Science and Religion: A Professional Dimension,” first published 1978, reprinted in Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life (Cambridge University Press, 1993); R. M.Young, “The Fragmentation of the Common Context,” in Darwin’s Metaphor. 17. [ James Collier], “The Development of Psychology,” Westminster Review, n.s., 45 (1874), p. 378. The article was a eulogy of Spencer’s book The Principles of Psychology, second edition (Williams & Norgate, 1870–1872). 18. T. Dixon, “The Psychology of the Emotions in Britain and America in the Nineteenth Century: The Role of Religious and Antireligious Commitments,” Osiris, n.s., 16 (2001): 288–320. 19. [T. S. Osler], “Summary of Theology and Mental Philosophy,” National Review 1 (1855), p. 238. (The National Review was Unitarian in outlook.) These ideas, suggested to me by Rhodri Hayward, clearly require more research. 20. Smith, “Knowing and Feeling [Part I],” p. 343. 21. [Capes], “Noble on the Mind and the Brain,” p. 353. 22. [Anon.], “Dr. Laycock on Mind and Brain,” London Quarterly Review 14 (1860), p. 440. 23. See “Science. Meeting of the British Association at Belfast—(Wed., August 19. 1874),” Academy 6 (1874): 209–217; Tyndall reprinted his address as “The Belfast

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Address,” in Fragments of Science: A Series of Detached Essays, Addresses, and Reviews, eighth edition, vol. 2 (Longmans, Green, 1892); Thomas Henry Huxley, “On the Hypothesis that Animals Are Automata and Its History,” Fortnightly Review, n.s., 16 (1874): 555–580. For Tyndall, see John Brooke and Geoffrey Cantor, Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of Science and Religion (Clark, 1998), pp. 250–255; Bernard Lightman, “Scientists as Materialists in the Periodical Press: Tyndall’s Belfast Address,” this volume. On the automatism debate, see Francis Neary, Consciousness, Evolution and Morals: Some Critical Perspectives on a History of the Human Automatism Debate 1870–1910, Ph.D. thesis, Lancaster University, 1999. 24. Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 1985); Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late-Nineteenth-Century England (Virago, 1989); Graham Richards, “Edward Cox, the Psychological Society of Great Britain (1875–1879) and the Meanings of an Institutional Failure,” in Psychology in Britain: Historical Essays and Personal Reflections, ed. G. Bunn et al. (British Psychological Society, 2001); Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (University of Chicago Press, 1998). 25. [Richard Simpson], “The Morals and Politics of Materialism,” Rambler 18 (1856), pp. 452, 453. 26. Herbert Spencer, “The Study of Sociology,” Contemporary Review 19 (1872): 555–572, 701–718; 20 (1872): 307–326, 455–482; 21 (1872): 1–26; 21 (1873): 159–182, 315–334, 475–502, 635–651, 799–820; 22 (1873): 1–17, 165–174, 325–346, 509–532, 663–677; also published as vol. 5 in the International Scientific Series, The Study of Sociology (Henry S. King, 1873). 27. [Sheldon Amos], “Mr. Mill’s Analysis of the Mind,” Westminster Review, n.s., 36 (1869), pp. 152–153. 28. G. H. Lewes, “Spiritualism and Materialism,” Fortnightly Review, n.s., 19 (1876), p. 482. Also: [G. W. Child], “Physiological Psychology,” Westminster Review, n.s., 33 (1868), p. 42, where the reviewer referred to “the morbid dread of theological error.” 29. Darwin was the classic instance of a scientist fearful of the accusation. Lightman, “Scientists as Materialists,” indicates how critics thought (it may have been with a certain satisfaction) that Tyndall’s “Belfast Address” instantiated the materialism they had long thought implicit in science. Lightman also shows how, once used, the label legitimated any kind of criticism. The evidence of my chapter, however, rather goes against Lightman’s conclusion that religious writers understandably felt a need “to reclaim” the periodicals from science for religion; the articles discussed here tend to indicate the persistence of a religious framework in the literature on psychological questions. But this may suggest only that there were differences of context in talk about psychology and talk about natural science. 30. John Bernard Dalgairns,“On the Theory of the Human Soul,” Contemporary Review 16 (1870), pp. 20, 27, 19, 33, 40. This opinion was repeated in H. E. M. [H. E. Manning], “The Relation of the Will to Thought,” Contemporary Review 16 (1871): 468–479.

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31. [ J. S. Mill], “Bain’s Psychology,” Edinburgh Review 110 (1859), p. 289. Mill’s view lay behind his commitment of time to a large-scale refutation of the Scottish philosopher, Hamilton, and to bringing out an updated edition of his father’s analysis of the mind: John Stuart Mill, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, and of the Principal Questions Discussed in His Writings, first published 1865, third edition (Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1867); James Mill, Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1869). See also: [Amos], “Mill’s Analysis.” 32. R. E. G. [Guy], “Dr. M’Cosh’s ‘Intuitions of the Mind’ and ‘Examination of Mill’s Philosophy,’ ” Dublin Review 60 (1867), pp. 174, 184. 33. [Osler],“Summary of Theology,” pp. 242–243. Osler was reviewing James F. Ferrier, Institutes of Metaphysic:The Theory of Knowing and Being (Edinburgh:William Blackwood and Sons, 1854). For Ferrier’s earlier argument for a “philosophy of mind,” as opposed to a “science of mind” (which he also described by the word psychology): [ J. F. Ferrier], “An Introduction to the Philosophy of Consciousness,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 43 (1838): 187–201, 437–452, 784–791; 44 (1838): 234–244, 539–552; 45 (1839): 201–211, 419–430. 34. D. M. [David Masson], “Bain on the Senses and the Intellect,” Fraser’s Magazine 153 (1856), p. 218. 35. [Child], “Physiological Psychology,” p. 39. 36. [Amos], “Mill’s Analysis,” p. 163. 37. [Martineau], “Cerebral Psychology,” pp. 502, 506, 521. 38. Though Spencer, in The Principles of Psychology (Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans, 1855), as well as Bain, in The Senses and the Intellect (John W. Parker & Son, 1855) and The Emotions and the Will (John W. Parker & Son, 1859), linked association psychology and physiology, it was the latter and not the former who received notice in the periodicals in the 1850s. 39. [Martineau], “Cerebral Psychology,” p. 511. A number of reviews described the influence of body on mind: [Laycock], “Body and Mind”; [Anon.], “Mind and Brain,” British Quarterly Review 40 (1864): 441–449. 40. [Anon.], “Mind and Brain”; Alexander Bain, “Phrenology and Psychology,” Fraser’s Magazine 61 (1860): 692–708, continued as “The Intellectual Faculties According to Phrenology, Examined,” Fraser’s Magazine 63 (1861): 715–730. See also Roger Cooter, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 1984);Young, Mind, Brain, and Adaptation. 41. [Mozley], “Philosophy, Psychology, and Metaphysics,” p. 126. 42. [Anon.] “Mind and Brain,” p. 440. Compare [Martineau], “Cerebral Psychology,” p. 501.

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43. F. Neary, “A Question of ‘Peculiar Importance’: George Croom Robertson, Mind and the Changing Relationship between British Psychology and Philosophy,” in Bunn, Lovie, and Richards, Psychology in Britain. 44. Leslie Stephen, “Darwinism and Divinity,” Fraser’s Magazine, n.s., 5 (1872): 409–421. Compare, Lewes, “Spiritualism and Materialism,” p. 717: “Man does not cease to be a moral being because his remote ancestors were unmoral.” 45. W. K. Clifford, “Body and Mind,” Fortnightly Review, n.s., 16 (1874), pp. 734, 724–725, 735. The reference to “healthy” emotions indicates that Clifford was far from adopting the separation of facts and values that he appeared to be advocating; but this is the subject for another paper. For more on Clifford, see Gowan Dawson’s and Helen Small’s chapters in the present volume. The evidence of my discussion goes against Small’s view that rationalist writers before Clifford had hoped to defer applying empiricist thought to the sphere of ethics. 46. [W. B. Carpenter], “On the Relations of Mind and Matter,” British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review 10 (1852), p. 507. Compare Dalgairns, “Human Soul,” p. 30: “Words have a real meaning—a truth always forgotten by those who war against formulas, theological or otherwise.” 47. Smith, “Knowing and Feeling. Part II,” p. 430. Smith’s statement contrasts strongly with a contemporary literature on criminal law, which expressed considerable fear that new physiological views really were destroying responsibility as a value; see, Roger Smith, Trial by Medicine: Insanity and Responsibility in Victorian Trials (Edinburgh University Press, 1981). 48. [Amos], “Mill’s Analysis,” p. 177. 49. [Child], “Physiological Psychology,” pp. 57–58. 50. Henry Calderwood, “The Present Relations of Physical Science to Mental Philosophy,” Contemporary Review 16 (1871), p. 229.This article was Calderwood’s introductory lecture to students of moral philosophy, which explains his main theme—the defence of his discipline. 51. The same passage from Tyndall, confirmed by Huxley, was picked up by a number of periodicals: Calderwood, “Present Relations,” p. 231; [Thomas Martin Herbert], “Mind and the Science of Energy,” British Quarterly Review 69 (1874), p. 106; [A.B.; not A. Bain], “Darwinism and Religion,” Macmillan’s Magazine 24 (1871), p. 49. The passages in question were John Tyndall, [Address by the President of the Section. Mathematics and Physics], in Notices and Abstracts of Miscellaneous Communications of the Sections, Report of the Thirty-Eighth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science; Held at Norwich in August 1868 (John Murray, 1869), p. 5: “The passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable;” and T. H. Huxley, “Mr. Darwin’s Critics,” Contemporary Review 18 (1871), p. 464: “I know nothing whatever, and never hope to know anything, of the steps by which the passage from molecular movement to states of consciousness is effected. . . .” 52. Calderwood, “Present Relations,” p. 230.

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53. [Mozley], “Philosophy, Psychology, and Metaphysics,” pp. 116–117, 119. 54. [Masson], “Bain on the Senses,” p. 227. 55. Herbert Spencer, “The Physiology of Laughter,” Macmillan’s Magazine 1 (1860): 395–402; John Cunningham, “On Visions and Dreams,” Macmillan’s Magazine 5 (1862): 506–514; idem., “On Sleep and Dreams,” Macmillan’s Magazine 9 (1864): 473–481; Francis Galton, “Hereditary Talent and Character,” Macmillan’s Magazine 12 (1865): 157–166, 318–327. Also: T. Collyns Simon, “Can We See Distance?” Macmillan’s Magazine 13 (1866): 429–442. For Macmillan’s, see Alvin Sullivan, ed., British Literary Magazines: The Victorian and Edwardian Age, 1837–1913 (Greenwood, 1984), pp. 215–217. 56. [Anon.], “Dr. Laycock on Mind and Brain,” pp. 435, 447, 439, 437. The article reviewed Thomas Laycock, Mind and Brain: Or, the Correlations of Consciousness and Organization (Sutherland and Knox, 1860). 57. Francis Power Cobbe, “Unconscious Cerebration: A Psychological Study,” Macmillan’s Magazine 23 (1870), p. 37. She continued her discussion in “Dreams as Illustration of Unconscious Cerebration,” Macmillan’s Magazine 23 (1871): 512–523. 58. [W. H. Smith],“Psychological Inquiries,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 77 (1855), p. 420, reviewing Benjamin Collins Brodie, Psychological Inquiries: In a Series of Essays, Intended to Illustrate the Mutual Relations of the Physical Organisation and the Mental Faculties (Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans, 1854). 59. Smith,“Knowing and Feeling. Part II,” pp. 431, 439. Smith, however, did not accept Mill’s and Bain’s phenomenalism, but considered categories such as space and personality to be intrinsic to consciousness. 60. William Smith, “Knowing and Feeling. Part III.—Speculative Thought,” Contemporary Review 16 (1871), p. 405. 61. [Anon.], “Mind and Brain,” p. 459. 62. Dalgairns, “Human Soul,” p. 18. 63. Especially [W. B. Carpenter], “The Phasis of Force,” National Review 4 (1857): 359–394. See also Brooke and Cantor, Reconstructing Nature, pp. 262–268; G. Cantor, “W. R. Grove, the Correlation of Forces, and the Conservation of Energy,” Centaurus 19 (1976): 273–290; V. M. D. Hall, “The Contribution of the Physiologist William Benjamin Carpenter (1813–1885) to the Development of the Principle of the Correlation of Forces and the Conservation of Energy,” Medical History 23 (1979): 129–155. 64. Alexander Bain, “On the Correlation of Force in Its Bearing on Mind,” Macmillan’s Magazine 16 (1867), p. 380, concluded lamely: “There is thus a definite, though not numerically-stateable relation between the total of the physico-chemical forces and the total of the purely psychical processes.” This was initially a lecture to the Royal Institution. His reward was unusually scathing criticism: “The utmost his argument reaches to is that nervous action, with which mental action is in close relation, may

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sometimes fail from starvation!” (D. D. H. [Douglas Denin Heath], “Professor Bain on the Doctrine of the Correlation of Force in Its Bearing on Mind,” Contemporary Review 8 (1868), p. 78). 65. Graeme Gooday, in the present volume, draws attention to the role of William Thomson’s periodical articles and of Balfour Stewart and P. G. Tait’s 1875 book The Unseen Universe in spreading usage of the term “energy,” but he also notes how reviewers of Stewart and Tait still confused “force” and “energy.” See also Gooday’s discussion of Stewart’s attempt to square the mind-body question with the conservation of energy principle. 66. [Herbert], “Mind and the Science of Energy,” p. 127. Compare Clifford, “Body and Mind,” pp. 727–728. 67. [Herbert], “Mind and the Science of Energy,” p. 124. Compare T. H. Huxley, “On Descartes’ ‘Discourse Touching the Method of Using One’s Reason Rightly, and of Seeking Scientific Truth,’ ” Macmillan’s Magazine 22 (1870), p. 72: “Nor is our knowledge of anything we know or feel, more, or less, than a knowledge of states of consciousness,” a passage quoted by Calderwood (“The Relations,” p. 234, quoting from a reprint of the article in Huxley, Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews [London: Macmillan, 1871], p. 327) to show how recent science and mental philosophy are moving toward a reconciliation. See a similar expression in T. H. Huxley, “Bishop Berkeley on the Metaphysics of Sensation,” Macmillan’s Magazine 24 (1871), p. 159. 68. Huxley “Darwin’s Critics,” p. 464, as quoted, with differences, in [Herbert], “Mind and the Science of Energy,” p. 113. 69. W. B. Carpenter, “On Mind and Will in Nature,” Contemporary Review 20 (1872): 738–762; James Martineau, “Is There Any ‘Axiom of Causality’?” Contemporary Review 14 (1870): 636–644; idem., “The Place of Mind in Nature and Intuition in Man,” Contemporary Review 19 (1872): 606–623. There were related views in J. F. W. Herschel, “On the Origin of Force,” Fortnightly Review 1 (1865): 435–442. See R. Smith, “The Human Significance of Biology: Carpenter, Darwin and the Vera Causa,” in Nature and the Victorian Imagination, ed. U. Knoepflmacher and G. Tennyson (University of California Press, 1977). 70. [Herbert], “Mind and the Science of Energy,” p. 130. 71. “Personality” is from [Martineau], “Cerebral Psychology,” p. 520, and Martineau, “Axiom of Causality,” p. 643. 72. [Carpenter], “Relations of Mind and Matter.” 73. [Martineau], “Cerebral Psychology,” pp. 506, 510. 74. Martineau, “Axiom of Causality,” p. 644. 75. [Simpson], “Materialism,” p. 448. 76. [Osler], “Summary of Theology,” p. 492.The reference to a “psychological essence” related to the author’s belief that true spirituality in man had a “psychological” rather than a “rational” source.

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77. [Mozley], “Philosophy, Psychology, and Metaphysics,” pp. 122, 134, 137. 78. See Tess Cosslett, The “Scientific Movement” and Victorian Literature (Harvester, 1982); Cosslett, ed., Science and Religion in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1984). 79. Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London (University of Chicago Press, 1989). On the radical connections of spiritualist psychology, see Logie Barrow, “Socialism Is Eternity: The Ideology of Plebeian Spiritualists, 1853–1913,” History Workshop 9 (1980): 37–69; idem., Independent Spirits: Spiritualism and English Plebians, 1850–1910 (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986). 80. Clifford, “Body and Mind,” p. 736; [Simpson], “Materialism,” p. 449. 81. [Anon.; possibly W. B. Rands], “Samuel Bailey on Mental Philosophy,” Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine 26 (1855), p. 267. Bailey’s work, beginning with A Review of Berkeley’s Theory of Vision: A Critical Examination of Bishop Berkeley’s “Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision” (Ridgway, 1842), stimulated a number of reviews on knowledge and perception. In the 1860s see A. C. Fraser, “Berkeley’s Theory of Vision,” North British Review 41 (1864): 199–230; T. Collyns Simon, “Can We See Distance?” Macmillan’s Magazine 13 (1866): 429–442. 82. [Martineau], “Cerebral Psychology,” p. 500; [Masson], “Bain on the Senses,” pp. 212–214; [Mill], “Bain’s Psychology,” pp. 287–288; [Osler], “Review of Theology,” pp. 234–235. 83. [Anon.], “Mind and Brain,” p. 440; Alexander Bain, “A Historical View of the Theories of the Human Soul,” Fortnightly Review, n.s., 5 (1866), p. 62. 84. [Mill], “Bain’s Psychology,” p. 287; Dalgairns, “Human Soul,” p. 29. 85. Smith, “Knowing and Feeling. Part II,” p. 431. 86. The Academy took this to an extreme: the editor appears to have hoped that the periodical could have become the ideal individual voice, magically recreating society as if it were this ideal individual. See Gillian Beer’s chapter in the present volume.

6 Sunspots, Weather, and the Unseen Universe: Balfour Stewart’s Anti-Materialist Representations of “Energy” in British Periodicals Graeme Gooday We shall venture to begin this article by initiating an analogy between the social and the physical world in the hope that those more familiar with the former than with the latter may be led to clearly perceive what is meant by the word ENERGY in a strictly physical sense. Energy in the social world is well understood. When a man pursues his course undaunted by opposition, unappalled by obstacles, he is said to be a very energetic man. Such a man may in truth be regarded as a social cannonball. By means of his energy of character he will scatter the ranks of his opponents and demolish their ramparts. Nevertheless, such a man will sometimes be defeated by an opponent who does not possess a tithe of his personal energy. Now, why is this? The reason is that, although, his opponent may be deficient in personal energy, yet he may possess more than an equivalent in the high position which he occupies, and it is simply this position that enables him to combat successfully with a man of much greater personal energy than himself. —Balfour Stewart and J. Norman Lockyer, “The Sun as a Type of the Material Universe,” part II, Macmillan’s Magazine, 1868,1 p. 319

Beginning in the early 1860s, readers of British periodicals encountered the theme of “energy” in an increasingly diverse range of contexts. As is evident from the epigraph, “energy” had traditionally been a quality of character often ascribed to dynamic men2 to account for their levels of social achievement. In the 1850s, though, what Crosbie Smith has identified as the “North British” group of natural philosophers appropriated and redefined energy to be the abstract referent of two new interlinked physical laws. The law of universal energy conservation was used to analyze the exact interconversion of one form of energy into another in all physical processes, while the second law quantified the dissipative tendency of mechanical energy to escape irreversibly from human control into environmental heat. Although this new energy synthesis brought a clarifying unity to disparate areas of science and technology, Smith has shown how the dissipation law in particular also raised troubling

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theological questions for the North British group of Christian natural philosophers—and their diverse audiences—concerning the position of humanity in the universe.3 Many late-Victorian Christians accepted the eventual material extinction of humanity implied by the dissipation law—this was, after all, in accordance with scriptural doctrine. Yet the seemingly wasteful diffusion of the vast preponderance of stellar energy into empty space seemed to some—not least Alexander Herschel and William Thomson—to challenge convictions that divine providence had bestowed on the universe an efficient natural economy for the benefit of human kind.4 As I show below, however, the overriding concern of Balfour Stewart (1828–1887) in his periodical writings was the law of energy conservation, most especially its implications for the nature of human existence in the material world and the Christian afterlife. As a theistic anti-materialist, Stewart sought, beginning in the mid 1860s, to extend the “North British” interpretation of the conservation principle to explicate the mechanism of divine agency in the universe, and in the late 1860s he wrote several important articles for the periodical press on this topic. Stewart’s pursuit of this agenda acquired greater urgency in the wake of a Belfast address of 1874 in which John Tyndall characterized physiological operations of life simply as the perpetual transformation and redistribution of energy operating under the constraint of the conservation law. Working with Peter Guthrie Tait on The Unseen Universe (1875), Stewart sought to discredit accounts (such as Tyndall’s) that appropriated the principle of energy conservation to characterize organic life merely as the interconversion of gravitational, chemical, and kinetic energies leaving no scope for the exercise of the soul or free will.5 Tyndall’s reductionism was just one of a series of contentious “readings” of the new energy synthesis in the decades that followed the public appearance of the North British synthesis. Early on, the North British theorists had sought to counter heterodox interpretations by presenting “authoritative” accounts of the subject to the widest possible audiences through the medium of the general periodical. In 1862, William Thomson of the University of Glasgow and Peter Guthrie Tait of Edinburgh University wrote a piece on “Energy” for the pious monthly Good Words. This criticized accounts that referred not to the conservation of energy but rather to “conservation of force,” a term they associated with “inconvenience and error.”6 This piece stimulated a variety of responses, inspiring the aspirant engineer James Alfred Ewing to become a disciple of

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Thomson while driving John Tyndall into a long-running dispute with Tait over who was the true “discoverer” of the conservation principle.7 The topic that concluded Thomson and Tait’s piece for Good Words was revisited in an article Thomson wrote later that year for Macmillan’s Magazine: “The Age of the Sun’s Heat.” As Smith and Burchfield have noted, Thomson used considerations of energy conservation and dissipation to try to place an upper limit on the longevity of the solar orb in order to challenge Darwin’s geology-based chronology for natural selection. For our purposes, this widely read article also added to the reasons for astronomers, physicists, and even meteorologists to focus their observational and journalistic activities on the sun.8 In the periodical writings of Balfour Stewart and Norman Lockyer (1836–1928) discussed in this chapter, however, the significance of the sun was not simply that it was the principal source of energy that sustained terrestrial life. More important for them were the periodic variations in the sun’s luminosity that provided the evidential key to unlocking energetic transformations across the cosmos. In their piece for Macmillan’s Magazine in summer 1868, “The sun as a type of the material universe,” they first sought to interrelate planetary motions, sunspot cycles and terrestrial weather patterns in a study collectively entitled “cosmical meteorology.” This utilitarian project to establish an astronomical foundation for longterm weather forecasting shared with Stewart’s widely read contemporary textbooks a concern to show the explanatory power of energy theory in uniting disparate branches of physics.9 Nevertheless, this chapter’s examination of his periodical writing and textbooks reveals that Stewart, a Christian Scot and a close friend of Tait, was no mere passive popularizer of the North British energy synthesis. I show below how Stewart introduced the novel principle of “delicacy” in the 1868 Macmillan’s Magazine piece to explain how the will of an intelligent agent could initiate an energy transmutation without breaching the law of conservation. His theistic corollary that the cosmic ubiquity of such “delicacy” furnished evidence of divine agency was later deployed in the anti-materialist arguments in Stewart and Tait’s Unseen Universe (1875)—albeit a move notably not sanctioned by William Thomson.10 Previous studies have focused on Stewart’s priority disputes with Robert Kirchhoff over the equivalence of absorption and emission spectra during the 1850s, on Stewart’s observations of sunspots at Kew Observatory from 1859 to 1870, and on his Professorship of Natural Philosophy at Owen’s College Manchester up to his death in 1887.11 This

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chapter shows how Stewart sought concurrently to gain a wider audience for his Christian “cosmic” physics through such diverse periodicals as the Intellectual Observer, the North British Review, Macmillan’s Magazine, and Nature. I show how Stewart drew upon these periodical writings in his contribution to The Unseen Universe, and responded (with Tait) to criticisms in the periodical literature, especially those of W. K. Clifford. Finally, I show how two pieces that Stewart wrote for the Contemporary Review in 1882 and 1884 on the role of energy in sustaining the afterlife were a direct response to the debates surrounding The Unseen Universe and the indifferent success of cosmical meteorology. To explain Stewart’s changing public representations of antimaterialist energy physics, I examine his successive activities as magnetician, meteorologist, and professor of physics and the alliances he built up with P. G. Tait, and Norman Lockyer. I also illustrate the important role of publisher Alexander Macmillan in supporting the literary work of all three men: he commissioned Stewart and Lockyer’s collaborative work in 1867–68, financed the innovative ventures of Macmillan’s Magazine and Nature, and published many editions of The Unseen Universe. It might be tempting for readers to analyze the fate of Stewart’s projects in terms of the energetic analogy he deployed in his 1868 Macmillan’s Magazine paper. From an early age Stewart had somewhat “independent” views on religious matters, and these evidently led to frequent disputes at home.12 In adult life his strong personal convictions brought him into further controversies in which his self-declared energetic “vitality” proved insufficient to “scatter the ranks” of such powerful opponents as Edward Sabine, president of the Royal Society, and Robert Scott, Stewart’s later successor as Director of Kew Observatory. The work of Stewart and Lockyer reveals an interesting disanalogy between energy as a fallible and impermanent quality of character and energy construed as a quantity infallibly conserved throughout the cosmos. Balfour Stewart, Sunspots, and the INTELLECTUAL OBSERVER Those who admit no waste of power in the different operations of the energies of nature must encounter the difficult question of the maintenance of a constant source of light and heat upon the surface of the sun. The sun constantly delivers to the earth, in heat alone, an energy equal to . . . the two thousand millionth part of the total heat, or energy, which the sun continually develops and dismisses into space; yet the efflux is unabated, and has apparently remained the same from the ear-

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liest historic ages, and from the remotest ages of geology, to the present time. —Alexander Herschel, “Constancy of Solar Light and Heat,” Intellectual Observer, March 186413

While James Prescott Joule experimented in his Manchester brewery cellar to secure evidence for the inter-convertibility of heat and work during the 1840s, others turned increasingly to the sun to explain characteristics of terrestrial life. Theories of geo-magnetism, radiant heat, and meteorology were topics of warm debate when Balfour Stewart learned them from Professor James David Forbes at the University of Edinburgh in 1842–1846. Colonel Edward Sabine was then on his imperial Magnetic Crusade, seeking evidence against Gauss’s claim that variations in terrestrial magnetism were due exclusively to causes internal to the earth.14 By 1851 Sabine found the strongest evidence against Gauss by linking the periodic recurrence of geomagnetic disturbances to cycles of sunspot variation previously identified over 10 or 11 years (depending on the authority cited).15 By this time, Sabine effectively controlled the Meteorological Committee that oversaw the operations of Kew Observatory in the Royal Botanic Gardens 10 miles southwest of London.16 This had been the permanent base for the (peripatetic) British Association since 1842, and in 1859 Balfour Stewart was appointed its superintendent, supervising the calibration of thermometers and barometers from around the country and in maintaining daily records of meteorological and magnetic data and instruments. In September 1859, the potential of sunspots to affect terrestrial life was demonstrated by a brilliant flare that erupted on the sun’s surface.The huge magnetic storm that swept across the earth not only caused huge disturbance to Stewart’s magnetic instruments, but also generated aurorae that were visible extraordinarily close to the equator. It even disrupted international telegraph communications, disintegrating messages into gibberish and causing electric shocks and fires in telegraph stations across the globe.17 This astounding event was just what Sabine needed to persuade the British Association to launch a major program of investigation of sunspots, and his position was further enhanced by his presidency of the Royal Society from 1861 to 1871. By 1862 he was able to entrust Stewart—a newly elected Fellow of the Royal Society—with a program of monitoring the motion and size of sunspots with the photoheliograph specially installed at Kew for the purpose. After two years of surveillance, Stewart announced a major discovery to the Royal Astronomical Society and to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. The movement of the planets

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could explain the origins and cyclical behavior of sunspots, being gestated at points in opposition to Venus and Mercury and growing in size as the planet orbited away.18 Later queried by popular astronomical writer Richard Proctor,19 Stewart nevertheless considered such evidence too important to be available merely to elite specialists. Accordingly, Stewart arranged to publish his findings for a wider audience of astronomical practitioners in the monthly Intellectual Observer for 1864, targeted at domestic devotees of astronomy and allied hobbyists of natural history, microscopy, and photography. Although this journal was edited from 1862 by Henry Slack, a Unitarian journalist and microscopist,20 there were many Anglican clergymen among its regular contributors. Notable among these was Rev. T. W. Webb of Hardwick Parsonage, Herefordshire, who, like Stewart, was a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. Each issue during 1864 carried a feature by Webb in which solar observation was a recurrent theme, as it was for several other contributors to the Intellectual Observer. For Webb and Stewart alike the central topic was quite literally the sun of God. Webb opened his piece on “Solar observation” for May 1864 with the comment that this “most magnificent object of all human contemplation” was without doubt, the “great star to whose influence our planetary system has been subordinated by its Creator.” Moreover, this great sun had been placed so benevolently close to earth that readers who could only afford smaller (i.e., cheaper) observational instruments could still scrutinize the “strangeness of his phaenomena.” All stood equal before God and the sun in their ability to study the curious periodicity in sunspots which, according to Webb, seemed to stand in close relation to the electrical state of the earth’s atmosphere and thus to the “conditions of vegetable and animal existence.”21 Balfour Stewart’s piece for the July 1864 issue of the Intellectual Observer chimed with the recurrent themes of Webb’s column. “On the Origins of the Light of the Sun and Stars” opened with grandiloquent piety: “When we turn our eye upwards and behold the sun, or gaze by night on the starry firmament, and reflect that those glorious orbs have shone through unnumbered ages, we cannot fail to be impressed with the majesty of that Great Being who upholds them in all their brightness. But if we descend from the great First Cause to those modes of action in accordance with which we are assured the universe is governed, and search for the source and fountain of its brilliancy, we have to grapple with one of the most perplexing problems in the history of science.”22 This was

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the problem that had preoccupied William Thomson in examining “The Age of the Sun’s Heat” for Macmillan’s Magazine in 1862 and Alexander Herschel in the Intellectual Observer three months earlier (see epigraph). Was the sun’s heat generated by some internal mechanism that was gradually running down or by some extrinsic source such as falling comets that could indefinitely (if irregularly) replenish it? While Thomson rejected the latter “meteoric theory” in his quest to rebut Darwinian chronologies of human life,23 Stewart did not. For him this question had a wider cosmological import that he construed in distinctly anthropological terms: the sun was not an individual “apart by himself,” but simply the most familiar member of a large family who, if questioned aright, “may perhaps inform us of the habits of his race.” From his Kew observations, Stewart inferred that the sun had a “tendency to break out into spots” as Venus moved away from it, and the converse occurred once Venus approached again. He argued from this sunspot evidence that the luminosity of the sun increased as a planet approached. He thus answered the question posited in his title by asserting that light was generally produced when two heavenly bodies approached each other—as had happened for many eons of planetary motions around the sun. Thus, Stewart was by no means compelled to share Thomson’s conclusions on the longevity of the sun. To emphasize the significance of this disagreement, Stewart quoted the conclusion of their mutual collaborator P. G. Tait that this planetary interaction had a ready analogy in the production of light by the “approach of two atoms towards one another.” The closing sentences of Stewart’s piece alluded more deferentially, however, to the North British orthodoxy. All processes in the universe, especially the gradual longer-term exhaustion of the Sun’s heat, tended toward dissipation: “. . . it is not inconceivable that the law indicated in this chapter may be merely that arrangement by means of which the visible motion of bodies is converted into light and heat, which we know, from Professor Thomson, are the ultimate forms to which all motions tend.”24 This closing remark is Stewart’s only allusion to the (North British version of the) doctrine of energy conservation discussed in Alexander Herschel’s paper four months earlier (concurrently with Thomson and Tait’s piece for Good Words).25 And Stewart’s abstention was not obviously due to his want of familiarity with the new energy synthesis. He was already pursuing research on energy conservation with Tait at Kew, studying the slowing down of rotating discs in vacuo, and hoping to find frictional evidence for a universal ether as the medium through which energy was radiated across

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space.26 We might thus conclude that Stewart saw no special advantage in using the systematizing language of energy to articulate his work to the readers of the Intellectual Observer: sunspot behavior simply furnished evidence of planetary interaction as an auxiliary source of the sun’s heat. A similar point could be made when Stewart presented the new energy synthesis in his first textbook, An Elementary Treatise on Heat in 1866. Though its preface revealed the importance of Tait in introducing Stewart to the laws of energy conservation and heat dissipation, Stewart was highly selective in using this new discourse of energy transmutation, focusing instead—as its title suggested—on the more traditional topic of heat for his presumptively unsophisticated readers.27 In “Meteorology, Past and Present,” an anonymous piece published by the broad church North British Review in September 1866, Stewart used “energy” in the more traditional sense of character assessment. This piece was a self-serving commentary on a report concerning the future of weather surveillance at the Kew Observatory.28 This official report had been precipitated by the suicide of Admiral Robert Fitzroy, which left in disarray the storm warning system that he had managed. With the Royal Society’s backing, the BAAS Committee now recommended that Kew take over all state responsibility for systematic weather forecasting, proposing that a new battery of self-recording instruments under Stewart’s control be located at seven locations across the British Isles. Stewart’s commentary for the North British Review “rejoiced” that the thermometric, barometric, and hygrometric measurements would enable the construction of systematic records of atmospheric movements of air and water. Meteorology could thus be restored to the same footing as astronomy for the first time since these heavenly twins had emerged at the time of Job. Nevertheless, to avoid morbid impropriety in his celebration of Kew’s future prospects, Stewart deployed the social discourse of energy only in its traditional sense to represent an exemplar of high moral character: Fitzroy had made a lasting contribution to the country’s benefit by means of his “genius and untiring energy.”29 By 1866, when Kew’s resources were launched into this new weather surveillance system, Stewart was working with Norman Lockyer on ways of uniting their shared interests in meteorology and solar physics. Their vision was articulated in a discourse of energy transmutation in a pair of collaborative pieces published in summer 1868 in Macmillan’s Magazine— Alexander Macmillan’s pioneering monthly shilling periodical—for which Lockyer had already contributed two articles, one being on the future of meteorology at Kew.

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The READER, MACMILLAN’S MAGAZINE, and the Origins of the LockyerStewart Collaboration [Lockyer’s] friendship with Balfour Stewart naturally drew his attention to meteorological matters, and in his work as scientific editor of the Reader he acquired the habit of bringing together the findings of men of science following different lines of research. We find, in an article contributed jointly with Stewart to Macmillan’s Magazine in 1868, a short reference to the influence of solar changes on the temperature of the air, and there are other indications that he [Lockyer] realised at a very early date that in the direction of meteorology a new branch of astronomy was conceivable if not actually possible.30 —Herbert Dingle, “The Sun and Meteorology” in T. Mary Lockyer, Winifred L. Lockyer, and Herbert Dingle, The Life and Work of Sir Norman Lockyer (Macmillan, 1928)

How did Stewart and Lockyer’s energy-based analysis of the relation between sunspots and terrestrial weather end up alongside a serialization of “A Chaplet of Pearls” by the Tractarian Charlotte Yonge and John Morley’s review of George Eliot’s Spanish Gypsy? To understand this requires an appreciation of how Lockyer’s journalistic ambitions and his networks of literary friends enabled him to gain access to the influential House of Macmillan and of Balfour Stewart’s concurrent role in directing Lockyer’s interest toward meteorology and the physics of solar pathologies. A detailed portrait of Lockyer’s early work can be found in the Life and Work jointly written for Macmillan by Winifred Lucas Lockyer, last daughter from his marriage to Winifred James in 1858, and by his second wife, Lady Mary Lockyer. Their biography shows that it was as an ambitious amateur astronomer that Lockyer attended meetings of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) in London from June 1861, getting himself elected a fellow of the RAS by March of the following year. Lockyer probably first encountered Balfour Stewart, his Kew colleague Warren de la Rue, and Rev. T. W. Webb at meetings of the RAS during the period 1861–1863. To understand how Lockyer became involved in both astronomy and the elite literary-science circle of Alexander Macmillan, we should note that the newly wed Norman and Winifred chose to settle in affluent Wimbledon around 1858.31 Norman offered his services as secretary to a new church-based “village club,” upon the committee of which served the barrister-novelist Thomas Hughes and fellow Christian Socialist J. M.

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Ludlow. Both these men frequented the Thursday evening “Tobacco Parliaments” held by Macmillan at his new London premises from 1857. Both also played a major part in the creation of Macmillan’s Magazine launched in November 1859, Macmillan aiming for it to carry only material that was “manly and elevating.” For several years they met with T. H. Huxley, Herbert Spencer, Alfred Tennyson, and Charles Kingsley at the weekly open gatherings where they discussed what to publish in the next issue of Macmillan’s Magazine.32 By mid 1864 the Tobacco Parliaments had ended, Macmillan holding discussions at his home in Tooting,33 but by this time Hughes and Ludlow had moved away somewhat independently of Macmillan to launch the Christian Socialist Reader—the journal on which Lockyer gained his first job as a science editor in 1862. From 1857 to 1869, Lockyer’s principal employer was the Civil Service—as it was for so many other aspiring Victorian men of letters. Jack Meadows points out that since he was only one among hundreds of third-class War Office clerks starting work in the late 1850s, Lockyer had to turn to the patronage of fellow Wimbledon club members for help in advancing his career. One such, the barrister George Pollock, was a friend of the York instrument maker Thomas Cooke, and early in 1861 Lockyer followed Pollock in purchasing a 3 –43 -inch Cooke reflecting telescope to pursue domestic astronomy. Frequently taking observations in his back garden until 2 A.M., Lockyer began to write articles on his new enthusiasm, persuading Cooke to lend him a 6 –41 -inch instrument for the purpose. The London Review soon published Lockyer’s account of the transit of Titan’s lunar shadow across Saturn’s disc on May 10, 1862, and invited him to become a regular contributor. The first paper he submitted to the RAS concerning detailed observations on Mars was more controversial, although Lockyer’s rapidly developing network of astronomical experts helped him overcome opposition to his findings. Lockyer then secured serialization of a less technical account of this study in the Spectator for 1862–63.This established what his widow and daughter described as a plan pursued through the rest of Lockyer’s life: publishing his results both in technical journals and in “popular language for the general public.”34 In late 1862, Lockyer’s night-time labors were greatly extended when he became science editor for the Reader (a weekly). For this “Review of Literature, Science and Arts,” Lockyer prepared a survey of contemporary publications, awards, and meetings in science (especially the Royal Society and BAAS) that ranged well beyond astronomy. In the first issue ( January 3, 1863), Lockyer commenced by surveying the “Past Year” in science,

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documenting the variability of nebulae and the use of parallax measurements on Mars to determine the solar-terrestrial distance. He then reported how spectrum analysis had recently shown a number of stars to possess a chemical constitution similar to that of the sun. Moreover, he reported the “rich harvest” of results that had been produced by patient meteorologists using various species of “ometer” with “unflinching perseverance,” noting in particular the decreased death-rate of fishermen and sailors since the recent introduction of meteorological telegraphy. Importantly, some distinctive editorial references to personal patronage are discernible too: every issue of the Reader carried a full-page advertisement for Macmillan publications, and in the January 17 issue an advertisement for Cooke of York emphasized prizes won at the London International Exhibition of 1862.35 Lockyer’s commissioning of book reviews provided him with a broader entrée to the wider scientific community, nurturing especially his long-term working rapport with P. G. Tait and T. H. Huxley, who both saw the Reader as a useful vehicle for promoting their interests too. Norman’s call for an English translation of Amédée Guillemin’s Le Ciel in an 1864 review helped launch Winifred’s career as a translator of French scientific treatises; and given the pressures of full-time work Norman clearly depended upon Winifred for other aspects of his work for the Reader. Working for this loss-making periodical was evidently important for the finances of the ever-growing Lockyer family, but the labor involved was so intense that Lockyer experienced his first breakdown in late 1864. Lockyer’s editorial role in the Reader effectively ceased after it was sold in autumn 1865 to the radical Cambridge don Thomas Bendyshe. Financial exigencies then led Norman to take up Civil Service work in editing new Army Regulations and the burgeoning Lockyer clan to relocate to unfashionable and less costly Hampstead. There Lockyer found the leisure to pursue new avenues of research with the spectroscope, determining the chemical constituents of heavenly bodies from light emitted by elements in gaseous form.36 In 1864, having encountered the remarkable analytical results attained by spectroscopy in his editorial work for the Reader, Lockyer was initiated by William Huggins into practical work with this instrument. Finding it of little value in examining Mars, he followed the example of Stewart, Webb, et al. in April 1865 in interrogating the constitution of the sun. In conversations with Lockyer, Balfour Stewart advised him to use this new fertile experimental device to study the more irregular features of the sun—solar flares, sunspots and eclipse phenomena. In 1865, using his

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newly purchased Herschel-Browning spectroscope, Lockyer sought evidence that would help resolve a running controversy between the Kew observers and the French astronomer Faye about the nature of sunspots. Having used ordinary astronomical observations to support the claims of Stewart et al. that sunspots were darker than the rest of the sun because they consisted of a downrush of cooler gas, Lockyer further vindicated the Kew Observers’ position by use of spectroscopic evidence. This account warranted sufficient attention to get Lockyer’s first paper published by the Royal Society in 1866.37 By spring that year Lockyer’s reputation in both scientific editing and publication of original research gave him a passport to the inner circle of Alexander Macmillan’s associates (Lockyer having met him several years earlier).38 Overwhelmed by the burdens of successful book publishing, Macmillan felt compelled to call upon specialists to share the task of reviewing and editing scripts submitted for publication. Lockyer thus became what Macmillan called his “consulting physician in regard to scientific books and schemes.” At the same time—and not coincidentally— Lockyer secured his first publication in Macmillan’s Magazine: “Prospects of weather science” in August. This was an upbeat commentary on plans for meteorology at Kew that showed remarkable similarities to Stewart’s contemporaneous piece for the North British Review.39 Although Lockyer continued publishing in the Saturday Review, the Athenaeum, and the Spectator until his second breakdown in March 1867, he increasingly committed his journalistic work and book-writing to Macmillan enterprises. As we shall see, Alexander Macmillan reciprocated by offering financial and institutional support for Lockyer’s talents and diverse projects in ensuing decades. The Lockyer-Stewart Collaboration I: Energy and “Delicacy” in MACMILLAN’S MAGAZINE . . . we have some reason to suppose a connexion between sun-spots and the meteorology of our globe . . . the different members of our [solar] system are more closely bound together than has been hitherto supposed. Mutual relations of a mathematical nature we were aware of before, but the connexion seems to be much more intimate than this— they feel, they throb together, they are pervaded by a principle of delicacy even as we are ourselves.40 —Stewart and Lockyer, “The Sun as a Type of the Material Universe,” part II, “The Place of Life in a Universe of Energy,” Macmillan’s Magazine, August 1868

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Although Lockyer’s publishing connections resulted in Balfour Stewart’s writing for Macmillan’s Magazine, Alexander Macmillan first suggested that Lockyer and Stewart should work together. Ever the enterprising and constructive publisher, Macmillan suggested in 1866 that as two contemporary experts on solar observations, Lockyer and Stewart should jointly write a popular book on the Sun. The plan collapsed later that year when Stewart found his free time eroded by his appointment as director of the newly enlarged meteorological facilities at Kew Observatory. Nevertheless, it is clear that Lockyer and Stewart engaged in some form of collaborative writing, Meadows suggesting this appeared in Lockyer’s textbook Elementary Lessons in Astronomy published by Macmillan in 1868. Certainly Lockyer undertook work on that volume concurrently with his frustratingly protracted negotiations for the construction of a powerful new Royal Society–funded spectroscope in the period between Lockyer’s second and third breakdowns in March 1867 and May 1868.41 But soon there was also another vestigial outcome of their shared discussions: in the three months after Lockyer’s last major incapacitation, Macmillan’s Magazine published the first of their jointly authored papers on “The Sun as a Type of the Material Universe.” By about June 1868 it was clear to Lockyer’s family that his “mental energy” had not been properly restored since his last collapse, and he was ordered by doctors to take a holiday abroad.42 Given Lockyer’s circumstances in the last stages of preparing these papers it is significant that Macmillan’s Magazine cited Stewart as first author of these pieces. This might simply have been because he steered the papers through their final stages of publication, or that Stewart was prima facie senior to Lockyer in age and professional expertise.Yet there is surely more to it than this. The collective title of the pieces recalls Stewart’s suggestion of a kind of stellar ethnography in the Intellectual Observer four years earlier: studying the physics of the sun might enable one to draw more general conclusions about “the habits of his race.” And whereas the first Macmillan’s Magazine piece summarizes for lay audiences the sunspot researches of both authors as previously published in technical and elite journals, the second Macmillan’s Magazine paper more distinctly displayed Stewart’s interests. Subtitled “The place of life in a universe of energy,” this covered central themes in the new energy physics introducing Stewart’s previously unpublished account of the principle of “delicacy” in relation to the actions of invisible intelligences in the universe. Finally, it should be noted that Stewart was explicitly ascribed authorship when the first part of the second Macmillan’s Magazine paper was published under

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the title “What is Energy?” in April 1870 in Lockyer’s new Macmillan journal, Nature.43 Stewart and Lockyer were probably both involved in writing all but the final section of their first (July 1868) paper for Macmillan’s Magazine. This piece commenced with an historical account of the shocking telescopic discovery in the early seventeenth century that the sun could no longer be regarded as an “exemplar of spotless purity.” Surveying the associated disagreements among Galileo and his contemporaries about the nature of sunspots, it moved quickly to the initially controversial conclusion of the Glaswegian observer Alexander Wilson in 1769 that sunspots were cavities on the surface of the sun. Using woodcut illustrations showing how the form of one of the “great sun-spots” of October 1865 changed over two successive days, the authors argued that the sun’s surface was not merely uneven but was in a state of perpetual flux and thus obviously cloud-like in nature. Lockyer and Stewart then presented spectroscopic analysis of solar radiation as the practical key to understanding the nature of this solar atmosphere. By this means Kirchhoff and Bunsen had proved that the sun was indeed the “nearest star” to the earth, though Lockyer (presumably) added that discovery of ten “terrestrial elements” in the sun’s atmosphere was so well known that “readers of Macmillan do not require a detailed notice of it here.” Such spectroscopic analysis was then directly linked to earlier observations that the size and temperature of sunspots went through an eleven-year cycle of maxima and minima and to the conclusions of Angelo Secci in Italy that sunspots were always cooler than the rest of the sun’s surface. Citing the recent researches of Stewart, Lockyer, and others on the character of sunspots, they offered a lengthy and somewhat polemical recapitulation of their controversy with Faye over their conclusion that sunspots consisted of a downrush of cooler matter toward the sun’s surface.44 The final section of the first paper marks a distinct move toward Stewart’s specialist concern. What were the “exceptional circumstances” that cause the ordinary convection currents on the sun’s cloudy surface to “develop themselves occasionally into sunspots”? This was resolved into four subordinate questions to which the remainder of the first paper and much of the second paper were devoted: did the amount of spotted surface on the sun vary over time? Were outbreaks of spots localized to a particular region of the sun? Were increases and decreases in the size of spots governed by any laws? And were spots connected with any other phenomena on the earth’s surface or elsewhere? Quoting from researches recently published by Stewart and fellow Kew observers in Proceedings of

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the Royal Society, he proceeded to the “astounding but apparently wellproven fact” that the birth and behavior of sunspots were regulated by the proximity of the planets Venus, Jupiter and Mercury. Such was the quasiastrological import of these findings that Stewart suggested—not without some irony—that he might now be able to “cast the horoscope of a sunspot with some approach to truth.” Bolstering this superficially whimsical notion, he reiterated Sabine’s claims that sunspot activity in turn governed terrestrial magnetism, and those of Manchester astronomer Joseph Baxendell published earlier in 1868 that sunspot activity determined the “direct heat of the sun’s rays” felt on earth.45 The first Macmillan’s Magazine paper concluded with a speculation about the causal origins of sunspots drawn explicitly from discussions with Stewart’s other collaborator P. G. Tait. There was a long quotation from the Kew Observers’ latest (1866) Royal Society paper to the effect that the thermal and luminiferous properties of a body could easily be influenced by the proximity of other large bodies. Just as “a poker thrust into a hot furnace” created a greater disturbance than when placed in a cooler fire, the extremely high temperatures of the sun rendered it especially sensitive to external influences from nearby cooler bodies, such as passing planets. These could cool areas of the sun’s outer atmosphere and thus bring the condensation that generated sunspots. Revisiting these claims in the second Macmillan’s Magazine paper two years later, Stewart argued that there appeared to be “a great molecular delicacy of construction in the sun” that was manifested by the unexpectedly “intimate” bond between the sun and planets. A disturbance from without was very easily communicated to “our luminary” and this could transmit a “thrill to the very extremities” of the solar system. He then left his readers with a tantalizing hint that further explanation of the crucial principle of “delicacy of construction” in the next issue of Macmillan’s Magazine would yield a final explanation of the phenomenon.46 The second Macmillan’s Magazine paper, subtitled “The place of life in a universe of energy,” moved from sunspot observations to show how the general principle of delicacy of construction could more generally explain the operation of free will in a cosmos constrained by the twin laws of energy transmutation.47 Stewart thus explained the conservation law to Macmillan’s Magazine readers with a view to showing how it precluded the ex nihilo creation of energy in any act of volition, and thus left unexplained the efficacy of a non-physical “will” in initiating energy movement. Importantly this problem would not have arisen for subscribers to the traditional notion of energy as a quality of human mind or character

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since on that account “energy” was intimately linked to human volition anyway.48 Thus it was necessary for Stewart to commence by presenting Macmillan’s Magazine readers with the new physicalist re-interpretation of “energy” so that the relationship between free will and energy could even begin to appear problematic. Linking the old and the new interpretations of energy Stewart adopted the socio-political metaphor of energetic men cited at the start of this chapter. In introducing his “parables and proverbs” of the energetic man in conflict with the elevated man, Stewart declared that the “actual or personal energy” of the “energetic man” was more than a mere arbitrary metaphor of the kinetic (or “actual”) energy of a moving body. Just as for a moving inanimate object, the amount of energy in such a man’s character could crucially be “measured” by the number of obstacles he could surmount, the number of opponents he could scatter and the amount of work he could do. Stewart contrasted this form of personal “intrinsic” energy with the energy of social position. In his politically charged account, this latter form was analogous to the potential energy acquired by a body when raised against the countervailing force of gravity—and gravity was akin to that social force “which keeps a man down in the world.” Pursuing the political analogy further, Stewart argued that a man of high social position owed this elevation to the historically remote “founder of the family” who had enjoyed greater personal energy than his fellow men. Such a man had expended a “vast amount” of personal (kinetic) energy in “raising himself and his family into a position of advantage.” From such a social height (maintained by wealth and power) the “man of position” would always have the resources to confound an ordinary man in social combat even if both were possessed of equal “personal energy.” Indeed the former would win, Stewart contended, even if he had only a “tithe” of the latter’s active personal energy.49 In terms the new energy synthesis, the force of this picture was to show Macmillan’s Magazine readers that there were always two types of energy to be considered in any analysis of the conservation of energy. For two bodies that had the same kinetic energy, the one with greater potential energy would always have greater overall energy, and would, by implication, be least deflected by a collision between the two. On closer inspection, the colorful metaphor adopted in the Macmillan’s Magazine piece was a political allegory. The preoccupation with powerful men prevailing over humbler men came directly from contemporaneous episodes in the lives of both authors. Meadows argues that Lockyer’s breakdown in May–June 1868 was a result of oppressive

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treatment by the Secretary of State for War that demoted Lockyer to a lower grade clerk and halved his salary.50 Stewart concurrently faced persistent opposition from Sabine who used his position as president of the Royal Society and head of the BAAS Kew Committee to block Stewart’s attempts to use Kew meteorological data to create a fully systematized hydrodynamics of weather.51 In consonance with the socio-political metaphor, the “personal energy” of Lockyer and Stewart was inevitably insufficient to prevent such powerful men from thwarting their ambitions. Nevertheless it is equally important to consider what this metaphor did not capture so as to grasp the radical nature of the North British school’s appropriation of “energy.”Though energy of character could be dissipated, by analogy with the second law, that quantity of such energy was not conserved. What happened to the “energy” of Lockyer during his breakdowns or of Fitzroy after his suicide? Evidently such energy of character was neither ultimately innate nor indestructible any more than it was accorded to individuals on the basis of personal merit.52 Stewart represented the application of energy physics in the wider universe as rather more ineluctably democratic in character than as applied to his socio-political metaphor. The laws of energy conservation and dissipation applied equally to all humans—even as it tied the existence of human life to the material sovereignty of the sun. It was “Our great luminary” which made possible the food, fuel, heating, motive power, and weather patterns that supported all terrestrial life. Yet the laws of energy conservation and dissipation constraining life did not completely specify for Stewart the causal conditions necessary for making the universe a “fit abode for living beings” that could (democratically) exercise their free will. A further condition was required that specified how human will could actually bring about a redistribution of energy in the world without breaching the law of energy conservation or dissipation.53 For human thought to serve as an infinitesimally small trigger to enact enormous effects required a “capability of great delicacy of organization.” To explain what he meant here, Stewart contrasted the causal processes involved in humans and machines. The trigger of a gun could bring about a “stupendous mechanical result” with the input of only a tiny amount of chemical energy (released by the combustion of gunpowder). But as Stewart emphasized the loaded gun epitomized the principle of a machine of great yet “finite” delicacy which required a comparably finite amount of energy to effect causation. By contrast, if the causal trigger that operated in the mind-body interaction were of infinitesimal delicacy,

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the quantity of energy required to effect change would be “incalculably” small. What Stewart did not specify, however, was the threshold of “great” delicacy at which triggering would not contravene the law of energy conservation, nor whether the enormous sensitivity required was specifically physiological in nature. Nevertheless, from this claim Stewart inferred that the hallmark of active intelligence in effecting energetic change was the presence of great “delicacy” of organization that enabled a very sensitive response.54 On the final page of their second Macmillan’s Magazine piece, Stewart and Lockyer returned to the theme of “The Sun as a Type of the Material Universe.” Here Macmillan’s Magazine readers were presented with an account of how sunspot phenomena instantiated the “principle of delicacy” that pervaded not only life but also the entire inorganic cosmos. Such evidence—carefully differentiated from spiritualist claims—showed that “great and visible” results could be produced from an “exceedingly small primordial impulse” acting even at a very great distance.55 Thus sunspots could be both the effects of planetary gravitational action on the “delicate” structure of its outer atmosphere, and also the cause of variable terrestrial magnetism and weather patterns in the earth’s highly sensitive atmosphere. The planets and the sun evidently tended to “throb together” pervaded by a principle of delicacy “even as we are ourselves.” And for Stewart this extraordinarily sensitive interlinking of sun and planets manifested in sunspots could only mean one thing. Drawing an inference that was a cosmic variant of an argument deployed in natural theology, the paper contended: “We remark in conclusion that something of this kind might be expected if we suppose that a Supreme Intelligence, without interfering with the ordinary laws of matter, pervades the universe, exercising a directive energy capable of comparison with that which is exercised by a living being. In both cases delicacy of construction would appear to be the things required for an action of this nature.”56 At this point, however, the chain of inference stopped. The author(s) declined to go beyond merely showing the possibility that solarterrestrial interactions were enacted by an intelligent invisible deity constructed according to the principle of “delicacy of construction.” Whether such a mode of action was a “fact” would have to be decided by “other considerations.” As we shall see in the final section of this chapter, it was further evidence from Lockyer concerning new cyclical patterns in terrestrial meteorology that enabled Stewart in the ensuing decade to develop a campaign against materialist interpretations of science.

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The Lockyer-Stewart Collaboration II: NATURE, Delicacy, and THE UNSEEN UNIVERSE Turning from matter to the phenomena which affect it, we notice one singular set of phenomena in which things insignificant and obscure give rise to great lines of events . . . a whole series of tremendous meteorological phenomena, such as hurricanes in the Indian Ocean, happen because certain positions of Mercury and Venus affect the sun’s atmosphere, causing spots in his, and th[is] condition of the sun affects the earth. Like the complicated series of effects which follow the pulling of the trigger of a gun, the effects are utterly disproportionate to their causes. Man is a machine of this unstable kind. . . . May not other beings [thus] be capable of touching what we may call the hair-triggers of the universe? Whatever these agencies are, angels or ministering spirits, they certainly do not belong to the present visible universe. The writers examine the sacred records to confirm their speculations.Thus, then, we have a visible and an invisible universe, and we have processes of delicacy in the former which at least suggest the action on it of agencies belonging to the latter.57 —anonymous review of The Unseen Universe, Nature, May 20, 1875

From September 1869 until the mid 1870s, the main platform on which Balfour Stewart and Norman Lockyer communicated their complex and interrelated speculations about energy, sunspots and meteorology to nontechnical audiences was the new Macmillan journal Nature, edited by Lockyer. Since their Macmillan’s Magazine pieces had been published in the previous year, the careers of the two men had undergone tumultuous changes—not to say reversals. After some persuasion from Lockyer and his many contacts in the world of science in late 1868, Alexander Macmillan had agreed to set up a new general science journal directed at both specialist scientific practitioners and the general public. To protect it against the financial failure that had recently befallen both the Reader and Huxley’s Natural History Review, Macmillan agreed to subsidize this venture to a remarkable degree. Indeed such was Alexander Macmillan’s faith in Lockyer’s judgment and accomplishments that the Macmillan company underwrote the entire production costs of Nature until it finally began to pay its own way in the mid 1890s.58 Thus Lockyer was able to leave behind him the Civil Service drudgery and night-time journalism to pursue wider goals. Latterly though, as one waggish Oxford don put it, Lockyer sometimes seemed to forget that he was merely the Editor of Nature, and not its Author.59

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In contrast with Lockyer, Stewart’s career as a civil servant came to a much unhappier end. Stewart’s job for the Governmental Meteorological Committee was to supervise the tabulation of rain, wind-speed, and barometric measurements arriving at Kew from field stations for publication by Sabine. Stewart wanted to correlate weather patterns into a form that could capture global patterns, extending Sabine’s regime of measurement practices so that he could fully quantify the dynamics of atmospheric vapor and turn meteorology into a “physical science”—correlated even with the behavior of sunspots.60 Having encountered strong resistance from Sabine et al., at the BAAS meeting of September 1869 Stewart launched an undiplomatic attack on the Committee’s merely “climatic” approach to meteorology.61 For this he won support from Sir William Thomson in Nature and even from the usually hostile Astronomer Royal, George Airy.62 But after an unsuccessful showdown Stewart resigned his Committee Secretaryship in October 186963 and vented his spleen in Lockyer’s newly launched Nature, railing against the “deplorable” lack of systematic cooperation among observers and bewailing how scientific workers had to “work with the one hand and fight with the other.”64 Within a few months Stewart fell out with Sabine again over the latter’s integrity in supervising data on terrestrial magnetism so it was with some alacrity that he took up the Chair of Natural Philosophy at Owens College, Manchester, in July 1870.65 At Manchester, Stewart had none of Kew’s technologies for meteorological observation. But he kept the matter alive in his widely published inaugural address to a captive student and faculty audience at Owens College: . . . it is of great importance to know whether the earth’s climate and atmosphere are influenced in any way by the changes taking place in the atmosphere of the sun. Such a connection has not yet been traced, but it has hardly been sought for in a proper manner. . . . I feel convinced that meteorology should be pursued in connection with terrestrial magnetism and solar observations; and were a well considered scheme for solving this great problem fairly introduced, I am sure that scientific institutions and individuals throughout the country would do all that they possibly could do to promote this most important branch of physical research.66

Stewart’s friend Lockyer soon provided the key. After lengthy discussions with the editor of the Ceylon Observer in 1871, Lockyer found that the rainfall and cyclone patterns of Ceylon [Sri Lanka] and its envi-

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rons could be characterized by cycles that matched the (alleged) 11 year periodicity of sunspots. In October 1872 he learned from the Secretary of the Mauritius Meteorological Society, Dr. Charles Meldrum, that similar patterns could be recognized in rainfall and numbers of cyclones in the Indian Ocean and Australasia. Lockyer then used a Nature editorial dated December 12, 1872 to announce his plan for “The Meteorology of the Future,” presenting Balfour Stewart as a martyr to the Kew Committee’s dogmatic past adherence to the mere “collection of weather statistics.” Lockyer then listed three pages of Meldrum’s correlative data between sunspots and terrestrial weather, concluding that spectrum analysis and helio-photography would defeat the “Mrs. Partingtons” who opposed the transformation of meteorology into a global science.67 Far from overwhelming his audience with the radical novelty of such claims, however, Lockyer soon received several letters from Nature readers around the world claiming earlier identifications of 11-year weather cycles. One such published in Nature on February 1873 came from the New Englander L. Trouvelot citing a report of his findings in the Boston Daily Advertiser of November 2, 1871.68 Priority in discovery was not Lockyer’s concern, however. In ensuing years he sought rather to persuade readers of Nature and the Nineteenth Century—and especially the Indian Meteorological Department opened in 1875—that state funds should pay for a solar physics laboratory to harness sunspot observations so as to pre-empt drought-induced famines in India.69 Balfour Stewart appropriated such evidence on weather patterns for rather different and theologically charged purposes. As Heimann and Smith have shown, Stewart collaborated with Tait in the mid 1870s to try to persuade skeptics—materialist and otherwise—that science and religion were in fact mutually compatible. To this end in spring 1875 Alexander Macmillan shrewdly indulged Stewart and Tait in publishing The Unseen Universe, a fast-selling work which argued that the “orthodox in religion” ought not to be aghast at the “materialist statements” so often made in the name of science.70 Although the first three editions were anonymous, persistent references to Stewart and Tait’s experiments on discs rotating in vacua, Stewart’s 1873 textbook and repeated allusion to the 1868 Macmillan’s Magazine pieces in the penultimate chapter would have left few informed readers unclear about the book’s authorship.71 Given Tait’s continuing animosity to John Tyndall, a principal target of this work was inevitably John Tyndall’s controversial Belfast Address of 1874.72 To counter Tyndall’s suggestion that both physical and “vital” phenomena could be subsumed under the “dominion” of energy conversation, they developed

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the theistic themes first introduced in the Macmillan’s Magazine articles even further beyond the confines of the original North British energy synthesis.73 Not only did Stewart insist that the principle of “delicacy of construction” was required to explain the interaction of energy and intelligent life, but also that there were divine agencies in the unseen universe that could make use of dissipated stellar heat to manage the sunspotweather relationships.74 Stewart and Tait argued that the “degraded” energy lost to ordinary mortals could be utilized by benign invisible beings in an indefinitely sustained afterlife linked continuously to the visible world. For the well-informed reader, there was a clear parallel here with the fictional molecule-sorting demon invoked by James Clerk Maxwell to demonstrate the purely statistical basis of the law of energy dissipation. This proposal for how non-humans might use energy—in ways that human could not— was very important for the argument in the penultimate chapter of The Unseen Universe. In “Speculations as to the possibility of superior intelligences in the visible universe,” Stewart and Tait sought supernatural causes to account for the extraordinary effects of Mercury and Venus on sunspots and thus on terrestrial weather. These involved “a vast transmutation of energy” in the sun that was triggered by only an “obscure and illunderstood” cause of “trivial” magnitude. From the principle of “great delicacy” Stewart and Tait argued that there was strong evidence here of the possibility at least of an unseen but intelligent agency since no known physical mechanism could have triggered this huge energy movement across such vast distances with such speed. Those familiar with Maxwell’s fictional demon might perhaps have surmised how an angelic counterpart might have acted instantly to direct molecular motions throughout the cosmos in ways that went beyond the facility or comprehension of human agents.75 The theistic arguments presented in the much-read book The Unseen Universe were subject to intense and multifaceted debate. It is not my purpose to present a complete survey of critical responses to their work in contemporaneous periodicals; rather I shall consider the reception granted to arguments concerning sunspots and energy transmutation and the replies offered by Stewart and Tait.76 As we saw in the epigraph above, an anonymous Nature reviewer in May 1875—probably Lockyer himself—was highly sympathetic to claims made in the passage on solarterrestrial relations. The reviewer contended that whether it were “angels or ministering spirits” that exercised the hair-triggers acting between sunspots and the planets, these agencies certainly did not “belong to the

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present visible universe.” This reviewer went rather further than Stewart and Tait in asserting the actual rather than the merely possible existence of such supernatural beings. Notwithstanding passing criticisms of “theological dogma” against which “the authors of The Unseen Universe” defended themselves a week later, the Authors soon wrote in to declare satisfaction with this review as otherwise a “very fair and candid” précis of their book.77 Their respected heterodox colleague William Kingdon Clifford wrote, however, a somewhat less charitable critique for the June 1875 issue of the Fortnightly Review. This pinpointed the ways in which uncritical believers would follow the drift of arguments in The Unseen Universe all the way to its implied tendentious conclusions about the real existence of the postulated invisible beings. In an opening passage that was later suppressed in his posthumously published lectures and addresses, Clifford mischievously caricatured the force of Tait and Stewart’s argument and made mocking allusions to arguments drawn from Maxwell’s fictitious demonology. In the new unseen worlds posited by these authors, Clifford contended, “there is room not only for deities to preside over their properties and functions, existence, energy and life, but all other machinery of Christian mythology—spiritual bodies replete with energy, angels, archangels, incarnation, molecular demons, miracles and ‘universal gehenna.’ And it is a well-known peculiarity of these things that if only the barest possibility of conceiving them, by any violence to the intellectual faculties, can be made out, there they are, established in triumph, to the satisfaction and comfort of every orthodox congregation.”78 Such was the impact of this dazzling parody and of other critical reviews that a second edition of The Unseen Universe was rapidly prepared for publication two months later with a new preface that replied to Clifford directly and at length. Tait and Stewart not only contended that their “brother” had not read the work beyond merely glancing into it “here or there,” but they adroitly leveled at him the counter-accusation that it was actually Clifford who was guilty of the spurious invocation of fictitious (non)beings. Adopting a sardonic tone which matched that of Clifford’s more pungent critical passages, they replied: “Our critic begins his article by summoning up or constructing a most grotesque and ludicrous figure, which he calls our argument, and forthwith proceeds to demolish; and he ends by summoning up a horrible and awful phantom, against which he feelingly warns us. . . .” It was with no little irony, Stewart and Tait quipped, that Clifford had neglected to explain whether this phantom stood for “Religion in general,” or only that “particularly objectionable

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form” of it called Christianity.79 Tait and Stewart thus contended that Clifford’s arguments were as ill-formulated as they were spurious, and thus that their energy-based account of the plausibility of a Christian afterlife was in no way diminished by his review of The Unseen Universe. More generally galling for Stewart and Tait was that many readers simply had not learned to interpret the book as a treatise about how energy physics was the key to the physical basis of both the present life and the afterlife. In their explicitly de-anonymized fourth edition of April 1876 the Professors of Natural Philosophy, Tait and Stewart, complained that too many of their critics simply had not grasped the concept of energy, most having exhibited almost “absolute ignorance” as to the proper use of “Force” which many tended apparently to use as a synonym for “Energy,” following the contemporary practice of Herbert Spencer. In replying to this appalling solecism, Stewart and Tait remarked wryly that the sole recorded case of “true Persistency or Indestructibility of Force” they had ever encountered occurred in connection with “Baron Munchausen’s remarkable descent from the moon.”80 Faced with persistent resistance to the new language of energy and to physically grounded notions of immortality, Stewart continued to write sporadically on these subjects over the next decade. In the two pieces he wrote for the conservative Anglican Contemporary Review in the early 1880s, he nevertheless felt it strategically necessary to decouple his crusades from the attempt to use evidence from sunspot-weather correlations to construct a theistic case again energy-based materialism. Quite apart from the skepticism uttered in some quarters against arguments in The Unseen Universe, the evidentially complex nature of the correlations between sunspots and weather combined with the difficulties of constructing forecasts from solar evidence had given their enemies plenty of ammunition. Richard Proctor, one of Lockyer’s most relentless journalistic critics, seized upon such infelicities with considerable glee,81 and Stewart’s hostile successor as Secretary to the (retitled) Meteorological Council, Robert Henry Scott, was somewhat sardonic about this project in his 1883 textbook, Elementary Meteorology.82 Even E. Douglas Archibald, who for many years prepared the three-day weather forecasts for the Times, was optimistic about the future prospects of cosmic prediction in 1884 while admitting frankly that “we are considerably in the dark” about many important aspects of sunspot behavior.83 Only a full century after his death were Stewart’s convictions vindicated in the creation of a financially successful scheme of long-term forecasting based on 22-year sunspot cycles.84

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In “On the Conservation and Dissipation of Energy,” written for the Anglican-sympathizing Contemporary Review in July 1882, Stewart returned to the task of explaining the basic elements of the Thomson-Tait energy synthesis to a non-expert readership, abandoning reference to sunspots and weather forecasts. To explain the apparent paradox that arose from adopting the second law, he returned to the concern raised by Alexander Herschel in the Intellectual Observer for 1864 and addressed in The Unseen Universe. How was it possible in a divinely ordered universe that the earth’s population should receive less than one thousand millionth part of the sun’s energy, while the rest apparently went to waste? Stewart wrote that it was unquestionably a startling thought that so much “high class” energy (i.e. readily harnessed to perform mechanical work) was carried away into space at an enormous rate “never apparently to return to us” again, only a very small proportion being “reserved for our especial benefit.”85 This point was even more sharply posed in the sequel published two years later by the same periodical: “The Visible Universe—Is it a Physical or a Spiritual Production?” Reiterating points made earlier in joint authorship with Tait, Stewart asked: “Is the visible universe, viewed as a physical construction, apparently well-adapted for the aim of its construction?” In Stewart’s anthropocentric account, the purposeless waste of the sun’s energy seemed prima facie to be contrary evidence. This topic as well as those of miracles and free will ceased to be troublesome, however, if the universe was not conceived simply as a physical production. Stewart argued that energy physics and religion could be viewed as an intelligible harmonious whole if not viewed merely as part of a physical universe. This universe should rather be seen fundamentally as a spiritual product of intelligent invisible beings under the benign jurisdiction of the “Divine Ruler” using energy available only to beings of great delicacy existing in the unseen universe.86 Conclusions Though The Unseen Universe can be regarded as a popularization of science for an ideological purpose, it was intended as a contribution to the philosophy of nature. —P. M. Heimann87

On the evidence presented above, one might generalize beyond Heimann’s comment that Balfour Stewart’s writings (with and without the collaboration of Tait and Lockyer) were more than just an attempt to popularize

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energy physics. My reasons for doing so, however, are not Heimann’s. After 1866 many general readers seeking to fathom the significance of energy conservation and dissipation would have encountered Stewart’s (closely related) periodical articles and textbooks. And the socio-political metaphor he developed in Macmillan’s Magazine uniquely addressed the problem facing many readers seeking to understand how energy, traditionally conceived as a quality of character, could be translated into an abstraction that existed in both “kinetic” and “potential” forms in the framework of general “conservation.” Yet insofar as Stewart’s writings concerned the relation of terrestrial weather, sunspots and the afterlife, these were neither simply about energy, nor an entirely conventional rendering of the North British energy synthesis. They also attempted to address some of the pressing philosophical and theological challenges raised by this synthesis. Thus Stewart introduced the new principle of “delicacy of construction” to resolve the problem of how the will—clearly assumed by him to be immaterial in nature—could intervene and influence a universe of energy transmutation. With Tait he suggested a solution to the moral puzzle of ubiquitous “dissipation” by arguing that energy lost to humans was reclaimed by divine intelligences in the “unseen universe” in order to exercise benign intervention in the visible world. Stewart’s writings are thus marked by a distinctive interest in the more transcendent human implications of energy physics. There are two caveats to my interpretation, however. Stewart’s writings did not indiscriminately draw upon the energy synthesis irrespective of his audience’s knowledge or interests. For some purposes, especially in his popular writings up to 1866 and in his school textbooks, he often had recourse to the older conceptual dichotomy of heat and work. Indeed, early on Thomson and Stewart recognized the strategic value of not using “energy” in situations where the novelty of such explanatory talk might distract attention from more important new claims that they were seeking to communicate to non-expert audiences. This is apparent in Thomson’s 1862 title “The Age of the Sun’s Heat” and in Stewart 1866 textbook, An Elementary Treatise on Heat. One might infer that in such contexts the older and more familiar language of heat and work had greater heuristic value in introducing new arguments, especially theologically driven claims about solar heat, that could confound Darwinian assessments about the age of the earth. For such specific cases the use of energy language per se was of somewhat contingent cultural utility. Conversely, however, we know that such was the demand for Stewart’s textbook, The Conservation of Energy, that it was published in several editions after his death in 1887 (including

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translations into French, German, Czech, and Icelandic) long after his periodical writings and pursuit of “cosmical” meteorology had been forgotten. Readers could evidently extract from Stewart’s writing what they needed to understand of energy discourse without having to assent to his theistic interpretation of solar-meteorological relationships. What can this study of Balfour Stewart’s periodical writing offer to scholars constructing historical accounts of science writing in the nineteenth-century general journal? Stewart’s periodical writings offer more than (yet another) instance of how a major Victorian practitioner sought to present his research to a wider public through the popular press. In evidential terms, it enables us to develop a much richer picture of his inter-related activities in meteorology, geomagnetism, sunspot analysis, energy physics and anti-materialist theology than previous historians have produced by restricting their attention to his books and technical publications. Second, Stewart used a general rather than a specialist technical periodical to introduce the world to a new theologically significant interpretation of his work with Lockyer in 1868: he used Macmillan’s Magazine (at Lockyer’s invitation) to present his analysis of how the “principle of delicacy of construction” explained sunspot-weather relations. However, we should not therefore see Macmillan’s Magazine as a mere passive vehicle that served the interests of self-promoting scientists: the role of publisher Alexander Macmillan as “impresario” was crucial in actively commissioning collaborative work from two scientists in his wide circle of contacts. Although it might be argued that Stewart had a conduit to Macmillan’s patronage through his close associate P. G. Tait, this fact could not by itself explain either the chronological provenance or subject matter of “The Sun as a type of the Material Universe,” let alone Stewart’s decision to collaborate with Lockyer. Moreover, the publishing house of Macmillan also furnished institutional continuity for both of Stewart’s long term collaborations. When Lockyer left Macmillan’s Magazine to become editor of Nature, he gave Stewart much column space for his often polemical writings on energy, meteorology and solar physics. In supporting the publication of The Unseen Universe in 1875, Macmillan enabled Stewart and Tait to extend the theistic arguments first articulated in Macmillan’s Magazine to a complete anti-materialist treatise on the energy physics of the afterlife—a theme Stewart continued to promote in his occasional periodical writing. Several wider questions for historical research on science in the nineteenth-century periodical might be drawn from the above analysis.

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How much credence did contemporary periodical commentators give to Stewart’s energy-based and delicacy-centered account of meteorology and the afterlife? To what extent did this depend on judgments about the credibility of his controversial collaborators Tait and Lockyer? How important was energy as a theme in periodical debates on materialism in the wake of Tyndall’s Belfast address?88 And how contentious anyway was the appropriation of such a culturally important term as “energy” for the new field of thermodynamics? For example, why were some periodical writers implicitly or explicitly concerned with the propriety of replacing all references to “conservation of force” with “conservation of energy”?89 Finally, how did contemporaries interpret the journalistic activities of such selfstyled “energetic” individuals as Stewart and Lockyer in relation to their promotion of a new cosmic physics of energy? From such research we might recover the extent to which their putatively intrinsic energy of character enabled them to scatter their opponents, or was diffused into heated controversies centered on their personal agendas rather than the central themes of the new energy physics. Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the following for advice and comments on earlier versions of this chapter: Kathryn Anderson, Gillian Beer, Jed Buchwald, Geoffrey Cantor, Gowan Dawson, Bernard Lightman, Ben Marsden, Richard Noakes, Ann Shteir, Crosbie Smith, Sally Shuttleworth, and other participants at the Dibner workshop in April 2001. Notes 1. Balfour Stewart and J. Norman Lockyer, “The Sun as a Type of the Material Universe,” part I, Macmillan’s Magazine 18 (1868): 246–257; part II (subtitled “The Place of Life in a Universe of Energy”), ibid.: 319–327. 2. The opening sentence of William Thomson and Peter Guthrie Tait, “Energy,” Good Words 3 (1862): 601–607, is very revealing on this point: “The non-scientific reader who may take up this article in the expectation of finding an exhortation to manly sports, or a life of continual activity with corresponding censure of every form of sloth and sensual indulgence, will probably be inclined to throw it down when he finds that it is devoted to a question of physical science.” For a further contemporary examination of physical and mental “Energy” as characteristics of male scientists, see Francis Galton, English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture (Macmillan, 1874), pp. 75–76.

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3. Crosbie Smith, The Science of Energy: A Cultural History of Physics in Victorian Britain (Athlone, 1998). 4. See below for discussion of Alexander Herschel’s comments in the Intellectual Observer, 1864. For general discussion of concerns about “waste” in Victorian energy physics see Smith, The Science of Energy; Ben Marsden, “Energy,” in Reader’s Guide to the History of Science (Fitzroy-Dearborn, 2000). 5. John Tyndall, Address Delivered before the British Association, Assembled at Belfast (Longmans, Green, 1874), pp. 45–46. Not all contemporary scientists followed Tyndall in seeing “energy” physics as the major problem in accommodating the existence of the soul or free will. For example, there is only one indirect reference to energy in T. H. Huxley, “On the Hypothesis That Animals Are Automata and Its History,” Fortnightly Review 22 (1874): 199–245. I am grateful to Kathryn Anderson for drawing my attention to this Huxley piece. 6. Thomson and Tait, “Energy,” p. 601. 7. Brooke and Cantor note that Tait’s disputes with the agnostic Tyndall were exacerbated by their religious differences. Tyndall, for example, was highly dismissive of arguments from design that were fundamentally important to both Tait and Thomson; Tyndall was nevertheless friendly with other Christians, especially those of dissenting denominations. See John Brooke and Geoffrey Cantor, Recontructing Nature: The Engagement of Science and Religion (Clark, 1998), pp. 253–254. 8. Joe D. Burchfield, Lord Kelvin and the Age of the Earth (Macmillan, 1975), pp. 27–32. Crosbie W. Smith and M. N. Wise, Energy and Empire: A Biographical Study of Lord Kelvin (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 353, 530–533. On the literary response to “The Death of the Sun,” see Gillian Beer, Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Clarendon, 1996), pp. 219–241; A. W. Ewing, The Man of Room 140: the Life of Sir Alfred Ewing (Hutchinson, 1939). 9. Balfour Stewart, An Elementary Treatise on Heat (Clarendon, 1866); Lessons on Elementary Physics (Macmillan, 1870); The Conservation of Energy (Henry S. King, 1873). 10. [Balfour Stewart and Peter Guthrie Tait], The Unseen Universe or Physical Speculations on a Future State (Macmillan, 1875). See below for analysis of this initially anonymous publication. For Maxwell and Thomson’s objections to the Stewart and Tait interpretation, see Smith Science of Energy, pp. 253–255. For Stewart’s relations to the “North British” school, see ibid., pp. 192, 256, 311–312. 11. According to one obituary, Stewart was introduced to meteorology by his uncle Dr. Cloaston, Minister of Stanwick: [Anon.], “Deceased Members: Dr. Balfour Stewart,” Proceedings of the Physical Society 9 (1887–88): 9–12. For more on Stewart’s meteorological work, see Arthur Schuster, “Memoir of the Late Professor Balfour Stewart, LLD, F.R.S.,” Memoirs and Proceedings of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, fourth series 1 (1888): 253–272. Daniel Siegel, “Balfour Stewart and Gustav Robert Kirchhoff: Two Independent Approaches to Kirchhoff ’s Radiation Laws,” Isis 67 (1976): 565–600; Karl Hufbauer, Exploring the Sun: Solar Science since Galileo

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( Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 49ff.; Robert Kargon, Science in Victorian Manchester (Manchester University Press, 1977); Simon Schaffer, “Where Experiments End: Table-Top Trials in Victorian Astronomy,” in Scientific Practice, ed. J. Buchwald (University of Chicago Press, 1995); Smith, Science of Energy, pp. 253–255. For the ways in which Stewart’s meteorological and astronomical researches informed the laboratory instruction that he gave to the young J. J. Thomson, J. H. Poynting, and Arthur Schuster in the 1870s, see Graeme Gooday, Precision Measurement and the Genesis of Physics Teaching Laboratories in Victorian Britain, Ph.D. thesis, University of Kent at Canterbury, 1989, chapter 7. For Stewart’s role in the debate on spiritualism among physicists in the 1870s, see Richard Noakes, Cranks and Visionaries: Science, Spiritualism and Transgression in Victorian Britain, Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1998, pp. 63–68. 12. For an analysis of Stewart’s comments on his own life as communicated to Galton (who anonymized them) in Francis Galton, English Men of Science, see Victor L. Hilts, “A Guide to Francis Galton’s English Men of Science,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Association, n.s., 65 (1975): 3–85, esp. p. 69. During his period at Kew in the 1860s Stewart settled into a more conventional form of institutionalized Anglicanism, becoming Church Warden of St Johns Church, Richmond, superintendent of the Boy’s Sunday School, and “co-adjutor of the Vicar (Canon J. D. Hales) in parish matters,” “Dr. Balfour Stewart,” Proceedings of the Physical Society 9 (1887–88), p. 11. According to P. J. Hartog, Stewart was a “devoted and fervent churchman’ elected by a Lambeth Palace conference in 1881 to a committee for “promoting interchange of views between scientific men of orthodox [Anglican] views in religious matters,” “Balfour Stewart” Dictionary of National Biography. 13. Alexander Herschel, “Constancy of Solar Light and Heat,” Intellectual Observer 5 (1864): 129–131. Compare the piece published in the previous year by Alexander’s father, John Herschel, “The Sun,” Good Words 4 (1863): 273–284. 14. Herschel and Babbage maintained that such variations were due to electrified air currents. J. Cawood, “The Magnetic Crusade: Science and Politics in Victorian Britain,” Isis 70 (1979): 493–519. 15. Schwabe’s claim for a 10-year sunspot cycle was, however, as much disputed as the credit for discovery of its connection to geomagnetism—the Swiss observer Wolf persistently claiming priority over Sabine and arguing instead for a correlation over an 11-year cycle. See Nathan Reingold’s entry on Sabine in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography; Hufbauer, Exploring the Sun, pp. 46–51; Richard Proctor, The Sun, Ruler of the Planetary System (London, second edition, 1872), p. 195ff. 16. On relations between Sabine and Airy, see Robert W. Smith, “A National Observatory Transformed: Greenwich in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Astronomy 22 (1991): 5–20, esp. pp. 10–12. 17. Cited in Proctor, The Sun, pp. 207–209. 18. B. Stewart, “On Sun-Spots and Their Connection with Planetary Configurations,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 23 (1864): 499–504. In the period

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1865–1873 Stewart published ten empirical papers on this and related subjects in collaboration with Warren de la Rue and Benjamin Loewy. 19. Proctor, The Sun, pp. 218–219. 20. On this period of the Intellectual Observer, see Ruth Barton, “Just before Nature: The Purposes of Science and the Purposes of Popularisation in Some English Popular Science Journals of the 1860s,” Annals of Science 55 (1998): 1–33, esp. pp. 7–13. 21. Rev. T. W. Webb, “Solar Observation. Transits of Jupiter’s Satellites,” Intellectual Observer 5 (1864): 292–299. 22. Balfour Stewart, “On the Origins of the Lights of the Sun and Stars,” Intellectual Observer 5 (1864): 448–455. 23. William Thomson, “The Age of the Sun’s Heat” Macmillan’s Magazine 5 (1862): 388–393, reproduced in W. Thomson, Popular Lectures and Addresses (Macmillan, 1891), vol. 1. 24. Ibid., pp. 448–449, 454–455. On William Herschel’s earlier project to undertake a natural history of the heavens, see Simon Schaffer, “Herschel in Bedlam: Natural History and Stellar Astronomy,” British Journal for the History of Science 13 (1980): 211–239. My thanks to Ben Marsden for his comments on this point. 25. William Thomson and P. G. Tait, “Energy,” Good Words 3 (1862): 601–607. For a discussion of this piece, see Smith and Wise, Energy and Empire, pp. 353 and 535. 26. Balfour Stewart and P. G. Tait, “Preliminary Note on the Radiation from a Revolving Disc,” Proceedings of the Royal Society 14 (1865): 90; “On the Heating of a Disk by Rapid Rotation In Vacuo,” ibid.: 339–343. Sequels to the lattermost were published in 1867, 1873 and 1878. Promising early evidence sustained this program into Stewart’s laboratory at Owen’s College Manchester in the 1870s, although others saw rather more mundane forces at work in the gradual slowing down of Stewart and Tait’s apparatus. See Arthur Schuster, Biographical Fragments (Macmillan, 1932), p. 212. 27. Stewart, Elementary Treatise on Heat, preface. 28. This report, written by Stewart himself in his official capacity as Secretary to the Meteorological Commitee, was published by the BAAS and both houses of Parliament. 29. Report of a Committee appointed to consider certain questions relating to the Meteorological Department, Department of Trade, Parliamentary Papers, 1866, vol. 65, p. 329; [Balfour Stewart], “Meteorology, Past and Present,” North British Review 45 (1866): 189–196. Stewart is identified as the author of the latter in W. Houghton, ed., Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals (Routledge & Kegan Paul and University of Toronto Press, 1966), vol. 1, p. 691.

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30. Herbert Dingle, “The Sun and Meteorology,” in T. Mary and Winifred Lockyer with the assistance of Herbert Dingle, The Life and Work of Sir Norman Lockyer (Macmillan, 1928), p. 337. 31. Ibid., pp. 8 and 22. They pass silently over the fact that such a move was only made possible by her James family inheritance, on which see Jack Meadows, Science and Controversy: A Biography of Sir Norman Lockyer (Macmillan, 1972), pp. 12–13. 32. Three years earlier Ludlow had suggested to Macmillan in 1856 that sales of Hughes’s forthcoming Tom Brown’s School Days would be greatly enhanced by serialization in a publisher’s house magazine. After the spectacular success of both this and Charles Kingsley’s Two Year’s Ago in 1857–58, Hughes reiterated Ludlow’s suggestion, and as Macmillan could now afford the financial risk of this new venture he secured their help in persuading David Masson to take up the editorship of the proposed new monthly. Charles L. Graves, Life and Letters of Alexander Macmillan (Macmillan, 1910), pp. 91–92, 115–118, 129–131. Graves (ibid., pp. 69–71) notes that in 1856 Alexander’s brother and senior partner, Daniel Macmillan (died 1857) also received a letter from Isaac Todhunter—author of Differential Calculus (Macmillan, 1852)— proposing the publication of a weekly or fortnightly “literary” magazine. For Macmillan quote see letter to Franklin Lushington, November 12, 1859 reproduced in Letters of Alexander Macmillan, ed. G. Macmillan (privately published, 1908), p. 173. For further discussion see Charles Morgan, The House of Macmillan, 1843–1943 (Macmillan, 1944), pp. 50–61. 33. Alexander Macmillan wrote to Peter Guthrie Tait on June 18, 1864: “I am now living in Tooting, about six miles down the Crystal Palace line. My friends come and see me there occasionally, and as I am here all the week I don’t now hold my feasts of Talk, Tobacco and Tipple on Thursdays as of old. Had you been in town yesterday I could have given you all three at my house in perfection. I had Huxley the Professor and Tennyson the Poet dining with me, and better talk is not often to be had than was going. When you come up give me a day or two’s notice and stay with me. . . .” See Letters of Alexander Macmillan, p. 173. 34. J. N. Lockyer, “Observations on the Planet Mars,” Monthly Notices of the Astronomical Society 32 (1864): 179–192. See M. and W. Lockyer, Norman Lockyer, pp. 8–14. See also Meadows, Science and Controversy, p. 6. Meadows (pp. 8–10) draws heavily on the former work in his account of Lockyer’s early years, but adds much useful information on Hughes’s indirect role in supporting Lockyer’s rise through the Civil Service in 1860–1865. 35. [J. N. Lockyer], “Science—The Past Year,” Reader 1 (1863): 19–20. For the Cooke’s advertisement, see ibid., p. 82. 36. M. and W. Lockyer, Norman Lockyer, pp. 14–27, 34–35; Meadows, Science and Controversy, 16–24. See Amédée Guillemin, The Heavens: An Illustrated Handbook of Popular Astronomy (Richard Bentley, 1866). 37. M. and W. Lockyer, Norman Lockyer, pp. 30–33; J. N. Lockyer, “Observations of a Sunspot,” Monthly Notices of the Astronomical Society 25 (1864): 236–241; “Spectroscopic

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Observations of the Sun, No. 1.” For a full account of Lockyer’s observations and their role in contemporary astronomical controversies, see Meadows, Science and Controversy, pp. 46–52. 38. M. and W. Lockyer, Norman Lockyer, p. 29. 39. Graves, Life and Letters of Alexander Macmillan, pp. 246 and 262; see also Morgan, House of Macmillan, p. 69; J. N. Lockyer, “Prospects of Weather Science,” Macmillan’s Magazine 14 (1866): 299–302. His account of the Leonid meteors appear in November in “The November Star-Shower,” Macmillan’s Magazine 14 (1866): 142–148. 40. B. Stewart and J. N. Lockyer, “The Sun as a Type of the Material Universe,” part II, Macmillan’s Magazine 18 (1868): 319–327. 41. Lockyer’s first breakdown occurred in March 1867 and the next in May-June 1868 when he was effectively demoted from his position as Head of the Regulation Branch at the War Office, see M. and W. Lockyer, Norman Lockyer, pp. 29–33, Meadows, Science and Controversy, pp. 10–12, 23–24. It was during this period that Norman and Winifred launched a long-lasting pattern of gregarious weekly “smokers” at their Hampstead home. Meadows’s suggestion is in contrast to speculations by family biographers that the relevant work to emerge from this attempted collaboration was Lockyer’s Contributions to Solar Physics (Macmillan, 1874). 42. M. and W. Lockyer, Norman Lockyer, p. 36. 43. Balfour Stewart, “What Is Energy?” Nature 1 (1869–70): 647–648. Although the piece is signed by Stewart, a footnote specifies: “This subject has been discussed from this point of view by Messrs Stewart and Lockyer in an article in Macmillan’s Magazine August 1868.” (ibid., p. 647) Later passages in the second Macmillan’s paper strongly resemble the last section in Balfour Stewart, The Conservation of Energy (Henry S. King, 1873), esp. pp. 157–167. 44. Stewart and Lockyer, “The Sun as a Type of the Material Universe,” pp. 246–254. 45. Stewart and Lockyer, ibid., p. 256. Compare Joseph Baxendell, “On Solar Radiation,” Proceedings of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society 7 (1868): 36–46, 97–106. 46. Stewart and Lockyer, “The Sun as a Type of the Material Universe,” p. 257. 47. On free will and determinism and their relation to the problem of “Maxwell’s demon” in statistical thermodynamics, see Smith, Science of Energy, pp. 240–241, 249–252. 48. See Galton, English Men of Science, pp. 75–76. 49. “The Sun as a Type of the Material Universe,” part II, p. 319. 50. Meadows, Science and Controversy, pp. 11–12.

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51. “The Sun as a type of the Material Universe,” part II, p. 319. See G. Gooday, “Balfour Stewart, Exact Meteorology.” 52. Stewart noted that just as there were forms of energy in the social world that conduced to “no useful result,” so there were in the physical world degraded forms of energy from which no human benefit could be derived. The only escape from perpetual dissipation of useful energy on earth was to have energy of a “superior” form communicated from without. (“The Sun as a Type of the Material Universe,” part II, pp. 321–323) 53. Ibid. A related discussion published in September 1867 can be found in Alexander Bain, “On the Correlation of Force in Its Bearing on Mind,” Macmillan’s Magazine 16 (1867): 372–383. Note that Bain used the older term “correlation of forces” in preference to “conservation of energy.” 54. Stewart briefly considered whether such delicacy could be sustained by a purely materialist conception of life, or whether a “vital principle” gave the only possible explanation. Although he obviously favored the latter interpretation, he evidently had no clinching argument against the materialist view, and devolved this battle to be fought “in other pages” by others with access to “other weapons” (ibid., pp. 325–327). Kathryn Anderson has drawn my attention to the way in which Stewart’s use of the word “delicacy” probably has distinct physiological overtones. 55. “May it not be possible,” Stewart and Lockyer write, “that in certain states of excitement there is action at a distance? This is a field of inquiry which men of science do not seem disposed to enter, and the consequence is that it appears to be given over to imposters. We need scarcely, after this, inform the reader that we do not believe in so-called spiritual manifestations; nevertheless we ask, does there not appear to be an amount of floating evidence for impressions derived from a distance in a way that we cannot explain?” (ibid., p. 327) 56. Ibid., p. 327. 57. “The Unseen Universe,” Nature 12 (1875): 41–43. Compare [Steward and Tait], Unseen Universe, pp. 143–146. 58. Morgan, House of Macmillan, pp. 84–87. 59. C. H. Pearson, “Biographical Sketch,” in Biographical Sketches and Recollections of Henry John Stephen Smith (privately published, 1894). This work was also appended to J. W. L. Glaisher, Collected Mathematical Papers of Henry J. S. Smith (Clarendon, 1894). 60. B. Stewart, “Remarks on Meteorological Reductions with Especial Reference to the Element of Vapour,” British Association Report pt. 2, 1869: 43–45. 61. Ibid., p. 43. 62. William Thomson, “Dr Balfour Stewart’s Meteorological Blockade,” Nature 1 (1869–70), p. 306. Airy’s comment was as follows: “By going on thus you may make meteorology into a science of causation, and raise it from its present contemptible

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state.” Letter from G. B. Airy to B. Stewart, 7 October 1869 cited in Stewart’s testimony to the Royal Commission on Scientific Instruction and the Advance of Science (Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1872), Sessional Papers XXV, p. 115, question 11354. 63. Schuster, Biographical Fragments, pp. 208–209. 64. B. Stewart, “Physical Meteorology—Its Present Position,” Nature 1 (1869), p. 102. 65. Schuster, Biographical Fragments. 66. Balfour Stewart, The Recent Developments of Cosmical Physics (Manchester: Thomas Sowler and Sons, 1870). 67. J. Norman Lockyer,“The Meteorology of the Future,” Nature 7 (1872–73): 98–101; Charles Meldrum, “On a Periodicity of Cyclones and Rainfall in Connexion with the Sunpot Periodicity,” British Association Report, 1873: 466–478. Meldrum’s paper had been cited in the October 24, 1872 issue of Nature. B. P. Shillaber (Benjamin Penhallow), in The Life and Sayings of Mrs Partington (New York: J. C. Derby, 1854), alludes to a character who during the great storm at Sidmouth of 1824 allegedly tried to push back the Atlantic with her household mop. 68. L. Trouvelot, “Meteorology of the Future” (letter to editor), Nature 7 (1872–73): 283. 69. See Meadows, Science and Controversy, pp. 124–129. See J. Norman Lockyer and W. W. Hunter, “Sunspots and Famines,” Nineteenth Century 2 (1877): 583–602, immediately followed by George Chesney, “Indian Famines,” Nineteenth Century 2 (1877): 603–620. The Indian Government’s chief meteorologist later announced he could not verify Lockyer’s claim that droughts regularly followed sunspot minima, Meadows, Science and Controversy, 127. 70. [Stewart and Tait], The Unseen Universe, 1875, preface. 71. Ibid. See especially p. 91, and also pp. 111–118. In fact their co-authorship was well known before its confirmation in 1876 in the fourth of the fourteen editions that appeared over thirteen years; see P. J. Hartog, “Balfour Stewart,” Dictionary of National Biography. There is an important structural homology in that both Tyndall’s Belfast Address and The Unseen Universe open with lengthy transcultural genealogies of crucial beliefs: the former on materialism the latter concerning the afterlife. For a suggestion that Stewart took the predominant role in the authorship of The Unseen Universe, see Schuster, Biographical Fragments, p. 214. 72. Tyndall, Address, pp. 45–46. 73. On the notion of appropriation used here see R. M. Friedman, Appropriating the Weather: Vilhelm Bjerknes and the Construction of Modern Meteorology (Cornell University Press, 1989). 74. See Bernard Lightman’s chapter in the present volume. 75. [Stewart and Tait], The Unseen Universe, 1875, p. 147. For discussion of Maxwell’s demon, on which William Thomson had lectured at the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1874, see Smith, Science of Energy, pp. 249–252

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76. As Tait later admitted in his Royal Society obituary notice of Stewart, the responses to The Unseen Universe varied from “hearty welcome and approval,” to “the extremes of fierce denunciation” or “lofty scorn.” Nevertheless, Tait maintained that their book had succeeded in its aim of showing “how baseless is the common statement that ‘Science is incompatible with Religion’ ”; at the same time he conceded that humanly practised science had “its limits” since there were some “realities with which it is altogether incompetent to deal.” P. G. Tait, “Dr Balfour Stewart,” Proceedings of the Royal Society 41 (1887–88), p. xi. 77. This Nature reviewer was generally skeptical of some arguments, doubting that the “invisible universe” could be supported eternally by energy dissipated in the “visible,” “The Unseen Universe,” Nature 12 (1875): 41–43; “The Authors of The Unseen Universe,” Nature 12 (1875), p. 66. 78. William Clifford, “The Unseen Universe,” Fortnightly Review 23 (1876): 776–793. A heavily edited and truncated version of this pungent critique of Stewart and Tait’s work was posthumously published in L. Stephen and F. Pollock, eds., Lectures and Addresses by the late William Kingdon Clifford (Macmillan; second edition, 1886). In the present volume, Gowan Dawson explains that the publishing staff at Macmillan persuaded Clifford’s widow to excise the more overtly anti Christian elements of her late husband’s review of The Unseen Universe in order to enhance sales of Lectures and Addresses. Compare review by “E.C.” in Fraser’s Magazine 93 (1876): 60–68. 79. Preface to second edition of [Stewart and Tait], The Unseen Universe, cited on pp. xiv–xv of fourth edition (1876). 80. Ibid., pp. vi–vii. My thanks to Ben Marsden for suggesting that this might have been an arch reference to the views of Tyndall and Mayer so regularly excoriated by Tait, see Smith, Science of Energy, 179–182. 81. R. A. Proctor, “Sunspots and Commercial Panics,” in Rough Ways Made Smooth (Chatto and Windus, 1880). I am very grateful to Bernard Lightman for this reference. 82. Scott contended that “next to no progress” had been made in the “cosmical” branch toward understanding the agencies that produced the “various phases of weather” (Elementary Meteorology, Kegan Paul Trench and Co., 1883, pp. 1–5). 83. E. Douglas Archibald, “On the Connection between Solar Phenomena and Climatic Cycles,” in The Scientific Roll, ed. A. Ramsay (W. Swan Sonnenschein, 1884), pp. 149–150. Archibald was Professor of Mathematics in the Bengal Education Department; see obituary of Archibald in Quarterly Journal of the Meteorological Society 40 (1914): 79–80. 84. See Pat Coyne, “Could the Sun Be the Main Influence on Our Weather?” New Statesman and Society, March 18, 1994, p. 47. 85. Balfour Stewart, “On the Conservation and Dissipation of Energy,” Contemporary Review 92 (1882), p. 42.

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86. Balfour Stewart, “The Visible Universe—Is It a Physical or a Spiritual Production?” Contemporary Review 96 (1884): 49–61. 87. P. M. Heimann, “The Unseen Universe: Physics and the Philosophy of Nature in Victorian Britain,” British Journal for the History of Science 6 (1972), p. 73. 88. See the chapter by Bernard Lightman in this volume. 89. Note for example St. George Mivart’s arguments against the replacement of “force” by “Energy” in his piece “Force, Energy and Will,” Nineteenth Century 3 (1878): 933–948, and the near synonymous use of “energy” and “force” in Viscount Bury, “Electric Light and Force,” Nineteenth Century 12 (1882): 98–119.

7 “Improvised Europeans”: Science and Reform in the NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW, 1865–1880 Crosbie Smith and Ian Higginson

The painful truth is that all of my New England generation, counting the half-century, 1820–1870, were in actual fact only one mind and nature: the individual was a facet of Boston. We knew each other to the last nervous centre, and feared each other’s knowledge. We looked through each other like microscopes. There was absolutely nothing in us that we did not understand merely by looking in the eye. There was hardly a difference even in depth, for Harvard College and Unitarianism kept us all shallow. We knew nothing—no! but really nothing! of the world. . . . Improvised Europeans, we were, and—Lord God!—how thin! No, but it is too cruel! Long ago,—at least thirty years ago, I discovered it, and have painfully held my tongue about it.You strip us, gently and kindly, like a surgeon, and I feel your knife in my ribs. —Henry Adams to Henry James, 19031

In June 1850, the famous New York publishing house of Harper & Brothers launched Harper’s New Monthly Magazine at $3 per annum. The announced aim was “to place within the reach of the great mass of the American people the unbounded treasures of the Periodical Literature of the present day.” Periodicals, the editorial asserted, “enlist and absorb much of the literary talent, the creative genius, the scholarly accomplishment of the present age. The best writers, in all departments and in every nation, devote themselves mainly to the Reviews, Magazines, or Newspapers of the day. And it is through their pages that the most powerful historical Essays, the most elaborate critical Disquisitions, the most eloquent delineations of Manners and of Nature, the highest Poetry and the most brilliant wit, found their way to the public eye and the public heart.” It was, furthermore, a devotion that was rapidly increasing to the point where nearly all the “wealth and freshness of the Literature of the Nineteenth Century are embodied in the pages of its Periodicals.”2 The editorial also quickly identified the magazine’s space in the changing periodical market of mid-century America. “Scientific discovery, mechanical inventions, the creations of Fine Art, the Orations of

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Statesmen, all the varied intellectual movements of this most stirring and productive age,” Harper’s proclaimed, “find their only record upon these multiplied and ephemeral pages” of the weekly and daily journals of Europe and America. But such pages were “intermingled with much that is of merely local and transient interest, and are thus hopelessly excluded from the knowledge and the reach of readers at large.” It was therefore the goal of the publishers “to place every thing of the Periodical Literature of the day, which has permanent value and commanding interest, in the hands of all who have the slightest desire to become acquainted with it.”The result each year would be “nearly two thousand pages of the choicest and most attractive of the Miscellaneous Literature of the Age,” aimed not “exclusively at any class of readers” and with “a value so much beyond its price, that it shall make its way into the hands or the family circle of every intelligent citizen of the United States.”3 The period 1850–1880 was a boom time for the monthly magazine in North America. By 1857 the Boston-based Atlantic Monthly had been launched at a similar annual subscription, initially under the editorship of James Russell Lowell, professor of belles-lettres at Harvard and one of New England’s most celebrated poets.4 Scribner’s Monthly followed, beginning in 1870; it was re-launched as the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine ten years later. The success of these long-lived monthlies masked a high casualty rate among all North American magazines. In the previous century, indeed, no magazine appeared to survive more than a dozen years. The earliest of North American periodicals—the American Magazine and Historical Chronicle, edited in Boston—lasted less than five years.5 In the first half of the nineteenth century the story was much the same as newly launched titles struggled to survive in a highly competitive market for magazine literature.6 In contrast, by 1860 the city of Boston alone apparently could boast “nearly one hundred and fifty periodical publications (about one-third being legitimate magazines,) perhaps as many more in the other New England cities and towns, and a progeny of unknown, but very considerable extent, throughout the Union.”7 One such periodical was the North American Review (hereafter NAR), founded in 1815 as a quarterly and continuously published to the present day but for one bizarre break during the Second World War.8 In Henry Adams’s phrase, it was the work of “improvised Europeans”: Harvard-centered, Unitarian in its balanced and critical tone, and reflecting the style, format, and aims of the British quarterlies. In what follows, we focus on the fortunes of this famous quarterly under its last Bostonian editor (1870–1876), Henry Brooks Adams.

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Henry Adams and the Republic of Letters

Adrian Johns has argued that the Enlightenment gave rise to the first consistent representation of “public reason” understood as the “rationality manifested by a dispersed community of readers—a community defined by its common access not just to printed materials in general, but to printed periodicals in particular.” Individual readers, working in the privacy of their libraries, judged for themselves matters of public life in the absence of constraints from church or state. The system depended above all on the notion of “a stable and trustworthy realm of printed knowledge.”9 In its first half-century, the NAR had acquired just such a stable and trustworthy image. By the middle of the century, at least, the tone of the Review was unashamedly progressive. Evaluating in 1846 the American edition of Thomas Arnold’s Introductory Lectures on Modern History (delivered in his capacity as Regius Professor of History at Oxford five years earlier), for example, the anonymous reviewer looked for ways to remove historical difficulties lying in the path of “our theory of the unintermitted progress of humanity.” “And,” he concluded with enthusiasm, “if mankind be thus passing ever onward to a nobler state and a higher destiny, let the race have our favoring efforts, our sincere godspeed,—our voice and arm ever on the side of justice, freedom, progress, and humanity.”10 Equally confident was another reviewer writing on “The Tendencies of Modern Science” in 1851: If the condition of humanity is under the control of Providence, and if that Providence be beneficent, and have the power to carry its will into effect, then must that condition always be progressive. And mankind is at every moment in some determinate stage of its progress. In some ages this progress may be more obvious than in others. In some, it may be exhibited by an incontestable and salient advance, while in others, there is a pause like that of a strong man, preparing to leap forward. And if the world seems to retrograde, it is but to gain a new position, and become ready to advance in a new direction.11

Such an unadulterated faith in upward progression coincided with a faith in the natural and social sciences of the time. Not surprisingly, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and its sequel, Explanations, were reviewed at length in 1845 and 1846 respectively.12 Throughout the 1840s and beyond, works of science that appeared to advance human knowledge in matters technological, mathematical, astronomical, geological, geographical, chemical, botanical, and physiological were commonplace in

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most volumes. So too were articles on social reform (especially those coupled to critiques of slavery in the South), on political economy and on natural theology, including extensive reviews of the works and life of Thomas Chalmers.13 After 1857, however, the NAR faced tough competition from the Atlantic Monthly, which rarely hesitated to promote its commitments to historical progress. Take, for example, a reviewer’s notice in 1869 of “Historic Progress and American Democracy,” John Lothrop Motley’s recent address to the New York Historical Society. “There is always something invigorating and inspiring in the tone of Mr Motley’s philosophy,” began the reviewer, “and here he utters only a little more directly and explicitly what is to be gathered from any of his histories; he . . . teaches that the hope of the world lies in the Americanization of the world, enforcing all with a fervid faith in democracy.”14 Confidence in natural progression seemed to go hand in hand with political progress, especially in the New World. Henry Adams’s major review of the penultimate edition of Sir Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology in 1868 had been undertaken at the celebrated geologist’s own bidding. Though introducing a note of skepticism concerning Lyell’s doctrine of strict uniformitarianism, Adams recognized the manner in which Darwin’s evolutionary biology had been carefully grafted on to a Lyellian geological foundation: the earth might be represented as a balanced, steady-state system, but in the living world there were clear evidences of upward progression.15 Readers of the North American could therefore feel reassured and comfortable as to the inevitability of natural and human progression, whatever the apparent evidences to the contrary. In a retrospective assessment, Adams asserted in his autobiographical work The Education of Henry Adams, “for fifty years the North American Review had been the stage coach which carried literary Bostonians to such distinction as they had achieved.” And though the quarterly “never paid its reasonable expenses” with a circulation that “never exceeded three or four hundred copies,” nevertheless “newspaper editors had their eye on quarterly pickings.” In Adams’s judgment, the NAR “stood at the head of American literary periodicals; it was a source of suggestion to cheaper workers; it reached far into societies that never knew its existence; it was an organ worth playing on; and, in the fancy of Henry Adams, it led, in some indistinct future, to playing on a New York daily newspaper.”16 These remarks captured well the NAR’s professed high moral status. Many of its contributors belonged to the Harvard-educated Unitarian elites of New England, centered on Boston and Cambridge. Indeed, Boston and its

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environs provided a cultural home to many of America’s most celebrated literary offspring. At the same time, modern scholars of American literature frequently attribute the origins of an “American Literary Renaissance” primarily to the New England Transcendentalists centered on the small town of Concord and inspired by the former Unitarian minister Ralph Waldo Emerson.This self-styled literary elite, however, by no means commanded universal respect in the nineteenth century. The Boston-born but Southern-based Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) despised and ridiculed what he saw as the arrogant elitism of this New England literary clique.17 And Henry Adams himself, although far from sharing Poe’s perspective of an underprivileged outsider, confessed in his Education that he “never reached Concord, and to Concord Church he, like the rest of mankind who accepted a material universe, remained always an insect, or something much lower—a man.”18 Yet the Transcendentalism of Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, James Russell Lowell, and others was one manifestation of a rapidly changing New England culture in which the strict dogmatic theology of the old puritanism had in part yielded to Unitarianism characterized by radical latitudinarianism. “I admire them as much as ever, but I shall not deny that they were intolerant even according to the age in which they lived,” Adams informed his protégé Henry Cabot Lodge in 1876 with respect to the earlyseventeenth-century Massachusetts Puritans, whose Protestantism gave birth to the Congregational values of New England.19 For almost two centuries, Congregational clergy, their “authority built on learning,” formed an “extremely aristocratic class” of “almost unrivalled authority and influence.”20 From the time of American independence, however, Enlightenment values of reason and toleration had eroded the older forms of dogmatic theology. With Unitarianism forming the dominant religious culture of Boston’s learned elites in the early nineteenth century, cultural authority shifted from the churches to the republic of letters, and especially to the learned periodical literature, of which the NAR was the supreme example. Embodying in its quarterly publication values of independent thought and judgment, the NAR professed to present critical perspectives on knowledge, understood in its philosophical form rather than as dogma. In 1876, when Adams resigned as editor, cultural authority in the United States, however, was a far more fragmented feature of the social landscape. Unitarianism was but the diluted Christianity of a small intellectual elite. Competing denominations such as the Methodists and the Baptists offered a far stronger brew and appealed not to the intellect but

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to the soul. Political, and especially economic, power was increasingly vested not in a highly educated “clerisy” but in the industrial corporations. Scholarly knowledge, it seemed, had yielded to material power. “If the world in London grows old and wanes towards its dotage,” Henry Adams wrote to his English gentlemanly correspondent Charles Milnes Gaskell in 1876, “the world here stands still. Boston is a curious place. Its business in life is to breed and to educate.” In Boston both parent and teacher reproduced themselves in child and in scholar, who in turn did likewise: “Nothing ever comes of it all. There is no society worth the name, no wit, no intellectual energy or competition, no clash of minds or of schools, no interests, no masculine self-assertion or ambition. Everything is respectable, and nothing amusing. There are no outlaws. There are not only no convictions but no strong wants. . . . when a society has reached this point, it acquires a self-complacency which is wildly exasperating. My fingers itch to puncture it; to do something which will sting it into impropriety. I want to tweak its nose.”21 Boston, in short, had seemingly become the embodiment of Enlightenment values, reasonableness, balance, and uniformity combining with gentle progression to smooth over the differences of religion and politics that gave purpose and vitality to a culture. Two years on, Adams confessed to Gaskell his own sins of “bourgeois ease and uniformity” that afflicted him in the neighborhood of his native city.22 In his Education, Adams affirmed that up to the middle of the century “New England society was still directed by the professions. Lawyers, physicians, professors, merchants were classes, and acted not as individuals, but as though they were clergymen and each profession were a church.” Exemplifying Coleridge’s notion of a “clerisy” or rule of an elite intelligentsia, the Bostonian belief in the classical republican values of “government by the best” had “produced the long line of New England statesmen,” not politicians, who “guided public opinion, but were little guided by it.” Immersed in such a culture from his early years, Adams “took for granted that this sort of world, more or less the same that had always existed in Boston and Massachusetts Bay, was the world which he was to fit.” It was a world too that had its counterparts in Paris and London: “The Paris of Louis Philippe, Guizot, and de Tocqueville, as well as the London of Robert Peel, Macaulay, and John Stuart Mill, were but varieties of the same upper-class bourgeoisie. . . . England’s middle-class government was the ideal of human progress.”23 In Boston, “the Puritan city,” the harsh dogmas of the old Puritanism had indeed yielded to a Unitarianism that expressed an optimistic faith in

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human advancement grounded in belief in a natural and moral order. As Henry wrote in his Education, everything “since the creation of man, all divine revelation or human science . . . conspired to deceive and betray” the young Adams, who took for granted that these “Bostonian” republican values were “alone respectable” and “would alone be respected.” Up to 1860, however, only his grandfather’s failure to realize his vision of natural and social perfection and his recognition that the democratic principle seemed productive not of communal good but of private greed, served to disturb the tranquil and complacent political ideology of gentlemanly professionalism which guided the young Adams.24 As Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray have shown, Boston residents (especially medical men) had been prominent among American visitors to the early meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) in the 1830s. John Collins Warren, professor at the Harvard Medical School and New England’s leading surgeon, conducted a vigorous campaign to create an American Association for the Promotion of Science along the lines of the BAAS. Although the proposal obtained strong support from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston, as well as support from the natural philosopher Benjamin Silliman (Yale) and the leading Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing (Boston), the hostility of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia (America’s oldest learned society) killed the scheme. The Association of American Geologists (formed in 1840 and adding the word “Naturalists” to its title two years later), however, was molded along BAAS lines, and at its Boston meeting in 1847 a proposal to create an American Association for the Advancement of Science was successful. The Bostonian geologist Henry Darwin Rogers, professor at the University of Pennsylvania and head of the Pennsylvania state geological survey, had been instrumental in shaping the AAGN from the start, and would play the lead role in drafting the AAAS’s constitution. Meanwhile, the arrival of Louis Agassiz in Boston in 1846 to take up the professorship of zoology and geology at Harvard’s new Lawrence Scientific School added European authority to the new Association, whose core members, like those of the BAAS, tended to be gentlemanly professionals.25 Invoking philosophical authority expressed in this and other ways, New England’s republic of letters could represent itself as the inheritor of Enlightenment, situated in a new nation that no longer owed anything to aristocratic patronage or to inherited wealth and status. Rather, its pedigree was thoroughly republican, philosophical and rational, in science, morality, and throughout learning. Up to the middle of the century,

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anonymity of authorship vested authority in the periodical rather than in individual contributors. And the Unitarian values of rationality and balance served to distance the NAR from sectarian and party interests. Above all, the philosophical perspectives on nature (seen as a perfect and enduring system) and society (represented as capable of perfection into a similarly stable system) would be mirrored in the dynamic stability and balanced judgment of the NAR itself. Science and Reform in the NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW

In November 1857, the first number of a new monthly literary magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, appeared.Very largely the creation of New England’s literati, its first editor was the celebrated poet James Russell Lowell whose optimistic progressivism (including antislavery) typified the circle of leading contributors to the periodical. Within three years, the Atlantic Monthly was bought by the ambitious Boston publishing house Ticknor and Fields. James T. Fields, a Unitarian and a partner in the publishing house, quickly displaced Lowell as editor. With contributions from distinguished Boston-centered literati, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier, John Lothrop Motley, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, the Atlantic Monthly soon showed itself well able to compete in the market of American monthlies.26 In contrast to Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly did not need to indulge in piracy from British magazines. Its winning formula was to blend light literature and contemporary comment with more serious essays and reviews which (in James Secord’s phrase) “marketed speculation.”27 In fact, by 1864 Ticknor and Fields had also bought the loss-making NAR. Even with Lowell as co-editor for a time, however, Fields could not find a similar winning formula to restore its fortunes. In March 1869 he informed editor Charles Eliot Norton: “We have determined, as the North America Review is an out-of-the-pocket, certainly of five or six thousand [dollars] a year, to let it die with the October number of this year. Let us mourn over it together when we meet in London.”28 A year later, Henry Adams was persuaded to try to breathe new life into the NAR. Adams inherited the NAR’s values of independence and balanced judgment. With his own review of Lyell’s Principles of Geology, published in 1868, he had set a high standard for even-handed analysis and accurate representation.29 Over the period of his editorship, the NAR would publish contributions by invited North American scholars (usually linked to the universities and colleges of the northeastern states) on such themes as

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political economy (Henry Adams, Simon Newcomb, Isaac Butts, Francis Walker, Charles Dunbar), geology ( J. D. Whitney), railroad problems (Charles Francis Adams Jr.), historical methods and principles (F. H. Hedge, J. H. Stirling), and so on. In 1876 Adams published two issues devoted to a systematic analysis of religion, politics, abstract science, economic science, law, and education in America over the century since independence.30 But it was Darwinism, natural selection, and human progress that dominated the NAR during Adams’s editorship. In 1860 the NAR published two essays devoted to On the Origin of Species. In the 1870s, essays reviewing Darwin and Darwinism appeared in an astonishing variety of forms, totaling 232 pages and including “Limits of Natural Selection,”“The Genesis of Species,” and “Evolution by Natural Selection” by Chauncey Wright, “Darwinism in Germany” by C. L. Brace, and “Darwinism and Language” by W. D. Whitney. But it was John Fiske’s “The Progress from Brute to Man” (1873) and “The Triumph of Darwinism” (1877) that really set the seal on the new evolutionary faith embodied in the pages of the NAR.31 Fisk, a rebel against a strict Calvinist culture, had had a controversial early career as a Harvard academic. A close friend of T. H. Huxley and other members of London’s “X-Club” of scientific naturalists, Fiske did not reject a theology of nature in which “the creative action of God” was directly manifested in the observed phenomena of nature. In Fiske’s positivistic language, science, once stripped of “metaphysical” claims, was not a threat to theology: “The business of science is simply to ascertain in what manner phenomena co-exist with each other or follow each other.” In pursuit of “its legitimate business,” he wrote, “science does not trench on the province of theology in any way, and there is no conceivable occasion for any conflict between the two.” But to assert “that complex organisms were directly created by the Deity is to make an assertion which, however true in a theistic sense, is utterly barren” from the perspective of scientific explanations concerned with the question of how.32 In “The Triumph of Darwinism” Fiske asserted exuberantly that “the sway of natural selection in biology is hardly less complete than that of gravitation in astronomy; and thus it is probably true that no other scientific discoverer has within his own lifetime obtained so magnificent a triumph as Mr Darwin.” Moreover, Fiske claimed, “in order fully to unfold the connotations of the word “Darwinism” one could hardly stop short of making an index to the entire recent literature of the organic sciences.” He confidently proclaimed that “the theory not only alleges a vera causa, and is not only confirmed by the unanimous import of the facts of

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classification, embryology, morphology, distribution, and succession; but it has further succeeded in tracing the actual origination of one generic type from another, through gradual ‘descent with modifications.’ And thus, within a score of years from its first announcement, the daring hypothesis of Mr Darwin may fairly claim to be regarded as one of the established truths of science.”33 Fiske’s article owed much to Huxley’s visit to the United States in the summer of 1876. As Adrian Desmond has argued, “Yale gave him the best week of his trip.” In particular, Huxley’s meeting with Othniel C. Marsh, professor of paleontology at Yale, had yielded something like a paleontological demonstration of evolution. Marsh’s collection of 30 species of fossil horse, arranged according to geological sequence, provided Huxley with fresh lecture material in which he could argue for the progressive change from small four-toed Orohippus to the recent single-toed Pliohippus. An even older five-toed (but conjectural) Eohippus would have made perfect the mammal descent of the horse.34 In Fiske’s review, the absence of “a perfect series of transitional forms connecting some well-known animal with its generically different ancestor” was due in part to “the fragmentary character of the geological record” and in part to “the fact that only a small portion of the earth’s surface has been explored by the paleontologist, and that portion superficially.” Marsh’s fossil horses fully confirmed the justice of such an explanation. Ignoring the conjectural nature of Eohippus, Fiske presented the horses as clearly showing a “gradation back to the ordinary mammalian type.” Indeed, the agreement of observation “with the requirements of theory is here complete, minute, and specific; and Professor Huxley may well say that the history of the descent of the horse from a five-toed mammal, as thus demonstrated, supplies all that is required to complete the proof of the Darwinian theory.”35 Unlike Fiske and many of his other contributors, however, Adams had begun to relinquish faith in the inevitability of upward socio-political progression. A diplomatic apprenticeship at the London Legation during the Civil War had taught him that the steamship, far from being the unproblematic bearer of enlightenment and progress, was the very embodiment of concentrated firepower, particularly when clothed in the form of British-built Confederate raiders, such as the notorious Alabama, that seemed to have destroyed the United States as a commercial maritime nation.36 Likewise, his brother’s postwar contributions to the NAR on the anti-democratic nature of American railroads, popularly the symbol of civilization and progress, had lifted the veil on the abuses of railroad power.

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But it was above all the coming to power in 1869 (for what turned out to be an eight-year presidency) of Civil War hero Ulysses S. Grant that finally convinced Adams that “progress” was in no sense an inevitable law of nature, still less of society. Here an image of the steam-engine was appropriate: the great machinery of democracy was less about progress than about power. As the narrator of the anonymous novel Democracy (1880), written under conditions of extreme secrecy by Adams himself, explained with respect to the heroine’s desire to understand democracy in America: Here, then, was the explanation of her restlessness, discontent, ambition,—call it what you will. It was the feeling of a passenger on an ocean steamer whose mind will not give him rest until he has been in the engine-room and talked with the engineer. She wanted to see with her own eyes the actions of primary forces; to touch with her own hand the massive machinery of society; to measure with her own mind the capacity of the motive power. She was bent upon getting to the heart of the great American mystery of democracy and government. . . . What she wished to see, she thought, was the clash of interests of forty millions of people and a whole continent, centering at Washington; guided, restrained, controlled, or unrestrained and uncontrollable, by men of ordinary mould; the tremendous forces of government, and the machinery of society, at work. What she wanted, was POWER.37

Indeed, even as early as the inauguration of President Grant, Henry dryly informed his brother Charles Francis of the possible makeup of the new cabinet. “We here look for a reign of western mediocrity,” he wrote, “but perhaps one appreciates least the success of the steamer, when one lives in the engine-room. I feel as though I ought to give my soul a thorough washing.”38 In his later Education, Adams judged Grant and his ilk with scornful irony: “[Grant once] seriously remarked to a particularly bright young woman that Venice would be a fine city if it were drained. . . . [Grant] had no right to exist. He should have been extinct for ages. . . . That, two thousand years after Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, a man like Grant should be called—and should actually and truly be— the highest product of the most advanced evolution, made evolution ludicrous. . . . The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin.”39 Adams was of course not making claims for or against the truth of the Darwinian doctrine of evolution by means of natural selection but he was playing on the assumption, widespread among the intelligentsia of both the United States and Britain, that evolutionary doctrine provided a

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scientific legitimation of inevitable social and political progress. Such a position was articulated in his novel Democracy by Nathan Gore of Massachusetts, like Lowell one-time minister at Madrid, possessor of “the aesthetic eye of a cultured Bostonian” and “head of American historians.” Like his more recent namesake, the fictional Mr. Gore was destined for political obscurity at the hands of Washington power brokers. Pressed by the perceptive heroine Madeleine Lee to answer the question “Do you yourself think democracy the best government, and universal suffrage a success?” Gore uttered his credo: These are matters about which I rarely talk in society; they are like the doctrine of a personal God; of a future life; or revealed religion; subjects which one naturally reserves for private reflection. But since you ask for my political creed, you shall have it. . . . I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it. Democracy asserts the fact that the masses are now raised to higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilization aims at this mark. . . . I grant it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth its taking; . . . Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the past. . . . I have faith; not perhaps in the old dogmas, but in the new ones; faith in human nature; faith in science; faith in the survival of the fittest. Let us be true to our time, Mrs Lee! If our age is to be beaten, let us die in the ranks. If it is to be victorious, let us be first to lead the column.40

In contrast to Gore’s faith in democracy and progress, the reality of raw power increasingly characterized Adams’s own view of the New World. His distaste for the perceived political shortcomings of Grant’s administration quickly found embodiment in the NAR under his editorship. The Republic of Letters would therefore publish an agenda for the active reform of the Republic of the United States of America—or perish in the attempt. In October 1870, Adams had written in his editorial capacity to the Massachusetts economist David Ames Wells (1828–1898), Special Commissioner of Revenue (1865–1870) until President Grant abolished the post, and author of a Report of the Commissioners . . . to Revise the Laws for the Assessment and Collection of Taxes for the State of New York (1871). “I have become editor of the North American Review, and propose to make it a regular organ of our opinions,” he explained. “Therefore I

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shall expect an article from you at your earliest convenience. Don’t try to get out of it.” He later told Wells with regard to Washington: “I found things badly changed there—run down hill. The President has succeeded in breaking down everybody of any value, including himself, and the prospect of getting rid of him is distant.” But Adams wanted Wells to contribute to the NAR “a regular financial review of the situation with an authoritative announcement of our proper policy, which should serve as a declaration of principles for our party.”41 In the first issue of 1871, the NAR published a piece by Jacob D. Cox 1828–1900), governor of Ohio (1866–1868) and Secretary of the Interior (1869–1870), on reform of the Civil Service, a matter central to Adams’s own agenda for the reform of government. As early as May 1869 Adams had informed his brother, Charles Francis, that “Grant’s Cabinet, except Cox and Hoar, is all pretty rough.” In November, Adams urged Cox: “Give the country a lead! We are all wallowing in the mire for want of a leader. If the Administration will only frame a sound policy of reform, we shall all gravitate towards it like iron-filings to a magnet.” What was needed in regard to Civil-Service reform, Adams emphasized, was “permanence of tenure which is to bar partisan corruption.”42 By October 1870, after attempting to introduce a merit system and to oppose attempts to impose political contributions on his departmental clerks, Cox had resigned from the administration. Adams saw the literary contributions of Wells and Cox as the means to “secure my success and assist the reform movement.” Without that aid, he could not see his way “to anything but failure.” In return, he promised to pay “five dollars a page which is the best the publishers will yet let me do.” Only when the NAR paid for itself could it be “very generous, but if it is successful I will quadruple the rates.” To that end, Adams wanted “to have this number [January 1871] extensively advertised in advance. . . . I mean to put all our machinery in the press to work in order to announce it beforehand.”43 Adams therefore saw the reform agenda and the success of the reformed periodical as inseparable. “I certainly do think that a statement on your part of the true principles of reform based on your experience in office, is very necessary, and to appear with it in my hand at the outset of my editorial career is of decisive consequence to me,” he informed Cox on November 17, 1870 as he anxiously awaited the former secretary’s article. But Adams also explained that he was going soon to New York “to meet our friends in council,” including Wells, and the

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newspapermen Horace White and Carl Schurz. A couple of days later he told Gaskell that he was heading for New York “to a political gathering of members of the press on my side . . . to press the interests of my Review.”The outcome was a meeting at which the views of Senator James Gillespie Blaine (1830–1893) prevailed. The ambitious Blaine, who provided the model for the scheming Senator Ratcliffe in Democracy and who was Speaker of the House from 1869 to 1875, “had declared himself satisfied that public opinion and the composition of the House demanded a recognition of our claims” for reform of both Civil Service and Revenue. He then “pledged himself to give us the Committee of Ways and Means, and any other positions that might be required of him.” Rather than split from the Republican party and form an alliance with the Democrats, therefore, the reformers (later known as the Liberal Republicans) “determined to support Blaine on the avowed ground that he had become one of us, and to throw on the republicans the responsibility of a rupture if they dared try it.”44 In correspondence with Senator Carl Schurz (1829–1906), one of the principal leaders of the reform movement and a St. Louis newspaperman, Adams differentiated between a hustings speech as “the creature of a day” and the kind of “political diagnosis that will last.” While the former would, once made, be “lost and forgotten in the files of a newspaper,” the latter formed a less ephemeral influence, “to which all our friends can appeal as applicable to the condition of the country now and at all times.” It was this latter role that Adams sought to construct for the NAR, addressing as it did that “class of readers who can only be reached by more permanent influences than the daily press, while through the daily press anything you say to a small and cultivated audience would at once be spread everywhere over the country.”45 Despite or perhaps because of this Republican reform agenda, Adams maintained that the NAR wanted material that “goes above politics or partisanship,” as he had told the historian-lawyer William Henry Trescot in September 1871. The key was to aim at “a point which other periodicals do not reach.”With Gaskell he privately went further, urging him to make future contributions pointed: “Nothing but what is particularly sharp will attract attention in a Quarterly. Stand on your head and spit at someone.”46 Few topics were guaranteed to fulfill that maxim more rapidly than to spit at the railroad interests. But it was the technique that really mattered in the quest to make the reader feel able to transcend the partisan and achieve independent judgment. Adams wrote the following to Trescot in August 1876 in the context of “The Southern Question”:

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. . . we are nothing if not scientific. We analyze like chemists; we dissect like surgeons; we construct like architects; we never lose our temper; we are never ornate; we are always practical. This is the character of all our writing and in order to create any effect on our hard-headed audience we must observe these rules. The condition of the southern states is a subject on which I have above all things wished to obtain a good article but I have after many years abandoned the attempt for the simple reason that all my southern correspondents who were willing to write for me, seemed possessed with the literary theories of 50 years ago, and let their feelings get the better of them. A calm, cold, scientific, unpartisan analysis of the condition of the south, its mental and economical condition, its modes of thought and its forms of industry; a plain summing-up of its position towards itself and towards the north, is very much needed. Every word of political feeling will weaken its effect. We in the north above all things respect the calmness of intellectual power, though we often pretend to ignore it.47

Issues pertaining to the South, of course, had potential for partisanship like no other in the New World, and Adams, with an impeccably Northern pedigree of anti-slavery and support for the Union in the Civil War, was scarcely impartial. But his strategy of integrating “science” and political reform aimed to transcend certain controversial and sensitive questions that had recently threatened and nearly destroyed the stability of the United States itself. To these ends, too, the editor encouraged his brother, Charles Francis, in his attacks on American railroad power. Henry told Gaskell in March 1871 of the dangerous target they were pursuing: I have been to New York in the interval, and besides a public dinner there, have been concocting our new attack on the [railroad financier] men of Erie in the next number of my Review. They have now found out that I wrote the Westminster article, and New York will soon be too hot for me. Cyrus Field [celebrated promoter of the 1857–58 Atlantic telegraph project] was after me, but I did not see him though he called before I was out of bed. Libel suits are looming ahead. There is going to be a very lively scrimmage in which some one will be hurt. We are in dead earnest on our side and our trains are laid far and near. Pray that we may not go under!48

In his Westminster Review article on “The New York Gold Conspiracy,” rejected by both the Tory Quarterly Review and the Whig Edinburgh Review as too controversial and potentially libelous, Adams had

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attacked the role of Field’s brother David Dudley Field as attorney to the railroad tycoons Jim Fisk and Jay Gould. Undeterred, the NAR published Charles Francis Adams’s “An Erie Raid” in April 1871 and Albert Stickney’s “Lawyer and Client” in the same number. With regard to the latter, the editor reassured his publisher on March 20: “Stickney’s article seems strictly professional. I see nothing to object to. The corrected proof is in, and I will have a copy sent to you today. It has been examined by several lawyers already.”49 “Trying to Be a Gentleman”: Forging Trustworthiness through Political Economy

In this section we focus on Charles Francis Adams, who, in close political alliance with his brother Henry, chose to build a career in railroads through the seemingly unlikely route of the NAR. We have argued that the material, moral, and political values embodied in the periodical were those of the republic of letters.The dispersed community of readers would bring to bear a “reasonable” judgment upon the knowledge claims and critical arguments of articles, independent of the authorities of church and state. More specifically, the NAR stood as the literary embodiment and trustworthy guardian of a New England Unitarian tradition in which rigid doctrine and infallible dogma had been replaced by an appeal to individual reason that would transcend sectarian and party interests. Above all, the NAR would appeal to reform agendas shaped by perceived threats to these “independent” values of rational judgment and philosophical enquiry. One such threat came directly from the burgeoning railroad corporations. In the late 1860s Henry worked tirelessly from his London base (where he continued to serve his father, Minister to England since 1861, as private secretary) to educate his brother in the ways of literary technique. Taking a draft of his brother’s lengthy article “Boston,” intended for the Atlantic Monthly, Henry first complimented his brother on producing an analysis which seemed “likely to act as hinges for future statesmanship.”50 One motivation for such articles was therefore to earn credibility for the author which in future might be exchanged for high office, whether in government or academe. Charles Francis Adams’s argument had rested on the claim that Boston’s failure to grow like New York and Chicago was due to Boston’s failure to extend its lines of communication, largely on account of “bad legislation” or “want of enterprise” in Massachusetts. Henry, however,

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disagreed with his brother’s inference and instead argued that Boston’s decline “has been simply due to the fact that other parts of the country were thought to offer, and in fact did offer, quicker and larger returns on expenditure of wealth or of labor than New England could afford to do.” But it had been political economy with a wasteful and ruinous moral consequence: “Boston has pitched millions of money into the gutter; she has gambled almost as recklessly—nay, far more recklessly—in gold and copper and petroleum stocks, than ever England did in Grand Trunk, Erie, or Atlantic & Great Western Railway securities.” It was this same “feeling” for faster and greater returns that “has carried her young energy away to New York, Chicago and San Francisco,” where “the stakes were heavier, the gains larger, and the losses identical, since ruin can only ruin, whether in Boston or the west.”51 Turning to the remedy, Henry approved his brother’s “central idea . . . that as you cannot stop the drain of resources, it is absolutely necessary to husband carefully and to employ economically all the force that is left.” But he urged Charles Francis to “go more carefully into the whole field of activity; to draw the railways a little back, and to push the adjuncts which you only indicate slightly, a little forward.” As a conclusion, he could then highlight his “railway commission as the best available remedy for the most pressing evil, not treating it, however, as a certain success, but as a necessary supplement to the acknowledged deficiencies of our political system.”52 At this point, Henry moved to their private agenda. In his view, “commissions were a useful, but an unfortunate make-shift,” whereas the “main-spring of life has got to lie in the people; the capitalists and the thinkers”: “If capital and thought will run away, commissions will not stop them; and our real hope must be in a reaction from the speculative fever of the last 20 years. All we can do in the interval is to economise our forces, and a railway commission, if it consists of really good men, may do something in that way. What is however of more importance to us is that such commissions open a door to men of our ability. This argument, however, is unfortunately not admissible and must be kept well out of sight.”53 The primary objective, then, was not simply to build Charles Francis Adams’s credibility for future statesmanship, but to secure for himself a place on a new state Railroad Commission. In due course Henry was consoling his brother on his rejection by The Atlantic Monthly’s editor, Fields, on the grounds that the article was too local. Published instead in the NAR (1868), “Boston” emphasized the urgency of establishing a State Railroad Commission. In “The Railway

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System” (1867) Charles Francis Adams had already made the case in an extended footnote, the purpose of which was to substantiate the argument for introducing a principle of large receipts and small profits into railroad management. But the problem was “not yet ripe for any satisfactory solution, through the absence of any reliable statistical tables.” Adams therefore asserted that the priority “in any future legislation” should be the creation, in the various States, of bureaus of railroad statistics, under the superintendence of competent commissioners. The annual returns of Massachusetts, for instance, need to be entirely remodelled, as from them it is almost impossible to arrive at any reliable conclusions. Such bureaus should be permanent, and collect information from all civilized countries, as well as exact specific returns on all possible points from the State corporations. Knowing the peculiarities in regard to through and local travel, construction, grades, and elevations of each road, and the requirements of particular regions of the State, they could shed a flood of light on railroad legislation which will never be derived from spasmodic agitations, leading to superficial hearings before legislative committees. When such a bureau exists, and not till then, may some intelligent railroad legislation be hoped for. Until that time comes, the most important material interests of the community are in perpetual danger of experimental legislative tinkering.54

With Henry back in the United States by the spring of 1869, the Adams brothers formalized their division of labor in their campaign for credibility. While Henry took on reform of the machinery of government (Civil Service reform and finance), Charles Francis pursued the railroad question. Corruption and conspiracy in matters of banking and railroads were intertwined. More strikingly, they were embodied in the figure of Jay Gould, whose power seemingly extended deep into the Grant administration. As Henry was to explain in his Education: “Charles took the railway history; Henry took the so-called Gold Conspiracy; and they went to New York to work it up.” There they “paid their respects in person to the famous Jim Fisk in his Opera-House Palace.”The outcome, for Charles Francis Adams, was an article titled “A Chapter of Erie” in the NAR (1869).55 “Erie,- Erie,- Erie,- I’m very weary of Erie,” wrote Charles Francis Adams in his private diary on May 8, 1869. “Mr Gurney came in to see me & horrified me with the information that the N. American was weak on its legs. I do hope that won’t go yet.” It seemed like a race against the likely demise of the periodical. By the end of May, however, the article

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was in the hands of the printer with proofs following a month later. With the Massachusetts Railroad Commission bill just through the House, it was scarcely accidental that the arrival of the proofs coincided with Charles Francis’s campaign for appointment as one of the three commissioners. On June 25 he finally “received an intimation through Hill that the Commissionership was ‘all right,’ which relieved me much;- my friends seem to have worked for me with a good will which astonishes me.”56 The campaign for railroad reform that the brothers had orchestrated in the NAR had gained for Charles Francis Adams the position he had sought as a member of the Railroad Commission. To an outsider the “undemocratic” manner of his appointment might have appeared suspect, but it was an appointment that involved above all the hard work of building trustworthiness through literary labor. “A Chapter of Erie” in particular had earned its author much credibility and authority and the author himself was privately pleased with the result: “In the evening read over my Erie and it astonished me,- it is far ahead of anything I have yet done if it does not make a stir, nothing will.” Direct financial returns were, however, derisory. James R. Osgood of the publishing house Fields & Osgood paid Adams a visit at the end of July to “explain the offensive check, which he did tolerably well. The old N. American is, I fear, going down & it is a great loss to me.” Meanwhile, he had worked out “a programme for publishing my Erie in New York” and took steps to get a pamphlet version printed. There was even a move to take the NAR to New York: “had a talk at the office with Henry & Gurney about the N. American which I hope we shall take to New York.”57 Charles Francis Adams now had access to the authority vested in the Railroad Commission. Within a culture of scientific (statistical) reform, Charles Francis served the Railroad Commission for some ten years. But his railroad career was yet to reach its zenith in the spring of 1884 with his appointment as president of Union Pacific, the first (and debt-ridden) transcontinental railroad. His presidency lasted until November 1890 when deteriorating financial conditions forced him to hand-over to his longtime bête noir, Jay Gould, whom Adams described in his private diary as the “little wizard.” “Gould showed me out,” Charles Francis wrote of the moment of his resignation: “As we formally shook hands, the little man seemed to look smaller, meaner, more haggard and livid in the face and more shrivelled up and ashamed of himself than usual; his clothes seemed too big for him, and, his eyes did not seek mine, but were fixed on the upper button-hole of my waistcoat.” Gould, in short, had not even the appearance of a trustworthy gentleman. Interviewed on November 28,

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Gould had his own verdict on his sternest critic: “The fact is that the [Union Pacific] road has been run on principles that have never before been carried into practice. They have appeared in books, I believe, and occasionally in poetry. The difference between the two presidents is very simple but very great. Mr Dillon is an honest, practical railroad man, while Mr Adams is a theorist.”58 The Decline and Fall of the NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW

The stability and trustworthiness of established periodicals were fragile. From the perspective of outsiders, such periodicals were often the preserve of literary and philosophical cliques, self-appointed oligarchies little different from Old World corruption, patronage, and prestige. Such at any rate was the verdict of Edgar Allan Poe, who seldom restrained his scorn at the power and privilege of the New England literati, whose circles he conspicuously failed to join. Working in the 1830s and the 1840s on or beyond the margins of North American periodicals of a stable and trustworthy character, Poe’s attempts to edit his own periodical under the name Broadway Journal lasted only a year (1845). And on a number of celebrated occasions Poe provocatively challenged the “trustworthiness” of periodicals like the American Whig Review with contributions such as “Some Words with a Mummy” and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” masquerading under the guise of scientific progress but, to the more discerning reader, written as a Swiftian satire on the pretensions of Whig values.59 Insiders such as Adams could, in private, be just as skeptical. A year or more into his editorship, he confessed to Gaskell in December 1871 that an English reviewer had described the NAR “as having ‘sprung into existence;’ a fact which sounds queerly in this benighted land [the United States], where the periodical has hitherto been considered as a species of mediaeval relic, handed down as a sacred trust from the times of our remotest ancestors.”60 But it was competition from the more popular, mass market monthlies such as the Atlantic Monthly that was threatening the stability of the NAR. Adams assumed the editorship with deep reservations about its future, as he told Charles Eliot Norton (1827–1908), editor from 1863 until 1868, early in 1871: Of my success with the Review I am far from sure. As you know I took it as a last resource, since no one else could be found, and at a moment when it was very doubtful whether the publishers would not decide to drop it at once. They determined to try me for one year. If

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I can make the Review pay for itself, it will go on. If not, it must die. And I do not yet know what the result will be. I have, however, succeeded in getting hold of Osgood [partner in the publishing house], who has allowed me to change in many ways the business management, and who has really done everything I have asked. If the experiment under these favourable conditions, still fails, I know no resource but to let the Review expire.61

Adams also identified the fundamental problem facing the NAR in the changing culture of the 1870s. “The first and vital problem is the financial one, and it is now demonstrated that mere literary success will not solve this, though without literary success there is no chance of reaching up to the problem at all,” he explained to Norton. “Articles enough, and good enough, I can get, but a page of advertisements would offer me more attractions than the cleverest page of criticism I ever saw.” Assuring Norton that he would “try to put more energy into the literary notices,” he emphasized that even were they “all written by a Macaulay or a Sainte Beuve, such is the condition of things that a good page of advertisements would outweigh them all in value to the Review.”62 By May 1875 there were signs that Henry Adams’s strategy for the NAR was failing to turn around the financial fortunes of the periodical. Asking rhetorically of his editorial assistant and former student Henry Cabot Lodge whether the October number might be “the last of our venerable periodical,” Adams reported that the publisher “wants to give up paying contributors, at least on the present scale. I think we had better let it die at once and bury it with decency.”63 A week later he expressed his private frustration to Lodge: “If Osgood can shove it off on Norton, I advise him to do so. . . . He is not my enemy, but if he were, I would like no better than to shove him into such a trap and jump out myself on his shoulders.” On the one hand, his irritation was with his contributors who were “all behaving like the devil and would exasperate me if I weren’t hardened to it.” On the other hand, he found Boston deeply limiting. As he told Lodge, “I care a great deal to prevent myself from becoming what of all things I despise, a Boston prig (the intellectual prig is the most odious of all) and so I yearn, at every instant, to get out of Massachusetts and come in contact with the wider life I always have found so much more to my taste.”64 Adams, however, had resolved not to relinquish the editorship without leaving a rack behind. In October 1874 he confessed to one of his contributors, William Dwight Whitney:

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I am much gratified at your approval of the Review, all the more because the numbers always seem to fall dead as the Pharaohs. No one ever takes the trouble to think whether they are good or bad. Still I vaguely hope that a century or two hence, book-collectors will pay fabulous prices for complete sets of the Review and value it as containing the only consecutive self-written record of American literature— and I trust that the portion that I have to superintend may not be the least sought for. But certainly the present reward is far from dazzling.65

With this kind of “monumental” goal in mind, Adams decided to commission a “centennial number” for January 1876 “to contain six articles of forty pages each on the movement of American thought in Religion, Politics, Literature, Law, Science and Economy, that is, physical growth.” The objective was “to ascertain whether and to what degree Americans should feel satisfaction or disappointment at the result of a century’s activity. The moral should be tolerably sharp-pointed, and the treatment broad.”66 Revealingly,Adams explained that his plan “in diverting a number of the North American Review into the Centennial business was to do something which seemed all the more necessary because no one else would do it; that is, to measure the progress of our country by the only standard which I know of, worth applying to mankind, its thought.”67 Apart from failing to persuade James Russell Lowell to contribute on literature, Adams successfully published the centennial number with articles by distinguished authors, including Simon Newcomb (1835–1909, professor of mathematics at the US Naval Observatory in Washington 1861–1897) on abstract science, William Graham Sumner (1840–1910, professor of social science at Yale 1872–1910) on politics, Daniel Coit Gilman (1831–1908, founder of the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale in 1851 and president of the University of California 1872–1875) on education, Charles Franklin Dunbar (1830–1900, professor of political economy at Harvard) on economic science, and Jeremiah Lewis Diman (1831–1881, professor of history and political economy at Brown University).68 Lowell, however, disapproved of the number, labeling it as “so disheartening a report of everything.”69 Adams’s parting shot was the October 1876 number. All his efforts to marshal an “independent” reform movement had been thwarted by party politics. “The two parties made their offers for us, and we dissolved like a summer cloud,” he told Gaskell in early September 1876. “Both parties are impossibly corrupt and the public thoroughly indifferent.” But he had resolved “to have my little say, and I have devoted the whole

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October number to a review of the field.”70 His aim was, as he admitted unashamedly to Whitney on the same day, “to make this a political or campaign number, from the independent stand-point.”71 He considered his last issue “a historical monument.”72 Adams availed himself “of a trifling disagreement with the publishers to throw off that load also and get rid of my editorial duties, leaving my monument behind me.”73 For their part, the publishers announced in the October 1876 number the resignation of the “editors.” As a result of “a difference of opinion with the proprietors as to the political character of this number, the proprietors, rather than cause an indefinite delay in publication, have allowed the number to retain the form which had been given to it, without, however, committing the Review to the opinions expressed therein.”74 Fiske’s 1877 “Triumph of Darwinism” coincided with the end of the NAR as Boston had known it. The article seemingly represented a high tide of “progression” whereby nature’s laws underwrote what Adams saw as the complacent Bostonian-Unitarian faith in upward social progress. Very soon after Adams’s departure as editor, the tone and contents of the NAR changed radically. No longer would half a year be devoted to the academic analysis of the state of the nation, as in 1876. The NAR quickly announced that an issue would appear every other month. Meanwhile, new editor (and owner), Allen Thorndike Rice (1851–1889) felt compelled to assert the traditional disinterestedness of the NAR: “The Review is perfectly untrammelled; it is not the organ of any party, or sect, or clique, or even of its own editors. The most vigorous thinkers, the most judicious critics, the broadest scholars, the best-trained minds of the day, will address the public through its pages, not as advocates of pet theories, but as judges summing up facts and theories in the light of the best intelligence.”75 The out-going editor seemed branded with the crime of having driven the periodical too close to the causes of political and social reform. As early as 1878, speculative articles such as “The Doctrine of Eternal Punishment” and “Is Man a Depraved Creature?” began to appear. By way of balance, so too did “An Advertisement for a New Religion” by “an Evolutionist.” And although Simon Newcomb continued as a frequent contributor on matters astronomical and economic, the NAR had firmly shifted its appeal to a much wider and more popular readership concerned to read about contemporary events and speculative theology—and would soon be moved to New York. Adams’s private assessment of his successor was at best uncomplimentary and at worst brutal. In 1889 Adams wrote the following to his confidante Elizabeth Cameron after hearing that

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President Harrison had appointed Rice as minister to Russia and that Rice had died just before his scheduled departure from New York: “At the dinner [with Mrs. Cabot Lodge] I was told of Allan Rice’s departure on a diplomatic mission, very far, I imagine, from his taste. I could not help shocking the company by wondering whether he was already at work worrying the Holy Ghost to write an article against the Prime Minister of the Heavenly Kingdom, and if so, whether he would be instantly sent to add to the terrors of the Inferno. Yet how comfortable it must be for a man who is dead, to know it, and not to go round like so many dead men, getting married and dining out.”76 Henry Adams’s “failure” to sustain the NAR as a stable element in a post-Enlightenment republic of letters was inextricably linked, in his view at least, to the changed social and political culture of the United States, especially during the presidency of Grant. The NAR spoke with philosophical (“scientific”) authority through the persona of its contributors, selected by and large as men of “national reputation” or as representative of a “younger school of our time” committed to reform but unwilling simply to indulge in “self-glorification” of the nation.77 As Adams became increasingly disillusioned with the prospects for a rapid cure of the nation’s chronic ills of political corruption and material self-interest, he turned to “history” as the means by which the “true” value of men and nations could be judged. Only in the production of such books would the historian construct enduring monuments to human thought and action in a world prone to “decay, disaster of collapse.”78 By the 1890s he was increasingly drawn to the possibilities of a “science of history” based on the energy physics of Lord Kelvin but inspired by the geological perspectives of his friend Clarence King, whom he had first encountered in the early 1870s. King, a New Englander with strong commitments to evangelical Christianity, had led the Fortieth Parallel geological survey along the approximate route of the first transcontinental railroad and had later become the first director of the US Geological Survey. As a result, he played a leading role in mapping the mineral resources of the American West.79 King’s enthusiasm for the energy physics of Kelvin knew no bounds. Kelvin had claimed that physical changes were driven by energy transformations from states of greater to lesser intensity. Earthquakes and volcanoes, for example, represented intensive forms of terrestrial energy. Furthermore, the intensity of the earth’s energy was assumed to diminish over geological time. In opposition to the “steady-state,” gradualist uniformitarianism of British geologists such as Lyell, Kelvin’s model appealed

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to King and other American “catastrophist” geologists, who believed that the evidence of geological action in the New World was anything but gradualist.80 King’s enthusiasm for the energy-based geological dynamics of Lord Kelvin infected even his skeptical friend Henry Adams. Unlike King, Adams’s “puritan” inheritance had turned away from its Calvinist foundations. But like King, Adams also shared several of the cultural values of the original North British energy physicists. His New England context was pervaded by a strong puritan culture that promoted the duty of productive work and denounced the sin of “dissipation” or waste. Furthermore, Henry’s grandfather, President John Quincy Adams, had rejected the optimistic and progressive Unitarianism of enlightened Bostonians. Instead, both he and Henry shared a characteristic skepticism toward all doctrines of human perfectibility. Like the Calvinism of their ancestors, the world was one infected with decay, sin, and death. In contrast to the onwards and ever upwards faith of many Darwinian disciples, therefore, “Kelvinism” spoke authoritatively of a universe ruled by the Universal Dissipation of Energy.81 Adams’s perspective highlights a profound shift from the Scottish founders and their Christian conception of a universe of beginnings and endings, of nature’s perfection and man’s limitations, to a godless world in which “the tyranny of thermodynamics” redefined man as “a bottomless sink of waste unparalleled in the cosmos” and beside which even the wasteful sun was “a model economist compared to man.”82 “We have created and established a new philosophy and religion, which I think will endure; the religion of Energy with a very big E, and of man with a very small m,” Henry Adams told a Bostonian clerical friend in 1902.83 These words effectively encapsulated Adams’s conclusions by the 1900s: that the ideals of the founding fathers of the United States, offering visions of an enlightened and rational society compared to Old World tyrannies, served only decorative roles. In contrast, by 1902 the United States had become, not a community driven by ideals, but a nation which worshipped material power. As a consequence, the new religion was Energy, the material manifestations of which reduced individual humans to seeming infinitesimal significance. Faith in progression had yielded to the uncertainties of massive power: Yet we have Gods, for even our strong nerve Falters before the energy we own. Which shall be master? which of us shall serve? Which wears the fetters? Which shall bear the crown?84

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Acknowledgments

The research on which this chapter is based relates to a larger project on Henry Adams and the role of energy and thermodynamics in latenineteenth and early-twentieth-century cultures. For its support through a Fellowship (Crosbie Smith) and a Leverhulme Special Research Fellowship (Ian Higginson), both authors are most grateful to the Leverhulme Trust. We particularly thank Geoffrey Cantor, Sally Shuttleworth, Jed Buchwald, and other participants in the Symposium for their constructive comments. Throughout our research, the archivists at the Massachusetts Historical Society provided invaluable advice, support, and encouragement. Notes 1. Henry Adams to Henry James, November 18, 1903, in The Letters of Henry Adams, ed. J. Levenson et al. (Harvard University Press, 1982–1988), vol. 5, p. 524. 2. “A Word at the Start,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 1 (1850): 1–2. 3. Ibid. 4. See James C. Austin, Fields of The Atlantic Monthly. Letters to an Editor 1861–1870 (Huntington Library, 1953), pp. 45–69. 5. “A Leaf from the American Magazine: Literature of the Last Century,” Atlantic Monthly 5 (1860): 429–438, esp. pp. 429–430 and 437. According to this article, the American Magazine was closely modeled on the successful Gentleman’s Magazine (first published in 1731 and selling some 10,000 copies) and London Magazine (“from whose pages it made constant and copious extracts, not always rendering honor to whom honor was due”). Of some dozen similar magazines launched between 1758 and 1796, none “survived their twelfth year [and] most of them lived less than half that period.” 6. See F. L. Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1741–1850 (Appleton, 1930); C. E. Frazer Clark Jr., “Origins of the American Renaissance: A Front-Page Story,” American Renaissance (1978): 155–164, esp. p. 162: “. . . circulations were not large, . . . subscription fees seemed high, and delinquent subscribers created perpetual collection and cash-flow problems.” In addition, high distribution costs, low or non-existent advertising revenues, and the expense of sending copies to newspapers in exchange for notices all meant narrow operating margins and problems with paying contributors. 7. Atlantic Monthly 5 (1860), pp. 437–438. 8. Apparently the Japanese-American proprietor from 1940 was interned soon after the outbreak of the Pacific war. 9. Adrian Johns, “Miscellaneous Methods: Authors, Societies and Journals in Early Modern England,” British Journal for the History of Science 33 (2000), p. 183.

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10. “The Progress of Society,” NAR 63 (1846), pp. 356–357. 11. [T. Parsons], “The Tendencies of Modern Science,” NAR 72 (1851), pp. 84–85. 12. [F. Bowen], “A Theory of Creation,” NAR 60 (1845): 426–478; [A. Gray], “Explanations of the Vestiges,” NAR 62 (1846): 465–506. 13. For example, [F. Bowen],“Chalmers’s Natural Theology,” NAR 54 (1842): 356–397; [S. G. Brown], “The Life and Writings of Dr Chalmers,” NAR 75 (1852): 489–529. 14. Atlantic Monthly 23 (1869), p. 519. 15. [Henry Adams], “The Principles of Geology,” NAR 107 (1868): 465–501. 16. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Houghton Mifflin, 1918), p. 234. All references are to this edition (hereafter EHA). 17. Ian Higginson, Patterns of Imagination and Discovery in the Works of Edgar Allan Poe 1829–1849, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Kent, 1992. See esp. pp. 37–45. In “Never Bet the Devil Your Head” (1841; see Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. T. Mabbott, volume 2, Belknap, 1978) and in “The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.” (1844), Poe satirized the NAR as the “North American Quarterly Humdrum.” The entrepreneurial hero of this tale finally “united all the literature of the country in one magnificent Magazine know everywhere as the ‘Rowdy Dow, Lollipop, Humdrum and GOOSETHERUMFOODLE.” See Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Mabbott, volume 3, p. 1145. 18. EHA, p. 63. 19. Henry Adams to Henry Cabot Lodge, July 31, 1876, Letters of Henry Adams, vol. 2, pp. 283–284. 20. J. L. Diman, “Religion in America, 1776–1876,” NAR 122 (1876), pp. 13–14. 21. Henry Adams to Charles Milnes Gaskell, June 14, 1876, Letters of Henry Adams, vol. 2, p. 275. 22. Adams to Gaskell, August 21, 1878, Letters of Henry Adams, vol. 2, p. 344. Not everyone saw Boston as the expression of Unitarian reasonableness. The Liverpool merchant and Unitarian George Holt visited Boston in the spring of 1851 and recorded in his Diary (May 30, 1851) his sadness at the way “political feelings run high amounting to strong animosity—respectable men of the same Unitarian faith differing even to quarrel & the direct cut of personal intercourse & this too amongst men of letters.” See George Holt, Diary—North America, Holt Papers, Liverpool Record Office. 23. EHA, pp. 32–33. On Coleridge’s notion of a “clerisy” or rule of an elite intelligentsia with a strong moral agenda, see Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray, Gentlemen of Science: Early Years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Oxford University Press, 1981), esp. pp. 17–29.

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24. EHA, pp. 40, 33; Brooks Adams, “The Heritage of Henry Adams,” in Henry Adams, The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (Macmillan, 1920), esp. pp. 77–86, 109. On Unitarianism, see Conrad Edick Wright, ed., American Unitarianism 1805–1865 (Massachusetts Historical Society and Northeastern University Press, 1989). 25. Morrell and Thackray, Gentlemen of Science, pp. 411–423. 26. Austin, Fields, pp. 45–69 (Lowell), 70–83 (Holmes), 84–98 (Longfellow), 185–207 (Whittier), 266–299 (Stowe). 27. James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation:The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 111–152. 28. Quoted in Austin, Fields, 64n. 29. Henry Brooks Adams, “The Principles of Geology,” NAR 107 (1868): 465–501. 30. NAR 122 (1876). 31. Chauncey Wright, “Limits of Natural Selection,” NAR 111 (1870): 282–311; “The Genesis of Species,” NAR 113 (1871): 63–103; “Evolution by Natural Selection,” NAR 115 (1872): 1–30; C. L. Brace, “Darwinism in Germany,” NAR 110 (1870): 284–299, John Fiske, “The Progress from Brute to Man,” NAR 117 (1873): 251–319; “The Triumph of Darwinism,” NAR 124 (1877): 90–106; W. D. Whitney, “Darwinism and Language,” NAR 119 (1874): 61–88. See esp. R. L. Numbers, Darwinism Comes to America (Harvard University Press, 1998); R. Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, revised edition (Beacon, 1992). 32. Fiske, “Triumph of Darwinism,” pp. 93–94. On Fiske’s career and religious views see J. S. Clark, The Life and Letters of John Fiske (Houghton Mifflin, 1917). 33. Ibid., pp. 91, 106. 34. Adrian Desmond, Huxley: Evolution’s High Priest (Michael Joseph, 1997), pp. 81–100, esp. p. 89. 35. Fiske, “Triumph of Darwinism,” pp. 104–106. 36. See for example Adrian Cook, The Alabama Claims: American Politics and AngloAmerican Relations, 1865–1872 (Cornell University Press, 1975). Although the Alabama captured some 48 United States merchant ships in the first year of commerce raiding and took only ten more prizes before being sunk off Cherbourg in June 1864 by the USS Kearsarge, nearly half a million tons of US shipping (750 vessels) were transferred to non-US flags between 1861 and 1864. 37. “Democracy: An American Novel,” in Henry Adams, Novels, Mont Saint Michel, The Education (Library of America, 1983), pp. 7–8. 38. Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams, February 23, 1869, Letters of Henry Adams, vol. 2, p. 20. 39. EHA, pp. 265–266.

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40. [Adams], Democracy, pp. 40–41. 41. Henry Adams to David A. Wells, Letters of Henry Adams. vol. 2, pp. 85, 98. 42. Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams, May 3, 1869, Letters of Henry Adams, vol. 2, p. 28; to Jacob D. Cox, November 8, 1869, ibid., p. 51. Adams himself had published “Civil Service Reform,” NAR 109 (1869): 443–476. 43. Henry Adams to Jacob D. Cox, October 31, 1870, Letters of Henry Adams, vol. 2, pp. 86–87. 44. Adams to Cox, November 17, 1870, Letters of Henry Adams, vol. 2, pp. 88–89; Adams to Gaskell, November 19, 1870, ibid., p. 90; Adams to Cox, November 28, 1870, ibid., p. 91. 45. Henry Adams to Carl Schurz, 16 May 1871, Letters of Henry Adams, vol. 2, p. 108. 46. Henry Adams to William Henry Trescot, September 30, 1871, Letters of Henry Adams, vol. 2, pp. 116–117; to Gaskell, October 2, 1871, ibid., p. 118. 47. Adams to Trescot, August 9, 1876, Letters of Henry Adams, vol. 2, p. 286. 48. Adams to Gaskell, February 13 and March 1, 1871, Letters of Henry Adams, vol. 2, p. 100. 49. EHA, pp. 286–287; Henry Adams to James R. Osgood, March 20, [1871], Letters of Henry Adams, vol. 2, pp. 102–103. 50. Henry to Charles Francis Adams, April 30, June 22, and July 30, 1867, Letters of Henry Adams, vol. 1, pp. 530–531, 536–538, 541–546. 51. Ibid., p. 542. 52. Henry’s interpretation (though not in his words) appeared in the published version. See Charles Francis Adams Jr., “Boston,” NAR 106 (1868), pp. 19–20. 53. Ibid. 54. [Charles Francis Adams Jr.], “The Railroad System,” NAR 104 (1867), pp. 497–498n; “Boston,” NAR 106 (1968), p. 25. 55. Charles Francis Adams Jr., “A Chapter of Erie,” NAR 109 (1869): 30–106; EHA, 270. 56. Charles Francis Adams, entries for May 8 and June 21–25, “Diary 1869,” Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. 57. Ibid., entries for July 21–24 and August 6, 1869. 58. Edward C. Kirkland, Charles Francis Adams, Jr. 1835–1915: The Patrician at Bay (Harvard University Press, 1965), esp. pp. 81, 124–126;The Pacific Railroads, typescript, Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. 59. Higginson, “Imagination and Discovery,” pp. 245, 259–261, 265.

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60. Henry Adams to Charles Milnes Gaskell, December 14, 1871, Letters of Henry Adams, vol. 2, p. 122. 61. Henry Adams to Charles Eliot Norton, January 13 ,1871, Letters of Henry Adams, vol. 2, pp. 96–97. 62. Letters of Henry Adams, vol. 2, p. 97. 63. Henry Adams to Henry Cabot Lodge, May 19, 1875, Letters of Henry Adams, vol. 2, p. 224. 64. Henry Adams to Henry Cabot Lodge, May 26, 1875, Letters of Henry Adams, vol. 2, pp. 227–228. 65. Henry Adams to William Dwight Whitney, October 15, 1874, Letters of Henry Adams, vol. 2, p. 209. 66. Henry Adams to Simon Newcomb, August 15, 1875, Letters of Henry Adams, vol. 2, p. 231. 67. Henry Adams to Daniel C. Gilman, November 17, 1875, Letters of Henry Adams, vol. 2, p. 243. 68. NAR 122 (1876). 69. Letters of Henry Adams, vol. 2, p. 246n (quoting Lowell’s review in the Boston Advertiser, June 29, 1876). 70. Henry Adams to Charles Milnes Gaskell, September 8, 1876, Letters of Henry Adams, vol. 2, p. 293. 71. Henry Adams to William Dwight Whitney, September 8, 1876, Letters of Henry Adams, vol. 2, p. 294. 72. Adams to Gaskell, September 8, 1876, Letters of Henry Adams, vol. 2, p. 293. 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid., p. 294n. 75. Publishers’ notice, NAR 124 (1877). 76. Henry Adams to Elizabeth Cameron, May 19, 1889, Letters of Henry Adams, vol. 3, p. 175. 77. Henry Adams to Henry Cabot Lodge, May 19, 1875, Letters of Henry Adams, vol. 2, p. 224; to Gilman, November 17, 1875, ibid., p. 243. 78. Henry Adams to Charles Milnes Gaskell, May 24, 1875, Letters of Henry Adams, vol. 2, p. 225. 79. See, e.g., Thurman Wilkins, Clarence King: A Biography (Macmillan, 1958). 80. Clarence King, Catastrophism and the Evolution of Environment. An Address by Clarence King Delivered at the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale College, on its Thirty-first Anniversary.

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June 26, 1877, 23–24. Pamphlet in possession of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Also published as Clarence King, “Catastrophism and Evolution,” American Naturalist 11 (1877): 449–470. See also Clarence King, “The Age of the Earth,” American Journal of Science 45 (1893), p. 1; Joe D. Burchfield, Lord Kelvin and the Age of the Earth (Macmillan, 1975), pp. 107, 115–117. 81. EHA, p. 40; Brooks Adams, “The Heritage of Henry Adams,” in Henry Adams, The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (Macmillan, 1920), esp. pp. 77–86, 109. On the British story of energy physics see, for example, Crosbie Smith, The Science of Energy: A Cultural History of Energy Physics in Victorian Britain (University of Chicago Press, 1998). 82. Henry Adams, “A Letter to American Teachers of History [1910],” in Henry Adams, The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (Macmillan, 1920), p. 218. 83. Henry Adams to Edward Everett Hale, February 8, 1902, Letters of Henry Adams, vol. 5, pp. 336–337. 84. Henry Adams, “Prayer to the Virgin of Chartres,” Letters of Henry Adams, vol. 5, p. 208. See also Crosbie Smith and Ian Higginson,“Consuming Energies: Henry Adams and ‘The Tyranny of Thermodynamics,’ ” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 26 (2001): 103–111.

8 The ACADEMY: Europe in England Gillian Beer

The writer, literary critic, and folklorist Andrew Lang replied thus to a request from Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa in March 1886: “If you really pine for the Academy, I always get it, and never keep more than a cutting once a year, but sure you don’t want to read the Academy! Every man his own Prig, or Pedantry for all.”1 The sour tone is typical of the peculiar relationship the Academy provoked with its readers. Soon after its first number, in October 1869, J. A. Symonds wrote to Henry Sidgwick: “I should think it might become a useful organ for writers, if not for readers.”2 Symonds’s grudging respect for it as a writers’ journal suggests the sheer difficulty it presents to readers baffled by its inclusiveness, to say nothing of its format. Notice, equally, that Lang seventeen years later makes it clear that he subscribes to the journal (“I always get it”), yet in the course of a year among its abundance of information he claims to find only one item worth cutting out and keeping. The journal is for the aspirant, he suggests (“Every man his own Prig, or Pedantry for all”). He mocks its academic claims—he a practical man of the literary world—but is intrigued that his far-off friend Stevenson pines for it in the South Seas. What does Stevenson miss, and what does Lang scorn? The Academy has had an odd history of scholarly neglect for a journal that set out to correct the weaknesses of British intellectual life according to European models, introducing readers to developments in research across Europe, and across the entire disciplinary span, encompassing all aspects of scientific and cultural endeavor. In part this neglect is the ironic outcome of a particular editorial decision taken at the outset by its young and energetic editor, Charles Edward Appleton. Since the publication of the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals twentieth-century scholars of nineteen-century intellectual and high culture journals have turned to the Wellesley Index for guidance when seeking out particular topics or authors for study. The task of the Wellesley Index was to track and name all the anonymous contributors to a great array of magazines that followed the Victorian convention of unnamed articles. The Academy, however, on

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principle named its contributors from the first issue on, for many years. Hence, no work for the Wellesley Index and no recognition of what was in its prime the most high-powered intellectual journal being published in England from 1869 on! Its first ten years mark an extreme of ambition that unhappily ended with the premature death of Appleton at the age of 38 from a mixture of tuberculosis and malaria while convalescing at Luxor in Egypt. He died just before his close friend W. K. Clifford, the subject of two other essays in this volume.3 Looking back on his achievements in 1881 Mark Pattison characterized Appleton’s mind in relation to Germany: “What he really brought back from Germany was the only thing of value which a German university has to offer—viz. the scientific spirit, a sense of the vastness of the field of knowledge, and of the nobleness and the charm of a life devoted to knowing it.”4 This sense of intellectual ambition is made clear in Appleton’s editorial at the end of the first year where he noted that his aim was to “create a journal which should systematically survey the European literary and scientific movement as a whole, and pass judgment upon books not from an insular, still less from a partisan, but from a cosmopolitan point of view.”5 In order to understand the high and oppositional aims of the Academy, as well as its vanishing from later maps of intellectual life in Victorian England, it is necessary to start the analysis before its foundation. The history throws light on the shifting taxonomies of knowledge in the period: what counts as science, what as other arts. It throws light, too, on the idea of an academy and its functions in British life. It enters the debate between university research and teaching in ways that still have something to say. Above all, it demonstrates the difficulties and the differences between French and German ideals of intellectual endeavor and those then current in England. It also pays tribute to—and sometimes realizes—a wonderfully inclusive ideal of free intellectual movement between disciplinary forms and across national boundaries. There is no doubt that Appleton was the person who made all this come together. An Oxford graduate, he studied at Heidelberg and in Berlin in the mid 1860s and was profoundly influenced by German commitment to research and by their determination to diffuse the results of research throughout educated society. He studied Hegelian philosophy and when asked to define it briefly replied: “I should say it was simply the consummation of the attempt, which has been going on in the best minds, for the last 2,000 years, to find an absolutely certain basis for complete knowledge.” But equally, he argued, it “takes nothing for granted, not even, like the celebrated Cogito, ergo sum, the thinking mind itself.” This paradox of

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the search for an absolutely certain base to knowledge couples with a thoroughgoing skepticism about knowledge generated by Appleton’s personal and intellectual energy. In letters to friends during his 1865 studies in Germany, Appleton enjoyed joking about Hegelianism itself, in the spirit of this skepticism: “Being is good, but Not-being is better, because it adds to the notion of Being the notion of Not.” And, in a sequence that at once mocks and delights in no-nonsense English versions of high European concepts: “Hegel has found a word which approximates to the meaning of onsia in the German Dingheit which a learned Italian, M. Vera, translates into French choseite; I suppose the English equivalent must be ‘thingumytight.’ ”6 What above all impressed him was the inclusiveness of Hegelian understandings of knowledge. Appleton’s first scheme on his return from Germany was for the translation into English of the most important works of political thinkers from all ages and all countries: this scheme came to naught—as its sheer ambition made likely, but it gives a measure of how inclusive were his philosophical goals, to say nothing of his publication ambitions. His studies at Oxford, where he was a Fellow of St. John’s College, had left him dissatisfied with the meagerness of the intellectual diet and its tendency to set aside scientific research, or indeed research of any kind as he saw it, in favor of teaching. His idea for his journal was to knit up together all the diverse fields of research and to make available in one place information leading out into all current research activities across Europe in its broadest sense (to include the Balkans and Scandinavia, and the Middle East, but with rather little concern for what might be going on in America). The first name for the journal, proposed in the draft prospectus of April 1869, was to be the Monthly Journal of Science. Lying behind that designation is clearly the German concept of Wissenschaft, which is then more laboriously, but perhaps more attractively, spelled out for readers in the journal’s first title: The Academy: A Monthly Record of Literature, Learning, Science and Art. Its motto reads “Inter silvas academi quaerere verum” (“Truth is to be sought among the woods of the academy”—or alternatively, “is to be found” there). The lineup of contributors to that first issue offers eloquent testimony to Appleton’s intellectual ambitions: T. H. Huxley’s review of Haeckel’s The Natural History of Creation and Sir John Lubbock’s discussion of a new German work on Darwin share the pages with Matthew Arnold’s review of a new French edition of Obermann, George Simcox on Baudelaire, and Mark Pattison on Classical

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Philology in the Netherlands. Other writers included H. de B. Hollings, Gustave Masson, H. Lawrenny (Edith Simcox), Sidney Colvin, J. B. Lightfoot, T. K. Cheyne, A. Neubauer, H. N. Oxenham, C. W. Boase, G. Waring, H. F. Tozer, T. Noldeke, D. B. Monro, J. Conington, and R. Ellis. Those were the named contributors, but there were also the book lists, the summaries, the “Intelligence” or high gossip (if that word may be used for so stern an array) about coming intellectual events across Europe. It is important to remark the term “A Record” in the journal’s subtitle. Part of the enterprise was to offer the reader not only very full reviews of works published in a number of different languages, reviewed here in English, but also a record of works recently published across Europe and a critical summary of the contents of particular scholarly European journals, the journals changing each month and usually numbering two, plus an account of scientific meetings and of fresh scientific discoveries and investigations. Indeed, the extent of the reference almost makes it seem like a universal academic website 150 years before its time. It differed from any website in the assurance it offered its readers that the naming of any book in its pages was a guarantee of the book’s importance! At the head of each number is stated: “Readers are reminded that the mention of New Books, Articles, etc., in our lists is intended as a guarantee of their importance.” What made it both an excellent set of scholarly tools, and yet exasperating to the reader, was the abundance of references in every issue, suggesting a universe of diverse learning endlessly waiting to be plumbed. Who then were the expected readers for this new enterprise, and what were its intellectual models? On the face of it a journal of such plenitude, and yet such severity, might be hard pressed to appeal to more than a few kindred souls such as George Eliot and G. H. Lewes, who were indeed friends of Appleton. (Appleton helped Lewes to revise his chapter on Hegel in Lewes’s History of Philosophy for the 1871 edition and it is very probable that it was through her close friend and collaborator Appleton that Edith Simcox first met George Eliot, for whom she formed a passionate affection.) Appleton’s letter to his prospective publisher John Murray is engagingly frank about his anticipated readers and their numbers: “I think that the journal would be taken in by about 300 people in Oxford and Cambridge. Then there are the Deans and more learned of the Anglican and dissenting clergy. The Scotch and Irish Universities. The Jews both at home and abroad (for the Oriental and Biblical articles) The German Universities; the Contributors themselves, probably several copies; and many students, bookbuyers, and booksellers.”7

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The nice practical psychology in this, especially “the Contributors themselves, probably several copies” did not prevent Murray from seeing the description as “suicidal.” Indeed, it is surprising that he ever involved himself in the enterprise and his short-lived relations with Appleton tended to the acrimonious.8 Murray was dismayed by the journal’s obscurely disaffected tone and seems to have concurred with his correspondent Martin Tupper, author of Proverbial Philosophy, who complained after the first issue: “I cannot approve the very high and dry, semi-infidel, scientifically and neologically difficult and unpopular tone that too much pervades it.”9 Still, with reviewers in the first few volumes of the caliber of Helmholtz, Wallace, Huxley, Tyndall, Arnold, Max Muller, Pattison, Symonds, Hueffer, Colvin, and now less known but equally able, the brother and sister George and Edith Simcox, the Academy could not be ignored. Moreover, it spread its net of affiliation well beyond England. To affirm its presence “for the Continent” it announced where in various cities it could be bought, listing particular book-sellers in “Berlin, Brussels, Calcutta, Copenhagen, Florence, Frankfort [sic], Geneva, Leipzig, Naples, Paris, Rome, Rotterdam, St. Petersburg, Stockholm, Turin, Vienna”—and as the final item and seeming afterthought, out of alphabetical sequence, “New York.” It drew on its two European models both in range and, to some degree, in presentation. However, here the usual Appletonian paradoxes emerge again. The declared models for the journal were the German Centralblatt für Deutschland (founded 1850) and the French Revue Critique (founded 1866). However, even a glance at these two models shows them to be widely at variance in their aims and philosophy. What binds them is high seriousness, which the Academy splendidly shares.What distinguishes them is that the Centralblatt is manifestly a record while the Revue is essentially review essays. The Centralblatt offers pithy summaries of an extraordinary array of books, with some few two paragraph reviews; the Revue sweeps into long, argued analyses of works often in other languages, presented in French. In tenor the Revue seems closer to the Academy, but the Academy (figure 1) provides the same kind of concentrated pemmican of information as does the Centralblatt when it comes to its reports and “Contents” items. All three journals also share, perhaps as their most important likeness, the ability to employ reviewers capable of engaging with difficult books in a whole range of subjects, in many other tongues. For the books reviewed are not only in French, German, Italian, Spanish, but in Latin,

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Figure 1 A page from the Academy. Reproduced with permission of Brotherton Collection, University of Leeds.

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Hungarian, Slovenian, Arabic, and Icelandic. And other languages besides: for example, H. Gaidoz reviewing the first volume of the Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness notes, somewhat archly, the Gaelic translation of God Save the Queen “by the society’s bard, Mr. Angus Macdonald, which was sung at the first annual meeting, and we willingly believe that ‘the surprise was pleasing and the effect grand.’ ” He then criticizes the society for their ignorance of Continental scholarship: “we have been surprised to see how little known in the upper north are the works of the continental Celtic scholars” such as “Zeuss’ masterly work, the Grammatica Celtica, which is the foundation-stone of all Celtic philological researches.”10 The emphasis on languages and on philology must be understood as part of the scientific enterprise of the journal, as I shall show more fully later. This was the period just after the publication of Max Muller’s Lectures on the Science of Language (1861, 1863) and in the new taxonomy of the disciplines philology was placed alongside other scientific investigations such as physics, biology, and mathematics. There was good reason for this since the current debate centered on the relation of language-development to organic development, including physical evolution and “the races of man.” By adopting his two diverse European models Appleton had in fact made space within the journal for a re-appraisal of the relations of the disciplines. He had also accommodated two distinct styles of reference and report: extensive essays and succinct summary. This made it possible to provide perspectives that reached far into specialist areas while offering major feats of concentrated interpretation open to any educated reader. That at least was his hope and aim, and that of his collaborators in Oxford. To quite a large degree they were successful.The magazine did not, despite dire expectations, founder at the end of the first year. By means of activity and diligence, ingenuity and importunity, Appleton took it forward and disengaged it from the morose Murray, learning in the course of the adventure much that he needed to know about business—of which he had been blithely unaware at the outset—and moving to London to oversee the venture while retaining his fellowship at Oxford. Still, the changes that were to keep the Academy afloat in name at least, through many alterations of character, over the next fifty-odd years (until it finally vanished into Plain English with which is incorporated The Academy on July 10, 1920) had to begin already at the end of the fourth volume in 1873. One remarkable feature of the journal in its early numbers had been the absence of any editorial commentary. The meaning

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of the journal emerged from the consort of named and unnamed contributors, many of them young intellectuals but with famous established names among them. Now, at the end of the fourth volume Appleton was obliged to confront the journal’s diminishing sales and to seek new readers by a principled declaration of change.11 He did so by offering at last an explanation of the full significance of the journal’s title, The Academy. In his address “To the Reader” Appleton first claims success and expansion (“instead of 480 pages of text a year, it will now publish, in 52 weekly numbers, 1040 pages, each of which will contain one-fourth more matter than the old Academy page”). It will in future include “Literature of the imagination, Travels and Antiquities, History and Biography” and will take note of current cultural events, with “regular notices of the Picture Exhibitions, the Music of the Season, and the current Drama, English and French.” It will function, without qualms, as authority in these matters: “In all these matters the Academy will tell people of all classes who are aiming at the higher culture, what to choose and what to discard, in unmistakable terms and with promptitude.” One quarter of the journal will be reserved for “scientific matters interesting to a smaller class of readers, but divested as far as possible of all unnecessary technicalities.” After this statement, Appleton offers his first major concession, a move away from his ideal of an open field of knowledge available equally across all times and countries: The various departments of knowledge have now become so minutely specialized that even the scientific man can no longer hope to keep pace with discovery in all directions at once, and beyond the limits of his own peculiar study occupies to a greater or lesser extent the position of the educated layman or general reader. So that the wants of the small scientific class are in this respect identical, or nearly so, with those of the larger reading public. These requirements vary in different countries and at different periods, and can only be ascertained by actual experience.12

That is, Appleton acknowledges the conditioned nature of knowledge, and the ebbing of his pan-European trans-historical ideal, as well as the constraints of specialization. He continues: Our experience during the past four years has been that the scientific matter to be found in the Academy has been pitched in too high a key, or at least been presented in too technical a form, to be so practically useful even to the scientific reader in this country and at the present

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time as it might without any diminution of fullness or accuracy be made. We propose then to ourselves a much more difficult task than we have hitherto attempted, viz. that of making this department of the Academy useful to all, and engaging the attention and interest of all educated persons in the progress of European knowledge.

Appleton dignifies the retreat by emphasizing the effortfulness of the new task, opening up scientific matter to the general reader so as to give them access to “the progress of European knowledge.” The next sentence, describing the contents of this scientific quarter of the proposed journal, is likely to come as something of a surprise to the modern reader: “This department will embrace Natural Philosophy, Theology, and the Science of Language, especially the English Language and Dialects, and the very important and interesting study of Comparative Philology, in connection with the Mythology, Folklore, Manners, Customs, and Institutions of the various races of mankind.” Science, in this categorization, includes not only Natural Philosophy (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.) but also theology and, emphatically, the Science of Language, under which are clustered sociology, anthropology, ethnography, folklore, and applied linguistics, all expressed through comparative philology. This taxonomy is very different from current constructions of knowledge and helps to give us an insight into the processes of association that functioned in the Victorian intellectual imagination. In particular, the extensive realm of language study and its assumed purchase on social information, as well as its scientistic methods, demonstrates the dominance of mythography in the wake of Max Muller’s work which knits theology into philosophy and the history of language into social structuration. After this account of the future taxonomy of the journal, Appleton makes what is at once a major admission and a major assertion. The lengthy passage is worth quoting in full because it both establishes the liens to other European institutions and at the same time brings out the fundamental paradox of the journal: it seeks to be both dissident and authoritative. It challenges English intellectual habits (or even the lack of such habits) but wishes not to impose a European form of authority, instead formulating within its own pages a fresh source of intellectual life that will assure standards while acknowledging development. Unlike the French Academy it does not seek predominantly to stabilize, but to participate in a more Germanic process of knowledge acquisition and assay. The ambition is startling: to place at the center of English culture a journal, subject to the ordinary laws of supply and demand, and to

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sustain it as an organ of disinterested integrity capable of carrying conviction as a benchmark of value. This suggests both high self-esteem and a conviction that truth will be universally recognized by its readers, readers who have up to now misconstrued the meaning of the journal’s title: Very few persons have, we think, understood what was meant by calling the old fortnightly periodical, which we now propose to supersede, The Academy. The word “Academy” suggests to the average English-men, in the first instance, the idea of a second-rate and pretentious private school. It is also the name of a chartered Institution in London, which has won a reputation for fairness and discrimination in hanging pictures. As the name of this periodical, it appears to have given the impression to some persons that we propose to ourselves to treat of matters exclusively interesting to schoolmasters and professors at the Universities. But in all European languages except English an “Academy” means a central organ of sound information and correct taste in intellectual matters. The great French Academy founded by Richelieu has more particularly taken under its charge the maintenance of the purity of the French language. The Academies founded in the principal German Capitals, and elsewhere, in imitation of the French, have laid a greater stress upon the maintenance of correct information in matters of scientific knowledge; and the renowned Academy in France has added to itself special Academies having the same object. Now it is in the sense in which the word is understood on the Continent, in the sense of a standard of correctness in intellectual matters, that the name was and is still applied to the Academy Journal. The great national importance of concentrating the intellectual forces of a country is recognized everywhere except in England; and this recognition has justified the employment of public funds for the maintenance of the Foreign Academies as public Institutions, and the partial support of their members. And the absence of such an institution in England has had this result, that a larger amount of bad work both in literature and in science passes unchallenged in this country than in any other, standing upon the same level of civilization. What, then, in other countries is done for learning and science by means of an Institution supported at the public expense, we propose to accomplish in this country, not only for these but for all the materials of culture and refinement by means of a periodical subjected, after the English manner, to the economic conditions of supply and demand, viz. to keep the reader up to the mark of what is best in the world, to

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gibbet mercilessly what is bad, and to criticize with sympathetic fairness what falls between these two extremes. Keeping thus always to the main stream of the best production, we shall have to point to Germany for Science, to France for Art, but to our own country for Poetry and Fiction, for the Literature of Manners and Society, for Travel and Adventure, as well as for those great philosophic ideas which are transforming the mental horizon of mankind.

In the last paragraph, English culture suddenly comes into its own, topping the previous mentors France and Germany by its generation of “great philosophic ideas.”These ideas must mean, in particular, the scientific work of Darwin and its various outcomes, and “philosophic” here moves across the taxonomic border with Natural Philosophy. Indeed, Anton Dohrn in his review of The Expression of the Emotions saw Darwin as providing, in natural selection, a grammar for meaning: The struggle against the overwhelming influence of speculation in the beginning of this century had ended in the other extreme, the accumulation of mere facts. The want of ideas was necessarily followed by the absence of criticism, and thus morphology and zoology resembled in some respects a dictionary containing all the words necessary for the construction of a thoroughly philosophical book, but which is not the book itself. Mr. Darwin came, and the book was written.13

In his emphasis on English prowess in literature and in new philosophical ideas Appleton was, to this degree, in accord with Matthew Arnold who had argued in his essay “The Literary Influence of Academies” that “energy and honesty” were the defining characteristics of English intellectual achievement and that, in a happy circle: Genius is mainly an affair of energy, and poetry is mainly an affair of genius: therefore, a nation whose spirit is characterized by energy may well be eminent in poetry—and we have Shakespeare. Again, the highest reach of science is, one may say, an inventive power, a faculty of divination, akin to the highest power exercised in poetry: therefore, a nation whose spirit is characterized by energy may well be eminent in science—and we have Newton.14

Arnold proceeds to move beyond the satisfactions of genius to the questions of intelligence and concludes his essay by arguing for a rigorous

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raising of the standards of “journeyman work”—but not by establishing any equivalent of the French Academy: I think academies with a limited, special, scientific scope, in the various lines of intellectual work—academies like that of Berlin, for instance—we with time may, and probably shall, establish. . . . But an academy quite like the French Academy, a sovereign organ of the highest literary opinion, a recognized authority in matters of intellectual tone and taste, we shall hardly have, and perhaps ought not to wish to have.15

Appleton and his colleagues have re-imagined Arnold’s idea of an academy to bring together the whole range of intellectual endeavors within the pages of a journal that will act as yardstick and beacon. The problem for such an enterprise is hinted at in that give-away British utilitarianism: “subjected, after the English manner, to the laws of supply and demand.” We come back to the question of the reader. Who will buy this journal? How will its effects permeate “all classes”?—or, at the least, all those classes “aiming at the higher culture”? The excellence of the contributions certainly promised a raising of standards more generally. One has only to read Helmholtz on the “Axioms of Geometry” and the ensuing correspondence,16 or Wallace hostile on Tylor,17 or Simcox on Rousseau18 to recognize the outstanding quality of the writing. The assessments, across the whole gamut from philosophy and physical science to art and archaeology to biblical and Arabic criticism to philology and literature in many languages, established in the first four volumes do make it possible to imagine an ideal reader formed by the journal and persuaded of the interlocked activities of all these fields and convinced of the marvelous extent of knowledge. But, unhappily, inevitably, not enough of these readers were formed, or bought the journal, for it to reach the extraordinary program it proposed. The long-established Athenaeum remained a significant rival. And for scientific readers there was a rival center in Nature, also established in 1869, toward which the Academy adopted at the outset a rather lofty tone (complaining that it did not sufficiently systematically refer to all “English and foreign” scientific papers), followed by the establishment of the psychological journal Mind in 1876. Interestingly, the Academy shared a number of contributors with Nature and Mind and the two scientific journals paradoxically welcomed more amateur contributors in their first volumes than did the Academy.

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In his description of the need for a central authoritative organ Appleton ignored the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries, but this was not merely perverse on his part since what he sought was an inclusive pan-disciplinary ordering of knowledge, which could drive intellectual progress across fields. In fact, later in the century the Royal Society moved in a contrary direction, deciding to establish as a separate entity the British Academy to act as a standard for work in the arts and humanities as the Royal Society did for the sciences (and in the middle of the nineteenth century rather unsatisfactorily and partially to some extent still did for the arts). It would be fascinating to explore the lineage of discussion that led to that move and the extent of the Academy’s involvement. Indeed, animated correspondence in 1897 surrounded the journal’s suggestion of “An English Academy of Letters” with letters from, among others, Gladstone, George Bernard Shaw, Arthur Quiller-Couch, the Chief Rabbi, and H. G. Wells.19 The British Academy was founded in 1904. Here Appleton’s other great campaign is significant, which was for the support of research in the universities and the establishment of professorships, readerships and lectureships more concerned with the advancement of research and learning than with teaching undergraduates. He pointed out that in a free market research would inevitably suffer and that it must be endowed and protected if “original investigation” and fresh knowledge was to be reached. He was secretary of the “Association for the Organization of Academical Study” and in 1876 edited a volume Essays on the Endowment of Research. Roll-Hansen writes well on this facet of his career and it takes one out into the field of activism in which he even managed for a time to involve Charles Darwin, that notorious non-activist, but total researcher.20 The Academy persevered with its high project after the change of direction signaled at the end of the fourth volume. The number immediately after the change of tack announced at the end of 1873 opens with a long review by Arthur J. Patterson of a two-volume collection in Hungarian of Hungarian Popular Poetry, published in Pest: not a mere crowd pleaser, certainly. The “Science” section of the June 1874 issue includes a review of a book on Kant, in English, and one in German on the Rig Veda, as well as botany, geology, short précis on the analysis of vanilla, polymorphic butterflies, gypsy tribes, and many other topics. In another testy reference, to the fifth volume, the log-rolling Lang writes to Stevenson “I dragged your Mentone article into that unbought print the Academy, in a notice of Symonds on the Cornice.”21 But unbought or

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not, it survived, partly through donations from supporters including Sidgwick and Ruskin. One of the gains of the new turn was the extensive analysis of concerts (which reveals the re-emergence of Bach’s Passions) and the very intelligent dramatic criticism. Another is the much greater coverage of travel literature, and of anthropological texts. The tone of the reviews is from the start and across the board severe, or at least steely and spirited, testing arguments to the limit and cutting short error, whether the topic be Herbert Spencer, Principles of Psychology (“Really the long discussion in Part VII, in which Mr. Spencer first seems to be maintaining Natural Realism and then proceeds to denaturalize it, has all the serious incongruity of an intense metaphysical dream”) or a skeptical account of “Mr. Wallace’s very curious papers on ‘Modern Spiritualism’ in the Fortnightly Review.” Strikingly, contributors to the journal are subject to the same elevated standards of judgment as any others. By late 1874 the subtitle is “A Weekly Review of Literature, Science, Art, Music, and the Stage” and that persists through the remainder of Appleton’s editorship. After Appleton’s death the journal was edited by his collaborator J. S. Cotton for sixteen years and during that time there is no marked dropping off of standards, though no longer such overt ambition. The journal began in the 1890s to include photographs and designs and is much more attractively presented (a photograph of the novelist Lucy Clifford (“Mrs. W. K. Clifford”) fronts one number, for example. It continued to attract major scientific contributors and this continued occasionally even when Charles Lewis Hind became editor from 1896 to 1903 and changed the subtitle in 1898 to “A Weekly Review of Literature and Life.” For example, in volume 55 (October 29, 1898) one finds a long article by St. George Mivart on “The Ancestors of Man”—but a slackening of expectation concerning the readership is revealed in the defensive opening which cannot quite take for granted what it claims to be assuming: “I take it for granted that all readers of the Academy accept the doctrine of evolution, and are sure that all kinds of animals which now exist have arisen, by natural generation, from other kinds of animals which preceded them.” But his conclusion is strikingly conservative: “Apes and men may be said to stand on a sort of zoological island entirely by themselves, and separated by a profound abyss from all the other islands or continents on which the various other tribes of beasts may be imagined to take their stand.” By 1902 the journal is called The Academy and Literature and the “Science” articles signed by F. Legge are an appalling decline from the

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earlier standards and the earlier willingness to enquire.This series is largely assertion, and gives a somewhat sinister image of the assumptions of the new Academy reader: take “The Increase of the Unfit”: The number of insane persons in the community has been steadily increasing for the last 50 years. Cancer during the same period has doubled the number of its victims. Tuberculosis would probably have done the same were it not that improvements in treatment have led to the cure of slight cases in their early stage, and to the prolongation of life in the more severe. How far this may be due to the admixture of alien blood—the Jews, for instance, annually produce more insane children than any other nationality—we need not stop to enquire. It is sufficient we should recognize the fact that the growing contamination of the nation’s blood should be checked at all hazards, and should then seek for a practical remedy.22

How totally at odds with Appleton’s first account of his expected readership is this!—and how afflicting is the loss of his “power to gibbet mercilessly what is bad” in argument. By 1904 there is no separate series on science. The journal went rapidly through the hands of a series of editors and made its reviews anonymous: John Oliver Hobbes’s father bought it so that she could place her work. From 1903–05 the editor was William F. Teignmouth Shore; then Harold Child and Peter Anderson Graham 1905–1907; Lord Alfred Douglas with T. W. H. Crosland 1907–1910; Cecil Cowper 1910–1915; Henry Savage 1915 until its disappearance into Plain English in 1920. From the end of the nineteenth century the journal is almost unrecognizable as the same endeavor that Appleton undertook. It was scuppered by “the English manner”: “being subjected to the economic conditions of supply and demand”—conditions that did not sustain an intellectual enterprise imagined according to mid-nineteenth-century European intellectual values. For some years it was magnificent, but its attempt to become the central organ of ideas ended by making it peripheral. Its inclusive conception of science did not prevail. When H. G. Wells explored the absurd enormity of commercialism in his novel Tono-Bungay he parodied an intellectual journal taken over by a fraudulent financier: “an important critical organ which he acquired one day—by saying ‘snap’—for eight hundred pounds. He got it ‘lock, stock, and barrel’—under one or other of which three aspects the editor was included. Even at that price it didn’t pay.” The title of the “important critical organ” was The Sacred Grove. It was a pastiche of the Academy:

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If you are a literary person you will remember the bright new cover he gave that representative organ of British intellectual culture, and how his sound business instincts jarred with the exalted pretensions of a vanishing age. One old wrapper I discovered the other day runs:— “THE SACRED GROVE” A Weekly Magazine of Art, Philosophy, Science and Belles Lettres Have You a Nasty Taste in your Mouth? It is Liver. You need one Twenty-Three Pill. ( Just One.) Not a Drug But a Live American Remedy. contents A Hitherto Unpublished Letter from Walter Pater. Charlotte Bronte’s Maternal Great Aunt. A New Catholic History of England. The Genius of Shakespeare. Correspondence:—The Mendelian Hypothesis; The Split Infinitive; “Commence” or “Begin”; Claverhouse; Socialism and the Individual; The Dignity of Letters. Folk-Lore Gossip. The Stage; the Paradox of Acting. Travel, Biography, Verse, Fiction, etc. the best pill in the world for an irregular liver

Intellectual inclusiveness has become clutter, in Wells’s parody (“The Mendelian Hypothesis” is relegated to Correspondence alongside “The Split Infinitive”). The whole magazine is a vehicle for liver pills. Wells himself, of course, did not share the financier’s view of the worth of the Academy. But he did observe its collapse under the pressures of a world less willing to “accept the exalted pretensions of a vanishing age.” He used the pastiche also as a means of satirizing contemporary intellectual decline, observing in: “the relations of learning, thought and the economic situation in the world at the present time . . . the contrasted notes of bold physiological experiment and extreme mental immobility.”23 Notes 1. Dear Stevenson: Letters from Andrew Lang to Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. M. Demoor (Peeters, 1990), p. 95.

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2. Letters and Papers of J. A. Symonds, ed. H. Brown (Murray, 1923), p. 38. 3. The one excellent account of the Academy’s first ten years is by Diderik RollHansen, The Academy 1869–1897: Victorian Intellectuals in Revolt (Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1957), Anglistica, vol. 8. Roll-Hansen concentrates on the literary criticism in the journal and scarcely refers to other materials, particularly scientific articles, notes, and reports. 4. Academy 19 (1881), p. 127. 5. [John Appleton], “Our First Year,” Academy 2 (1870), p. 1. 6. John H. Appleton [C. E. Appleton’s brother] and A. H. Sayce, Dr. Appleton: His Life and Literary Relics (Trubner, 1881), pp. 12–13. 7. Quoted in Roll-Hansen, The Academy 1869–1897, p. 119. 8. The first twelve numbers were published by John Murray III. “In Mr. Murray’s business career of nearly fifty years there was only one venture . . . on which he looked back . . . with mortification and regret, and that was the foundation of the Academy.” George Paston, At John Murray’s: Records of a Literary Circle 1843–1892 (Murray, 1932), p. 231. 9. Quoted in Paston, At John Murray’s, p. 214. 10. H. Gaidoz, “The Gaelic Society of Inverness,” Academy 4 (1873): 125–126. 11. The sales dropped from a peak for the second number of 7,000 to 3,000 a year later; there were 20 pages of advertisements in October 1869, only four pages in September 1870. During the first year of the journal, Roll-Hansen notes (p. 118), Murray paid a salary of £200 to the editor and contributors were paid at the rate of £1 a page, with 30/- a page for scientific notes. 12. [ John Appleton], “To the Reader,” Academy 4 (1873): 461–462. 13. Anton Dohrn, review of Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Academy 4 (1873), p. 211. 14. Matthew Arnold, “The Literary Influence of Academies,” Cornhill Magazine 10 (1864), p. 158. 15. Ibid., p. 172. 16. Reviews of mathematical works in German, English, and Italian ( Academy 1, 1870: 128–131), and the long letter from Helmholtz ( Academy 3, 1872: 52–53). 17. A. R. Wallace, review of E. B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture, Academy 3 (1872): 69–71. 18. Academy 4 (1873), pp. 121–123. 19. Academy 52 (November 6, 13, and 20, 1897), pp. 376, 401–403, 431–432.

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20. Appleton also helped to found an intellectual club for both men and women which became the Albemarle Club of Curzon Street and was active in the Savile Club, which brought scientists and writers together. 21. Demoor, Dear Stevenson, p. 32. See A. Lang, review of J. A. Symonds’s Sketches of Italy and Greece, Academy 5 (1874): 505–506. 22. “The Increase of the Unfit,”The Academy and Literature 63 (1902), p. 584. 23. H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay (Macmillan, 1909), pp. 219–220.

9 Scientists as Materialists in the Periodical Press: Tyndall’s Belfast Address Bernard Lightman

It’s a very queer world. It used to be so straightforward and simple; and now nobody seems to think and feel as they ought. Nothing has been right since that speech that Professor Tyndall made at Belfast. —Mrs. Whitefield to Tanner, in act IV of George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman (1901–1903)

It wasn’t long before John Tyndall, Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution, regretted his decision to accept the presidency of the British Association of the Advancement of Science, which was to meet in Belfast in the summer of 1874. Owing to Tyndall’s reputation for outspokenness, there were protests as soon as his appointment to the presidency was announced. His close friend Thomas Huxley had been one of those who had convinced him to stand for the presidency. “I wish to Heaven you had not persuaded me to accept that Belfast duty,” Tyndall complained to Huxley in a letter dated September 24, 1873. “They do not want me.” An Irishman himself, Tyndall knew that he would be delivering his presidential address in the heart of one of the strongholds of Irish Protestantism. Potentially, the audience could be even more hostile than the one Huxley had confronted at the famous British Association meeting in 1860 at Anglican Oxford, where he had taken on Bishop Samuel Wilberforce. But rather than pull out, the combative Tyndall had decided to face his critics and to respond to their opposition to his presidency by being “less tender in talking to them than I otherwise should have been.” Tyndall’s presidential address would be nothing less than an unapologetic defense of the autonomy of science and an aggressive attack on the cultural authority of Christian theologians. “So I suppose I am in for it—and so are you you know,” he warned Huxley.1 During the months before Tyndall was to deliver his address, Huxley worried that his friend would go too far. In a letter written on June 24, 1874, he asked if Tyndall would be “as wise and prudent as I was at Liverpool,” when Huxley had the honor of presenting the presidential address to the British Association.2

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Tyndall replied reassuringly on July 1 that he would try to cause “the least pain to others.”3 But Huxley still fretted. Almost a month later, on July 22, he begged to see the address, hoping to head off any potential problems.4 As it turned out, Huxley had good reason to be concerned. Tyndall’s presidential address was delivered on a Wednesday evening, August 19, 1874. It was a scientific tour de force, covering not only the entire history of science and its complex relationship to philosophical materialism, but also the significance of materialism for the three key issues in nineteen-century science, the conservation of energy, notions of species, and physiological psychology. He began with the birth of science in ancient Greece in the writings of Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius, “freethinking and courageous men,” whose atomic theory was designed to clear away the “mob of gods and demons” inhibiting the discovery of knowledge.5 In the next section, he portrayed the Middle Ages as a period ravaged by scientific drought due to the pernicious influence of Aristotle, and then he moved on to the struggles of Copernicus, Bruno, and Galileo, who succeeded in revolutionizing science despite the retarding influence of Christianity. Tyndall’s subsequent account of Bacon, Descartes, and Gassendi emphasized their contributions to atomic theory, since without “this fundamental conception” a theory of the material universe was not capable of scientific statement.6 At this point in the Address, Tyndall presented a quaint interlude: an imaginary debate between Bishop Butler, who holds that the clash of dead atoms cannot explain the existence of consciousness, and a disciple of Lucretius. Tyndall then resumed his historical survey, celebrating the achievements of Darwin in a section on evolutionary theory and discussing another grand generalization of modern science, the doctrine of the Conservation of Energy. The last two sections of the Address presented Tyndall’s views on the philosophical implications of modern science, particularly in light of its basis in the materialistic atomic theory. Although materialism was a fruitful philosophy of science and an indispensable guide to scientific research, it could not be a complete philosophy of life. Tyndall could not accept the simplistic materialism of Democritus, which disregarded the existence of human consciousness and which went beyond the limits of human knowledge in proclaiming that everything can be reduced to matter. In Tyndall’s opinion, ontological materialism was contradicted by the most recent research in physiological psychology. Furthermore, this vulgar materialism ignored the “latent powers” in matter, its mysterious quality as “the manifestation of a Power absolutely inscrutable to the intellect of man.” Tyndall’s “higher materialism” found in matter “the promise and potency

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of all terrestrial Life.”7 In the final section, Tyndall attempted to police the boundaries between science and religion. Religion added “inward completeness and dignity to man” if it remained within the “region of poetry and emotion,” but became mischievous if it intruded on the region of objective knowledge. Any systems which infringed “upon the domain of science” must “submit to its control.” Scientists, Tyndall aggressively declared, “claim, and we shall wrest from theology, the entire domain of cosmological theory.”8 Tyndall concluded on an inspirational and humble note. Once religion’s proper role was fully accepted, the creative faculties of humanity could be directed toward a poetic rendering of “the Mystery from which it has emerged.” But since this was a theme too great for Tyndall to handle, he left it for loftier minds to pursue in the future,“when you and I, like streaks of morning cloud, shall have melted into the infinite azure of the past.”9 Despite Tyndall’s conciliatory ending, the pulpits of Belfast lashed out at him. Belfast Protestants and Catholics joined together in branding him a materialist.10 Scholars focusing on the English, rather than the Irish, context of Tyndall’s Belfast Address have recognized that the heated controversy it engendered was an important event in the contest between Anglican clergy and scientific naturalists for cultural authority in Victorian Britain. Blinderman refers to it as “one of the epochal works marking the transition from the comfortable orthodoxy of the early Victorian age to the new equilibrium between old conviction and bold assumption, which characterized the eighteen seventies.” Tyndall’s sin, according to Blinderman, was that he upset the truce between science and religion “then being carefully and adroitly re-established after the blows delivered by Darwin and Huxley.”11 Turner has argued that “no single incident in the conflict of religion and science raised so much furore.”12 Among the few substantial analyses of the Belfast Address, Barton and Kim have explored the complicated nature of Tyndall’s materialism. Though Barton emphasizes the romantic and idealist components of Tyndall’s thinking, treating him as a pantheist, while Kim emphasizes the agnostic and transcendental dimensions of Tyndall’s materialism, both agree that many of his contemporaries ignored or were confused by these subtleties.13 Turner and Dawson have focused more on the controversy after the Belfast Address rather than the intricacies of Tyndall’s thought, following up on how Tyndall had unwittingly prepared the way for an attack on modern scientific naturalism through a critique of classical materialism. Concentrating primarily on books written after the Belfast Address, Turner has argued that Christian commentators reaped several advantages by portraying Tyndall and his allies as revivers of

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an ancient philosophy. Scientific naturalism’s claim to represent modernity could be discredited and defenders of the faith could take heart from the fact that they opposed a philosophy that Christianity had overcome in the past.14 Dawson has added another important point in a study which draws heavily on periodical literature, that scientific naturalists could also be presented as advocates of the immoral sensualism which hastened the downfall of pagan antiquity.15 But there was much more at stake in the Belfast Address controversy than just who could get the most polemical mileage out of classical materialism. As I will show, the public perception of John Tyndall was significantly altered as a result of the controversy—a controversy in which the general periodical press played a key role and which led to the publication of an enormous pamphlet literature.16 Before the Belfast Address, Tyndall was usually cast in a positive light in the periodical press, albeit with some reservations, and he was not labeled as a materialist. But after the Belfast Address he was portrayed as an aggressive, dishonest, devious, and distinctly un-British materialist. Even in the 1870s, the charge of materialism was a serious one. It grouped Tyndall together with lower-class atheists, casting aspersions on his status as a member of the intellectual elite. Moreover Tyndall became a symbol of everything that was wrong with modern science and scientists in general. By depicting the scientist as the most powerful embodiment of modern materialism, defenders of the Christian establishment could use the periodical press to discredit the philosophical basis of scientific naturalism, re-evaluate the cultural authority of Tyndall and his allies, and assign a more limited role to scientists in modern culture. The controversy over the Belfast Address provided members of the Anglican intellectual elite with the opportunity to cleanse science of its materialism and reclaim it for Christianity. This involved a sweeping indictment of modern scientific culture and of the cultural organs which had facilitated the spread of scientific materialism. Ironically, not even the periodical press could escape criticism for its part in infecting both science and British culture with dangerous antiChristian doctrines. Tyndall’s Belfast Address came at an opportune moment for protectors of the religious establishment. It was during the early 1870s that the social shift from a predominantly clerical to a secular and scientific cultural elite reached a critical point due to a series of events. The extension of the franchise to rate payers in the large industrial cities in 1867, many of whom were members of the working-class hostile toward organized religion, the passage of the Education Act in 1870, which led to fears that

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the role of the Church in public education would be weakened, the removal of religious tests for university appointments in 1871, which further eroded the Anglican hold over Cambridge and Oxford, and the publication of Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871), all seemed to threaten the power of the established church. Furthermore, an economic decline, leading to fears that England was being eclipsed by Germany as the leading industrial nation in the world, and the shock of the insurrectionary force of the Paris Commune in 1871, disturbed the relative stability which had been preserved during the middle of the century.17 It was a time when defenders of the faith felt as though they were under siege and Tyndall offered them an irresistible target which enabled them to go on the offensive. But before 1874, the British periodical press was generally well disposed toward Tyndall, and those who were critical did not accuse him of materialism. On April 6, 1872, Vanity Fair published a caricature of Tyndall, one of a series of over 2000 portraits of public men appearing between 1869 and 1920. Tyndall is presented as the public lecturer rather than the scientist surrounded by his experimental apparatus (figure 1). Tyndall’s broad, expressive face, framed in a bushy mass of hair, looks out at his audience with soulful, serious eyes. His overly large head sits upon an awkwardly positioned body, derriere pushed back and large powerful frame leaning forward on a table, resting on impossibly small and delicate hands with fingers splayed outwards. This is a man of purpose and determination. The accompanying text emphasizes his distinction as a man of science, his combativeness, his prowess at lecturing to a popular audience, and his skills as a mountain climber. Of his many writings, the only one mentioned is his “The Scientific Use of the Imagination” (1870). There is no reference to his controversial views on prayer or to his lecture “Scientific Materialism” (1868).18 Both the caricature and the account of Tyndall’s life seem to be positive. However the final sentence contains a subtle ambiguity. Whether in the lab, in the lecture theater, on the peaks, or in the smoking-room of his club, Tyndall “is a man at all times to be envied, and at nearly all to be admired.”19 The curious “nearly all” may have hinted at the author’s reservations about Tyndall’s unconventional views on religion. The Vanity Fair caricature and accompanying text reflected themes which were common in articles on Tyndall in the periodical literature in the early 1870s before he delivered the “Belfast Address.” Tyndall’s heterodox views were not a controversial issue prior to 1874. None of the major weeklies or quarterlies ran articles on Tyndall’s “Scientific Materialism,” his

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Figure 1 Tyndall, before 1874, pictured as an eminent man of science and popular lecturer “at all times to be envied, and at nearly all to be admired.” Source: Vanity Fair, April 6, 1872.

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president’s address to the Mathematical and Physical Section of the British Association at Norwich in 1868. The periodical press portrayed Tyndall, for the most part, in a positive light. The Academy ran a series of reviews of Tyndall’s work during the early 1870s. In a comparison of Huxley’s Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews with Tyndall’s “On the Scientific Use of the Imagination,” it was Huxley who made the reviewer uncomfortable by attacking his enemies too ferociously.20 The following year the same reviewer discussed recent Alpine literature, including Tyndall’s Hours of Exercise in the Alps (1871). Though he was critical of Tyndall’s tendency to express emotion in scientific language, he asserted that “it is in his scientific relation to the Alps that Dr. Tyndall’s name will be remembered.”21 In the public’s mind, Tyndall was associated with daring ascents of alpine peaks in his courageous quest for knowledge. When the first edition of Tyndall’s Fragments of Science (1871) was published, a glowing review appeared in Nature. Tyndall was presented as an exemplar of “the true scientific spirit” whose “noble faith” allowed him to trust the guiding principle that if the evolution hypothesis is proven by science to be true, it must come from God.22 Huxley complained that for some reason, compared to him, Tyndall was treated with far more tolerance. In a letter dated October 2, 1870, he admitted to being nervous about a controversial passage in Tyndall’s British Association paper “On the Scientific Use of the Imagination.” But, Huxley joked, “those confounded parsons seem to me to let you say anything while they bully me for a word or a phrase.”23 Not that Tyndall escaped all criticism in the general periodical press. He was one of Punch’s favorite targets. In 1863 Tyndall’s popularity with an adoring public was lampooned. A report on Professor Petgoose’s “highly popular and instructive lecture on the THEORIES OF LIGHT” began with an account of how the learned Professor entered and walked to the table, whereupon “the audience applauded immensely” this “amusing experiment.”24 Tyndall’s scientific speculations were also held up to ridicule. His assertion that all our philosophy, all our poetry and all our science and art are potential in the fires of the sun drew from Mr. Punch in 1871 the question, “Are the potential energies of cocks and hens latent in eggs before they have been sat upon?”25 Tyndall’s remarks on the possibility that a chemist could make a baby by bringing together the proper materials in a retort led to comparisons between Tyndall’s chemistry and the cookery of an “unscientific anonymous bard” whose mixing of sugar and spice and everything nice might result “under certain conditions” in the production of little girls.26 Tyndall’s role in the

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controversy over devising a physical test of the efficacy of prayer did not pass unnoticed by Mr. Punch. In July 1872, Tyndall introduced a letter to the readers of the Contemporary Review which proposed that the mortality rates of a group of ordinary patients made the object of special prayer be compared to the rates of similar patients at other leading hospitals during the same period.27 A few months later, Punch made its tongue-in-cheek contribution to devising a trustworthy experiment. The scientist could not be positive about the absence of prayer in the case of that group of patients who were not the object of special prayer: “Even in a hospital of professed atheists somebody might be moved to say his prayers.” The only solution was to “let the two hospitals be veterinary hospitals.”28 Punch also poked fun at Tyndall’s intense earnestness and his sense of wonder, but before 1874 the satire did not characterize him as a materialist.29 Sharper criticism of Tyndall appeared in 1873 and in the spring of 1874 in, ironically, two liberal periodicals, James Knowles’s Contemporary Review and John Morley’s Fortnightly Review, and in the progressive Unitarian journal Theological Review. St. George Mivart, the liberal Catholic evolutionist, was the author of both articles. Excommunicated by Huxley from the Darwinian camp a few years previously for his criticisms of Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871) and for his providential evolutionism, Mivart was still smarting.30 In the Contemporary Review Tyndall is portrayed together with Huxley and Spencer as partially responsible for the great revival of paganism based on the rejection of the supernatural. Mivart observed sarcastically that Tyndall’s works contain “glowing passages” which could serve as hymns for the rituals of the new paganism since they glory in the beauty of nature.31 In his Fortnightly Review essay on “The Assumptions of Agnostics,” Mivart treated Tyndall along with Huxley and Spencer as adherents to Agnosticism, “the metaphysical system at present so widely popular in England.” Here Mivart was concerned with the “intellectual paralysis” which results from the “absolute scepticism” lying at the heart of agnostic epistemology. He was critical of Tyndall and his allies for wandering “beyond the domain which is specially their own into the metaphysical region,” a theme which was to become important in the controversy which erupted after the Belfast Address.32 The appearance of Mivart’s articles in the Contemporary Review and the Fortnightly Review did not indicate that the editors of these journals or their readers shared Mivart’s criticisms of Tyndall. Both Knowles and Morley provided an open forum for diverse opinions, and regularly published articles by Tyndall and his friends.

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The following year, about four months before Tyndall’s address was to occur, an article on “Materialism, An Unscientific Habit of Thought” appeared in the Theological Review by a Unitarian minister, Thomas Elford Poynting (1813–1878). Whereas Mivart had referred to Tyndall as an agnostic, a skeptic, and a pagan, Poynting raised the issue of Tyndall’s association with materialism. Poynting argued that there was no scientific evidence for materialism as a philosophy. It consisted of “taking the vulgar, unscientific notion of the nature of matter—a notion into which the scientific laws of thought have not been carried—and grafting upon that, and interpreting by it, the ideas as to natural evolution and other phenomena of matter which modern science has so liberally given.” Tyndall is mentioned twice in the article. Although Tyndall has a sense of the mystery of matter, in “Scientific Use of the Imagination” he appeared to argue that the conception of the evolution of matter is sufficient to explain everything. Poynting feared that readers with the “vulgar notion of matter” would think Tyndall was saying that mind comes from matter. To teach the doctrine of natural evolution “to the general mind in words like those of Mr. Huxley and Dr. Tyndall,” Poynting declared, “without at the same time removing the prevalent false conceptions as to the nature of matter, is to implant notions radically untrue intellectually, and gratuitously destructive of all high faith and hope, religiously.”33 Poynting did not, significantly, charge Tyndall with materialism. Tyndall was merely sloppy in his discussions of evolution and of matter, given the knowledge of the audience he was addressing. Before the Belfast British Association meeting, Tyndall was thus generally portrayed positively in the periodical press, and even his critics rarely accused him of materialism. Shortly before the meeting Nature, ever the supporter of professionalizing scientists like Tyndall, featured him in the series “Scientific Worthies.” In the first section of the article, a biographical account of Tyndall emphasized his humble origins, his struggle to improve his lot in life, and the important work he undertook in physics while working with distinguished German scientists on his doctoral degree. The second section was meant to demonstrate that many eminent German scientists, including Knoblauch, Wiedemann, and Bunsen, supported Tyndall and the opinions he expressed in the Belfast Address. This article, which was based on Helmholtz’s preface to the recently published German translation of Tyndall’s Fragments of Science, was a tribute both to Tyndall’s talents for popularizing science and to his skills as a scientific researcher who had contributed original and remarkable discoveries in physics and physical chemistry.34 The article appeared the day after the

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Belfast Address had been delivered at Belfast in the issue of Nature which also contained a copy of the entire Address.35 The article was clearly intended as an endorsement of Tyndall’s scientific credentials at that crucial moment. Despite the endorsement of Nature, Tyndall found himself at the center of a storm of controversy that lasted for several years after he delivered the Belfast Address. The general periodical press was used by those who opposed the radical conclusions of scientific naturalism. As Dawson has argued, the response of liberal publications was “at best equivocal” while the conservative press furiously denounced Tyndall and his materialism.36 Among the liberal publications which appeared within two years of the Belfast Address, the Theological Review published an article by John Page Hopps (1834–1911), a Baptist minister, on the question of knowledge of God. Hopps defended Tyndall from attack by Christian theologians. “Mr. Tyndall,” Hopps wrote, “in his Belfast Address, indicated the possible meeting-place between Science and Religion; and perhaps, when the theologians have done denouncing him as an Atheist, they will make the discovery that he has really done invaluable service by pointing out how vast a field modern Science is compelled to leave, as an unexplored region of mystery and the hiding-place of the mighty secret.”37 Similarly, John Hutton Browne (1845–1921), barrister and miscellaneous writer, condemned the intolerance of theologians who used the word “materialist” as a “weapon of offense” against scientists in a review of Andrew Dickson White’s book The Warfare of Science in the Westminster Review. “Have we not seen Professor Tyndall called by very hard names in consequence of some candid utterances of his at the meeting of the British Association at Belfast,” Browne declared.38 But neither of these articles were directly on Tyndall or his Address. The Contemporary Review published two articles within two years of the Belfast meeting which dealt substantially with Tyndall, one defending him and the other part of a prolonged controversy which involved Tyndall directly. Neither of the essays charged him with materialism. Dealing with “Professor Tyndall and the Religious Emotions,” James Hinton (1822–1875), surgeon and philosopher, argued that Tyndall allowed for a spiritual order underneath the universe of matter and force and therefore he was not a materialist.39 The eminent Unitarian James Martineau wrote a two part essay on modern materialism and its relationship with theology, a response to Tyndall’s essay “ ‘Materialism’ and its Opponents” in the November 1875 issue of the Fortnightly Review. Tyndall’s piece had contained an attack on Martineau’s earlier essay on “Religion as Affected by

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Modern Materialism.” Despite grave reservations about Tyndall’s position, Martineau did not consider the Belfast Address to be materialistic.40 Taken together, however, the articles in the Contemporary Review, the Westminster Review, and the Theological Review did not add up to a powerful defense of Tyndall by the liberal periodical press. Far more supportive than the liberal journals, Charles Bradlaugh’s National Reformer, a working-class secularist periodical, published a series of stories which welcomed the Belfast Address without any reservations. However, unlike the liberal press, the National Reformer was happy to number Tyndall among the atheistic materialists. Although Tyndall had avoided vulgar materialism, it was clear that “he believes in Nature without a God.” It was a “cheering symptom of the rapidly advancing freedom of thought and utterance” that “a man in his position should thus have dared to announce scientifically the doctrine of Atheism to the British Association.”41 These were not the allies that Tyndall sought. Being grouped together with working-class unbelievers opened Tyndall up to the same danger that Charles Darwin had perceived nearly 40 years earlier. As Desmond and Moore have shown, Darwin kept his evolutionary ideas to himself for 20 years because he was petrified of being condemned as a materialist. Evolution and materialism were associated in the thirties and the forties with the medical underworld in London and with artisan atheists. No respectable gentleman entertained notions which could be seen as blasphemous and grounds for legal action.42 But did Tyndall face the same danger in the 1870s? Four days after Tyndall presented the Belfast Address, a London merchant wrote to the Home Secretary suggesting that the physicist be investigated for blasphemy.43 Although nothing came of this challenge, the blasphemy laws were still enforced, as G. W. Foote, the secularist editor of the Freethinker, discovered in 1883. But conservative Christians who were outraged by Tyndall’s Belfast Address could nevertheless take advantage of all the unsavory connotations associated with the label of materialist. Tyndall provided them with the perfect excuse to attach the pejorative term to him in his lecture on the roots of modern science in classical atomic materialism, even if he claimed that he did not accept materialism as a complete philosophy of life. The line from the Belfast Address where he asserted that “the promise and potency of all terrestrial Life” could be found in matter was quoted or referred to by many of Tyndall’s critics.44 In the Athenaeum, the anonymous author offered a favorable description of the Address but recoiled when the reviewer encountered Tyndall’s pleas for a radical change in

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notions of matter. “Would that we could see sufficient evidence, to enable us to join in the confession of the President that Matter has in itself the promise and potency of every form and quality of life!”45 This phrase was among the most controversial in the Address, especially when taken out of context, and many periodicals cited it as evidence that Tyndall was a materialist. Accusations of materialism appeared in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (which referred to Tyndall’s “gospel of Materialism”), the Christian Observer and Advocate (“Professor Tyndall is an accepted exponent of Materialism”), the Dublin Review (“he has adopted, and would now wish to promulgate, the Religion of Materialism”), the Irish Monthly (“all he says tends to prepare the mind for that profession of materialistic faith in which his discourse culminates”), The Month and Catholic Review (“the avowal of materialism made at Belfast by Professor Tyndall”), and the New Quarterly Magazine (“Professor Tyndall is certainly a materialist”).46 Even Punch read Tyndall as worshipping “Matter, the wise man’s God” (figure 2).47 Once identified as a materialist,Tyndall could be criticized for a host of mortal sins. Besides capitalizing on the unspoken class connotations of materialism, journalists, especially in Catholic periodicals, presented it as originating in heterodox, foreign intellectual traditions. An article in the Irish Monthly on Tyndall’s Belfast Address was entitled “The New Koran.”48 In another Irish Monthly piece, Tyndall’s materialism was traced to Germany, the “land of foolish philosophers,” and the home of Feuerbach, Büchner, Moleschott, and Vogt.49 William Francis Barry (1849–1930), Catholic apologist and essayist, wrote two articles for the Dublin Review linking Tyndall not only to German thought, but also to Eastern philosophy and religion. Tyndall was a product of “English and German Rationalism,” his science “akin to materialistic Hegelianism” and his religion “the latest form of Buddhism” in its emphasis on reality as an illusion. Tyndall was a foreign invader who, “in a predatory and Asiatic fashion, invaded the whole realm inhabited by abstract thinkers.”50 Catholics weren’t alone in pointing to foreign elements in Tyndall’s materialism. Henry Reeve (1813–1895), editor of the Whig Edinburgh Review, could conceive of “nothing more humiliating to the intelligence of this country than that many of the leaders of thought at the present day should repudiate the grand traditions of English philosophy,” which allied the religious spirit of Bacon, Newton, Locke, and Boyle with “courage and independence in the investigation of truth,” and instead swear allegiance to “the latest school of German materialists” or submit to “the exploded delusions of primitive heathenism.”51 Whether Tyndall’s materialism was presented as

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Figure 2 Tyndall identified as a materialist unable to use his philosophy to plunge deep enough into the source of law, life, mind, matter, and motion. Source: Punch, August 29, 1874.

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German, Asiatic, Islamic, or even pagan, critics were agreed that it was neither orthodox nor British. Since Tyndall’s materialism, like all materialism, did not descend from a good, wholesome British intellectual lineage, it was morally corrupt. Dawson has explored how Tyndall’s opponents equated his celebration of classical atomists (especially Epicurus) in the first part of the Belfast Address with immoral hedonistic ethics.52 Certainly the traditional critique of materialism—that it undermined belief in God, the soul, and the moral fabric of British society—became a significant argument in the hands of Tyndall’s adversaries. However in this controversy Tyndall’s materialism was also linked to a morally objectionable abuse of language, which undermined the existence of truth. Tyndall’s rhetorical strategies were subjected to a powerful critique and his moral authority as teacher, his moral fitness as member of the intellectual elite, were questioned. One strategy adopted by Tyndall’s critics to raise doubts about his moral authority concerned his dependence on faulty and superficial scholarly sources for his historical overview of atomic theory. In the Irish Monthly, the author charged that Tyndall had repeated some of the historical inaccuracies to be found in Lange’s History of Materialism.53 In the Edinburgh Review, Reeve criticized Tyndall for not applying the patient and thorough research techniques which he used in his laboratory at the Royal Institution. In preparation for the Belfast Address, Tyndall had relied on “two or three meagre compilations on the history of philosophy by Dr. Draper and Herr Lange,” and with these “inadequate materials he attempted to sound the depths of Greek philosophy and to give a sketch of the progress of the human mind.” As a result, Reeve asserted, the Belfast Address “bears not a trace of original research.”54 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine took this type of criticism one step further. There Tyndall was accused of not fully acknowledging the heavy use he had made of Draper’s History of the Intellectual Development of Europe. Tyndall was not just less original than formerly supposed, his use of Draper bordered on plagiarism, though the term “plagiarism” does not appear in the article.55 Barry, in the Dublin Review, pushes the point to its final conclusion, although Tyndall’s use of Lange, not Draper, elicited the accusation. “So much indeed is he in Lange’s debt that we,” Barry announced, “who had read the Belfast Address before the German author, were tempted afterwards to consider Mr. Tyndall a downright plagiarist.”56 Other commentators focused on Tyndall’s dishonest use of language to conceal the dangerous materialistic and heterodox consequences of his thought. In a discussion of Tyndall’s notion of the soul as a poetic

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rendering of a phenomenon which refuses to be determined by mechanical law, the Contemporary Review observed that “it is too true that men of science sometimes employ language of this order in a dishonest, shuffling way.” The author had no problems with Tyndall’s use of the term “soul” here, but he was critical of the physicist in other instances when he employed language which carried with it “old and cherished religious associations” which would pass among the reading public “for the equivalent of truths to which those associations cling.”57 In The Month and Catholic Review, a critic alerted his readers to the dangers of Tyndall’s “hideous and revolting” moral system which he and his ilk preached “with such sweet persuasiveness.”58 Similar objections were voiced by novelist, satirist and philosopher W. H. Mallock (1849–1923), although he was not prepared to charge Tyndall with intentional deceit. Mallock complained that scientists like Clifford and Tyndall used language aglow with ethical fervor with “the one aim of persuading the world that life will not be altered save for the better, by a radical alteration in our notions of its origin and end.” But if materialistic atheism were embraced, all ethical notions would be “turned upside down” and those “who deny this fact or try to conceal it from us are guilty either of unconscious inconsistency or unconscious fraud.”59 Materialism was not only morally corrupt, it was intellectually bankrupt. Tyndall’s materialism, in the eyes of some critics, undermined the integrity of language, even if his intention was to convey truth. Moreover, Tyndall’s enthusiastic endorsement of materialism led him to commit the sin of intellectual hubris through his transgression of the limits of scientific knowledge, his refusal to accept the proper role of the scientist, and his abuse of his position as president of the British Association. In drawing attention to Tyndall’s failure to exercise sound intellectual judgment on these crucial matters, his critics questioned whether he deserved to remain a member of the scientific elite. Tyndall’s use of Kant and Fichte in the Belfast Address led the author of “Mr. Tyndall at Belfast” in the Irish Monthly to warn his readers about the interspersing of “learned allusions to the idealists of Germany” by materialists, a rhetorical move deflecting attention away from the real nature of their thought, which had “become fashionable for popular science lecturers, in Albemarle-street and elsewhere.”The “timely reference to Fichte or Schelling” gave “an appearance of profundity to what is in reality but shallow sophistry” and imposed an “air of mysterious wisdom over what borders very closely on the absurd.” But the absurdity of materialism undermined the very basis of rational thought and therefore of all

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truthful discourse. The Irish Monthly essayist argued that “almost every thought we think, and every sentence we utter is an absurdity if Materialism be true; that the world is a mad-house, and all men fools, if Mr. Tyndall be not grievously in error.”60 In the Contemporary Review, Charles Elam, M.D., also explored the deceptions which lay at the heart of materialistic discourse. Huxley and Tyndall, Elam observed, adopted materialistic terminology, but claimed to repudiate materialist philosophy. Elam remarked that it had “become customary of late years to consider it immaterial what language is used to express, or it may be to conceal, our ideas,” and he quoted Huxley on how it was of little moment whether phenomena of matter be expressed in terms of spirit or the phenomena of spirit in terms of matter. But, Elam pointed out, Huxley and Tyndall’s materialism rendered language, ironically, totally immaterial, or of no consequence.“Language is indeed of ‘little moment,’ ” Elam declared, “if it be true that thought may be ‘regarded as a property of matter.’ ”61 Materialism swallowed up both the human mind and the language it used to articulate truth. In doing away with the soul, the materialist made it impossible to embody truth in language. The intellectual failings of Tyndall’s materialism were also manifested in his failure to recognize that he had strayed into regions beyond the legitimate limits of scientific knowledge. As The Month and Catholic Review put it, physical science reached the “boundary line of its powers” when it attempted to deal with consciousness, yet Tyndall maintained that materialism was the logical conclusion to draw from the theories of modern science.62 This was a response to Tyndall’s warning to theologians not to interfere in the domain of science. Writing in the Quarterly Review for 1878, Henry Wace (1836–1924), Professor of Ecclesiastical History at King’s College, London, admonished Tyndall to pay attention to the limits of scientific knowledge “the next time he is tempted to make an excursion into the field of theology.”63 Martineau had no objections when Tyndall applied the notions of matter and force to nature. This was their proper “scientific use.” But when they “break these bounds, and, mistaking their own logical character, set up philosophical pretensions as adequate data for the deductive construction of a universe without mind,” then Martineau resisted their “absolutism.” Tyndall, “an enthusiast in the study of nature, excited by the race of rapid discovery,” mistakenly fancied that he could “ride off into the region of ontology.”64 In the New Quarterly Magazine, Robert Buchanan (1841–1901), poet, novelist, and critic, maintained that Tyndall and other materialists went beyond the experimental evidence in their rejection of the existence of

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the soul. Buchanan remarked, “You are an experimental philosopher—you can tell us startling things about the phenomena of light, heat, radiation, and magnetism—but neither you nor any of your school can tell us one fact, can give us one idea, explaining the phenomena of life.”65 Similarly, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, John Tulloch (1823–1886), professor of theology and principal of St. Andrews, argued that Tyndall’s support of materialism “exceeds the bounds of science.” In Tulloch’s estimation, materialism was more like one of those anthropomorphic conceptions which Tyndall claimed to find in Christianity, rather than a system based on valid scientific conclusions.66 Although the anonymous author of the article in the Quarterly Journal of Science was appalled by the viciousness of the attacks on Tyndall, he agreed that the physicist appeared to “cross the border” between “interpretation of the physical universe” and “the emotional phase of man’s being” in his Belfast Address. He regretted that Tyndall, “in some parts of his speech, had apparently forgotten that it is the duty of the British Association to confine itself to facts, and to inductions carefully drawn and rigidly verified, or at least capable of verification.”67 Tyndall’s materialism not only led him to transgress the limits of science, he also failed to recognize that as a scientist his intellectual domain was limited. One critic in the Irish Monthly agreed that Tyndall deserved his fame in the field of physical research. However “we challenge his competency to deal in any manner whatsoever with questions of theology, ethics, mental philosophy, free-will or human destiny.” Tyndall’s Belfast Address contained “humiliating proofs” that an able scientist “may be a child (or less than a child) in history, logic, and the higher questions of philosophy.”68 To call attention to the gaps in Tyndall’s argument in the Belfast Address, one critic drew a humorous analogy in The Month and Catholic Review between a dangerous climb of steep alpine peaks and Tyndall’s invitation to his readers to follow him along the risky path of materialism. “There are those of us,” he joked, “who would not like to play, Follow the leader, with the Professor among the Alpine crevasses; still more loath are we to play that game in a region where the chasms are more tremendous, and the leader himself looks afraid.”69 Another reviewer from the same journal reminded readers where Tyndall had earned his reputation. “As long as the Professor deals with what can be weighed and measured and experimented upon, meteorology, chemistry, heat, nerves and muscles,” he maintained, “it has been well remarked, he speaks as one having authority, derived from study and consequent knowledge.” But as soon as Tyndall went beyond his area of expertise to proclaim the validity of materialism, he was “‘quite at sea’” and without any authority.70

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Tulloch was of the same mind. The issue had nothing to do with Tyndall’s position as “a man of science.” In his Belfast Address, Tyndall had “affected the rôle of Prophet, and invited men to look beyond the facts and laws of science to the origin of things in its highest sense.”Tulloch not only “questioned whether Nature has fitted him for this higher rôle,” but also attempted to restrict the role of the scientist in such a way that Tyndall was precluded from speaking about religious and theological issues.71 Just as scientific naturalists had argued that only trained experts had authority when in scientific matters, Tulloch and his allies turned the professionalization gambit back onto their opponents by suggesting that qualifications were also required to deal with religious, theological, and philosophical issues. Tyndall was also widely criticized for breaking with tradition by using the British Association’s prestigious presidential address to promulgate materialism rather than, as was traditional, to review the scientific developments of the past year.72 According to his opponents, this provided powerful proof that his enthusiastic support of materialism rendered him incapable of exercising sound intellectual judgment. Compromising his role as scientist was one thing. Abusing the role of the president in the most publicly visible scientific society of the land was unforgivable. In the Irish Monthly, Reverend Michael O’Ferrall lashed out at Tyndall for believing that he was “accredited” under “the name of Science” to deliver a “message of death” at Belfast.“He speaks untruly when he boasts the commission of science to deliver that message,” O’Ferrall insisted.73 Tulloch questioned “whether the position temporarily occupied by Professor Tyndall was an appropriate one for the ventilation of materialistic theories.” The position of president was “a place of privilege” and “every such place has its decent reserves.” Tyndall’s private religious opinions, “or lack of religious opinions,” had nothing to do with the business of the Association. There was “a degree of impertinence in the obtrusion on such an occasion” of a confession. Huxley, Tulloch suggested, had wisely abstained during the BAAS meeting in Liverpool in 1870 from “turning the British Association into a propaganda of scientific belief or no-belief.” Tyndall should have “followed his example, for the sake both of his own reputation and of the reputation of the British Association.”74 In the Edinburgh Review, Reeve contended that Tyndall had “committed a great error of judgment in making the chair of the president of the British Association a pulpit for the promulgation of highly speculative opinions on questions of abstract philosophy and metaphysics.”75 In the Saturday Review, the critic was surprised that “the President so wholly

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abandoned himself to elaborating one idea, and that one so distasteful to a large portion of those interested in science.” Tyndall should have stuck to “subjects directly connected with the immediate work of scientific discovery” rather than engaging in “light and easy theorizing.” He had chosen his presidential address as the occasion of a manifesto but “the occasion is one which should be sacred to science, not to polemics between science and its real or fancied foes.” Although Tyndall already possessed a reputation for being outspoken, he was expected to exercise discretion. However “he has shown himself to be one of those eager champions of science whose zeal will not permit them to allow science to colonize quietly district after district over which of old theology exercised sway, but who insist on the formal cession of the whole.” Men like Tyndall were responsible for “most of the ill-feeling between members of the two schools of thought.”76 In the final stanza of his poem satirizing the Belfast Address in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, the physicist James Clerk Maxwell joked that Tyndall’s materialism undermined the credibility of the very scientific body over which he presided: The British Association, like Leviathan worshipped by Hobbes, The incarnation of wisdom, built up of our witless nobs, Which will carry on endless discussions, when I, and probably you, Have melted in infinite azure—and, in short, till all is blue.77

Having reduced the human mind to a “witless nob,”Tyndall had rendered the scientific discussions in the British Association never ending, meaningless babble. The closing lines of Tyndall’s Address, which refer to the “infinite azure,” became for Maxwell a poetic metaphor for the haziness of materialism and for the state into which Tyndall believed we would all return, including the members of the British Association, when, after our death, our bodies become one with the rest of the atoms in the universe. The contrast between the portrayal of Tyndall in the periodical press before and after the Belfast Address couldn’t be starker. Punch’s satirical pokes at Tyndall after the meeting mirrored this alteration in Tyndall’s reputation.They became harsher and more frequent. Although Punch ridiculed the response of befuddled members of the public (figure 3), the main target was the absurdity of Tyndall’s materialistic theories (figure 4) or their superficiality (figure 5).78 The respected scientist and gifted popular lecturer, admired for his courageous ascents of the Alps, was now depicted as a morally corrupt and intellectually bankrupt materialist. Although he had

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Figure 3 A globular “swell” is stunned by the idea in the Belfast Address that he (like all humanity) could be derived from globular atomic particles. Source: Punch, October 3, 1874.

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Figure 4 The incompatibility of Tyndall’s materialism with teetotalism is noted by Mr. Punch. If, as Tyndall holds, primordial forms are similar to “drops of oil suspended in a mixture of alcohol and water,” then they are (the scientific reasoning is unimpeachable) remarkably alike to a whisky-toddy, or “Punch.” But, Mr. Punch asks, how likely is it that Tyndall is correct if his materialism leads him to such absurd conclusions? Source: Punch, September 5, 1874.

a reputation previous to 1874 for being outspoken, Tyndall’s critics managed to use the outcry following the Belfast Address to depict him as a loose cannon who never missed an opportunity to attack Christian theologians. In 1875, the Academy reacted negatively to Tyndall’s essay “Materialism and Its Opponents,” which had appeared in the Fortnightly Review. “As usual in his polemical writings,” the writer affirmed, “the author’s reluctance to leave any kind of attack unanswered reduces him at times rather too much to the attitude of ‘one that beateth the air.’ ”79 In this controversy, the periodical press became a site for opposing Tyndall’s alleged materialist leanings. It provided an opportunity to raise doubts about his adherence to the recognized limits of science, about his respect for the proper role of the scientist, and about the way he treated

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Figure 5 Tyndall’s notion of a self-designing nature, based on architectural atoms, is lampooned by Mr. Punch. Tyndall is referred to as “Shallow Professor” and his materialism—the result of his “sceptic silliness”—as fated to be crushed. Source: Punch, November 7, 1874.

important professional responsibilities, such as the presidency of the British Association. In other words, it was questionable whether or not Tyndall was fit to be a member of the scientific elite. However critics also agreed that Tyndall was not atypical among modern scientists and that he expressed views which were pervasive within contemporary British culture.To Savile in the Christian Observer and Advocate “Professor Tyndall may be regarded as the representative of modern science in an eminent degree.”80 In the Dublin Review, Barry saw Tyndall as symbolic of a larger cultural phenomenon. Tyndall “stands for a class” and was “putting forth a creed in their name.” He “represents the spirit of the age in one of its manifestations” while his Belfast Address was “a token and sign of the times.”81 Martineau was “profoundly conscious how strong is the set of the Zeit-geist against me.” Since he believed that Tyndall’s materialistic tendencies were shared by his audience, he despaired of persuading them that the Belfast Address contained serious flaws. “To those—doubtless the majority in our time—who have made up their minds that behind the jurisdiction of the natural sciences no

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rational questions can arise,” Martineau declared, “I cannot hope to say any useful word.”82 According to the critics, all of Tyndall’s materialistic sins were shared by many modern scientists and infected British culture at large. To counteract the materialism of Tyndall and his allies required more than just an attack on the author of the Belfast Address. Opponents of Tyndall broadened their criticisms into an indictment of the materialistic tendencies of all modern scientists and their harmful effect on British culture. As Mallock observed in the Contemporary Review, “in the opinion of the world at large, it is the authority of men of science by which Unbelief has been established. They are the men that in the present day are listened to; who are supposed to speak with authority.”83 Although it had been widely believed that scientific naturalism resulted in materialism, and although Tyndall and his friends were sometimes accused of implicit materialism, the move to openly brand them as materialists following the Belfast Address distinguished this controversy from those that preceded it.84 The effectiveness of the campaign can be seen years later, in 1886, when Huxley was still trying to fend off charges of materialism in his essay “Science and Morals.” Huxley vehemently denied that he was a materialist and rejected the notion that modern physical science had inspired the growth of materialism. “I repudiate,” he stated categorically, “as philosophical error, the doctrine of Materialism.”85 But the critique of modern science launched after the Belfast Address could not be dismissed so easily by Huxley and his allies. It involved a deconstruction of the formation of scientific authority, a discussion of the superficial reasons for accepting new scientific theories, and was frequently accompanied by an attempt to recapture science for religious ends. Christian critics were not willing to allow Tyndall and his allies to control science or the interpretations of its larger significance, no matter how much their influence had grown. In an attempt to shake the readers’ trust in the materialist beliefs of Tyndall and his fellow scientific naturalists, their opponents raised concerns about how scientists created an illusion of authority. In the Saturday Review, one writer objected to the “fulsome adulation” accorded to Darwin by Tyndall. Such extravagant praise should be reserved only for the dead.86 Others believed that scientists were too prone to lavish praise on one another, a strategy that helped bolster their authority. But to these critics, it merely revealed the superficial nature of modern science. In the moderate Nonconformist British Quarterly Review, George Dean (1837–1880), divine and geologist, remarked on “how frequently do we meet in scientific books with such expressions as these, ‘My learned and

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distinguished friend, Sir A. B., informs me,’ or, ‘It is stated by C. D., Esq., F.R.S., an eminent authority of this subject.’ ” Instead of reinforcing the authority of both scientists, Deane argued that such formalities showed that “sufficient care is not always taken by scientific inquirers to verify these statements of their friends.” While men of science accepted novel theories uncritically from their colleagues, those who hesitated to accept their conclusions were looked down upon with contempt. Consequently, “the acceptance of the theory really becomes quite as much a test of scientific respectability, as that of the latest style of dress is of the necessary qualification to be admitted into fashionable society.” Deane effectively questioned whether scientists should be accorded authority when they were slaves to fashion rather than seekers after truth.87 Tulloch was even harsher in his condemnation of the “manner in which living names are used” by the materialist school. “Anything more offensive than the vulgar admiration so largely interchanged amongst its members it is hard to imagine,” he remarked, “and Dr. Tyndall’s address is a conspicuous instance of this offensiveness. His friends and admirers are everywhere bespattered with the most ridiculous praise.” Tyndall’s praise of Darwin was referred to as an “outburst of nauseous compliment.” The president of the British Association, Tulloch complained, should be free “from this vulgar species of flattery.” But Tulloch was aware that this was the means by which Tyndall and his friends established and reinforced their cultural authority. Although they claimed a privileged place within the intellectual elite, they had secured a position of authority by forming a society “for mutual admiration” similar to other coteries in the intellectual world.88 Another strategy for shaking the authority of Tyndall and his allies was to pit them against other scientists. Taking advantage of a lecture in 1877 by Rudolf Virchow, Professor of Pathology at Berlin, in which he claimed that evolution had not yet been experimentally proved,Wace challenged Tyndall’s position that human evolution was accepted as fact by scientists. “It reflects,” Wace declared, “as we have said, grave discredit upon Professor Tyndall’s judgment as a man of Science that he should thus treat as an established truth a speculation which is at present absolutely discountenanced by our latest knowledge.”89 Martineau appealed for help from a group of scientists closer to home. To sever Tyndall’s link between atomic theory and materialism, Martineau maintained that modern physicists no longer believed that “by pulverizing the world into its least particles, and contemplating its components where they are next to nothing, we shall hit upon something ultimate beyond which there is no problem.”

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In support of his contention that physicists read no materialistic implications into modern atomic theory, he quoted from James Clerk Maxwell and Balfour Stewart, two respected Scottish physicists who opposed Tyndall and the other scientific naturalists.90 Playing off Tyndall and his friends against respected scientists both in Britain and Europe, Wace and Martineau effectively questioned their scientific authority, their claim to speak on behalf of science. Rather than challenge the authority of scientific naturalists on scientific issues, most critics chose to dispute their authority on matters outside the domain of science. We have already seen this strategy applied to Tyndall. In Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Tulloch compared Newton’s spirit of modesty to the lack of humility in “our modern scientists,” who insisted that all “ ‘religious theories’ must be brought to their lecture-rooms and tested.” No doubt, Tulloch admitted, it is a great thing “to extend the boundaries of science, and to apply its verifying tests to the explanation of all phenomena; but it is also a serious thing to meddle rashly with the foundations of human belief and society.”91 In an article in Fraser’s Magazine attacking Tyndall, Huxley, and Clifford as modern prophets of atheism, William Allingham, poet and at that time editor of Fraser’s, claimed his right to speak on important issues “as to which no group of specialists, it seems to me, howsoever highly cultivated, have the right to dictate, or to suppose themselves competent to formulate human experience.”92 In an earlier essay “On The Limits of Science” in the same journal, the author, after rebuking Tyndall for unsettling “the belief of thousands” by making statements in the Belfast Address that were not justified by the conclusions of science, he criticized all scientists for similar mistakes. “What I complain of,” he wrote, “is that scientific men should quit the domain of science, and substitute conjecture for proof, and imagination for reality.”93 Once scientists ventured outside of the limits of science to speak on religious and philosophical matters, including the assertion of materialism or atheism, they spoke with no authority. If they claimed the support of science for their personal beliefs, they were actually abusing their scientific authority. Having denied that Tyndall and his allies spoke on behalf of science, and rejected their authority outside the scientific domain, critics of scientific naturalism could reclaim science for Christian ends. Genuine science, even the theory of evolution, was not inherently hostile to religion. They could oppose what seemed to be one of the driving themes in the Belfast Address, the idea that science and religion were necessarily in conflict. Despite their attack on modern science, in particular the materialism of

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scientific naturalists, critics in the periodical press were not prepared to give up on science. Critics were unanimous in rejecting the notion that science and religion were inherently opposed. In the Dublin Review, Barry chided Tyndall for styling the Catholic Church as the arch-enemy of science. He reminded his readers that the Catholic Church had “trained up more scientific men than any human institution that ever existed.”94 Tulloch contended that Tyndall, “as well as his whole school,” greatly exaggerated the antagonism between science and religion. The antagonism existed only by “perverting theological conceptions on the one hand, and, on the other hand, claiming for science what can never come within its sphere.”95 Savile in the Christian Observer and Advocate asserted that “nothing is more certain than this—that no fact of science, fully ascertained, has ever yet been proved to be in opposition to any statement of Scripture rightly understood.”96 Similarly, the essayist in The Month and Catholic Review was confident that all valid scientific discoveries could be fitted into the Catholic scheme of creation. “We can assure Professor Tyndall and all his school, that we have no fear of the results of their profound researches,” he declared. “We will accept them all, provided they will demonstrate their truth, we pledge ourselves to that, for we know that all truth is one, and no truth of physical nature can contradict truth of a higher nature.”97 Even evolution was acceptable and potentially in harmony with Christian doctrine, although at least two reviewers were unwilling to acknowledge its validity as a scientific truth. To Savile, the theory of evolution was still “the wildest, most illogical, and most unscientific hypothesis that has ever entered the brain of man,” while in the pages of the Contemporary Review, Elam characterized evolution as “a figment of the imagination” and at best a hypothesis unsupported by “one single fact in the whole range of natural history or palaeontology.”98 But several years later in the same journal, Elam was contradicted by Richard St. John Tyrwhitt (1827–1895), an essayist on art, who argued that evolution could be accepted by Christians despite Tyndall’s attempt to use it as a “new torpedo” to “blow the Christian Church . . . out of the water.”99 Deane in the British Quarterly Review agreed with Elam that evolution was not yet proven, but if it were, he believed that it was not incompatible with traditional religious beliefs.100 Buchanan objected that “it is not right that we should be construed as objecting to Science, or to its leading modern doctrine, that of Evolution.” He rejected Tyndall’s position that a choice had to be made between creationism and materialism, since science revealed nothing about creation at all.101 Similarly, although a writer in the Specta-

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tor acknowledged that the seeming randomness of the evolutionary process was the cause of the “new materialistic wave which is passing over England,” he also denied that organic variations were tentative or that natural selection was as negative as it seemed.102 Tulloch vehemently denied that the “antagonism which is everywhere in the writings of Evolutionists, and especially so in Dr. Tyndall’s Address, presumed to lie betwixt the idea of evolution and the old idea of design or Mind in nature, is entirely gratuitous.” The notion of design which Tyndall and his allies repudiated, was “never anything but a caricature.”103 Punch’s poetic parody of Tyndall’s Belfast Address, “Democritus at Belfast,” pictured modern scientists as demons lost in a maze due to their defiance of the divine being: But, even as Milton’s demons, problem-tossed, When they had set their Maker at defiance, Still “found no end, in wandering mazes lost,” So it is with our modern men of science. Still in the “Open Sesame” of Law, Life’s master-key professing to deliver, But our meeting with deaf ear on scorn-clenched jaw, Our question “Doth not law imply law-giver?”104

Tyndall and the modern men of science did not recognize the true meaning of the activity in which they were engaged. For them, as for Newton, the search for natural law was the secret password which opened the door to knowledge of nature. But they refused to acknowledge that their emphasis on natural law put the concept of a designing god at the heart of the scientific enterprise. Whether they realized it or not, scientific naturalists were perpetuating a form of natural theology, rather than offering atheistic materialism. Part of the campaign to criticize the materialistic direction of modern science and its baleful affects on British culture involved, for some, an examination of the role of the periodical press. Had the periodical press aided or hindered the spread of materialism? In his discussion of Tyndall’s defense of liberty of scientific discussion in the Belfast Address, the Irish Monthly reviewer condemned one leading periodical for its support of Tyndall’s heterodox opinions. “We know of no threatened encroachment of Mr. Tyndall’s liberty of thought or liberty of teaching,” the reviewer declared. Tyndall was free to lecture wherever and whenever he pleased and could “enunciate with perfect safety doctrines which are utterly subversive of the mutilated remnant of faith to which England still clings.” He had nothing to fear “so long as the leading organ of public opinion

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in these countries,” the Times, could find no theological reason for recoiling from his conclusions.105 In the Edinburgh Review, Reeve extended his criticism to include the entire periodical press. Scientists who claimed to “represent the most advanced philosophical opinions and conquests of the age” were raising questions about the origin of all things, the nature of humanity, and the being and attributes of God. “Through the press,” Reeve asserted, “they exercise a considerable influence over the country, by the audacity of their hypotheses and the vivacity of their style,” even though “that influence is pre-eminently destructive of all the most cherished convictions and beliefs of man.” The “entire fabric of society, of morals, and of law,” not to mention “religious creeds,” would be “subverted and overthrown” if “we are to discern with Professor Tyndall in matter ‘the promise and potency of all terrestrial life.’ ”106 In Fraser’s Magazine, Allingham likewise charged the periodical press with effecting a crucial change in public opinion quietly, “without earthquake or tornado.” For “the first time in the history of western civilization ATHEISM,” Allingham regretfully observed,“is publicly and authoritatively inculcated” in lectures, books, and periodicals “addressed to people of every rank and every degree of culture.” Whereas atheism was previously found by artisans “skulking in his cheap newspaper” now it appeared openly in more up-market periodicals like the “half-crown Fortnightly Review and its twopenny National Reformer.”107 In a more sustained analysis in the Dublin Review, Barry also called attention to the crucial role the periodical press had played in undermining the religious fiber of British culture. Periodicals were part of an explosion of cheap publications which propagated “an intellectual Black Death” in the name of “the diffusion of general enlightenment.” Tyndall’s Fragments of Science was singled out as a “melancholy specimen of infectious literature” addressed, “first of all, to unscientific people.” Due to the pernicious influence of the public press, people believed that it was their right to think whatever they pleased. No laws needed to be held in reverence, “no venerable creed, no pervading and prevailing conviction,” even if it had previously “entered into the life’s blood of an entire people.” Why look to the old when “I can get any new creed inserted in the magazines and reviews, and distributed by popular scientific societies.” Though England had begun the nineteenth century as an orthodox Protestant country, it might leave it Protestant, but no longer orthodox, “what with the growth of undigested knowledge, the profuse chatter of a thousand journals, and the free importation of infidelity from abroad, the

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ancient lines of thought have been unable to resist pressure.” Barry was especially hard on the liberal journals which catered to Tyndall’s school of contemporary thought.Tyndall’s disciples loved “science, literature, politics; they read much, and may exert themselves to reflect on what they read in the columns of the Fortnightly Review, the Westminster, and the Contemporary.” These journals were the new sacred texts, “which, with many,” Barry believed, “have the place of Bible and preacher,” even though “the truth is hardly to be looked for there.”108 In the wake of the Belfast Address, Tyndall and his colleagues were not the only targets. Those like Barry who condemned the periodical press for its role in the spread of infidelity were also attempting, through the intimidation of publishers and editors, to force them to pursue an editorial policy more congenial to Christian goals.109 In 1878, Henry Wace looked back on the controversy over the Belfast Address through a discussion of the use and abuse of scientific lectures. Wace, who was to become Dean of Canterbury in 1903, emphasized the importance of the scientific lecturer, who stood “between the scientific discoveries of his age and the public at large” and who brought “the truths of Science really home to the people at large.” The scientific lecturer must not abuse the opportunities of the office as it would arouse suspicion against “the great subject he represents,” retarding the appreciation and the progress of scientific truth. Just as the clergy inevitably discredited religion if they misused the pulpit to discuss subjects outside their knowledge and to disparage science, “scientific Lecturers who make use of their platforms to disparage religious and moral truths, with which at the same time they display a most imperfect acquaintance, must inevitability damage, with a large portion of the public, the just influence of Science.” Wace asserted that his caution to scientific lecturers was not prompted by an “imaginary danger,” and then launched into a discussion of Tyndall’s “misuses” of his position which “set an example which might become a dangerous and mischievous precedent.” More than once in recent years, Tyndall had severely tried the patience of the public as well as a large number of scientists, by “the rashness with which he had intruded his speculations into regions far beyond those which are properly the province of the Professor of Natural Science.” However, Wace’s primary concern was the way that Tyndall unscrupulously manipulated an uninformed audience who had no way of evaluating his claims. The Belfast Address he could partially forgive, for here Tyndall was addressing an audience of scientists and the scientifically informed who had enough knowledge to assess the validity of his

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materialism. But when lecturing to a popular audience Tyndall was “in the position of a public teacher, and he shares a teacher’s responsibilities.” His audience come “as learners, and submit themselves for an hour to his guidance.” Under such circumstances “it is surely a Lecturer’s duty . . . to restrict himself to the elucidation of truths which he knows to be conclusively established, which are within the range of his own scientific knowledge.” By violating this principle on numerous occasions in order to unsettle the beliefs of his audience, Tyndall had behaved irresponsibly. “For a trusted Lecturer,” Wace declared, “to take an uncertain hypothesis, to treat it as a recognised law of nature, and to employ it in a direct attack upon the moral convictions of an unlearned audience—this is a course which, it appears to us, deserves the strongest moral reprobation.”110 Wace was not alone in condemning Tyndall for taking advantage of his audiences, whether it be at Belfast or Birmingham. Peard was alarmed that Tyndall’s address at Birmingham, “Science and Man,” fascinated thousands of minds, especially “young minds among the classes whose leisure is small, and in whom the habit of disentangling twisted threads of thought, and sternly making pleasant phrases give up their last meanings, is not yet formed.”111 After portraying materialism as a fad attracting the uncritical “neophytes of the Modern Spirit,” Tulloch castigated Tyndall for forgetting at Belfast “that there were many of his hearers who could receive the theory on trust from him, as a sort of temporary Pope of science.”112 Tyndall had misused his authority as a member of the scientific elite. In “The ‘Bankruptcy of Science’ Debate: The Creed of Science and Its Critics, 1885–1900,” Roy MacLeod has argued that critics of science did not launch a full scale attack on scientific naturalism until the early 1880s.113 Although he traces the sources of the “bankruptcy” debate to the theological and philosophical opposition of the 1870s to the Darwinians, including Tyndall’s Belfast Address, an examination of that particular controversy may lead us to revise MacLeod’s estimate of when the debate began. It is significant that Wace, Peard, and Tulloch voiced their objections to Tyndall’s misuse of his authority as scientist in the periodical press. The critics of scientific naturalism turned to the periodical press because other forums for expressing their objections, such as scientific societies, were quickly becoming closed to them. By the 1870s, scientific naturalists had consolidated enough power, especially within the institutional framework of British science, that the general periodical press may have been one of the few remaining outlets for voicing criticism of the new scientific establishment. Despite censuring the periodical press for spreading modern scientific materialism, opponents of scientific naturalism

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Figure 6 Tyndall near the end of his life, portrayed as an aggressive scientific gun for hire, in this case taking on Gladstone and his cronies in a bitter controversy over Home Rule in The Times. A passionate Orangeman, Tyndall joined Huxley and a number of other scientific naturalists in siding with the Unionists. Tyndall saw the Liberal Party’s Home Rule proposals as a grave threat to the secular and intellectual freedom of Ireland. Source: Punch, February 22, 1890.

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realized in 1874 that in order to reclaim science for religious ends, they also had to reclaim the quarterlies, the monthlies, and the weeklies. It was the only way to reach the rapidly growing reading audience and warn them that scientific naturalists like Tyndall were abusing their authority by promulgating heterodox views which did not represent the true spirit of science.Through the periodical press, a concerted effort was made to transform Tyndall’s image in the public eye from the respected popular lecturer well known to genteel audiences at the Royal Institution into the aggressive and radical materialist. It would not do to refer to him merely as a skeptic, or even as an agnostic, these all too respectable terms did not carry associations with working-class atheism or bring home the morally repugnant dimensions of his thought. Near the end of his life, Punch portrayed Tyndall as a militant soldier for science, the scientific volunteer, ever ready to fight for the cause, by taking on the Anglican clergy and their political allies, such as Gladstone (figure 6). But in the eyes of his detractors Tyndall symbolized everything that was wrong with modern science, especially the pretensions of scientific naturalists to replace the Christian clergy as members of the cultural elite. After Belfast, the periodical press became a significant site of resistance to the cultural authority of scientific naturalists, part of a growing disillusionment with the attempts of Tyndall and his allies to dominate science, and through it, the fate of British society. Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge all of the help I have received on this project. Thanks to my colleagues at the SciPer project for allowing me to search for articles on Tyndall in the most recent versions of the database. My research assistants, Sharrona Pearl and Wesley Ferris, saved me hours of legwork by digging up a huge stack of periodical reviews of Tyndall’s Belfast Address. Edward Royle pointed me toward scholarly sources on the meaning of materialism during the nineteenth century. I am indebted to those who read various drafts of the paper and shared their thoughts with me: Ruth Barton, Peter Broks, Gowan Dawson, Adrian Desmond, Jeff Mackowiak, and Richard Noakes. Notes 1. London, The Imperial College, Huxley Papers, John Tyndall to T. H. Huxley, September 24 [1873]. Scientific and General Correspondence, vol. 8, fol. 155.

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2. Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley (Appleton, 1902), vol. 1, p. 440. 3. London, The Imperial College, Huxley Papers, John Tyndall to T. H. Huxley, July 1, 1874. Scientific and General Correspondence, vol. 8, fol. 130. 4. Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, vol. 1, p. 442. 5. John Tyndall, “The Belfast Address,” in Fragments of Science, eighth edition (Longmans, Green, 1892), vol. 2, pp. 136–137. 6. Ibid., p. 161. 7. Ibid., pp. 191–193. 8. Ibid., p. 197. 9. Ibid., p. 201. For a far more detailed analysis of the Belfast Address see Ruth Barton, “John Tyndall, Pantheist: A Rereading of the Belfast Address,” Osiris 3 (1987): 111–134. 10. David Livingstone, “Darwinism and Calvinism: The Belfast-Princeton Connection,” Isis 83 (1992): 408–428; David Livingstone, “Darwin in Belfast,” in Nature in Ireland: A Scientific and Cultural History, ed. J. Foster (Lilliput, 1997). 11. Charles Blinderman, “John Tyndall and the Victorian New Philosophy,” Bucknell Review 9 (1961): 283–284. Similarly, MacLeod states that the “Belfast Address, with its intimations of materialism, broke the uneasy philosophical truce that had followed the first wave of Darwinian debate.” See Roy M. MacLeod, The “Creed of Science” in Victorian England (Aldershot, 2000), p. 7. 12. Frank Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 196. 13. Ruth Barton, “John Tyndall, Pantheist: A Rereading of the Belfast Address,” p. 116; Stephen Kim, John Tyndall’s Transcendental Materialism and the Conflict Between Religion and Science in Victorian England (Mellen University Press, 1996), p. 117. 14. Frank Turner, “Lucretius among the Victorians,” Victorian Studies 16 (1973): 329–348. 15. Gowan Dawson, Walter Pater, Aestheticism and Victorian Science, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Sheffield, 1998. 16. In preparing this study I have drawn on the relevant articles published in the general periodical press from about 1870 to 1878. This includes articles which focused on Tyndall as well as on materialism or other varieties of heterodoxy which paid some attention to Tyndall. I have not attempted to wade into the massive pamphlet literature on the Belfast Address. 17. Dawson, Walter Pater, Aestheticism and Victorian Science, p. 122. 18. Tyndall’s controversial views on prayer became more widely known shortly after the Vanity Fair caricature appeared. The article setting off the prayer gauge debate

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appeared in July 1872 in the Contemporary Review, and Tyndall followed this up with “On Prayer” in the October issue of the same journal. 19. E. C. Watson, “Reproductions of Prints, Drawings and Paintings of Interest in the History of Physics. 40.Vanity Fair Caricature of John Tyndall,” American Journal of Physics 17 (1949), p. 88. 20. James R. Thursfield, “Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews by T. H. Huxley. On the Scientific Use of the Imagination by John Tyndall,” Academy 2 (October 22, 1870), p. 14. 21. James R. Thursfield, “General Literature. Recent Alpine Literature,” Academy 2 (October 15, 1871), p. 469. 22. James Stuart, “Tyndall’s Fragments of Science,” Nature 4 (July 27, 1871), p. 238. 23. Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxey, vol. 1, p. 361. 24. “Science for the Schools,” Punch 44 (May 23, 1863), p. 213. 25. “Biology and Botheration,” Punch 60 (March 11, 1871), p. 94. 26. “Frankenstein’s Chemistry,” Punch 61 (July 29, 1871), p. 41. 27. John Tyndall, “The ‘Prayer for the Sick’: Hints towards a Serious Attempt to Estimate Its Value,” Contemporary Review 20 (July 1872): 205–210. 28. “Arduous Experiment,” Punch 63 (September 21, 1872), p. 123. 29. James G. Paradis, “Satire and Science in Victorian Culture,” in Victorian Science in Context, ed. B. Lightman (University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 156–157. 30. Adrian Desmond, Huxley: From Devil’s Disciple to Evolution’s High Priest (AddisonWesley, 1997), pp. 407–408. 31. St. George Mivart, “Contemporary Evolution,” Contemporary Review 22 (1873), p. 613. 32. St. George Mivart, “The Assumptions of Agnostics,” Fortnightly Review 19 (1873): 718–719, 726. Mivart’s point was echoed in the Dublin Review, where it was observed that “in theological matters he is utterly out of his element” since Tyndall had no real training. See “Literature and Dogma,” Dublin Review 72 (April 1873), p. 374. 33. T. E. Poynting, “V. Materialism, An Unscientific Habit of Thought,” Theological Review 11 (April 1874): 228–229. 34. “Scientific Worthies. IV. —John Tyndall,” Nature 10 (August 20, 1874): 299–302. 35. The Belfast Address was also printed shortly after being delivered by Tyndall in the Academy. See “Science. Meeting of the British Association at Belfast—Wed., August 10, 1874,” Academy 6 (August 22, 1874): 209–217. 36. Dawson, Walter Pater, Aestheticism and Victorian Science, p. 128.

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37. John Page Hopps, “God, The Unknowable and the Knowable,” Theological Review 12 (April 1875), p. 226. 38. [ J. H. Browne], “The Warfare of Science,” Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review 107 ( January 1877), p. 34. 39. James Hinton, “Professor Tyndall and the Religious Emotions,” Contemporary Review 25 (December 1874), p. 98. 40. James Martineau, “Modern Materialism: Its Attitude towards Theology,” Contemporary Review 27 (1876), p. 328. 41. “Jottings,” National Reformer 24 (August 30, 1874), p. 132. The Practical Magazine, a technology and practical arts magazine with obvious working-class ties, also responded favorably to Tyndall and his “celebrated address.” See W. S. C., “John Tyndall, LL. D., F.R.S.,” Practical Magazine 7 (1877), p. 357. 42. Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin (Norton, 1994), pp. 250–251, 296. Secularists such as Southwell, Cooper, Holyoake, and Bradlaugh all saw atheism as a necessary consequence of materialism. There was no reason to believe in the existence of a First Cause since materialism did not allow for the creation or destruction of matter. See Edward Royle, Victorian Infidels: The Origins of the British Secularist Movement 1791–1866 (Manchester University Press, 1974), p. 114. 43. A. S. Eve and C. H. Creasey, Life and Work of John Tyndall (Macmillan, 1945), p. 187; Kim, John Tyndall’s Transcendental Materialism, p. 141. 44. [William Francis Barry], “Mr. Tyndall and Contemporary Thought,” Dublin Review 27, series 2 (1877), p. 454; William Forsyth, “On the Limits of Science,” Fraser’s Magazine 11 (February 1875), p. 205; “The British Association,” Graphic 10 (August 22, 1874), p. 174; T. F., “Mr. Tyndall at Belfast,” Irish Monthly 2 (1874), p. 566; “Professor Tyndall’s Address,” Spectator 47 (August 22, 1874), p. 1057; [John Masson], “The Atomic Theory of Lucretius,” British Quarterly Review 62 (October 1875), p. 176. 45. “Literature,” Athenaeum, August 22, 1874, p. 233. 46. [John Tulloch], “Modern Scientific Materialism,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 116 (November 1874), p. 533; B. W. Savile, “Professor Tyndall,” Christian Observer and Advocate 75, no. 11 (1875), p. 842; [Barry], “Mr. Tyndall and Contemporary Thought,” p. 452;T. F. “Mr.Tyndall at Belfast,” p. 564; J. R., “Professor Tyndall’s Inaugural Address,” The Month and Catholic Review 22 (1874), p. 212; Robert Buchanan, “Lucretius and Modern Materialism,” New Quarterly Magazine 6 (April 1876), p. 30. 47. “Democritus at Belfast,” Punch 67 (August 1874), p. 85. 48. Rev. Michael O’Ferrall, “The New Koran,” Irish Monthly 2 (1874): 649–661. 49. T. F., “Mr. Tyndall at Belfast,” p. 573. 50. [Barry], “Mr. Tyndall and Contemporary Thought,” pp. 447, 458, 466, 468. In his second article, Barry likened Tyndall’s doctrine to Buddhism, since this Eastern religion acknowledges “no God, puts aside the immortality of the soul, looks upon all

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the universe as empty seeming, teaches the philosopher a stoical morality (which degenerates into materialism amongst the people), and considers that the desirable end of all things is their absorption in Nirvana.” Barry claimed that Tyndall’s Buddhism was derived from German thought, especially Fichte and Lange. England was “suffering under a Teutonic invasion of ideas which seems likely to end in conquest,” and should that be “the fate of the English nation, it will mean that Christianity has at length died out amongst us, and that the religion of materialism reigns in its stead.” See [William Francis Barry],“Recent German Thought—Its Influence on Mr.Tyndall,” Dublin Review 29, series 2 (1877), pp. 469, 471. 51. [Henry Reeve], “Mill’s Essays on Theism,” Edinburgh Review 141 ( January 1875), p. 4. 52. Dawson, Walter Pater, Aestheticism and Victorian Science, pp. 120–167. 53. O’Ferrall, “The New Koran,” p. 657. 54. [Reeve], “Mill’s Essays on Theism,” pp. 6–7. 55. [Tulloch], “Modern Scientific Materialism,” p. 524. 56. [Barry], “Recent German Thought,” p. 471. 57. George Peard, “Professor Tyndall’s Birmingham Address,” Contemporary Review 30 (1877), p. 1002. William Allingham (1824–1889), poet and critic, voiced comparable reservations about Tyndall’s use of poetic language, though not in reference to his supposed anti-religious beliefs. He attacked Tyndall’s claim in On Heat that the discoveries and generalizations of modern science constitute a poem more sublime than has yet been addressed to the human imagination. An account of the world drawn exclusively from scientific minds would be utterly dreary. It was to the poets, “the inventors and purifiers of language, Professor Tyndall owes it that he can address mankind in eloquent and imaginative discourse, and is not confined to the worse than PigeonEnglish or Chocktaw of scientific phraseology,” Allingham declared. Allingham’s main concern was to counter any attempt to replace poetry with science. Allingham made a sharp separation between the worlds of the poet and the scientist. The poet perceived a world which was “more beautiful” and more “like the real ‘substance’ of things, than the world of microscopists and atom-hunters.” See [William Allingham], “Modern Prophets,” Fraser’s Magazine 16 (1877): 290–291. 58. W. S., “Professor Tyndall at Birmingham,” The Month and Catholic Review 31 (December 1877), p. 424. 59. W. H. Mallock, “Modern Atheism: The Attitude towards Morality,” Contemporary Review 29 ( January 1877): 172–173. 60. T. F., “Mr. Tyndall at Belfast,” pp. 566–567. 61. Charles Elam, “Automatism and Evolution. Part II,” Contemporary Review 28 (October 1876), p. 730. 62. W. S., “Professor Tyndall at Birmingham,” p. 425.

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63. [Henry Wace], “Scientific Lectures—Their Use and Abuse,” Quarterly Review 145 ( January 1878), p. 60. 64. Martineau, “Modern Materialism,” p. 334. 65. Buchanan, “Lucretius and Modern Materialism,” p. 23. 66. [Tulloch], “Modern Scientific Materialism,” p. 533. 67. “Science, Her Claims, Position, and Duties,” Quarterly Journal of Science 5 ( January 1875): 78, 76. 68. O’Ferrall, “The New Koran,” p. 650. 69. J. R., “Professor Tyndall’s Inaugural Address,” p. 216. 70. W. S., “Professor Tyndall at Birmingham,” p. 424. 71. [Tulloch], “Modern Scientific Materialism,” p. 520. 72. Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority, p. 270; Barton, “John Tyndall, Pantheist,” p. 113. 73. O’Ferrall, “The New Koran,” p. 659. 74. [Tulloch], “Modern Scientific Materialism,” pp. 520–521. 75. [Reeve], “Mill’s Essays on Theism,” p. 5. 76. “Professor Tyndall’s Address,” Saturday Review 38 (August 22, 1874): 236–238. 77. [James Clerk Maxwell], “British Association, 1874. Notes of the President’s Address,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 116 (November 1874), p. 583. 78. “Democritus at Belfast” can also be read as an exposé of Tyndall’s shallowness. In the first stanza there is a reference to how the depths of Nature lie beyond the plummet of his “sounding-line.” Though the poem “The Fine Old Atom-Molecule” does not mention Tyndall by name, clearly it is also an attack on the idolatry of his molecular evolutionism. See “Democritus as Belfast,” p. 85; “The Fine Old Atom-Molecule,” Punch (December 12, 1874), p. 247. 79. “Notes and News,” Academy (November 6, 1875), p. 477. 80. Savile, “Professor Tyndall,” pp. 841–842. 81. [Barry], “Mr. Tyndall and Contemporary Thought,” pp. 447, 431. 82. Martineau, “Modern Materialism,” p. 345. 83. Mallock, “Modern Atheism,” p. 171. 84. On previous charges of materialism see Roger Smith’s chapter in this collection. Ellegård’s analysis of the controversy surrounding Darwin’s Origin of Species shows that the strength of the evolutionists within science was played down at first by their opponents. Moreover, though there were some charges that Darwin encouraged a

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materialistic perspective, Ellegård does not assert that this claim was broadened out to include the majority of British scientists in that period. Both Ellegård and Desmond agree that there was little controversy produced by the publication of the Descent of Man in 1871. See Alvar Ellegård, Darwin and the General Reader: The Reception of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in the British Periodical Press, 1859–1872 (University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 40, 59, 296; Desmond, Huxley, p. 433. 85. T. H. Huxley, Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays (Macmillan, 1911), pp. 182, 132, 140. 86. “Professor Tyndall’s Address,” p. 237. 87. George Deane, “Modern Scientific Inquiry and Religious Thought,” British Quarterly Review 59 (January 1874), p. 38. 88. [Tulloch], “Modern Scientific Materialism,” pp. 528–530. 89. [Wace], “Scientific Lectures,” p. 53. 90. Martineau, “Modern Materialism,” p. 340. For more on the North British Physicists see Crosbie Smith, The Science of Energy: A Cultural History of Energy Physics in Victorian Britain (University of Chicago Press, 1998). 91. [Tulloch], “Modern Scientific Materialism,” p. 520. 92. [Allingham], “Modern Prophets,” p. 273. 93. Forsyth, “On the Limits of Science,” p. 205. 94. [Barry], “Mr. Tyndall and Contemporary Thought,” p. 450. 95. [Tulloch], “Modern Scientific Materialism,” p. 522. 96. Savile, “Professor Tyndall,” pp. 841–842. 97. W. S., “John Tyndall,” pp. 434, 437. 98. Savile,“Professor Tyndall,” p. 857; Charles Elam,“Automatism and Evolution,” Contemporary Review 28 (September 1876), p. 546. 99. Richard St. John Tyrwhitt, “On Evolution and Pantheism,” Contemporary Review 33 (August 1878), p. 85. 100. Deane, “Modern Scientific Inquiry and Religious Thought,” p. 45. 101. Buchanan, “Lucretius and Modern Materialism,” p. 23. 102. “The Materialists’ Stronghold,” Spectator 47 (September 1874), p. 1170. 103. [Tulloch], “Modern Scientific Materialism,” p. 537. 104. “Democritus at Belfast,” p. 85. 105. T. F., “Mr. Tyndall at Belfast,” p. 568. 106. [Reeve], “Mill’s Essays on Theism,” p. 2.

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107. [Allingham], “Modern Prophets,” p. 274. 108. [Barry], “Mr. Tyndall and Contemporary Thought,” pp. 434, 436, 440–441, 444. 109. I am obliged to Gowan Dawson for this point. 110. [Wace], “Scientific Lectures,” pp. 37–39, 54. 111. Peard, “Professor Tyndall’s Birmingham Address,” p. 1001. 112. [Tulloch], “Modern Scientific Materialism,” pp. 521–522. 113. MacLeod, “Creed of Science” in Victorian England, pp. 2, 4, 7.

10 Science, Liberalism, and the Ethics of Belief: The CONTEMPORARY REVIEW in 1877 Helen Small

In January 1877, the liberal1 monthly Contemporary Review published an article by W. K. Clifford that elicited a storm of protest from the wider periodical press.2 Like other famously provocative articles of the 1860s and the 1870s, such as Huxley’s “On the Physical Basis of Life” (Fortnightly Review, 1869)3 and Henry Thompson’s “The ‘Prayer for the Sick’: Hints towards a Serious Attempt to Estimate Its Value” (Contemporary Review, 1872), Clifford’s essay was seen as a serious attempt by a scientific naturalist to undermine the philosophical claims of religion and metaphysics, and (for many) worrying evidence of the growing influence of an agnostic wing within the liberal intellectual press. “The Ethics of Belief ” was one of numerous articles in the Contemporary Review and its principal rival, the Fortnightly Review, that sought a rational debate on such fundamental philosophical questions as the status of evidence, credibility, and authority—with a view to extending scientific principles beyond science itself into all regions of intellectual inquiry.4 Unlike any other major contribution to the war of ideas between scientific naturalism and metaphysics, however, “The Ethics of Belief ” was published in a context where the liberalism of the liberal periodical press was suddenly much less able to be taken for granted than it had been hitherto. In January 1877 the Contemporary Review became embroiled in a serious public dispute over editorial direction and policy which saw the dismissal of James Knowles from the assistant editorial post that he had held since 1870—this despite general recognition that his efforts had transformed the magazine from a staid and only modestly successful publication into one of the leading intellectual organs of its day. For Knowles “The Ethics of Belief ” may well have felt like “an excellent joke at the expense of those earnest believers”5—or at least a sharp parting jab. If so, it was a jab which said more than Knowles himself, or the scientists who wrote for him, should have been entirely comfortable with. This chapter will argue that “The Ethics of Belief ” identified a serious

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difficulty with the definition of credibility, both in mid-to-late-nineteenthcentury science generally and, more specifically, within the liberal periodical press which had helped to shape and promote a particular version of science for the public. Clifford’s article was in several respects not outstandingly original or philosophically subtle, but it exposed (and, discomfitingly, demonstrated) strains within the prevailing account of the grounds for legitimate scientific belief. The circumstances under which the article was published were themselves unexpectedly ethically complex. Copies of the January edition of the Contemporary Review had been on the bookstands for barely three weeks when the editorship of the journal became the subject of a high profile court case in Chancery, in February 1877, in which questions of belief were very publicly played out, and contributors to the journal were required to make a decision about the validity of the Contemporary Review’s claim to be a liberal forum for debate. Read in that context, the tensions and contradictions within the argument of Clifford’s essay were, I shall be arguing, predictive of the concessions that had to be made in his strenuous ethics of belief when moving from the realm of philosophy of science to the practical world of periodical publishing. “The Ethics of Belief ” is remembered now, almost exclusively, for the swagger of brutal rationalism about its claim that there is a “universal duty of questioning all that we believe”—a duty that “no simplicity of mind, no obscurity of station, can escape.”6 Clifford was 31 years old when it was published, Professor of Applied Mathematics at University College London, a fellow of the Royal Society since 1874, and the youngest member ever elected to the Metaphysical Society. (The paper had been read before the Society on April 11, 1876.) He already possessed a reputation as an “ardent libertarian,” a “convinced republican,”7 and so fearless a goader of the public’s “religious prejudices” that even a friend and admirer like Leslie Stephen would soon hesitate to publish him in the Cornhill Magazine.8 He was also fighting the pulmonary disease which would kill him within little more than two years. His reputation for unflinching rationalism has served in some measure to obscure those aspects of Clifford’s thinking which distinguished him from many of his fellow promoters of science in the liberal press.9 In a series of papers published in the Fortnightly Review and the Contemporary Review during the earlier 1870s, he argued vigorously against that very visible strain within scientific rationalism—Huxley and James Fitzjames Stephen being the prime exemplars—that habitually denied or at least deferred indefinitely the application of scientific modes of inquiry to the

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spheres of ethics and, relatedly, moral psychology.10 Stephen, for example, bullishly concluded a duffing up of W. G. Ward in the December 1874 issue of the Contemporary Review with a statement that “For my part I can only regret, as a waste of power, the passionate efforts which are continually being made to get at some superior kind of truth, by poring over the speculations of the mind.”11 Even John Tyndall, the great defender of the use of the imagination in science, found it necessary in certain contexts, such as the 1860s debate on the scientific credibility of miracles, to make a strict distinction between “affair[s] of the heart”—in which he included the affections, the emotions, and “the estimation of moral goodness”—and the work of weighing “the credibility of physical facts”: “. . . these must be judged by the dry light of the intellect alone.”12 At its strictest, which is not infrequently, this rhetorical strain in the public defense of scientific rationalism banishes to the future everything that does not deal purely and logically with “objective fact.” More commonly, it draws a pragmatic dividing line between the empirical work of science (glossed by G. H. Lewes as “work of Reason and Demonstration,” of “Verification, and Not Conviction”) and the acknowledgment of “those Moral Instincts and Aesthetic Instincts which determine conduct and magnify existence”—”ultimate facts of Feeling” which we cannot explain and must “simply accept.”13 “The Ethics of Belief ” needs to be read, first and foremost, within this context of ongoing, often antagonistic debate about the proper limits of “science.” The debate had many philosophical underpinnings, but perhaps the most significant for an assessment of Clifford’s position in 1877 was the still potent legacy of the conflict within earlier Victorian philosophy of science over the nature and definition of induction: a conflict famously (though by no means exclusively) represented by William Whewell and John Stuart Mill. For Whewell, in History of the Inductive Sciences (1837) and The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840),14 the grounds for scientific knowledge had to be understood historically as well as logically. His was a “philosophy of discovery,” strongly Kantian in character, which presented both theory and fact as historically contingent terms, and which reserved a central role for “intuition” in the growth of scientific knowledge.Whewell held that theories develop through a process of historical and dialectical rationalism, and that “conceptions of the mind,” as distinct from facts, play a special part in the production of scientific “truth.” As fundamentally, he argued that facts and theories are not, finally, separable, and that “any description of them must imply their relation”— in other words, there can be no apprehension of a “fact” without a

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theoretical claim which enables its identification as a fact, and there can be no theory which is not established by reference to perceived facts and what he called “fundamental Ideas” (Space,Time, Number, Motion, Cause, Force, and Uniformity, among them). Mill’s version of scientific induction was, by comparison, toughly empiricist. In A System of Logic (1843)15 he defined hypotheses much more narrowingly as the logical mental manipulations of observed facts—his opposition to the residual metaphysics in Whewell’s philosophy leading him to misrepresent his opponent’s thinking (as E. W. Strong argued in a much cited essay of 1955), ignoring the arguments for the historical conditioning of thought and the relativity of theory and fact.16 In short, Mill’s Logic turned its back on those elements of Whewell’s philosophy of induction which presented facts as anything other than the sufficient and objectively perceivable bases for those operations of logic which lead to knowledge.17 Broadly speaking, Mill’s empiricism dominated the popular presentation of science for much of the nineteenth century.18 But the Mill who had attracted most comment in the liberal journals during the three years preceding the publication of Clifford’s paper was, importantly, not the Mill of A System of Logic, but the Mill of the posthumously published Three Essays on Religion which, greatly to the consternation of disciples like John Morley (editor of the Fortnightly), found it “legitimate and philosophically defensible” to preserve an “indulgent hope” that the world progresses toward an ideal good, that there is “a large balance of probability” in favor of the creation of Nature “by intelligence . . . perhaps unlimited intelligence,” and even that there might be an afterlife.19 Morley devoted a two-part review article in the Fortnightly Review to countering this apostasy by turning the clear-sighted empiricism of the younger Mill back on the “twilight hopes and tepid possibilities” of the late Mill.20 The Contemporary, perhaps as tellingly, did not review the book at all—but both periodicals found themselves giving expanded room, as the 1870s progressed, to the arguments of men like R. H. Hutton, W. R. Greg, and W. B. Carpenter who sought to retain a place for idealism and (often) for religion alongside an empiricist science. It was partly in reaction against such defenses of idealism and theism that the most publicly committed empiricists, including Huxley, Stephen, and Tyndall, found themselves rhetorically banishing metaphysics and morals to the realm of the “non-scientific.” Clifford, by comparison, was a proselytizer on behalf of science who devoted himself, in his writing for the general periodical press, to bringing morals within the domain of scientific rationalism. One of the reasons

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for his greater willingness to put ethics at the center of scientific inquiry may well be the extent of his influence by Whewell in addition to Mill— a fact often forgotten by his contemporaries and by later historians when they place him too exclusively in the camp of Millite empiricists.21 It is, for example, rarely recalled now that Clifford delivered the oration at Whewell’s memorial service in Trinity College, Cambridge.22 “The Ethics of Belief ” is, I want to suggest, torn between the clinical empiricism of Mill’s Logic and something closer to the more flexible rationalism of Whewell and the later Mill. It fights shy of asserting the philosophical viability of theism, but not out of antipathy to the unscientific realms of possibility—rather out of a desire to draw attention back from the enticements of hope to the moral virtue of skepticism, and to find room, within his conception of the philosophy of science, for the demands of conscience. The primary duty for Clifford is to inquire constantly into the conditions of all our beliefs and inquiries—not in order to secure “Truth” (which he concedes may be beyond our reach even in small matters) but as a moral and intellectual good in its own right. Clifford began with a cautionary tale: A shipowner was about to send to sea an emigrant-ship. He knew that she was old, and not over-well built at the first; that she had seen many seas and climes, and often had needed repairs. Doubts had been suggested to him that possibly she was not seaworthy. These doubts preyed upon his mind, and made him unhappy; he thought that perhaps he ought to have her thoroughly overhauled and refitted, even though this should put him to great expense. Before the ship sailed, however, he succeeded in overcoming these melancholy reflections. He said to himself that she had gone safely through so many voyages and weathered so many storms, that it was idle to suppose that she would not come safely home from this trip also. He would put his trust in Providence, which could hardly fail to protect all these unhappy families that were leaving their fatherland to seek for better times elsewhere. He would dismiss from his mind all ungenerous suspicions about the honesty of builders and contractors. In such ways he acquired a sincere and comfortable conviction that his vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy; he watched her departure with a light heart, and benevolent wishes for the success of the exiles in their strange new home that was to be; and he got his insurance-money when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales. What shall we say of him? Surely this, that he was verily guilty of the death of those men. It is admitted that he did sincerely believe

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in the soundness of his ship; but the sincerity of his conviction can in nowise help him, because he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him.23

The subject matter and the idiom (“he was verily guilty”) left few of the essay’s first readers in doubt that Clifford intended an analogy between the ship and the Church of England (or religion more broadly)— and the parallel prompted several readers to complain vehemently. R. H. Hutton protested (anonymously) in the Spectator that Clifford had “muddied the waters by causing his credulous shipowner to profit commercially by the disaster.” The Saturday Review columnist objected, similarly, to an argument based on “supposed instances of credulity prompted by self-interest, regardless of the possible or certain injury to others.”24 But the nature of self-interest was precisely what Clifford was concerned with. The burden of almost all his writing on ethics is that the primary question of knowledge is not the ascertainment of Truth but the rigorous pursuit of the best possible conditions for belief by exercising “our powers of self-control, of doubting, of judicially and fairly weighing the evidence.” Self-interest, as he saw it, tends too often to take the easiest route—to accept what is comfortable and involves the least effort to ourselves— whereas Clifford (the athlete who had once appalled, and thrilled, his contemporaries at Cambridge by swinging off a church weathercock by his toes) believed in the virtue of making life as exacting and arduous for oneself as possible. It is perhaps because of the tone of exactingness that Clifford’s article was too quickly perceived by opponents and supporters as of a piece with the scientific rationalism of Huxley or Stephen.25 In fact Clifford’s empiricism is quickly modified by strains much closer to Whewell’s sense of the historical and social contingency of facts.26 “The Ethics of Belief ” moves on from the analogy of the shipowner to acknowledge that there are “many cases,” both in society and in science, when “it is our duty to act upon probabilities, although the evidence is not such as to justify present belief ” (p. 296), and equally many cases when we are asked to believe not on the evidence of our own experience but on the testimony of others. Too often, Clifford claims, we are unreasoningly satisfied with the reputation of a person for excellent moral character “as ground for accepting his statements about things which he cannot possibly have known” (p. 297). His first examples are drawn from religion (tactfully, from Buddhism and from Islam rather than from Christianity), his next from science. “If a chemist tells me, who am no chemist, that a certain substance can be

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made by putting together other substances in certain proportions and subjecting them to a known process, I am justified in believing him unless I know anything against his character or his judgment.” (p. 301) His professional training, the fact that his experiments are subject to verification by other chemists who have an interest in watching and testing for error, are sufficient to lend him authority. “But if my chemist tells me that an atom of oxygen has existed unaltered in weight and rate of vibration throughout all time, I have no right to believe this on his authority, for it is a thing which he cannot know without ceasing to be a man. . . . No eminence of character and genius can give a man authority enough to justify us in believing him when he makes statements implying exact and universal knowledge.” (p. 301) The unobjectionable conclusion is in danger of obscuring the implications of the preamble. Credibility has to do not just with facts but with their social context: with the individual “character” of the scientist, the structure of the profession and the collective “character” of scientists generally. “The Ethics of Belief ” begins to look still less comfortably empiricist as it progresses. Not long into the first section, “The Duty of Inquiry,” Clifford complicates the argument sufficiently to bring into doubt whether there are any circumstances under which one can adequately scrutinize the rightness of one’s own convictions: “No man holding a strong belief on one side of a question, or even wishing to hold a belief on one side, can investigate it with such fairness and completeness as if he were really in doubt and unbiassed; so that the existence of a belief not founded on fair inquiry, unfits a man for the performance of this necessary duty.” (p. 291) If this is so, it would appear to disqualify most people from doing adequately what, Clifford was insisting, none could be excused from attempting. Soon after, Clifford is to be found arguing that no instance of belief can ever be trivial given that, first, it goes to make up that “aggregate of beliefs” which stamps an individual character, and second, it necessarily impinges on the life of society, for our words, phrases, forms and processes and modes of thought are indissolubly social. With a (no doubt tactical but in the context unexpected) return of the language of religion, he identifies a “sacred faculty” of belief in those truths which “have been established by long experience” (p. 292). The intention is clearly to signal a moral duty of inquiry into all our beliefs, but in invoking the social nature of belief, and asserting its “sacred” quality, no less, he comes very close once again to a Whewellian perception of the social contingency of belief.

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The argument for the “universal duty of questioning all that we believe” occupies only the first part of a three part essay, the second and third sections of which have attracted curiously little attention. In the second part, on “The Weight of Authority,” Clifford endeavors to salvage from “tradition” something that can serve as guidance in the moral as well as in the material world: “. . . conceptions of right in general, of justice, of truth, of beneficence” are, he asserts, not “statements or propositions” but they “answer to certain definite instincts, which are certainly within us, however they came there. . . . [A] man retires within himself and finds something, wider and more lasting than his solitary personality.” (p. 303) The agnostic reflex (“however they came there”) is in tune with the Mill of the Logic, but the concession that there exists such an “instinct” at all is far more reminiscent of Whewell’s claims for the role of intuition in the formation of scientific theories. This is not, however, territory which Clifford seems comfortable occupying for long. He rapidly redirects the reader’s attention to the practical deployment of that instinct: the necessity of continually turning the instinctive wish to do good into the question, Is this action or convention good or not? The final part of “The Ethics of Belief ” confronts most squarely the implications of this argument for an inferential philosophy of science. Here Clifford poses the crucial philosophical question of the limits of inference: How are we justified in moving beyond our own experience to more general truths? His answer is that “we may go beyond experience by assuming that what we do not know is like what we do know; or, in other words, we may add to our experience on the assumption of a uniformity in nature” (p. 306). But what is meant by “uniformity” here? It was a standard term in Millite induction, but equally a key term for Whewell—classed under those “fundamental Ideas” which are not facts but conditions for systematic inquiry into the relations of things. Elsewhere Clifford had already argued that “uniformity of nature is necessary to responsibility. . . . Only upon this moral basis can the foundations of the empirical method be justified,”27 and knowledge of that background makes it unclear whether he means here nature as “the physical world” and/or nature as the defining qualities of a person. Clifford ducks the question: “What this uniformity precisely is, how we grow in the knowledge of it from generation to generation, these are questions which for the present we lay aside. . . .” (p. 306)28 The conflict between Whewellian relativism and Millite empiricism in “The Ethics of Belief ” extends finally to the examples offered of a justified extension of belief beyond personal experience. The first of

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Clifford’s cases is bluntly empiricist—we may infer the existence of hydrogen in the sun because, when shone on the slit of a spectroscope, the sun produces the same bright lines as are produced by hydrogen. The second is altogether less tidy, though Clifford declines to recognize its untidiness. How do we know that the siege of Syracuse in the Peloponnesian war took place? Answer: we have a number of distinct and mutually reinforcing historical documents to that effect, and “we find . . . that men do not, as a rule, forge books and histories without a special motive; we assume that men in the past were like men in the present; and we observe that in this case no special motive was present. That is, we add to our experience on the basis of an assumption of a uniformity in the characters of men” (p. 308). Is that assumption justified? Henry Sidgwick and W. G. Ward thought not.29 Moreover, there is no role here for error, or for the accidental loss of testimony which might have complicated or contradicted the surviving evidence, or for what Clifford elsewhere called “involuntary action”—only for deceit: “if there is any special reason to suspect the character of the persons who wrote or transmitted certain books, then the case becomes altered. . . . Then we must say that upon such documents no true historical inference can be founded, but only unsatisfactory conjecture.” Clifford’s article was guaranteed to cause dismay among churchmen. Its choice of language was calculated to make them feel singled out for philosophical rebuke, even if the instances discussed steered carefully away from Christian theology and church practice. But the indignation of “believing” readers of the Contemporary Review was also a distraction from the more fundamental challenges posed by the article to the definition of scientific knowledge and—by extension—to the liberal periodical press. Though superficially in accord with the versions of scientific credibility advocated by Huxley, Stephen, and Tyndall, Clifford had argued his way into repeated concessions to a much less clear-cut perception of the grounds for belief. Like Whewell, he had found himself required to make certain allowances for what many of his fellow promoters of science in the Contemporary Review would have dismissed out of hand as “subjectivism” or “metaphysics”: that it might prove impossible to separate rationalism from belief; that there might exist such a thing as an intuitive apprehension of “truth”; that a man’s claim to credibility might in part be a function of his social, professional and, not least, historical context. Each time such a concession is made, Clifford closes the questions down again and retreats.

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Given Clifford’s own reluctance on this occasion to pursue moments of unwanted philosophical complication, it is not surprising that critics did not, in the main, pick up on them.30 The ethics of belief were, however, anything but a theoretical question for the Contemporary Review’s editorship at the time Clifford’s article was published. On February 22, the case of “Strahan and Co. [Ltd.] and others v. King and Co. and Knowles” was heard before the Chancery Division of the High Court of Justice. The terms of that case, and the extended public jostling for position that went on around it, represent, I want to suggest, something like a return of the repressed in the sphere of liberal ethics—an object lesson, if one were needed, in the social contingency of believing in what men or their magazines say. The clash between Knowles and Strahan occurred primarily as a consequence of serious embarrassments in Strahan’s business affairs. Since the early 1860s Strahan had been propping up his publishing company through ever more complicated debt and mortgage arrangements with a string of creditors.31 In 1876 the whole fragile structure collapsed around him, but with characteristic resilience and luck he managed to secure financial backing, through the assistance of the Congregationalist minister John Brown Paton, from Samuel Morley: hosiery magnate, influential member of the Liberal party, and prominent Evangelical.32 Together, Morley, Paton, and probably (but by no means certainly) Strahan, saw an ideal opportunity to counter the damage that the spread of “rationalism” was doing via the periodical press. Knowles reported to Gladstone, in dismay, that when he met Morley at the start of November 1876, “he did not scruple to tell me that his own wish was to see an Editor of the C. R. with a strong bias in his own direction (ex. gr. as to his own view of the doctrine of the atonement).”33 Knowles was gone from the editorial offices of the Contemporary Review by December. Within weeks he was advertising the imminent publication of a new liberal monthly under his sole proprietorship and editorship, to be published and distributed by the same company which handled the Contemporary Review, Henry S. King & Co. Faced with a mass exodus by his contributors, almost all of whom chose to support Knowles now, and by the likelihood that the Nineteenth Century would profit significantly from access to the commercial structures of the Contemporary, Strahan went to court. Public interest in the case, and unduly much of the case itself, was focused on Knowles’s advertisement. It was, in effect rather more than that:

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THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: a monthly review. edited by james knowles, late of the CONTEMPORARY REVIEW. The management of the Contemporary Review has recently passed into the hands of a limited company, consisting of Mr. Samuel Morley, Mr. Francis Peek, the Rev. Paton (of the Independent College at Nottingham), and others, and formed for the purpose of “editing, managing, and publishing” the Contemporary Review, the Day of Rest, Good Things for the Young, and Peepshow. A separation has taken place between the Review and Mr. Knowles, whose editorial connexion with it dated from the resignation in 1870 of Dean Alford, its first editor. The change made after Mr. Knowles joined it in the conduct of the Contemporary by enlarging the comparatively limited “platform” of the Dean and converting it into an entirely free and open field, where all forms of honest opinion and belief (represented by men of sufficient weight) should be not only tolerated, but equally welcomed, met with the marked approval of the public.The results of that policy were such as now encourage Mr. Knowles in establishing, by the help of his friends, a new review, under the title the Nineteenth Century, which will be conducted on the absolutely impartial and unsectarian principles which governed the Contemporary during his connexion with it.

The statement was signed by 110 names, including most of the leading contributors to the Contemporary Review in the past seven years: Lewes, Huxley, Stephen, and with them Arnold, Tennyson, Frederic Harrison, Mark Pattison, R. H. Hutton, W. R. Greg, Walter Bagehot, Frederic Myers, Croom Robertson, James Sully—and W. K. Clifford.34 It was, to say the least, a damaging document for the Contemporary Review. Without directly accusing the new management of anything, Knowles had succeeded in representing them as intellectually “illiberal” by dint of their known religious affiliations; he had depicted himself, doubly advantageously, as the rightful heir to the Review’s first editor, and a clear improver on his policies and work. He had also given the strong impression that the “staff ” of the Contemporary Review viewed him as the defender of its principles against a hostile takeover. Strahan’s decision to seek legal redress is understandable, but, in a fundamental error, he allowed his case to become tied to the question of whether, here and more generally, Knowles had been falsely representing himself as the editor of the Contemporary Review rather than, as the terms of his agreement with Strahan had always been, a “consulting” or “assistant” editor and “friend.” Knowles had no difficulty in establishing in court that he had never claimed to be editor in name, but that he had been an active assistant editor, and salaried as such.

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Strahan’s still greater mistake was in seeking an injunction to restrain the publication of the Nineteenth Century altogether. The Vice Chancellor, Sir Richard Malins, threw the case out, with costs against Strahan, and unqualified support for Knowles. In essence, Malins read the case as one of the freedom of the press, and the freedom of an individual to earn a living. Having been wrongfully dismissed from his position on the Review, Knowles had been “quite justified in seeking further employment [and] had exercised the right which every Englishman possessed, of setting up a publication on his own account; it was really marvellous, said his Lordship, that his conduct should have been made the subject of the long discussion which had arisen upon it.” As for the advertisements and statements issued by Knowles, he “could see no inaccuracy in them.” All well and good for Knowles, but neither he nor, unsurprisingly, Strahan was content to let the court alone decide the issue. By the time Strahan and Co. Ltd.’s suit against Knowles and King came to court, Knowles and Strahan had been engaging in gloved fisticuffs in the mainstream press, and the trade journals, for more than a month. Both men energetically sought endorsement of their positions from the Contemporary’s contributors through private letters and personal interviews, but also public statements to the press, and (in Strahan’s case) at least three privately printed pamphlets. In a pamphlet dated February 7, 1877, circulated by Strahan among former writers for the Contemporary Review, he explicitly stated his rationale for resorting to such measures: “contributors,” he wrote, need to know “how much of truth there is in statements which have induced them . . . to give promises to a rival publication introduced by its proprietor in such terms that those promises might possibly be read as a revocation of their confidence in the Contemporary.” Just over a week later he was writing again, this time to Gladstone, the Duke of Argyll, and the Dean of Westminster (and probably to others), protesting more specifically against “the use being made” of their “names and influence to cast discredit upon that journal”: It is not simply the appearance of your names beneath the advertisement of the Nineteenth Century that is working the injury, but the fact that your names were used to get other names, and that the other names cannot be withdrawn while yours stand. I have seen several of the other gentlemen whose names are on the list, and have been told by them that they will virtually be guided by what you do. If you dissociate yourselves from The Contemporary they will do the same. If you abide by it, so will they.35

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Knowles was meanwhile making much the same point in trying to secure contributions from Gladstone and from Tennyson for the first issue of the Nineteenth Century. “[O]f course it lies with you” he wrote to Tennyson, “to do more towards helping me to realise my purpose than with any other one man—I mean—my purpose of collecting all of the very best & highest—for you know quite well that it is no flattery to say your name will draw others which no other name would do in literature.”36 And to Gladstone, ingenuously: “my Fortune as an Editor would be made.” “It rests—my dear Mr. Gladstone—with yourself alone.”37 Gladstone, especially, was singled out by Strahan and by Knowles as the key figure in each man’s campaign to ensure public faith in himself and the “liberalism” of his periodical. Strahan besieged him with long letters of selfjustification, copies of his correspondence with Knowles, and accusations against Knowles which grew more detailed and vituperative with each missive.38 Knowles was less importunate, but no less clearly determined to secure the great man’s support.39 The question was, fundamentally, one of belief—in these men and in their claims to be fostering liberal journalism—but this was not the ethics Clifford had in mind when he described the necessity of submitting credence to “free and fearless questioning.” Unlike the courts, neither Tennyson nor Gladstone was in a position to conduct a full investigation of the facts. Nor did either have authority in this sphere beyond that of being perceived, in Clifford’s terms, as a “man of excellent moral character”—and the character of a man may be “excellent evidence that he [is] honest and spoke the truth so far as he knew it; but it is no evidence at all that he knew what the truth was.”40 The ethics at work here, on Knowles and Strahan’s side, were plainly pragmatic and, to a degree, cynical. If Gladstone would lend his name, other prominent supporters of the liberal periodical press would follow. Knowles and those who followed him in leaving the Contemporary Review might do so in the name of an ideal of free and fearless rational inquiry, but in practice the world was neither so ethical nor so rational as Clifford, at his most bracing, would have had it be. Gladstone’s response was, ambiguously, liable to be read either as equivalently pragmatic, or as the one “Cliffordianly” ethical stance taken in all this. His diaries for 1877 record numerous letters to both Strahan and Knowles.41 Whether or not he was inquiring deeply into the rights and wrongs of their conflict is unclear, but he appears to have endorsed neither too explicitly in public, and he declined to sign the advertisement for the Nineteenth Century. He continued to write for both, and the piece

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he gave Knowles for the first issue of the Nineteenth Century was, fittingly enough, a review of George Lewis’s On the Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion (1849, second edition 1875), in which he staunchly opposed Lewis’s claim that there can be no authority in matters of religion, and championed the view that mass assent to the propositions of Christianity may be sufficient grounds for belief.42 Knowles led with the piece, of course, but James Fitzjames Stephen was disgusted, and produced a brisk demolition of Gladstone’s logic, and scholarly accuracy, for the next issue.43 Gladstone replied, defending himself but adding the benignly pragmatic rider that “Authority is . . . not an ideal or normal, but a practical or working, standard.”44 More telling, in light of the ongoing history of the liberal periodical press and its championing of the cause of science, is the structure James Knowles worked out for representing science in the Nineteenth Century. One of the features which most clearly distinguishes that magazine from its liberal predecessors is its attachment to that revealing phrase Knowles had included when setting out his terms for the journal: “all forms of honest opinion and belief (represented by men of sufficient weight) should be not only tolerated, but equally welcomed.” It is a familiar criticism of the Nineteenth Century that it drew too heavily on the pulling power of established names, at the expense of that openness to rational ideas, irrespective of their authorship, which was supposed to characterize a liberal debate. The Contemporary Review put the objection pithily at the outset of Knowles’s publishing venture: “[A good editor’s] menagerie must not be all lions.”45 Knowles’s attraction to the big cats of the publishing world had no more telling expression than in his choice of Huxley as the primary spokesman for science in his pages. Too busy to write a regular summary of scientific developments himself, Huxley agreed to act as an advisor to Knowles, who produced a (somewhat) regular column called “Recent Science” under a headnote: “Professor Huxley has kindly read, and aided the Editor with his advice upon, the following article.” The columns were compilations, probably of abstracts from scientific journals, perhaps (Priscilla Metcalf has suggested) with the help of learned-society librarians at New Burlington House.46 Was this “ethical” use of Huxley’s claim to the credence of the public? John Tyndall, for one, thought not, and wrote to Huxley in 1880 to express his dismay that Huxley was lending the weight of his supposed authority to statements about areas of science in which he was not competent to guide the public. Huxley replied in some confusion:

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My dear old Tyndall I must tell you the ins and outs of this XIX century business. I was anxious to help Knowles when he started the journal and at his earnest and pressing request I agreed to do what I have done. But being quite aware of the misinterpretation to which I should be liable if my name “sans phrase” were attached to the article—I insisted upon the exact words which you will find at the head of it; and which seemed, and still seem, to me, to define my position as a mere advisor to the Editor— Moreover by diligently excluding any expression of opinion on the part of the writers of the compilation—I thought that nobody could possibly suspect me of assuming the position of an authority even on subjects with which I may be supposed to be acquainted, let alone those such as Physics & Chemistry of which I know no more than any one of the Public may know— Therefore your remarks came upon me tonight with the sort of painful surprise which a man feels who is accused of the particular sin of which he flatters himself he is especially not guilty. . . .47

W. K. Clifford would have not have accepted the defense. In principle, that is. In practice, he knew the compulsions of embarrassment. “A great misfortune has fallen upon me,” he wrote once: “I shook hands with—[the name was suppressed by Clifford’s editor]. I believe if all the murderers and all the priests and all the liars in the world were united in one man, and he came suddenly upon me round a corner and said, “How do you do?” in a smiling way, I could not be rude to him upon the instant.”48 Acknowledgments

This chapter develops an argument begun in my article “Liberal Editing in The Fortnightly Review and The Nineteenth Century,” Publishing History 53 (2003): 75–96. I would like to thank Geoffrey Cantor, Gowan Dawson, Bernard Lightman, Sally Shuttleworth, and Jonathan Topham for their help in the preparation of this chapter. Quotation from the Huxley Papers is made with the permission of Imperial College of Science, Technology, and Medicine Archives, London. Notes 1. Liberal not, of course, in the party political sense but in the Millite philosophical sense of espousing “the natural emergence of truth by free expression and interplay

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of as many points of view as possible” (D. A. Hamer, John Morley: Liberal Intellectual in Politics, Clarendon, 1968, pp. 73–74). 2. Contemporary Review 29 ( January 1877): 289–309. On the article’s reception, see Patricia Thomas Srebrnik, Alexander Strahan: Victorian Publisher (Michigan University Press, 1986), p. 157. 3. Fortnightly Review 11 o.s., 5 n.s. (February 1869): 129–145. 4. Inter alia, J[ames] F[itzjames] Stephen, “Necessary Truth,” Contemporary Review 25 (December 1874): 44–73; Clifford’s own “Philosophy of the Pure Sciences,” part I, Contemporary Review 24 (October 1874): 712–727, part II, Contemporary Review 25 (February 1875): 360–376; three articles “On the Scientific Basis of Morals,” by Clifford, Connor Magee, and Frederic Harrison, Contemporary Review 26 (September 1875); William Benjamin Carpenter, “On the Fallacies of Testimony in Relation to the Supernatural,” Contemporary Review 26 ( January 1876); James Martineau, “Modern Materialism: Its Attitude toward Theology,” Contemporary Review 27 (February 1876). Almost all these articles prompted responses in subsequent issues. 5. Srebrnik, Alexander Strahan, p. 156. 6. Clifford, “Ethics of Belief,” p. 293. 7. Alan Willard Brown, The Metaphysical Society: Victorian Minds in Crisis, 1869–1880 (Columbia University Press, 1947), p. 135. 8. Leslie Stephen, Letter to W. K. Clifford, June 20, 1877, Selected Letters of Leslie Stephen, ed. J. Bicknell (Macmillan, 1996), vol. 1, pp. 209–210. On Clifford’s agnosticism, and his public reputation, see Bernard V. Lightman, The Origins of Agnosticism: Victorian Unbelief and the Limits of Knowledge ( Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 14–15, 93–95, 135–136. 9. Lightman’s Origins of Agnosticism, is an important exception. See particularly pp. 161–164, 168–272. 10. See particularly, W. K. Clifford, “Right and Wrong: The Scientific Ground of Their Distinction,” Fortnightly Review 24 o.s., 18 n.s. (December 1875): 770–800; “On the Scientific Basis of Morals,” Contemporary Review 26 (September 1875): 650–660. See also “The Philosophy of the Pure Sciences,” Contemporary Review 24 (October 1874): 712–725; 25 (February 1875): 360–376. 11. J. F. Stephen, “Necessary Truths,” Contemporary Review 24 (December 1874), p. 73. 12. John Tyndall, “Miracles and Special Providences,” Fortnightly Review 7 o.s., 1 n.s. ( June 1867), p. 649. 13. George Henry Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, first series, The Foundations of a Creed, vol. 1, third edition (Trübner, 1874), p. 456. Lewes was among the most prominent of those scientific rationalists who did attempt to draw science into the sphere of ethics, Herbert Spencer being another. See particularly the Data of Ethics (1879) and its later volumes, published together as Principles of Ethics (Williams and Norgate, 1892–93).

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14. Both volumes were significantly revised in 1847 and again in 1858–1860, and supplemented by Whewell’s essay On Induction, with especial reference to Mr. J. Stuart Mill’s System of Logic (1849). For Mill’s further responses to Whewell, see especially the revised edition of 1851. 15. The following summary draws on E.W. Strong, “William Whewell and John Stuart Mill: Their Controversy about Scientific Knowledge,” Journal of the History of Ideas 16 (1955): 209–231. See also C. J. Ducasse, “Whewell’s Philosophy of Scientific Discovery,” Philosophical Review 60 (1951): 56, 213–234. 16. Strong, “William Whewell and John Stuart Mill,” p. 229. 17. On Mill’s efforts in his Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy to find an empiricist alternative to idealism, and the dissatisfaction of Clifford and his fellow scientific agnostics with those efforts, see Lightman, Origins of Agnosticism, pp. 173–174. 18. See Frank Miller Turner, Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England (Yale University Press, 1974), pp. 17–21. 19. J. S. Mill, Three Essays on Religion: Nature, Utility,Theism (Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1874). For a succinct summary of Morley’s and other liberal critics’ reactions, see Edwin Mallard Everett, The Party of Humanity: The Fortnightly Review and Its Contributors (Russell & Russell, 1939), pp. 294–296. 20. John Morley, “Mr. Mill’s ‘Three Essays on Religion,’ ” Fortnightly Review, 22 o.s., 16 n.s. (November 1874): 634–651; 23 o.s., 17 n.s. ( January 1875): 103–131. 21. See, e.g., Leslie Stephen, The English Utilitarians (1900; Blackwell, 1966); James C. Livingstone, The Ethics of Belief: An Essay on the Victorian Religious Conscience (American Academy of Religion, 1974), pp. 28–30. Again, Lightman is an exception. My argument here for the Whewellian strain in Clifford’s thinking should not be taken to imply that he adopted Whewell’s Kantianism uncritically. On the extent of Clifford’s departure from Kant’s conception of the limits of knowledge, see Origins of Agnosticism, pp. 162–166. 22. See F. Pollock’s introduction to W. K. Clifford’s Lectures and Essays, ed. L. Stephen and F. Pollock (London, 1879), p. 10. 23. Clifford, “Ethics of Belief,” pp. 289–290. 24. [R. H. Hutton], “Professor Clifford on the Sin of Credulity,” Spectator, January 6, 1877: 10–11; “The Ethics of Unbelief,” Saturday Review, January 13, 1877, p. 41 (both quoted on p. 157 of Srebrnik, Alexander Strahan). 25. In addition to notes 21 and 23, see W. G. Ward, “The Reasonable Basis of Certitude,” Nineteenth Century 2 (March 1878): 531–547; Wilfrid Ward, “The Wish to Believe,” Nineteenth Century 11 (February 1882): 195–216 and 14 (September 1883): 457–479. 26. Bernard Lightman has commented on the part Darwin’s concept of natural selection, and probabilistic thought more broadly, played in Clifford’s increased

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skepticism, from the 1860s, about the ability of science to supply “precise and necessary knowledge of a constantly evolving natural world” (Origins of Agnosticism, pp. 166–172). 27. Clifford, “Right and Wrong,” pp. 793, 799. 28. On Clifford’s resort elsewhere to the assertion that there is a pragmatic necessity of assuming the uniformity of nature, even though we cannot believe that nature is “absolutely and universally uniform,” see Lightman, Origins of Agnosticism, p. 166. See also Simon Schaffer, “Metrology, Metrification, and Victorian Values,” in Victorian Science in Context, ed. B. Lightman (University of Chicago Press, 1997); Joan L. Richards, Mathematical Visions:The Pursuit of Geometry in Victorian England (Academic Press, 1988), pp. 109–113. 29. Livingstone, Ethics of Belief, p. 21. 30. Ward is an exception. 31. See Srebrnik, Alexander Strahan, chapters 4–8. 32. Morley was a member of the Congregational Union. 33. Quoted in Srebrnik, Alexander Strahan, p. 154. 34. Reprinted in the report of the case in the Times of London, February 23, 1877. 35. British Library, Gladstone Papers and Correspondence, Add MSS 44453, fols. 73–76, February 7, 1877; fol. 114, February 16, 1877. 36. Tennyson Research Centre, Knowles to Tennyson, January 6, 1877, quoted in Metcalf, James Knowles, p. 278. 37. Quoted in Priscilla Metcalf, James Knowles: Victorian Editor and Architect (Clarendon, 1980), p. 278. 38. British Library, Gladstone Papers and Correspondence, Add MSS 44453, fols. 44–47 (Strahan to Gladstone, January 17, 1877); fols. 69–76 (Strahan to Gladstone, July 8, 1877, enclosing privately printed pamphlets by Francis Peek and by himself, both dated February 7, 1877); fol. 114 (Strahan to the Duke of Argyll, Gladstone, and the Dean of Westminster, February 16, 1877); fol. 204 (an eight-page pamphlet entitled “Last Words from Alexander Strahan about ‘The Contemporary Review’ and Mr. J. T. Knowles.” See also Add MSS 44454, fols. 364–369 (privately printed pamphlet by Strahan titled “Strahan and Co. versus King”). 39. Metcalf, James Knowles, p. 278. 40. Clifford, “The Ethics of Belief,” p. 297. 41. The Gladstone Diaries, ed. M. Foot and H. Matthew (Clarendon, 1968–1994), vol. 9, pp. 184–197. 42. W. E. Gladstone, “On the Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion,” Nineteenth Century 1 (March 1877): 2–22.

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43. J. F. Stephen, “Mr. Gladstone and Sir George Lewis on Authority,” Nineteenth Century 1 (April 1877): 270–297. 44. W. E. Gladstone, “Rejoinder on Authority in Matters of Opinion,” Nineteenth Century 1 ( July 1877), p. 903. 45. [W. B. Rands], “Editing,” Contemporary Review 19 (August 1877), p. 518. 46. Metcalf, James Knowles, pp. 282–283. 47. Huxley to Tyndall, December 2, 1880, Manuscript holdings of Imperial College, London, Huxley Papers. Scientific and General Correspondence, vol. 9: Supplementary Letters, fol. 30. 48. Quoted by Pollock, Introduction to Clifford, Lectures and Essays, pp. 19–20.

11 Victorian Periodicals and the Making of William Kingdon Clifford’s Posthumous Reputation Gowan Dawson

. . . to our friends and loved ones we shall give the most worthy honour and tribute if we never say nor remember that they are dead, but contrariwise that they have lived; that hereby the brotherly love and flow of their action and work may be carried over the gulfs of death and made immortal. —W. K. Clifford, “The Unseen Universe,” Fortnightly Review 17, n.s. (1875), pp. 779–780

By September 1878, William Kingdon Clifford, the 33-year-old Professor of Applied Mathematics at University College London, knew that he was almost certainly dying. Recuperative visits to Europe and North Africa had failed to stay the pulmonary disease that had been progressively destroying his lungs since the spring of 1876, and his trusted physician,Andrew Clarke, could offer no further hope of a medical remedy. Before embarking on one last journey to Madeira in the new year, Clifford, with the assistance of his devoted wife Lucy, began to put his affairs into some sort of order, specifying exactly who should edit his unfinished mathematical papers, and also stipulating that he wanted to be buried in England on high ground and not under a tree.1 One final thing Clifford conspicuously did not do, however, was to make his peace with the Christian deity whom he had forsaken while an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge. Rather, during his painful last days in England, as Leslie Stephen remembered, Clifford “enjoyed nothing so much as talk of a kind not calculated to edify believers,”2 and, despite having teasingly told Henrietta Huxley that to “escape the torture I would say I believed in the Father, the Son, the Winking Virgin, the Devil, the Holy Ghost, and the Flying Dutchman,”3 he boarded the steamship to Madeira in early January without having made any conscious effort to modify his popular reputation as a strident and refractory atheist. By the time of his death on the island on March 3, Clifford, as the Examiner reported, was “regarded by the timid orthodox with more fear and dislike than any other writer of the day,” and, according to the Times, had

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gained “the reputation in some quarters of being an extreme or violent writer.”4 Even in death he continued to goad the orthodox; his parting shot was the heretical epitaph that adorned his gravestone: I was not and was conceived I loved and did a little work I am not and grieve not

Until the very end of his short life, then, Clifford seems to have selfconsciously cultivated his notoriety as a stoically implacable unbeliever and an incendiary freethinker. Much to the chagrin of some members of the English mathematical community, he also refused clearly to separate this popular notoriety from his international reputation as a brilliant and innovative mathematician and pedagogue.5 Once the 33-year-old’s mortal remains were interred in the unconsecrated ground of Highgate Cemetery, however, the future fate of Clifford’s reputation was entirely in the hands of others. His standing as both a specialist mathematician and a popularizing science writer could now be re-shaped in accordance with the various agendas of both his friends and allies as well as the numerous enemies he had made during his brief life. Throughout the 1870s, for instance, Clifford proselytized on behalf of Darwin’s theory of evolution as well as a more general naturalistic worldview (although he did not accept that the uniformity of nature was a universal truth),6 and as a member of the Metaphysical Society and founder of the Congress of Liberal Thinkers he became closely associated in the public mind with the leading proponents of scientific naturalism. Clifford, though, was of a different generation and social background to men like Thomas Henry Huxley and John Tyndall, and, already assured of the tacit respectability bestowed by an Oxbridge degree, was considerably less discreet in his public pronouncements. Scientific naturalism, as many historians have observed, was part of a political campaign to wrest intellectual and cultural authority away from the monopolistic Anglican establishment. In the endeavor to establish a new socially acceptable secular theodicy which might displace the stagnant orthodoxy of Anglicanism, it was imperative for scientific naturalism to be urgently sequestered from any hostile associations that might tarnish it in the eyes of the Victorian public.7 It therefore suited the purposes of earnest scientific professionals like Huxley, busy “selling themselves to the public as . . . a respectable white-collar body,”8 that their late friend and colleague should be memorialized after his death in ways that largely excluded his connections with

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political radicalism, extremist atheism, and alleged immorality. This moral recasting of Clifford’s posthumous reputation was particularly necessary because the detractors of scientific naturalism were equally determined to draw critical attention to Clifford’s association with precisely these issues. This chapter will examine the vigorous battle over Clifford’s posthumous reputation that was fought out in the pages of the Victorian periodical press, and will seek to relate it to the wider cultural politics of scientific naturalism. At the same time, Clifford’s disconsolate widow and two young daughters had been left totally unprovided for, and, notwithstanding a subsequent Testimonial Fund and Civil List pension, it was necessary for Lucy Clifford, who now owned the copyright of her late husband’s works,9 to maximize the potential sales of his posthumous publications by not only keeping Clifford in the public eye, but also by ensuring that it was a generally positive (and thus marketable) portrayal of him that was presented. Mrs. W. K. Clifford, as she now styled herself, soon became a best-selling novelist as well as a prolific literary journalist, and as she gradually recovered from the great “tragedy of my . . . life,”10 was able to shape aspects of Clifford’s reputation in accordance with her own views, which, significantly, did not always concur with those of her dead husband. As this chapter will argue, Lucy Clifford was, over the next 50 years (she died in 1929), the most active participant in the making of her husband’s posthumous reputation, and her vital role in shaping the way that Clifford would be viewed by posterity deserves the same scholarly attention already given to other Victorian scientific wives such as Henrietta Huxley.11 As several obituaries observed,12 Clifford, by the time of his death, had published just a single monograph, The Elements of Dynamic, and that had been rushed through the presses in an incomplete form only during the last months of his life.13 Clifford’s standing as both a leading mathematical specialist and an iconoclastic scientific publicist had instead been forged largely in the pages of the Victorian periodical press—in arcane journals like the Educational Times (which printed his first work in 1863), professional organs such as the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, and general middle-class reviews such as the Nineteenth Century. Although in the decade after his death the book market was flooded with some seven monographs claiming to be authored, at least partly, by Clifford, the periodical press continued to play an integral role in the making of his posthumous reputation. Obituaries, previously unpublished works, advertisements for posthumously published books, reviews and notices, gossip and reader’s letters appeared in almost every sector of the late Victorian

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print media, and largely determined how this “greatest of English thinkers and . . . noblest of English men” or “contemptuous and obtrusive denier of God” was perceived by the different periodical readerships to whom he was known.14 As well as their particular ideological agendas, the distinctive editorial practices, preference for anonymity or signature, price levels, and various temporal schedules of different periodicals strongly influenced how Clifford could be portrayed in the press by both friends and enemies. The precise nature of the making of Clifford’s posthumous reputation, as this chapter will contend, was deeply implicated in the material and commercial aspects of periodical publication in the late nineteenth century. It Is Not Right to Be Proper

In March 1868, Clifford, then a 22-year-old mathematics fellow at Trinity, concluded his first address to the Royal Institution by pointing to the urgent need for “checking the growth of conventionalities” which might retard the nation’s evolutionary progress, and boldly insisting that “In the face of such a danger it is not right to be proper.”15 This impudent peroration announced the arrival of an audacious and sensational new talent on the London scientific scene;Thomas Archer Hirst, in his journal, called Clifford “the lion of this season.”16 Over the next decade, Clifford, already feted for his innovative work on non-Euclidean geometry,17 became increasingly notorious for his frequent transgressions of the boundaries of Victorian middle-class acceptability. His lectures and journalism declared, amongst other things, the need for strong trade unions to represent the working classes, defended the ethical standards of pagan antiquity, and alleged that belief without sufficient evidence was a terrible sin against mankind.18 In addition, Clifford’s move to London in 1871 to take up the Applied Mathematics chair at University College was, according to the American Unitarian Moncure Conway, considered “a great event” by metropolitan freethinkers, and Clifford soon became an active member of the circle of radicals, republicans, and bohemians (including political émigrés) who gathered at Conway’s South Place Chapel in Finsbury.19 The group had been brought together by their enthusiasm for the elderly Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini, and Clifford too shared this passion. The strident iconoclasm that Clifford honed amongst his heterodox friends was obviously not suitable for much of the Victorian print media. Leslie Stephen, editor of the Cornhill Magazine, canvassed the opinion of

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his old college friend in 1877 on “popular” science writers who might be suitable for the family-oriented magazine, but considered that Clifford himself would probably not “have time to spare for such things,” adding that in any case “when you do write ad populum [you] are apt to touch upon their religious prejudices.” With the Cornhill Magazine’s circulation plummeting, Stephen nevertheless attempted to coax a contribution from his high-profile friend: “If, indeed you ever felt disposed to enlighten the world upon some neutral topic, I should be glad if you came my way: but I can’t expect it.”20 Stephen’s editorial misgivings about Clifford’s suitability for the respectable pages of the Cornhill Magazine were fully justified, and, despite having courted the publisher Alexander Macmillan by submitting an early article to the rival Macmillan’s Magazine,21 Clifford’s controversial essays hardly ever appeared in shilling monthlies or associated periodical genres. At the same time, there were journals at the other end of the periodical spectrum which coveted even the smallest contribution from the nation’s best-known scientific firebrand, but which Clifford seems to have considered too seditious for even his purposes. In 1876, for instance, he replied cagily to a request for a contribution from Annie Besant, co-editor with Charles Bradlaugh of the infamous freethought weekly the National Reformer, claiming to have “far too much on my hands now . . . to write anything which seems to me suited for the Nat. Ref.”22 Besant clearly took Clifford’s evasive excuse as a personal rebuff, and in the following year prefaced an abstract of his latest heretical article in the high-brow Fortnightly Review by expressing the “regret . . . that its publication at 2s. 6d. puts it utterly out of the reach of the majority of the people. It is impossible not to regret that some of these leading scientific men speak heresy only to the richer part of the community.”23 For all Clifford’s public bravado about not being proper or respectable, his private correspondence with Besant shows that in practice he scrupulously eschewed any connection with cheap, underground radical journalism. (In contrast to the Fortnightly Review, the National Reformer cost just two pence and was not stocked by W. H. Smith.) This cautious avoidance of the gutter press reveals the carefully defined limits of Clifford’s essentially elitist iconoclasm. As the surgeon and radical journalist John Munro later complained, if a passage from Clifford’s essays had “occurred in the pages of the National Reformer and in connexion with a signature not that of W. K. Clifford, we can very well imagine the Bishop of Manchester denouncing it as ‘flippant Atheism.’ ”24 As will be seen, Clifford’s ambiguous relationship with the cheap radical press would

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later become an important issue in the making of his posthumous reputation. It was primarily in the new genre of middle-class monthly reviews that Clifford was able to forge his identity as a general periodical writer. Journals such as the Fortnightly Review and Contemporary Review had disavowed the previously “sacred principle of the Anonymous,” instead enforcing a strict policy of signature, and they owed allegiance, at least in principle, to neither of the main political parties. The “open platform” of these periodicals allowed regular contributors to establish distinct authorial personas with consistent individual opinions expressed throughout several different articles.25 Clifford, for instance, emerged as a kind of celebrity iconoclast who could always be relied upon flamboyantly to stick the boot into orthodoxy in all its forms. He also tried out different authorial personas in other sectors of the press, as a curmudgeonly writer of letters to the Times on subjects such as the nuisance of street musicians,26 and as an anonymous critic of Disraeli’s foreign policy toward Russia in an unidentified journal.27 Although it was in the Fortnightly Review and Contemporary Review that Clifford established his most consistent persona, he nevertheless on occasion transgressed the limits of personal freedom of opinion tolerated even by these journals. In 1876 the editor of the Fortnightly Review, John Morley, revealed to Huxley that he had been made “to suffer a storm of abuse and remonstrance for printing Clifford’s paper on the Unseen Universe, in which he delivered some over direct thrusts.”28 Similarly, as Small shows, Clifford’s acerbic essay on “The Ethics of Belief ” in the January 1877 Contemporary Review was an instrumental factor in the decision of the review’s new owners to terminate the contract of its editor James Knowles, and Clifford became an object of persistent vilification in the new more doctrinally conservative Contemporary Review that began to appear subsequently.29 Knowles seems to have attributed no blame to his erstwhile contributor, and at once invited him to join his own new venture, the Nineteenth Century, the periodical in which Clifford would be given his greatest degree of freedom. Clifford’s first full-length article for the Nineteenth Century was a rewritten version of a talk that he had given to the Sunday Lecture Society over four years earlier in May 1873. The original lecture, which had elicited “hearty and general applause” from the “crowded scientific and aristocratic élite,”30 had dealt with “The Relations between Science and Some Modern Poetry,” showing how the best recent poetry gave expression to “Cosmic emotion,” the feeling of veneration engendered by the “universe of known things” and the “universe of human action,” which could

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serve as a stimulus to the fight for political freedom.31 The modern poet who, for Clifford, best represented this new sense of wonderment at the harmonious order of both the wider universe and the microcosm of man was Algernon Charles Swinburne. Swinburne, though, was a hugely controversial figure during the 1870s, and was rarely commended in the press except by his small clique of aesthetic friends.32 His most recent collection of poems, Songs Before Sunrise, had championed atheism, republicanism, and the revolutionary politics of Mazzini, but he was even more notorious as the “libidinous laureate of a pack of satyrs . . . grovelling down among . . . nameless shameless abominations” who in 1866 had produced Poems and Ballads, whose poetic treatment of pagan debauchery and vice made it one of the most scandalous books of the entire nineteenth century.33 Clifford’s lecture, when it appeared in the October 1877 issue of the Nineteenth Century, contained extensive quotations from both Songs before Sunrise and Poems and Ballads (as well as smaller passages from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass), and declared that to the organic forces which constantly engender new life “it seems to me that we may fitly address a splendid hymn of Mr. Swinburne’s . . . into whose work it is impossible to read more or more fruitful meaning than he meant in the writing of it.”34 Clifford had previously included an unattributed passage from Swinburne’s melancholy poem “The Garden of Proserpine” in an essay for the Fortnightly Review,35 but it was only in the Nineteenth Century that he was able to publish his four year old paper that actually named the still highly notorious poet.This public advocacy of Swinburne’s verse, at a time when he was often not referred to by name in more decorous journals like the Cornhill Magazine (“a modern singer”) and Contemporary Review (“a living English poet”),36 seems to have provoked little attention at the time, but it would soon become a central issue in the portrayal of Clifford immediately after his death. Anything Serves the Other Side for the Thin End of a Wedge

Before his death, Clifford’s enemies in the conservative press had portrayed him as a vulgar and profane neophyte, whose fatuously controversial statements, as the Quarterly Review proclaimed, would “sully our pages and shock our readers,”37 and this charily dismissive tone characterized many of the remarkably unsympathetic obituaries that appeared in 1879. These anti-panegyrics blubbered crocodile tears, but nevertheless cast subtle aspersions on Clifford’s moral judgment and drew attention to his recent endorsement of Swinburne. Richard Holt Hutton, writing as the editor

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of the Spectator, suggested that the late Professor “showed signs of a curious nakedness of the finer moral sensibilities,” and added that the “indulgence in cosmic emotion seems to us very like pitching ourselves down the backstairs of a universe which has backstairs—the backstairs of gradual dissolution and decay,—which backstairs, however, we need not descend quite so rapidly, if we refused to indulge in such cosmic emotions as Mr. Swinburne’s.”38 Writing anonymously in the Edinburgh Review, William Hurrell Mallock cunningly identified the damaging influence of Swinburne at the very center of Clifford’s scientific thought, sneering that “Like most young men . . . [Clifford] read and quoted the poetry of Mr. Swinburne,” which he “thought . . . some of the wisest and most precious poems ever written. All this was bound up closely with his scientific theories; and . . . he regarded . . . Mr. Swinburne as the prophet of evolution.”39 Meanwhile, Fraser’s Magazine weighed in with the wholly inaccurate assertion that “Clifford quotes no poet except Mr. Swinburne and Walt Whitman,” which it took as another of the “curious indications of fanaticism” in his thought.40 The fact that Clifford’s language contained allusions to the work of poets like William Barnes,41 and his essays quoted verse such as Augustus De Morgan’s re-working of Jonathan Swift’s “Poetry, a Rhapsody,”42 was deliberately disregarded in hostile obituaries that were determined to identify him solely with the hugely controversial work of Swinburne. This tarnishing of a prominent scientific naturalist by association with Swinburne was nothing new, especially in conservative quarterlies like the Edinburgh, which in 1873 had claimed that in many London circles “fluent conversational evolutionists are to be found whose literary culture hardly goes deeper than a slight knowledge of Mr. Swinburne’s poetry, and whose scientific and philosophical training is restricted to a desultory acquaintance with some of Mr. Darwin’s more popular works.”43 In the same year, moreover, the Darwinian apostate St. George Mivart had likewise suggested in the Contemporary Review that the “prevailing tone of sentiment” amongst contemporary evolutionists had “long been increasingly Pagan, until its most hideous features reveal themselves in a living English poet [i.e. Swinburne], by open revilings of Christianity, amidst loathsome and revoltingly filthy verses which seem to invoke a combined worship of the old deities of lust and cruelty.”44 Scientific naturalists like Tyndall in fact tended to ally themselves with older, more respectable poets such as Tennyson; literary allusions, after all, could be used to denote the decency and respectability—or otherwise—of particular scientific theories and practices in relation to the wider culture. But, uniquely, in this case

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Clifford had made the controversial association with Swinburne himself, and it was only now that he was dead that his friends and allies could begin to extricate his reputation, and that of their own wider scientific agendas, from the taint of wantonness, blasphemy, and immorality that Swinburne’s name unmistakably signified at this time. This retrospective chastening of Clifford’s heretical reputation became a crucial endeavor in the cultural politics of scientific naturalism. The effort to present a more innocuous portrayal of Clifford began in the friendly pages of the Fortnightly Review, where Frederick Pollock acknowledged his late friend’s “preference for modern poetry,” but pointedly avoided identifying the particular poets to whom he had been drawn. He also conceded that it was “possible to take offence at certain passages in his writings,” although insisting that it was “impossible not to like the man.” Pollock, however, then addressed Clifford’s moralizing critics directly, declaring that “Being always frank, he was at times indiscreet; but consummate discretion has never yet been recognized as a necessary or even a very appropriate element of moral heroism.” This, he advised the potential readers of Clifford’s work, “must be borne in mind in estimating such passages of his writings as, judged by the ordinary rules of literary etiquette, may seem harsh and violent.”45 Those readers who had not previously encountered Clifford’s work in periodicals, though, were not to be given the chance of forming an estimate of such passages. Pollock’s generous elegy for his dead friend was reprinted later in 1879 as the introduction to the collection of Clifford’s non-mathematical writings, Lectures and Essays, which he co-edited with Leslie Stephen. Appended to the end of this introduction was an inconspicuous admission (removed in all subsequent editions of the book) that “certain passages have been omitted which we believe that Clifford himself would have willingly canceled, if he had known the impression they would make on many sincere and liberal-minded persons whose feelings he had no thought of offending.”46 These circumspect editorial interventions included excising almost four pages from the periodical version of “The Unseen Universe,” dealing, amongst other things, with the intimate connection between orthodox Christianity and the “vile and detestable . . . fraud” of spiritualism.47 Significantly, Pollock’s private correspondence with Macmillan & Co. seems to reveal that it was not just he and Stephen who were involved in the initial consultations over the form that Lectures and Essays should take.48 Rather, the brooding shadow of Huxley looms over the book’s partially bowdlerized pages, and, as Lucy Clifford later disclosed, “my husband told me when in doubt to go to one of those [i.e., Pollock,

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Stephen, and Huxley] for advice.”49 Although it was confidently insisted that Clifford would have “willingly” assented to them, the significant editorial modifications made to Lectures and Essays can instead be seen as a clear attempt to re-shape his posthumous reputation in accordance with the different scientific and political agendas of his powerful friends and allies, and in particular scientific naturalists like Huxley. This attempt to disengage Clifford’s reputation from the Swinburnian connotations of prurience and recklessness with which it had been tarnished in the general periodical press, is also evident in the circumstances of the much delayed publication of his more specialist mathematical writings. A reputation for disinterested probity is obviously a prerequisite for establishing the credibility of any scientific practitioner (and scientific naturalists in particular),50 but, perhaps surprisingly, in this case it was Clifford’s widow Lucy rather than his more obviously scientific friends who seems to have been most sedulous in ensuring that Clifford’s standing as a specialist mathematician was not damaged by the underhand tactics of his enemies. In early 1885 Karl Pearson, Clifford’s successor at University College, completed the laborious revision of one of his predecessor’s unfinished manuscripts, now titled The Common Sense of the Exact Sciences. Before it was published as part of Kegan Paul’s “International Scientific Series,” Pearson asked Mrs. Clifford to look over the brief preface he had written for the book. She commended him on his “excellent taste,” and suggested that it “could not be improved upon” except in one incidental but highly significant detail. The “only point I have rather an idea might be altered,” she wrote, is “ ‘Clifford was wildly excited over his theory’ &c. It is quite correct. Only all things considered it might be as well to say ‘entirely taken up’ or something like that. This is merely because I never like—considering many things he wrote—that the other side shd. think any of his statements may [be] put down to mere excitement.” She closed the letter by warning that “Anything serves the other side for the thin end of a wedge you know.”51 Pearson seems to have sympathized with these anxieties, and the amended line appeared as “Clifford was much occupied with his theory of ‘Graphs,’ and found it impossible to concentrate his mind on anything else.”52 The use of otherwise innocuous terms like “wildly excited” to describe Clifford’s attitude toward his mathematical deliberations might in this context further intensify his association with the sort of unrestrained fervency for which Swinburne’s verse had for many years been notorious.53 The insinuations of incontinent impetuosity made against him in the general periodical press were clearly perceived by Clifford’s defenders to be no less

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detrimental to his status as a scientific specialist than to his standing as a “popular” science writer. Only three years earlier, one reviewer of his specialist Mathematical Papers had remarked that the “exuberant philosophy of his popular works . . . must have harmed his reputation for solidity of thought.”54 At the same time, Lucy Clifford’s increasingly affectionate correspondence with Pearson over the next few years (he was an eligible bachelor until 1890) reveals how seriously she took the attempt to defend her late husband’s posthumous reputation against the disreputable aspersions cast by those on “the other side.” Lucy, however, could not protect the book against all censure when it came to be reviewed in the press, especially when prominent reviewers included long-standing adversaries of her husband.The June 11, 1885 issue of the scientific weekly Nature contained a closely argued notice of The Common Sense of the Exact Sciences which filled her with contemptuous animosity toward both the reviewer and the editor who had allowed it to appear. The signed review was by Peter Guthrie Tait, Professor of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh University and the fiery bulldog of the “North British” group of Presbyterian physicists and engineers who consistently challenged the intellectual credibility of the largely metropolitan advocates of scientific naturalism.55 In it, he alleged that Clifford, in his mathematical practice, had often “dispense[d] with important steps which had been taken by his less agile concurrents” and then “consequently gave them (of course in perfect good faith) without indicating that they were not his own.” As such, Clifford’s “statements were by no means satisfactory (from the historical point of view) to those who recognised, as their own, some of the best ‘nuggets’ that shine here and there in his pages.”56 Upon reading this implicit accusation of intellectual plagiarism, Lucy littered the margins of her copy of Nature with angrily indignant exclamation marks and strident refutations of particular points; at the top of the first page of Tait’s review she scrawled “This is what I expected from P.G.T.!”57 The review, she subsequently told Pearson, was “disgraceful” and “simply shameful,” and its captious tone, especially the assertion that “purely physical subjects were, properly speaking, beyond his sphere,”58 merely exposed it as “a bitter remembrance, of course, of my husband’s attack on Tait and Balfour Stewart’s ‘Unseen Universe.’ ”59 In further letters, she called on Pearson (as well as Sylvester, who declined) to pen a resolute response in which he “might resist the accusation of absolute dishonesty brought against my husband and remark that Prof. Tait is probably still sore about the ‘Unseen Universe.’ That will worry him.” Lucy, though, was equally concerned that Nature’s editor Norman Lockyer, who had earlier sided

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with Tait in a similar dispute with Herbert Spencer,60 had “allowed Prof. Tait to review the book remembering his known attitude towards my husband. It was an unfair thing to do.”61 Pearson’s spirited rejoinder duly appeared in Nature’s next number, but Lucy, furious that Tait had, in his own words, “grown cockier and cockier” under the patronage of Lockyer,62 and evidently determined to carry on fighting her husband’s scientific battles long after his death, seems at this time to have decided to take a more hands-on approach to the making of Clifford’s posthumous reputation in the periodical press. Mrs. W. K. Clifford, as Marysa Demoor has recently shown, was extremely adept at fashioning her own identity as a novelist and literary journalist; she had, for instance, altered her date of birth to appear younger, and substituted exotic Barbados for mundane London as the place of her birth (even in Leslie Stephen’s DNB entry for her husband).63 Lucy, though, was equally willing to use some extremely sharp journalistic practices to similarly re-fashion the posthumous identity of the late husband who she so profoundly missed. Charles Kegan Paul had resisted her request to demand that Sylvester should write a favorable review of The Common Sense of the Exact Sciences, admonishing her that his publishing company had “always made it a rule to interfere in no way whatever with reviews of any books we publish,”64 but Lucy was nevertheless soon in a position to facilitate such literary “puffing.” Already the author of a sensational novel and several short stories, in the mid 1880s she became one of the most prolific contributors to the “Literary Gossip” column in the Athenaeum, a prominent weekly review now edited by her close friend Norman MacColl.65 The journal’s strict policy of anonymity allowed her surreptitiously to promote her own work in the column, and, in the wake of her recent bitter experience with Nature, also to publicize the posthumous publication of her husband’s writings. For instance, the issue dated June 12, 1886 contained an anonymous announcement of the imminent publication of “a new and cheaper edition, in one volume, of the late Prof. W. K. Clifford’s lectures and essays,”66 which, as the editor’s “marked file” of the Athenaeum reveals, was in fact written by the book’s chief financial beneficiary.67 Lucy also contributed occasional tidbits of information to the “Science Gossip” column too, which allowed her to promote the work of her husband’s allies, disclosing, for example, that “Prof. Karl Pearson will contribute a volume to the ‘International Series’ which will be to physics what Prof. Clifford’s ‘Common Sense of the Exact Sciences’ (which Prof. Pearson edited) is to mathematics.”68 With the Athenaeum’s strict adherence to anonymous publication and the apparent complicity of

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an amenable editor, Pearson could repay the favor, and in July 1887 he contributed a highly laudatory review (although differing slightly from Clifford over the definition of mass) of the recently published second part of The Elements of Dynamic, which, he averred, presented “Clifford pure and simple” and could not fail to reawaken the “oft-told regret that Clifford did not live to reshape the teaching of elementary dynamics in this country.” It was, of course, somewhat unethical for Pearson furtively to review the work of his erstwhile friend, but he nevertheless used the opportunity to deliver a sly rebuke to Tait, remarking that Clifford “had entirely shaken off the prejudices which some imbibe from the perusal in student days of a well-known disquisition on the laws of motion; or it may be that that disquisition had remained for him a mystery—it described for him an ‘unseen universe.’ ”69 Fulfilling the request that Lucy had made some two years earlier, Pearson pointedly alluded to Clifford’s bitter war of words with Tait, and Balfour Stewart, over their doctrinally orthodox interpretation of the second law of thermodynamics; the title of their wellknown book being used as a convenient synonym for abstruse and overly abstract scientific speculation. Having been so perturbed by the negative portrayal of her husband in the signed pages of Nature, Lucy Clifford seems to have used her position and contacts at the anonymous Athenaeum to ensure favorable coverage of him, enrolling friends to write reviews of his work which she could guarantee would be complimentary. At precisely this time, however, Lucy and her friends among the scientific naturalists faced the greatest challenge to their efforts to re-shape Clifford’s posthumous reputation, with the re-emergence of potentially awkward details of his early engagement with radical freethought. He Had Some Rather Wild Ideas

After the skirmish with Tait and Nature, Lucy’s friendship with Pearson grew still closer (he was “oddly akin” to her husband she told him),70 and they began discussing aspects of Clifford’s early life and opinions. In the summer of 1885, in the wake of William Thomas Stead’s sensational journalistic exposé of child prostitution in the “Modern Babylon” of London, Pearson had brought together a small group of radicals, feminists, and socialists, both male and female, who were all eager to discuss the increasingly piquant subject of sex.71 The Men and Women’s Club also invited external contributions to its self-consciously “advanced” discussions, and around this time Pearson seems to have quizzed Lucy concerning her

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famously unorthodox husband’s opinions on such matters. Clifford, she confessed in a long confidential letter, had “had some rather wild ideas . . . concerning those questions,” but she cautiously insisted that this had been “before we knew each other” and that he had afterwards “modified them.” The “very strong views” on the proper relations between men and women which Clifford held before his marriage to Lucy in 1875 “would not do for the majority,” but he had nevertheless articulated them in an early essay now in the possession of the bohemian poet Mathilde Blind. This unpublished paper, provocatively entitled “Mistress or Wife,”72 apparently argued that “making divorce easier wd. make marriage more popular which was to be desired as the only real check on prostitution, & that it would put the relations of men and women on a realistic basis.” If “the absolute constancy and confidence” necessary to a happy marriage began to fail “& if the desire for divorce arose,” Clifford had postulated, “it shd. be discussed and reasoned in together, & if mutually desired shd. be obtainable,” for in “easy divorce,” which would end the social obligation to protract sexually dysfunctional marriages, “lay the only real solution of the prostitution question.” In addition, the essay also disclosed, Lucy revealed, that “In purity for men he simply did not believe. Half of his hatred for priests arose from the fact that he thought they had unnatural or secretly immoral lives.” Throughout the late 1860s and the early 1870s the miscellaneous freethinkers of the newly founded London Dialectical Society, which extolled the “principle of absolute liberty of thought & speech” and the “unbiased consideration of all . . . important questions,” had frequently debated the vexed subjects of marriage, prostitution, and birth control.73 In April 1871, moreover, Clifford’s friend Moncure Conway read a paper to the society which likewise proposed making divorce easier as a method of checking vice (as well as overpopulation in Conway’s view).74 It seems possible therefore that Clifford may have written “Mistress or Wife” at this time to present to the London Dialectical Society or at a similar meeting of heterodox metropolitan radicals. Now, nearly 20 years later, its incendiary combination of radical freethought (the frank discussion of mutually pleasurable sexual relationships in particular) and ribald heresy was precisely the kind of provocative “advanced” material that Pearson wanted to present at the meetings of his own new discussion club. Before giving the strict instructions that “I don’t want you to repeat all this as applied to us personally but you can use the substance of it if it is useful,” Lucy explained to Pearson that her late husband had attempted

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to conduct his own private life according to the same rational standards adumbrated in his unpublished paper. She told him that “if during our married life he had been tempted with any sort of unfaithfulness he wd. at once have told me, as he wd. have told me of any other stray or lustful thoughts that overtook him,” while she herself had been made to promise “that if I ever found myself loving him less, or thinking of anyone else I would go & tell him naturally as a matter of course.”75 Despite certain misgivings, Lucy initially consented to Pearson’s plan of “getting the paper (if you can) from Miss Blind & reading it,”76 but she demurred at the prospect of him reading it aloud to the members of the Men and Women’s Club. The problem, of course, was that if such candid details of Clifford’s youthful “wild” views leaked into the public realm they would inevitably be exploited by his enemies to tarnish further his posthumous reputation in the periodical press. In fact, the negative portrayal of Clifford in the conservative press had already contained enough hints to suggest that his adversaries were aware of the potential existence of a paper like “Mistress or Wife” with its frank discussion of taboo subjects such as prostitution. In Mallock’s satirical roman à clef “The New Republic; or Culture, Faith, and Philosophy in an English Country House,” which appeared anonymously in Belgravia during the summer of 1876, the “red-headed” atheist Mr. Saunders, a cruel parody of Clifford’s outspoken radicalism (with slight touches of Swinburne too), blithely observed: We think it, for instance, . . . a very sad thing when a girl is as we call it ruined. But it is we really that make all the sadness. She is ruined only because we think she is so. And I have little doubt that that higher philosophy of the future that Mr. Storks [i.e. Huxley] speaks of will go far, some day, towards solving the great question of women’s sphere of action, by its recognition of prostitution as an honourable and beneficent profession.77

Meanwhile, the Quarterly Review, in a notice of Mallock’s novel, slyly alluded to Clifford’s “peculiar tastes” for “opinions, which if carried into practice, would turn the world into a menagerie let loose.”78 It could only be counterproductive, then, to corroborate unnecessarily some of the malicious rumors and gossip disseminated over many years by Clifford’s sworn foes (and many of the details of Mallock’s hostile obituary had come from an undisclosed “source . . . [who] seemed to us to be trustworthy”);79 a tight-lipped silence was the only realistic option. While editing Lectures and Essays in 1879, Pollock had looked over “one or two early writings

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which Clifford must have deliberately not chosen to print,” but he did “not find anything that would do to publish.”80 Now seven years later, it would still be extremely dangerous to allow details of Clifford’s early engagement with radical freethought, especially with regard to sex, to appear semi-publicly, even if only in the debates of an elitist intellectual discussion club. After consulting Leslie Stephen in Switzerland, who was aghast that her “freethinking friends” might inadvertently provide a “pretext for accusing her of supporting immoral opinions,”81 Lucy came to “the conclusion that I don’t want it read at any meeting,” telling Pearson that if her husband “had wished to publish this paper or its substance—he would have done so.” She nevertheless offered him a second chance, suggesting that Pearson himself should confer with Pollock and Stephen, and affirming that “If either of these approve it shall be published, or if Prof. Huxley does” and then “you shall read it at yr. club if you like.” Perhaps conscious of the dubious ethics of her own sharp practice at the Athenaeum, Lucy insisted on a further condition: . . . if it is published it must be in the most public place, in the XIXth with his name . . . seeing the bold subject it is on I shd. like it done in the light of day, not virtually in secret as if he was afraid to face those whom he knew wd. demur. There is something cowardly to my mind in that. It wd., and properly, be a slur on him, wd. give the enemy a title & wd. weaken all his previous work.

It was, she apologetically told Pearson, “the subject” of the paper “that makes it so necessary to be extra careful,” and if it were decided that it should not be published then “we are all bound in honour for ever to hold our peace concerning it.”82 Given their circumspect editorial modifications of Lectures and Essays, it seems highly unlikely that the peremptory triumvirate of Pollock, Stephen, and Huxley would have been willing to countenance Pearson’s scheme to expose the “wild” contents of Clifford’s early essay to public view, even if only to the readers of an overtly liberal journal like the Nineteenth Century. In addition, the involvement of Mathilde Blind, a prominent member of the South Place Chapel circle of radicals in the early 1870s as well as a reputed lover of Swinburne’s83 (she also claimed to have shared with Clifford “an intimacy which I see more & more is very rare between men & women”),84 would have made avowedly respectable scientific naturalists like Huxley and Stephen even less inclined to sanction the publication of Clifford’s problematic early paper.

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“Mistress or Wife” was, of course, never published in the Nineteenth Century or any other periodical (and the manuscript seems no longer to exist), but subtle traces of Clifford’s controversial opinions on marriage and prostitution nevertheless appeared in the pages of the radical press at this time. Just a month after Lucy had prohibited the reading of her late husband’s essay at the Men and Women’s Club, Pearson published his own discussion paper, “Socialism and Sex,” in the Fabian Society journal To-Day, edited by Hubert Bland and Edith Nesbit and costing only three pence. Toward the end of his eugenicist argument, Pearson contended that “when the relations of men and women are perfectly free and they can meet on an equal footing, then so far from this free sexual-relationship leading to sensuality and loose living, we hold it would be the best safeguard against it.” Every “man and woman,” he continued, “would probably ultimately choose a lover from their friends, but the man and woman who being absolutely free would choose more than one would probably be the exceptions;—exceptions, we believe, infinitely more rare than under our present legalised monogamy accompanied as it is by socially unrecognised polygamy and polyandry—the mistress and the prostitute.” The close resemblance of this passage to Lucy’s summary of the argument of Clifford’s early essay in her recent letter to Pearson was not merely accidental. Rather, as Pearson acknowledged in an appended footnote, “Some of the above remarks we owe to the letter of a woman-friend; they express our own views in truer words than we have been able to find for ourselves.”85 Moreover, when Pearson’s paper was reprinted (without the footnote) the following year as the concluding essay of The Ethic of Freethought, Lucy told him: “It is a fine book . . . I am so proud to think you owe . . . some of it to my husband.”86 Clifford’s own ambiguous relationship with underground radical journalism notwithstanding, and despite the apparent determination of Pollock, Stephen, and Huxley effectively to suppress his early radical writings, Clifford’s heterodox opinions on highly taboo subjects were nevertheless smuggled, under the cover of a threefold anonymity, into the cheap radical socialist press, where they appeared in a number of a journal which also contained an installment of a new translation of Marx’s Capital.87 Conclusion: Converted from Cliffordism

The dilemma over Clifford’s early radical writings, and whether she should follow the promptings of freethinking friends like Pearson and Blind or the more circumspect advice of Pollock, Stephen, and Huxley, led Lucy

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to ponder her role as the guardian of her late husband’s scientific oeuvre and the principal defender of his posthumous reputation. The “remit I am acting upon,” she had told Pearson regarding the early unpublished paper, “is simply my duty as past guardian of what he left,” and she insisted that “If he had left as the result of serious conclusion papers to the effect that Mormonism was the revealed religion or that murder & lying shd. be cultivated as fine arts I shd. have felt it a matter of conscience to publish them. My business is not to criticise his opinions but only to be quite certain that they were his.”88 Lucy’s role in maintaining her dead husband’s public profile, however, had never involved simply the disinterested promulgation of his known opinions, no matter how repugnant they might be. Rather, as has been argued throughout this chapter, she subtly refashioned aspects of Clifford’s actual personality that might now play into the hands of his numerous adversaries (she had conceded, after all, that Pearson’s description of his “wild excitement” over the theory of “Graphs” was “quite correct”), and allowed her friends among the scientific naturalists to memorialize her husband strategically in ways that largely excluded his awkward connections with political radicalism, Swinburnian poetics, and alleged immorality. In fact, despite the passive self-image of a meek and dutiful widow that she assiduously fashioned for herself in interviews,89 photographs (in which she is invariably portrayed in black velvet widow’s weeds; see figure 1), and eccentric personal conduct,90 Lucy, after her husband’s early death, began to differ considerably from Clifford on some of his most characteristic and defining beliefs, and on eschatology in particular. Though Clifford had implacably asserted that the world was “made up of material molecules and of ether” and “no room is here to be found for either ghosts of the dead, or ‘superior intelligences,’ or bogies of any kind whatever,”91 his wife, just two years after his death, anonymously published “Lost” in Macmillan’s Magazine, a touching short story which details the anguish experienced by a spectral dead woman as she watches her living husband gradually overcome his grief and begin a new relationship. The ghostly narrator nevertheless affirms that “as the clay-fetters fall, dear, and the earthly chains one by one give way, our souls shall draw nearer and nearer, until slowly the mist shall clear and we shall see each other once more face to face, and out of the darkness of human pain shall come everlasting light.”92 After reading the story, Lucy’s friend William James told his wife that “Obviously she cares much about immortality, but thinks it her duty to care nothing for it. Don’t tell anyone she wrote it; she seems in a deadly fear lest Leslie Stephen should find it.”93 When James later

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Figure 1 Lucy Clifford portrayed in black velvet widow’s weeds. Windsor Magazine 9 (1899): 483. By courtesy of the University of Leicester Library.

recounted a visit to Lucy’s Bayswater home where her daughters had recited their nightly “prayer” to their father, his friend Francis Child commented that “Mrs. Clifford will be converted from Cliffordism if she goes on that way.”94 Even as late as 1925 (just four years before her own death), Lucy confessed guiltily to Pearson that although “none of us are orthodox . . . I can never bring myself to believe, or rather to feel, that genius is absolutely extinct (tho’ he did) . . . I dread the least ghost of a chance being lost.”95 By the mid 1880s, Lucy had also begun to form a distinct circle of her own friends, some of whom, like the “ethical mystic” Victoria, Lady Welby,96 would have been distinctly unsympathetic to the implacably atheistic views of her late husband. Even Clifford’s most loyal

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defender—and by far the most active participant in the making of his posthumous reputation—could not, it would seem, necessarily always be relied upon actually to agree with some of his most deeply held and controversial opinions. It therefore behooves historians of science to resist merely reproducing the blithe confidence of their positivist historical actors in the Comtean doctrine of “Subjective Immortality” (as witnessed by the epigram at the beginning of this chapter), and instead to treat the reliability of posthumous portrayals of Clifford in primary literature with extreme caution. It should not, for example, be assumed that Lectures and Essays, the standard textbook of Clifford’s thought, offers a neutral statement of all his views on non-mathematical subjects, for, as has been seen, the book’s production involved significant editorial modifications as well as the deliberate suppression of awkward early writings. This aspect of Clifford’s brief career and much lengthier afterlife, furthermore, proffers a highly apposite illustration of the wider cultural politics involved in the presentation of scientific naturalism to its several different audiences. Above all, then, historians must pay close attention to the different political, intellectual, and literary contexts in which Clifford’s posthumous reputation, as well as that of his wider scientific agenda, was forged by both friends and enemies, and, in particular, to the crucial role played by the Victorian periodical press. Notes 1. See L. Clifford to A. Macmillan, April 19, 1879, Macmillan Archive Add. 54932, British Library; L. Clifford to K. Pearson, December 27, 1924, Pearson Papers 661, University College London Library. 2. J. Bicknell, ed., Selected Letters of Leslie Stephen (Macmillan, 1996), vol. 1, p. 236. Upon learning of a newspaper report at this time which claimed that he was converting back to the High Church faith of his youth, Clifford boldly retorted that his “M.D. had certified he was ill, but ‘twas not mental derangement” (Walter White, The Journals of Walter White, Chapman and Hall, 1898, p. 168). 3. W. K. Clifford to H. Huxley, June 25, 1878, Huxley Papers 12. 244, Imperial College of Science, Technology, and Medicine Archives, London. 4. Examiner, August 30, 1879, p. 1123; Times, October 22, 1879. 5. For instance, James Joseph Sylvester called Clifford “a very great genius” but “wish[ed] he would stick to mathematics instead of talking atheism.” See Jewish Chronicle, December 24, 1897, p. 14. 6. See Bernard Lightman, The Origins of Agnosticism: Victorian Unbelief and the Limits of Knowledge ( Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 171–172.

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7. See James R. Moore, “Theodicy and Society: The Crisis of the Intelligentsia,” in Victorian Faith in Crisis: Essays on Continuity and Change in Nineteenth-Century Religious Belief, ed. R. Helmstadter and B. Lightman (Macmillan, 1990); “Deconstructing Darwinism: The Politics of Evolution in the 1860s,” Journal of the History of Biology 24 (1991): 353–408. 8. Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin (Michael Joseph, 1991), p. 432. 9. See F. Pollock to A. Macmillan, April 4, 1879, Macmillan Archive Add. 55083, British Library. 10. Lucy Clifford, “A Remembrance of George Eliot,” Nineteenth Century 74 (1913), p. 116. 11. See Paul White, “Science at Home: The Space between Henrietta Heathorn and Thomas Huxley,” History of Science 34 (1996): 33–56. See also Helena M. Pycior, Nancy G. Slack, and Pnina G. Abir-Am, eds., Creative Couples in the Sciences (Rutgers University Press, 1996), pp. 3–35. Monty Chisholm (Such Silver Currents: The Story of William and Lucy Clifford, 1895–1929, Lutterworth, 2002) details Lucy Clifford’s career with affection and enthusiasm, but her uncritical account lacks scholarly rigor and does not consider Lucy’s role in shaping her husband’s reputation. 12. See Academy, March 15, 1879, p. 242; Saturday Review, March 15, 1879, p. 325. 13. See L. Clifford to A. Macmillan, November 29, 1878, Macmillan Archive Add. 54932. 14. National Reformer, March 16, 1879, p. 165; [W. H. Mallock], “The Late Professor Clifford’s Essays,” Edinburgh Review 151 (1880), p. 479. 15. W. Kingdon Clifford, “On Some Conditions of Mental Development,” Notices of the Proceedings at the Meetings of the Members of the Royal Institution of Great Britain 5 (1866–69), p. 328. 16. William H. Brock and Roy M. MacLeod, eds., Natural Knowledge in Social Context: The Journals of Thomas Archer Hirst (Mansell, 1980), p. 1828. 17. See Joan L. Richards, Mathematical Visions: The Pursuit of Geometry in Victorian England (Academic Press, 1988), pp. 61–111. 18. See Clifford, “On the Education of the People,” Notices of the Proceedings at the Meetings of the Members of the Royal Institution of Great Britain 7 (1873–1875), p. 315; “Right and Wrong: The Scientific Ground of Their Distinction,” Fortnightly Review 18 n.s. (1875), pp. 775–776; “The Ethics of Belief,” Contemporary Review 29 (1877), p. 295. 19. Moncure Conway, Autobiography (Cassell, 1904), vol. 2, p. 351. On the South Place Chapel circle of radicals, see Susan Budd, Varieties of Unbelief: Atheists and Agnostics in English Society, 1850–1960 (Heinemann, 1977), pp. 220–224; Edward Royle, Radicals, Secularists and Republicans: Popular Freethought in Britain, 1866–1915 (Manchester University Press, 1980), p. 42.

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20. Bicknell, ed., Letters of Leslie Stephen, vol. 1, p. 210. 21. See W. K. Clifford to A. Macmillan, August 13, 1872, Macmillan Archive Add. 54932. 22. W. K. Clifford to A. Besant, October 24, 1876, MS Misc. 3C, University College London Library. 23. National Reformer, August 5, 1877, p. 538. 24. National Reformer, December 14, 1879, p. 804. 25. John Morley, “Valedictory,” Fortnightly Review 32 n.s. (1882), p. 513; “Memorials of a Man of Letters,” Fortnightly Review 23 n.s. (1878), p. 601. 26. Times, March 7, 1878. 27. See Examiner, March 8, 1879, p. 301: “It will interest some readers to know that he held the strongest Anti-Russian views, and often regretted the inactivity of England and Europe during the late war. Shortly before he left England he wrote two letters to a journal known for its strong opposition to Russia, which were published, though not with his signature.” 28. J. Morley to T. H. Huxley, January 9, 1876, Huxley Papers 23. 24. 29. See Patricia Thomas Srebrnik, Alexander Strahan, Victorian Publisher (University of Michigan Press, 1986), pp. 149–177. 30. Academy, April 17, 1875, p. 398. 31. Syllabus for “The Relations Between Science and Some Modern Poetry,” May 4, 1873, Proceedings of the Sunday Lecture Society 1869–90, British Library. 32. Clifford may have met the infamous poet through their mutual friend Moncure Conway, who “used to see a good deal of Swinburne in the time of his controversy with Philistines,” but there is no mention of such a meeting in the correspondence of either man. Conway, Autobiography, vol. 2, pp. 377–378. 33. Saturday Review, August 4, 1866, p. 145. Rikky Rooksby observes: “The cultural impact of Poems and Ballads was immense. Not only did it strike Victorian poetry with the force of a tidal wave; it sent ripples of sexual and religious rebellion far and wide,” making Swinburne “an international figurehead for sexual, religious and political radicalism” whose name “became charged with a satanic aura for the timid and conservative.” (A. C. Swinburne: A Poet’s Life, Scolar, 1997, p. 135) 34. W. K. Clifford, “Cosmic Emotion,” Nineteenth Century 2 (1877), p. 424. 35. See Clifford, “Unseen Universe,” p. 791. 36. [ J. B. Brown], “Ethics and Aesthetics of Modern Poetry,” Cornhill Magazine 37 (1878), p. 583; St. George Mivart, “Contemporary Evolution,” Contemporary Review 22 (1873), p. 608.

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37. [ J. A. Hardcastle], “The New Republic and Modern Philosophers,” Quarterly Review 144 (1877), p. 530. 38. Spectator, November 8, 1879, pp. 1412, 1413–1414. 39. [Mallock], “Clifford’s Essays,” p. 483. 40. “Professor Clifford,” Fraser’s Magazine 20 n.s. (1879), pp. 697, 695. 41. See Gillian Beer, Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Clarendon, 1996), p. 209. 42. See Clifford, “Unseen Universe,” p. 776. 43. [T. S. Baines], “Darwin on Expression,” Edinburgh Review 137 (1873), p. 503. 44. Mivart, “Contemporary Evolution,” p. 608. Swinburne himself later claimed that there existed an “association for prosecuting and suppressing the circulation of the works of Tyndall, Huxley, J. S. Mill and A. C. Swinburne” (C. Lang, ed., The Swinburne Letters, Yale University Press, 1959–1962, vol. 5, p. 8)—presumably the short-lived Society for the Suppression of Blasphemous Literature. 45. Frederick Pollock, “William Kingdon Clifford,” Fortnightly Review 25 n.s. (1879), pp. 670, 675, 676–677. 46. William Kingdon Clifford, Lectures and Essays, ed. L. Stephen and F. Pollock (Macmillan, 1879), vol. 1, p. 70. 47. Clifford, “Unseen Universe,” p. 781. A reviewer in the Times (October 22, 1879) did not notice even this omission, stating blithely that “all the papers are preserved in their original form.” 48. See F. Pollock to A. Macmillan, April 4, 1879, Macmillan Archive, Add. 55083: “Your letter of the 1st has been seen by Huxley & L. Stephen. We think your offer in the main acceptable, and have only one or two points to remark on.” Pollock then discusses photographs of Clifford that might be used. Lectures and Essays seems likely to be the book referred to; it was the only one of his posthumous publications to have a photograph of Clifford as a frontispiece. 49. L. Clifford to K. Pearson, January 24, 1887, Pearson Papers 661. 50. Adrian Desmond has recently observed that because most scientific naturalists “had not been ‘morally’ trained to be the social equals of the squires at Oxford and Cambridge, they had . . . to gain trust through ‘disinterested’ research into Nature,” and this “notion of ‘neutrality’ or ‘disinterest’ . . . evoked the aristocratic ethos of ‘disinterest,’ that is, the way a gentleman carried out his duty, say, as a magistrate, who judges with magisterial ‘disinterest.’ ” “Redefining the X Axis: ‘Professionals,’ ‘Amateurs’ and the Making of Mid-Victorian Biology—A Progress Report,” Journal of the History of Biology 34 (2001), pp. 37, 39–40. 51. L. Clifford to K. Pearson, March 13, 1885, Pearson Papers 661.

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52. William Kingdon Clifford, The Common Sense of the Exact Sciences (Kegan Paul, Trench, 1885), p. viii. 53. The Edinburgh Review, for instance, censured Swinburne for his “unpruned exuberance of language and imagery, . . . wild luxuriance of merely metrical diction” and “feverish sensuality,” all of which made his poetry so dangerously alluring to “the illgoverned hey-day of youthful blood” and “excitable but weak and unbalanced natures.” [T. S. Baines], “Swinburne’s Poems,” Edinburgh Review 134 (1871), pp. 71–72. 54. Nature, July 6, 1882, p. 217. The review was written by the Edinburgh mathematician George Chrystal. 55. See Crosbie Smith, The Science of Energy: A Cultural History of Energy Physics in Victorian Britain (Athlone, 1998), pp. 170–191. 56. Nature, June 11, 1885, p. 124. 57. Annotated page from Nature, June 11, 1885, Pearson Papers 661. 58. Nature, June 11, 1885, p. 125. 59. L. Clifford to K. Pearson, June 17, 1885, Pearson Papers 661. 60. See A. J. Meadows, Science and Controversy: A Biography of Sir Norman Lockyer (Macmillan, 1972), pp. 36–37. 61. L. Clifford to K. Pearson, June 18, 1885, Pearson Papers 661. 62. Quoted in Meadows, p. 37. In response to Pearson’s letter of complaint, Tait replied: “On reperusing my notice . . . I still think that it expresses what I meant to say.” (Nature, July 2, 1885, p. 196) 63. Marysa Demoor, “Self-Fashioning at the Turn of the Century: The Discursive Life of Lucy Clifford (1846–1929),” Journal of Victorian Culture 4 (1999): 276–291. 64. C. K. Paul to L. Clifford, June 19, 1885, Pearson Papers 661. 65. See Marysa Demoor, “Where No Woman Fears to Tread: The Gossip Column in the Athenaeum, 1885–1901,” Barcelona English Language and Literature Studies 7 (1996): 33–42. On Lucy’s friendship with MacColl, see I. Willis, ed., Vernon Lee’s Letters (privately printed, 1937), pp. 64–66. 66. Athenaeum, June 12, 1886, p. 779. 67. The editor’s “marked file” of the Athenaeum, which identifies nearly all of the anonymous contributors to the journal between 1830 and 1919, is held at City University Library, London. 68. Athenaeum, June 26, 1886, p. 849. 69. Athenaeum, July 16, 1887, p. 86. 70. L. Clifford to K. Pearson, January 24, 1887, Pearson Papers 661.

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71. See Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Virago, 1992), pp. 135–169. 72. See M. Blind to K. Pearson, January 6, 1887, Pearson Papers 638/6, University College London Library. 73. Bertrand Russell and Patricia Russell, eds., The Amberley Papers: The Letters and Diaries of Lord and Lady Amberley (Hogarth, 1937), vol. 2, p. 167. 74. See Charles Maurice Davies, Heterodox London: or, Phases of Free Thought in the Metropolis (Tinsley, 1874), vol. 1, pp. 176–180. 75. L. Clifford to K. Pearson, November 22, 1886, Pearson Papers 661. 76. L. Clifford to K. Pearson, December 20, 1886, Pearson Papers 661. 77. [W. H. Mallock], “The New Republic; or Culture, Faith, and Philosophy in an English Country House,” Belgravia 29 (1876), pp. 521, 543. 78. [Hardcastle], “New Republic,” pp. 530, 526–527. 79. [Mallock], “Clifford’s Essays,” p. 482. 80. F. Pollock to F. Macmillan, May 26, 1886, Macmillan Archive Add. 55083. 81. Bicknell, ed., Letters, vol. 2, p. 344. 82. L. Clifford to K. Pearson, January 24, 1887, Pearson Papers 661. 83. See Rooksby, Swinburne, p. 157. 84. M. Blind to K. Pearson, January 6, 1887, Pearson Papers 638/6. 85. “P.” [K. Pearson], “Socialism and Sex,” To-Day 7 (1887), p. 53. 86. L. Clifford to K. Pearson, February 10, 1888, Pearson Papers 10/32, University College London Library. In the same letter, Lucy explained to Pearson that, unlike her husband, she herself considered that “divorce . . . shld. be much easier for the woman to attain than for the man, for the man (I am not thinking of men like my husband nor of the men like you but the ordinary common animals) wd. often feel tempted to go on ruining one pretty woman after another . . . shocking her by mere intimate contact with his nature if he knew he could as easily get rid of her. It is a crying shame that a woman can’t get a divorce from the brute who beats her & makes her life a degradation when he adds on infidelity.” 87. The necessity of concealing Clifford’s posthumous involvement with Pearson’s freethinking writing was reinforced 2 years later when the Catholic commentator William Samuel Lilly, in his book On Right and Wrong, reproduced the very passage from The Ethic of Freethought that draws on Lucy’s summary of “Mistress or Wife” as a particularly repugnant example of the “social forecast of one of the most accomplished and zealous of English ‘advanced thinkers’ [i.e., Pearson],” who considers marriage “a source of stupidity and ugliness to the human race” and “would summarily abolish it.” (W. S. Lilly, On Right and Wrong, Chapman and Hall, 1890, pp. 209–210)

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88. L. Clifford to K. Pearson, January 24, 1887, Pearson Papers 661. 89. In an interview conducted in 1897, Sarah A. Tooley detected in Lucy’s sombre manner “the suggestion of a heart fraught with sadness, a mind looking forth in pity and sorrow upon human misery.” “Some Women Novelists,” Woman at Home 6 (1897), p. 170. Less charitably,Virginia Woolf, in her diary for January 1920, remarked on Lucy’s “large codfish eyes” and penchant for “black velvet,” finding her manner “morbid— intense . . . with a dash of the stage—‘dear’ ‘my dear boy—Did you know Leonard, that I was only married for three years, & then my husband died & left me with 2 babies & not a penny. . . .’ ” The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. A. Bell (Hogarth, 1977–1984), vol. 2, p. 12. 90. Vernon Lee records that while visiting Lucy’s Bayswater home in June 1884 she “took up some books & saw invariably written inside them ‘W. K. & Lucy Clifford’ which struck me as rather odd in books printed some five or six years after W. Clifford’s death. Then, just before I left, Mrs. Clifford asked me to write an inscription in the copy of Euphorion which had been sent to her. ‘Write ‘to William & Lucy Clifford’—I always have that on my books’ she said.” Willis, ed., Letters, p. 144. 91. Clifford, “Unseen Universe,” p. 782. 92. [L. Clifford], “Lost,” Macmillan’s Magazine 44 (1881), p. 49. 93. Marysa Demoor and Monty Chisholm, eds., “Bravest of Women and Finest of Friends”: Henry James’s Letters to Lucy Clifford, English Literary Studies 80 (University of Victoria, 1999), p. 108. 94. Ralph Barton Perry, ed., The Thought and Character of William James (Oxford University Press, 1935), vol. 1, p. 591. 95. L. Clifford to K. Pearson, January 19, 1925, Pearson Papers 661. 96. See Lucy Clifford, “Victoria, Lady Welby. An Ethical Mystic,” Hibbert Journal 23 (1924): 101–106. Lucy’s close friendship with Welby in the 1880s perturbed many of the older friends whom she had met principally through her husband. See L. Clifford to K. Pearson, November 22, 1886, Pearson Papers 661.

12 Grant Allen, Physiological Aesthetics, and the Dissemination of Darwin’s Botany Jonathan Smith

Despite its title, “Dissecting a Daisy,” an 1878 article by Grant Allen for the Cornhill Magazine is less about botany than it is about aesthetics, or rather, about the relationship between the two. “There are good grounds for believing,” wrote Allen, that the pleasure we take in color “is shared by a large part of the animal creation, and has descended to us men from our early half-human frugivorous ancestors. The bright hues of fruits and flowers seem to have been acquired by them as attractive allurements for the animal eye, and as aids to cross-fertilisation or the dispersion of seeds.”1 Following his graduation from Oxford in 1871, Allen (1848–1899) had spent two unhappy years teaching classics to schoolboys, followed by three happier ones as Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy at the new Government College in Jamaica.2 When the College closed in 1876, Allen returned to England. Keenly interested in natural science and a disciple of Spencer, Darwin, Huxley, and Wallace, he sought to earn his living by popularizing and extending their evolutionary theories. He turned initially to what he called, in a book of the same name in 1877, “physiological aesthetics”—the view that aesthetic feelings have a physical basis, are the product of natural and sexual selection, and thus are not unique to humans. Several important strands of this new aesthetics were rooted in botany, in particular the researches of Darwin on crossfertilization and the evolutionary relationship between flowers and insects. For the remainder of his life, but especially from the late 1870s to the mid 1880s, Allen played a key role in disseminating Darwin’s botany to various middle-class audiences via the periodical press. As in “Dissecting a Daisy,” however, he frequently did so in a way that also explicated its importance for a new understanding of the origin and development of the human sense of beauty, an understanding that challenged the influential views of Victorian England’s most famous art critic, John Ruskin.3

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Allen’s physiological and evolutionary understanding of aesthetics synthesized recent work in several related scientific fields. Most prominently, it drew on the physiological psychology of Spencer and Alexander Bain and adopted the Spencerian notion that pleasurable sensations are the subjective corollary of the normal functioning of bodily tissue, painful sensations of its destruction or privation. Aesthetic pleasure is thus, for Allen, the sensation associated with normal tissue activity not directly connected with the body’s vital functions. Differences in aesthetic taste among individuals result from differences in the nerve cells of sensory organs, which undergo change depending on whether they are habitually stimulated in normal or destructive ways. Individual taste, however, can be both cultivated and passed down to descendants. When similar stimuli occur widely in a community, taste becomes more uniform and fixed, and since the process of cultivation involves the intellect and emotions, the combination of healthy stimuli, advancing knowledge, and refined emotions leads to improving standards of taste. Allen’s aesthetics, like the psychological theories on which it was based, also depended on the new physiological understanding of sensory perception that had recently emerged in Germany and was most closely associated with Hermann von Helmholtz. Helmholtz’s work on optics and acoustics during the 1850s and the 1860s detailed the mechanisms by which the eye processed light and the ear processed sound, making clear that our ability to perceive the world around us is shaped by the anatomy of our sense organs and the physiology of our nervous system.4 This work was quickly translated into English and became widely known via the lectures and popular writings of both Helmholtz and his English allies. By the 1870s, Helmholtz’s views were so well established that Darwin, in the sixth edition of The Origin of Species (1872), could invoke Helmholtz’s assessment of the imperfection of the human eye as beyond dispute.5 Furthermore, this new understanding made it possible to see how vision and hearing had developed, and to explain why some sensations— color combinations, musical tones, etc.—were pleasurable while others were not. When it came to specific evolutionary arguments about the origin and development of aesthetics, however, Allen depended most heavily on Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871) and his various botanical publications. In The Descent of Man, Darwin’s theory of sexual selection had implied the

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existence of an aesthetic sensibility throughout the animal world. Birds were the classic example. The tail of the peacock was the result of generations of peahens selecting males with the most brilliant colors and elaborate ornaments. But Darwin argued that similar aesthetic choices were made by various species of insects, fish, reptiles, and mammals. Beauty, while in the eye of the beholder, served a utilitarian purpose. Most of Darwin’s contemporaries, including Wallace, rejected sexual selection, but Allen embraced and defended it, frequently incorporating the theory into his writings on aesthetics and explicitly rebutting Wallace in his follow-up book to Physiological Aesthetics, The Colour-Sense, Its Origin and Development (1879). Darwin was delighted by Allen’s championing of sexual selection, and reviewers saw his advocacy as evidence that he was, in the words of James Sully, “an out-and-out Darwinian.”6 Even more important to Allen were Darwin’s botanical researches. During the 1860s and the 1870s, Darwin published a series of books and articles on botany. Unlike The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, The Descent of Man, and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, the three books that fleshed out the empirical evidence for the “long argument” of The Origin of Species mostly by synthesizing the work of others, Darwin’s botanical publications reflected his own original experiments at Down House. These publications may be usefully grouped into two broad categories: those dealing with plant growth, and those dealing with plant fertilization. In the former category were The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants (1875), Insectivorous Plants (1875), and The Power of Movement in Plants (1880), applications of natural selection to botanical behavior that blurred the seemingly firm boundary between plants and animals. In the latter category were On the Various Contrivances by which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects (1862), The Effects of Cross and Self Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom (1876), and The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species (1877). These were the books that proved so fertile for Allen’s aesthetic arguments. In them, Darwin argued that cross-fertilization is beneficial to the health and vigor of plants, and that many species have evolved elaborate mechanisms for insuring its occurrence, usually with the aid of particular insects. In the case of orchids, Darwin demonstrated that the brilliant colors, unusual markings, and odd structures of their flowers served to attract insects and guide them to the nectary, often permitting access in such a way that only those species capable of effecting cross-pollination secured the honey. Flowers and insects, he thus contended, had evolved in tandem. John

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Lubbock, Darwin’s friend and neighbor, investigated many of the same issues from the insect side in his studies of ants, bees, and wasps, work on which Allen also drew.7 In most areas Allen was generally content to popularize the work of others, but in botany, his area of special interest, he added original contributions. And he saw clearly the importance of Darwin’s work for aesthetics, rarely missing the opportunity to draw out the connection. As a popularizer of Darwin’s botanical work, then, Allen was not a passive transmitter or simplifier: he actively appropriated Darwin’s botany into his evolutionary and physiological aesthetics, which was, as we shall see, a broad interdisciplinary synthesis aimed at displacing the authority of cultural elites on specifically cultural issues.8 If, as Bernard Lightman has suggested, “the cultural dimension of science is nowhere more evident” than in popularization, this is especially true of Allen’s effort to bring Darwin’s botany to bear on aesthetics itself.9 But as an ally of the scientific naturalists, Allen occupied a position more like Huxley’s than that of many other popularizers. Lightman characterizes Allen’s popular essays as “evolutionary epics” that enact “the secularization of wonder” by grafting evolutionary genealogies onto “narratives of natural history,” the conversational stories of personal encounters with nature so common during the latter half of the century.10 This element of secularization is perhaps even more aptly captured by the Huxleyan term “lay sermon.” In several essays Allen refers to the natural object he is examining as the “text” on which he will “preach,” and on at least one occasion he explicitly invokes the term. Almost all of the botanical essays follow the Huxleyan pattern of drawing evolutionary lessons from a common plant or flower.11 In doing so, Allen competed with those writers like J. E. Taylor who attached religious and moral meanings to Darwin’s botanical work and those like M. C. Cooke who popularized Darwin’s results without reference to natural selection. Reviewing Cooke’s Freaks and Marvels of Plant Life (1882), a volume published by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge in the Academy, Allen complained that Cooke had “certainly gone too far in the way of tacitly suppressing the evolutionary argument, and implicitly suggesting the method of design” for the benefit of his “orthodox audience.”12 In turn, Allen’s lay sermons on evolutionary aesthetics were themselves sometimes attacked by the opponents of Darwinism.13 Drawing out the implications of Darwin’s work in his own writings, Allen argued that colored flowers were themselves the product of evolutionary change. The prehistoric world, Allen contended, had once been

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unremittingly green. The development of other colors, and of color contrast, had depended on chance variation and the ability of insect eyes to perceive and, at a primitive aesthetic level, appreciate color difference. As Allen put it in an 1884 essay for the Gentleman’s Magazine on “Our Debt to Insects,” “I believe we owe almost entirely to insects the whole presence of colour in nature, otherwise than green; without them our world would be wanting in more than half the beautiful objects which give it its greatest aesthetic charm in the appreciative eyes of cultivated humanity.” Moreover, according to Allen it is not fanciful to speak of the insects as having particular aesthetic “tastes.”While the ability to distinguish colors “is a mere question of the presence or absence of nerve-centres,” the association of food with color ultimately associates pleasure with color, even for insects: “creatures which pass all their lives in the search for bright flowers must almost inevitably come to feel pleasure in the perception of brilliant colours.”14 Colored flowers have not been divinely created for human benefit and pleasure, but have been self-generated by the reproductive needs of plants and the nutritional needs of insects. The success of Allen’s initial effort to promulgate his aesthetic theory was mixed. As a first book by an unknown author, Physiological Aesthetics was for the most part unwanted. Allen had to finance its publication himself, and fewer than 300 copies were sold. Yet by his own estimation it made his name known in London intellectual circles and enabled him to establish contact with a number of leading scientists. Spencer accepted the dedication and praised the contents; Wallace acknowledged his presentation copy by telling Allen he would incorporate some of his views into his own work (Clodd, Grant Allen, pp. 59–65). George Romanes reviewed the book favorably in Nature. James Sully’s notice in Mind was more critical, but he took up Allen’s views fully and seriously. Across the Atlantic, William James wished for a more detailed study with a sounder empirical basis, but he closed his review for the Nation by remarking that Allen had the potential to become a leading psychologist.15 Encouraged by these successes, Allen expanded an abandoned chapter from Physiological Aesthetics on “The Genesis of Aesthetics” into a new book on The Colour-Sense. Like its predecessor, The Colour-Sense did not sell. Allen’s share of the profits amounted to 30 pounds, inducing him to note caustically that “As it took me only eighteen months, and involved little more than five or six thousand references, this result may be regarded as very fair pay for an educated man’s time and labour” (Clodd, Grant Allen, p. 70). But more so than Physiological Aesthetics, The Colour-Sense made a splash. It received more and generally lengthier

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reviews than Physiological Aesthetics—Wallace in Nature, Sully again in Mind, Henry Finck in Macmillan’s Magazine, C. M. O’Leary in Catholic World, Edward Aveling in Charles Bradlaugh’s Radical National Reformer— in part because it entered directly into controversies being played out in the periodical press. The primary target of Allen’s book was the new argument contending that the human color-sense had only developed recently. The most visible exponent of this position in England was none other than W. E. Gladstone, whose 1877 article “The Colour-Sense” in the Nineteenth Century had returned to his claim, made almost 20 years before, that Homer’s use of color-terms was vague and limited. Gladstone dusted off and updated his Homeric argument to take a swipe at Darwinism. If Homer’s color sense was undeveloped in comparison with that of modern Europeans, Gladstone argued, then human physiology could alter at a pace far more rapid than natural selection would allow. Yet, if Homer had achieved so much without the benefit of a refined color-sense, then surely the progress that natural selection supposedly brought to all facets of human life was a delusion.16 Allen’s book specifically challenged Gladstone, arguing that the human color-sense had in fact been inherited from fruit-eating ancestors whose ability to discriminate color had been developed in the same way and for the same reason as that of birds and insects. This argument embroiled Allen in a second controversy, over Darwin’s theory of sexual selection. Wallace had challenged Darwin’s notion that animals were capable of aesthetic choices, and Allen, while “aware how ill prepared I am to encounter so thorough a biologist as the joint discoverer of Natural Selection on his ground,” came “humbly” to Darwin’s defense.17 A grateful Darwin thanked Allen for rebutting Wallace and endorsing his widely rejected theory (Clodd, Grant Allen, pp. 74–75). If Allen did not garner a large readership with these books, he made good use of the doors they opened with editors. He re-packaged and extended the material for the periodical press, which in the late 1870s continued to devote considerable attention to Darwinism and those subjects being re-examined in relation to it.18 By foregrounding his popularization of Darwin’s botanical work, in which the interest was great, Allen was able to make his own views on physiological aesthetics available to a wider audience. Although there is no evidence of a conscious program on Allen’s part—and Allen’s increasing journalistic output and the expanding array of venues for his work was no doubt fueled in large measure by pecuniary needs—the placement of his articles suggests some concern for exposing his views to a variety of middle-class audiences, and

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even to the upper reaches of the working classes and the lower reaches of the upper class. The Cornhill Magazine was Allen’s first major venue. Under Leslie Stephen’s editorship, the Cornhill Magazine was already publishing articles on evolutionary psychology and aesthetics, particularly by James Sully, so Allen’s success is not surprising.19 An article on “Aesthetic Analysis of an Obelisk” preceded “Dissecting a Daisy” by two months, while “The Origin of Flowers,” “The Origin of Fruits,” and “Colour in Painting” followed it over the course of 1878. In the early 1880s a new round of Allen’s botanical articles appeared: “The Daisy’s Pedigree,” “The Colours of Flowers,” “An English Weed,” and “Queer Flowers.” The Cornhill Magazine was Allen’s favorite venue among the monthlies, both generally and for his science articles. Like Macmillan’s Magazine and Longman’s Magazine, competitors in which Allen also brought out botanical essays, the Cornhill Magazine aimed at a middle-class audience. But the differences among the three—Macmillan’s Magazine addressed the controversial religious and political topics that the Cornhill Magazine and Longman’s Magazine generally avoided, and Longman’s Magazine was explicitly launched as a mass-market venture—ensured that Allen reached various elements of that audience. The Cornhill Magazine under Stephen was open to discussions of Darwinism and its implications, and Alexander Macmillan, who also published Nature, while personally uneasy with the consequences of Darwinism for humans, had published articles by Darwin’s supporters since the inception of Macmillan’s Magazine in 1859.20 Allen’s introduction of his evolutionary botany and aesthetics to Longman’s Magazine was more surprising, but he had managed to place his work in stranger publications. During the same period that Allen’s botanical and aesthetic pieces were appearing in the Cornhill Magazine, he published two extended series of short articles for the Pall Mall Gazette and St. James’s Gazette, both series subsequently collected and published separately (as Vignettes from Nature and The Evolutionist at Large, respectively) in 1881. Allen described the former as “popular expositions of current evolutionary thought” told from “an easy-going, half-scientific, half-aesthetic standpoint,” while the purpose of the latter was “to make the general principles and methods of evolutionists a little more familiar to unscientific readers.”21 A sampling of the titles of these little essays—”A Bed of Nettles,” “The Donkey’s Ancestors,” “A Wayside Berry,” “Dogs and Masters”—captures their conversational tone and colloquial language. Despite their simplicity, however, these essays are pointedly current and pointedly evolutionary, and one of their most

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prominent themes is the physiological and evolutionary character of aesthetics, almost invariably delivered by way of an examination of flowers and fruits. In an essay on bindweed, for example, Allen writes: “The old school of thinking imagined that beauty was given to flowers and insects for the sake of man alone: it would not, perhaps, be too much to say that, if the new school be right, the beauty is not in the flowers and insects themselves at all, but is read into them by the fancy of the human race.” The “whole loveliness of flowers” ultimately depends on “all kinds of accidental causes—causes, that is to say, into which the deliberate design of the production of beautiful effects did not enter.” In an essay on “Butterfly Aesthetics,” Allen makes even more specific claims.The response of butterflies to certain colors and markings in flowers and mates can be regarded as a result of butterflies being, on the one hand, merely “a cunning bit of nervous machinery,” but on the other hand, when “viewed emotionally, a faint copy of ourselves.”While we should not take “too human” a measure of butterflies’ taste—their selection of particular flowers and particular mates is not conscious—the fact that we, too, take aesthetic pleasure in butterflies and butterfly flowers suggests to Allen “a close community of taste and feeling between the butterfly and ourselves.”22 The value of these essays was not lost on Darwin, Wallace, and Huxley. “I find much to admire in the way you conjoin precision with popularity—a very difficult art,” wrote Huxley to Allen. Speaking of Colin Clout’s Calendar (1882), another collection of short, familiar essays culled from the St. James’s, Huxley urged Allen to include “a few illustrations to help ignorant people to find what they ought to see” (Clodd, Grant Allen, p. 112). (Huxley no doubt also appreciated Allen’s allusion to Colin Clout, John Skelton’s plain-spoken sixteenth-century satirical poem attacking clericalism and Cardinal Wolsey.) Darwin, too, expressed his “envy” at Allen’s pleasant yet accurate prose and saw its proselytizing potential:“Who can tell how many young persons your chapters may bring up to be good working evolutionists!” (Clodd, Grant Allen, p. 111). Wallace, reviewing Vignettes from Nature, declared in Nature that Allen “stands at the head of living writers as a popular exponent of the evolution theory.”23 Edward Aveling, the freethinking University College fellow and frequent contributor on science to the National Reformer, regarded Allen’s success as a popularizer of Darwinism so highly that he named The Evolutionist at Large one of the nine most important scientific books of 1881.24 Yet Allen’s essays for the Pall Mall and the St. James’s were obviously not originally read by the ignorant and the young. Both were evening papers devoted to political and cultural issues for London gentlemen at

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their clubs. When the Pall Mall began publication in 1865, it hewed an independent political line, but by the late 1870s it had become identified mainly with the Conservatives, and its editor, Frederick Greenwood, had evolved into a fierce opponent of Gladstone.25 When George Smith, publisher of both the Cornhill Magazine and the Pall Mall, gave the latter to his Liberal son-in-law, Henry Yates Thompson, in 1880, Greenwood and his staff resigned en masse and one month later launched the St. James’s, from which the attacks on Gladstone resumed. It seems likely that Allen’s contacts at the Cornhill Magazine provided him an entrée at both the Pall Mall and the St. James’s, and his own public argument with Gladstone gave him something in common with Greenwood. Regardless of the mode of access, however, Allen clearly took advantage of the opportunity to promote Darwinian botany and physiological aesthetics to a more socially rarefied audience than even the Cornhill Magazine offered, and one far less accustomed to seeing favorable applications of evolution to the human realm.26 Yet even Allen’s popular essays included original insights, and he endeavored to ensure that his theories reached a professional scientific audience and, as his confidence grew, to stake some claim to a professional scientific identity of his own. “The fact is,” Allen confided to Darwin, “I have not the time, money, or opportunity for working practically at natural science. I earn my whole livelihood by writing for the daily or weekly press. . . . I can only give to science the little leisure which remains to me after the business of bread-winning for my family is finished.” Nonetheless, he continued, “I believe that I can be of some little use to scientific men by throwing out such hints as occur to me, and by working . . . in my own way, with the few materials which come within my reach.”27 In private and public, elite figures increasingly confirmed his originality. Darwin provided Allen with extensive commentary on an early manuscript dealing with the colors of flowers and fruits as well as on The Colour Sense itself, and his favorable reaction to one of Allen’s later Cornhill Magazine articles encouraged Allen to pursue the topic in more detail.28 In the same letter extolling the educative value of The Evolutionist at Large, Darwin told Allen that “Several of your views are quite new to me, and seem extremely probable” (Clodd, Grant Allen, p. 111). Wallace acknowledged in Nature that Allen had so thoroughly “mastered [the evolution theory’s] principles” and “imbued himself with its leading ideas” that he was “able to apply it in an intelligent and often original manner.”29 As his standing with the scientific naturalists rose, Allen began to place his botanical work in the professionals’ chief organ, Nature.30 In 1882, Allen

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published two series of articles there, one on “The Colours of Flowers” and another on “The Shapes of Leaves,” and he defended his views in its correspondence columns when he received criticism from leading scientists like Wallace or W. B. Carpenter. While he continued to maintain a deferential tone toward such elite figures, disavowing expert status and often lamenting his inability to conduct sustained, detailed investigations, Allen respectfully objected to misinterpretations of his positions. Both of the works generally regarded as Allen’s most important botanical publications,“The Colours of Flowers,” issued in book form later in 1882 by Nature’s publisher, Macmillan, and Flowers and Their Pedigrees (1883), illustrate Allen’s ability to combine popular exposition and original insights. Although The Colours of Flowers was fleshed out in Nature, Allen noted in his preface that the central idea of the book, the theory that petals originally evolved from stamens, had first appeared in one of his Cornhill Magazine articles. Indeed, “The Daisy’s Pedigree” and “The Colours of Flowers” outlined in familiar form for the readers of the Cornhill Magazine the same theory that readers of Nature were being offered in more technical language at roughly the same time. “The Daisy’s Pedigree” in its turn became the germ of Flowers and Their Pedigrees, a collection of essays brought out by Longman’s but originally published in several of the middle-class general-interest periodicals (Longman’s Magazine, the Cornhill Magazine, Macmillan’s Magazine, Gentleman’s Magazine, Belgravia) in which Allen’s fiction and non-fiction appeared.31 Allen also sought out a specialist audience in the new journal Mind. Established in 1876 by Alexander Bain with George Croom Robertson as its editor, Mind was, Croom Roberston declared, “The first English journal devoted to Psychology and Philosophy.” It sought to make philosophy a more “academic” field and to connect it more closely with the new physiological psychology of men like Helmholtz. First on Croom Robertson’s list of “the variety of fields whereon the psychologist is in these days called to range” was “Physiological investigation of the Nervous System in man and animals, by which mental science is brought into relation with biology and the physical sciences generally.” Such a marriage of mental and physical science, Croom Robertson argued, would constitute “A true psychology” with the potential to revolutionize both the understanding and the teaching of “Logic, Aesthetics, and Ethics.”32 Here was a venue made to order for Allen, who described himself in the preface to The Colour-Sense as “a comparative psychologist,” and he soon availed himself of it.33 Having briefly sketched his arguments against Gladstone in Mind in 1878, Allen

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published a series of essays on aesthetics over the ensuing three years: “The Origin of the Sublime,” “The Origin of the Sense of Symmetry,” “Aesthetic Evolution in Man,” and “Sight and Smell in Vertebrates.” More comfortable with his specialist credentials in physiological psychology and aesthetics, Allen even adopted a more assertive, less deferential tone in Mind when responding to criticism, as in his reply to Sully’s review of Physiological Aesthetics.34 Allen’s desire to reach both professional and popular audiences with his writing on evolutionary botany and physiological aesthetics is also signaled by his quickly becoming a frequent contributor to Knowledge, the new journal launched by the astronomer Richard Proctor in 1881. As Bernard Lightman has shown, the purpose of Knowledge was the popularization of science for a mass audience. Proctor vigorously eschewed Nature’s effort to speak in part to professional scientists and to advance their aims. While Allen lacked Proctor’s professional credentials and his pugnacious attitude toward the professional elite, he was, like Proctor, a figure who could claim to inhabit both professional and popular worlds. More important, he had established a reputation as a master of the entertaining but accurate and informative essay, the very thing Proctor wanted for Knowledge. Here, then, was a new audience for Allen, less specialized than the readers of Mind or Nature and further down the class ladder from the readers of the Cornhill Magazine, Longman’s Magazine, Macmillan’s Magazine, or the Pall Mall and St. James’s Gazettes. During Knowledge’s life as a weekly from 1881 to 1885, Allen contributed at least 54 articles, the vast majority on botanical subjects, including two series—“A Naturalist’s Year” from December 1882 to December 1883 and “The Evolution of Flowers” from February to July 1884—the first similar in form and style to Colin Clout’s Calendar, the tone of the latter pitched appropriately between that of his Cornhill Magazine essays and Nature articles. Allen’s botanical writings, then, overwhelmingly sought to popularize, apply, or extend Darwin’s botanical research. For Allen, Darwin’s botany, particularly his work on the importance of cross-fertilization and the corresponding evolutionary relationship between insects and flowers, was important both on its own terms and for its connection to a physiological understanding of aesthetics. Allen endeavored to make those aesthetic implications clear to various segments of a primarily middleclass audience, adjusting his presentation for different levels of scientific understanding and moving with ease between book and periodical publication.

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The Nature of Beauty: Physiological versus Ruskinian Aesthetics

Allen’s physiological aesthetics was not simply an intellectual exercise. It had a target: the influential aesthetic theories of the great Victorian art and social critic, John Ruskin. While characterizing Ruskin’s aesthetics is a notoriously complicated matter, he was closely associated in the public mind throughout his career with two general positions: fidelity to nature and the morality of art. In Modern Painters (1843–1860), Ruskin had argued that it was J. M. W. Turner, not venerated seventeenth-century masters like Claude Lorrain and the Poussins, who represented nature truthfully. Great art, Ruskin agreed, required careful observation and accurate reproduction, but Claude and the Poussins rarely depicted any natural form correctly, and their followers had then reified these inaccuracies into conventions. In painstaking detail, Ruskin attempted to demonstrate that Turner, in faithfully painting what he saw, actually achieved far greater truth to nature than his predecessors had. Particularly in the second volume of Modern Painters, however, Ruskin also made clear that such objectivity was not a sufficient condition for the production of great art. He decried mere imitation or copying, and he criticized the “ditch-water” realism of Dutch genre painting as sharply as the idealizations of Claude. For great art requires great (although not necessarily elevated) subjects, Ruskin argued, and great subjects are beautiful subjects, those in which higher truths—spiritual, moral truths— are to be found.35 Great artists are those rare figures of healthy and vigorous imaginations who can both see and depict these truths. They may thus, as Turner did, sometimes depart from strict adherence to what they see in nature, but the grounding of their “subjective” vision in physical truths is what enables them to elucidate the higher ones. Since for Ruskin nature is the creation of God, such faithful art is simultaneously an act of praise, a confirmation of divine attributes, and an uncovering of divine lessons for humankind.While both the depiction and experience of beauty bring pleasure, great art provides more than that. Pleasure is not the end of art, for art is not merely sensual but spiritual and moral. Indeed, Ruskin rejects the term “aesthetic,” arguing that to characterize the perception of beauty solely according to pleasure is “degrading it to a mere operation of sense.”36 The perception of beauty is, rather, a function of the moral faculty that Ruskin called, after Plato, theoria. By rooting the human perception of beauty in the physical sensations of insects, Allen “degraded” aesthetics far more than Ruskin thought possible in 1846. Indeed, in his preface to Physiological Aesthetics, Allen

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framed his theory as one that sought to answer the very questions Ruskin regarded as unanswerable: “ ‘Why we receive pleasure from some forms and colours and not from others,’ says Professor Ruskin, ‘is no more to be asked or answered than why we like sugar or dislike wormwood.’ The questions thus summarily dismissed by our great living authority on Aesthetics are exactly the ones which this little book asks, and, I hope, answers.” And the answers, continued Allen, were to be found in Darwin, “our great teacher.” Just as our differing reactions to sugar and wormwood can be explained by their differing physical effects on our bodies, so our differing reactions to forms and colors can be regarded as the “constant subjective counterparts of certain definite nervous states.” Our aesthetic responses are themselves “the necessary result of natural selection.”37 Allen often opened or closed his periodical essays in a similar way, making clear that physiological aesthetics represented an alternative to Ruskinian aesthetics. Opening his essay on “Aesthetic Evolution in Man” in Mind, for example, Allen argues that “the construction of a scientific doctrine of aesthetics” must reject the approach of “professors of fine art” like Ruskin (who, at the time the essay was published, had recently resigned as the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford). The “psychological aesthetician” cannot concentrate his attention on “the very highest feelings of the most cultivated classes in the most civilised nations” but must instead examine the common, universal feelings on which cultivated aesthetic tastes are based: “It is enough for him,” wrote Allen, “that all village children call a daisy or a primrose pretty.”38 In making this proclamation, Allen echoed the blunt statement with which he had closed “Dissecting a Daisy” two years earlier in the Cornhill Magazine: Aesthetics is the last of the sciences in which vague declamation is still permitted to usurp the place of ascertained fact. The pretty imaginative theories of Alison, of Jeffrey, and of Professor Ruskin are still allowed to hold the field against scientific research. People think them beautiful and harmless, forgetting that everything is fraught with evil if it “warps us from the living truth.”We shall never understand the nature of beauty so long as we attack the problem from the wrong side. As in every other department of knowledge, so in aesthetics, we must be content to begin at the beginning, and then we may perhaps have fair hopes of some day reaching the end.39

It is difficult to imagine a more biting assessment of Ruskin’s work. His famous prose style is reduced to “vague declamation,” his vast oeuvre to

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“pretty imaginative theories.” His repeated claim to have based his criticism in careful, detailed observation of the natural world is stood on its head—he is instead the enemy of “ascertained fact” and “scientific research.” His aesthetics, despite his insistence that he transcends the analysis of mere physical beauty and physical pleasure, rising instead to the uncovering of moral and spiritual truths, is in fact “fraught with evil.” Indeed, Ruskin’s entire program approaches aesthetics “from the wrong side.” To “begin at the beginning” in aesthetics is, according to Allen, to begin with physiological aesthetics. Yet by focusing on physical sensations and reducing complex emotional phenomena to their physiological basis in pleasure and pain, Allen’s aesthetics approached its subject from the very direction that Ruskin viewed as inadequate and misguided. It is against the backdrop of this promulgation of physiological aesthetics that Ruskin’s writings on science late in his career must be viewed. Ruskin’s famously caustic comments about Darwin, Huxley, and Tyndall, and his own writings on ornithology in Love’s Meinie (1873–81), botany in Proserpina (1875–86), and geology in Deucalion (1875–83), are now understood in the overlapping contexts of his opposition to scientific naturalism and his intellectual and emotional idiosyncrasies during two decades of increasing battles with mental illness.40 But even Ruskin’s most sensitive and sympathetic modern critics have tended to find his vituperative remarks about Darwin and Darwinism, like the following comment from Proserpina, rather embarrassing: “All . . . materialisms, in their unclean stupidity, are essentially the work of human bats; men of semi-faculty or semi-education, who are more or less incapable of so much as seeing, much less even thinking about, colour; among whom, for one-sided intensity, even Mr. Darwin must often be ranked. . . .” (Works, vol. 25, p. 263) Ruskin’s own “one-sided intensity” in such denunciations is usually accounted for, implicitly or explicitly, by reference to his unstable mind. In his recently completed biography of Ruskin, for example, Tim Hilton, while noting that the “intellectual programme” of Proserpina was “to oppose Darwinism and to insist on the eternal value of myth,” contends that the key to understanding Ruskin’s “Studies of Wayside Flowers” is to see it in personal terms, as one of Ruskin’s “memorials” to Rose La Touche, the young Irishwoman with whom Ruskin had been infatuated since 1858, when she was just thirteen, and who had died in 1875.41 There is much truth in this biographical reading, but it seriously underestimates the method in Ruskin’s madness by failing to appreciate why Ruskin needed to launch such an “intellectual programme” in the first place. For the fact is that Ruskin saw, correctly, that Darwin’s writings, especially in

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The Descent of Man and the botanical books, posed a virtually complete challenge to his own aesthetics. However tempting to reduce the source of his resistance to Darwin’s botany to his personal queasiness about sexuality or his obsession with Rose La Touche, we need also to acknowledge Ruskin’s awareness that in natural selection lay a rival to his life’s work. There is no evidence that Ruskin read Allen. But he read Darwin, and his references indicate that he was familiar with some of the details of Darwin’s botanical writings, was aware of some of the popular accounts of them in the periodical press, and understood their centrality to a physiological understanding of aesthetics. The context of his condemnation of the “unclean stupidity” of materialistic accounts of color is his awareness of recent publications, “not uningenious, and highly industrious, on the subject of the relation of colour in flowers, to insects—to selective development, etc., etc.” (Works, vol. 25, p. 264). One of these publications was the American botanist Asa Gray’s article on “The Relation of Insects to Flowers” in the Contemporary Review, another was Lubbock’s 1874 address to the British Association on “Common Wild Flowers Considered in Relation to Insects,” subsequently published in Nature. The latter, Ruskin wrote to a friend, made him “miserable” (April 26, 1875; Works, vol. 37, p. 165). He felt even worse about the role of more unsavory insects, urging readers of Proserpina to ignore such questions as “how far flowers invite, or require, flies to interfere in their family affairs” (Works, vol. 25, pp. 413–414). He emphatically refused to discuss “the recent phrenzy for the investigation of digestive and reproductive operations in plants,” insisting that “the flower exists for its own sake—not for the fruit’s sake. The production of the fruit is an added honour to it—is a granted consolation to us for its death. But the flower is the end of the seed,—not the seed of the flower” (Works, vol. 25, pp. 390–391, 249–250). This latter remark, written in 1874 and published the following year, shows that Ruskin didn’t need Allen to point out for him the aesthetic implications of evolutionary botany, but the stark contrast between it and Allen’s claim in his Cornhill Magazine essay on “The Origin of Fruits” three years later that “The sole object of flowering is the production of seeds” suggests how directly the two men’s botanical and aesthetic views were opposed.42 Indeed, Allen closed “The Origin of Fruits” with a stirring peroration, a radically un-Ruskinian assessment of both the present and future state of art, couched in Ruskinian language and invoking both Turner and Titian, the artistic heroes of the first two volumes of Modern Painters:

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What a splendid and a noble prospect for humanity in its future evolutions may we not find in this thought, that from the coarse animal pleasure of beholding food mankind has already developed, through delicate gradations, our modern disinterested love for the glories of sunset and the melting shades of ocean, for the gorgeous pageantry of summer flowers, and the dying beauty of autumn leaves, for the exquisite harmony which reposes on the canvas of Titian, and the golden haze which glimmers over the dreamy visions of Turner! If man, base as he yet is, can nevertheless rise to-day in his highest moments so far above his sensuous self, what may he not hope to achieve hereafter, under the hallowing influence of those chaster and purer aspirations which are welling up within him even now toward the perfect day!43

This was what Ruskin well understood, and perhaps most feared, in scientific naturalism: not that it rejected the moral, the aesthetic, the imaginative, but that it claimed them for its own. Proserpina, however, provided a limited platform from which to counter the popularization of Darwinian botany. Ruskin published it in separately issued parts, and circulation was small—1000 of each part initially, with an additional 1000 of the first six parts a few years later (Works, vol. 25, pp. 191–193). It is little wonder, then, that Hilton speaks of Ruskin taking pleasure in the “extension of his usual readership” afforded by a series of essays for the Nineteenth Century in 1880–81, during a lull in Proserpina’s appearance.44 These famous essays, on “Fiction, Fair and Foul,” were primarily a condemnation of what Ruskin saw as the contemporary novel’s obsessive interest in death, disease, and moral decay amidst urban squalor. But botany being much on Ruskin’s mind, the first essay opens with a recollection of the plants along the lane near his Herne Hill home, where as a boy and a young man he derived both pleasure and intellectual benefit from his studies of the primroses and daisies. But the lane, Ruskin complains, is now a site of suburban development and industrial waste, so a child of the present can only experience “the thrill of scientific vanity in the primary analysis of some unheard-of process of corruption.” Scientific pleasure in “analysis of physical corruption” has its corollary in, and has contributed to, Ruskin argues, the aesthetic pleasure taken in the fiction of Dickens, Collins, Balzac, and Victor Hugo, whose portraits of mental and physical disease are “like the botany of leaf lichens” (Works, vol. 34, p. 268). Divorced from the context of the threat posed by physiological aesthetics, Ruskin’s dire claims appear overheated, and his use of botanical references in a discussion of modern fiction seems odd. But Darwin and Allen and Lubbock had already made botany central to the new aesthet-

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ics, and the periodical press was the key forum for its dissemination. Ruskin knew he had to meet his foes on their own ground. Notes 1. Grant Allen, “Dissecting a Daisy,” Cornhill Magazine 37 (1878), p. 62. 2. Edward Clodd, Grant Allen: A Memoir (Grant Richards, 1900), pp. 35–37. Subsequent references are cited in the text. 3. My arguments and conclusions in this essay are similar to those reached by David Cowie in his Ph.D. dissertation, The Evolutionist at Large: Grant Allen, Scientific Naturalism, and Victorian Culture (University of Kent-Canterbury, 2000). Cowie’s study, the first to offer a full-scale account of Allen’s career as a writer, demonstrates both that all of Allen’s work—including his fiction and travel writing—can be seen as advancing the program of the scientific naturalists, and that the specific, practical art criticism found in many of Allen’s later essays and books develops the evolutionary aesthetics of his early works. My own examination of Allen’s publications from the late 1870s and the early 1880s puts greater emphasis on the connections between Allen’s aesthetics and Darwinian botany, and while I concur with Cowie’s general assessment of Allen’s opposition to Ruskin, I find his treatment of Ruskin problematic. 4. R. Steven Turner, In the Eye’s Mind: Vision and the Helmholtz-Hering Controversy (Princeton University Press, 1994);Timothy Lenoir (“The Eye as Mathematician: Clinical Practice, Instrumentation, and Helmholtz’s Construction of an Empiricist Theory of Vision”), Richard L. Kremer (“Innovation through Synthesis: Helmholtz and Color Research”), Stephan Vogel (“Sensation of Tone, Perception of Sound, and Empiricism: Helmholtz’s Physiological Acoustics”), and Gary Hatfield (“Helmholtz and Classicism: The Science of Aesthetics and the Aesthetics of Science”), in Hermann von Helmholtz and the Foundations of Nineteenth-Century Science, ed. D. Cahan (University of California Press, 1994); Nicolas Wade, A Natural History of Vision (MIT Press, 1998). 5. Charles Darwin, “The Origin of Species” by Charles Darwin: A Variorum Text, ed. M. Peckham (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959), pp. 373–374. 6. James Sully, review of Grant Allen, The Colour-Sense: Its Origin and Development, Mind 4 (1879), p. 417. 7. Lubbock’s popular expositions of his work appeared in British Wildflowers Considered in Relation to Insects (Macmillan, 1874) and Ants, Bees, and Wasps: A Record of Observations on the Habits of the Social Hymenoptera (Kegan Paul, 1882), the latter reviewed by Allen in Academy 22 (1882), p. 51. See also J. F. M. Clark, “ ‘The Ants Were Duly Visited’: Making Sense of John Lubbock, Scientific Naturalism, and the Senses of Social Insects,” British Journal for the History of Science 30 (1997): 151–176. 8. On popularization as a process of knowledge-making rather than the passive diffusion of specialist research, see Roger Cooter and Stephen Pumphrey, “Separate Spheres and Public Places: Reflections on the History of Science Popularization and Science

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in Popular Culture,” History of Science 32 (1994): 237–267; Stephen Hilgartner, “The Dominant View of Popularization: Conceptual Problems, Political Uses,” Social Studies of Science 20 (1990): 519–539; Richard Whitley, “Knowledge Producers and Knowledge Acquirers: Popularisation as a Relation between Scientific Fields and Their Publics,” in Expository Science: Forms and Functions of Popularisation, ed. T. Shinn and R. Whitley (Reidel, 1985). 9. Bernard Lightman, “ ‘The Voices of Nature’: Popularizing Victorian Science,” in Victorian Science in Context, ed. B. Lightman (University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 190. 10. Bernard Lightman, “The Story of Nature: Victorian Popularizers and Scientific Narrative,” Victorian Review 25 (2000). On “the narrative of natural history,” see Greg Myers, Writing Biology: Texts in the Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge (University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), pp. 142–143; Barbara T. Gates and Ann B. Shteir, introduction to Natural Eloquence:Women Reinscribe Science (University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), pp. 11–12. 11. “Pleased with a Feather” (Cornhill Magazine 39, 1879: 712–722) and “An English Weed” (Cornhill Magazine 45, 1882: 542–554) are two overt examples of Allen’s lay sermons. On Huxley’s use of religious language for secular ends, see James Paradis, T. H. Huxley: Man’s Place in Nature (University of Nebraska Press, 1978). 12. Grant Allen, review of Freaks and Marvels of Plant Life, by M. C. Cooke, Academy 21 (1882): 85–86. J. E. Taylor authored both Flowers: Their Origin, Shapes, Perfumes, and Colours (Bogue, 1878), which reached a third edition in 1885, and The Sagacity and Morality of Plants (Chatto and Windus, 1884). 13. See, e.g., J. G[erard]., “The Theorist at Large,” Month: A Catholic Magazine 64 (1888): 346–363. 14. Grant Allen, “Our Debt to Insects,” Gentleman’s Magazine 256 (1884), pp. 452, 465. 15. George J. Romanes, “Physiological Aesthetics,” Nature 16 (1877): 98–100; James Sully, review of Physiological Aesthetics, by Grant Allen, Mind 2 (1877): 387–392; [William James], “Allen’s Physiological Aesthetics,” Nation 25 (1877): 185–186. 16. W. E. Gladstone, “The Colour-Sense,” Nineteenth Century 2 (1877): 366–388. 17. Grant Allen, The Colour-Sense: Its Origin and Development (Houghton, 1879), p. vii. 18. A. J. Meadows, “Access to the Results of Scientific Research: Developments in Victorian Britain,” in The Development of Science Publishing in Europe, ed. A. Meadows (Elsevier, 1980), p. 58. Alvar Ellegård, in Darwin and the General Reader: The Reception of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in the British Periodical Press, 1859–1872 (1958; reprint, with a foreword by David Hull, University of Chicago Press, 1990), discusses the response in the periodical press to Darwin’s account of the human aesthetic sense in The Descent of Man only briefly, but he notes that it was generally resisted for reasons similar to those advanced in rejections of Darwin’s account of human mental and moral powers (329).

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19. Ed Block Jr., “Evolutionist Psychology and Aesthetics: The Cornhill Magazine, 1875–1880,” Journal of the History of Ideas 45 (1984): 465–475. See also Clodd, Grant Allen, pp. 65–66. 20. “The Cornhill Magazine, 1860–1900,” Macmillan’s Magazine, 1859–1900,” and “Longman’s Magazine, 1882–1900,” in The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824–1900, ed. W. Houghton et al. (University of Toronto Press, 1966–1989), vol. 1, pp. 321–324, 554–556; vol. 4, pp. 430–437; Roy MacLeod, “Macmillan and the Scientists,” Nature 224 (1969): 428–430. 21. Grant Allen, The Evolutionist at Large (Fitzgerald, 1881), p. 1. The passage from the preface to Vignettes from Nature is quoted in Peter Morton, “Grant Allen (1849–1899): An Annotated Bibliography” (www.flinders.edu). 22. Allen, Evolutionist at Large, pp. 36–37, 46–47. 23. Alfred R.Wallace, review of Vignettes from Nature, by Grant Allen, Nature 25 (1882), p. 381. 24. Edward B. Aveling, “A Review of Scientific Progress in 1881,” National Reformer 39 (1882), p. 55. Aveling put Allen’s book in the company of works by Darwin,Wallace, and E. B. Tylor. 25. J. W. Robertson Scott, The Story of “The Pall Mall Gazette” (Oxford University Press, 1950), pp. 133–147, 235–242, 252–258. 26. Based on Ellegård’s statistics in Appendix II of Darwin and the General Reader, the Pall Mall offered limited discussion of Darwinism between 1865 and 1872, and while its attitude to evolution was generally quite favorable, it was much cooler to Darwin’s application of natural selection to humans. 27. Allen to Darwin, February 2, 1879, Darwin Papers, Cambridge University Library, DAR 159A. 43. Quoted with permission of the Syndics of the Cambridge University Library. 28. See Grant Allen, The Colours of Flowers (Macmillan, 1882), p. v; Allen to Darwin, March 13 [1878], March 19 [1978], and February 21 [1879], Darwin Papers, Cambridge University Library, DAR 159A. 41, 42, 44; Darwin to Allen, undated and January 2, 1882, Dittrick Medical History Center, Case Western Reserve University. Only parts of the letters from Darwin are quoted in Clodd, Grant Allen. 29. Wallace, review of Vignettes from Nature, p. 381. 30. Ruth Barton, “Just before Nature: The Purpose of Science and the Purpose of Popularization in Some English Popular Science Journals of the 1860s,” Annals of Science 55 (1998): 1–33; Bernard Lightman, “ ‘Knowledge’ Confronts ‘Nature’: Richard Proctor and Popular Science Periodicals” (paper presented at the Science in the NineteenthCentury Periodical Conference, Leeds, April 2000); David A. Roos, “The ‘Aims and Intentions’ of Nature,” in Victorian Science and Victorian Values: Literary Perspectives, ed. J. Paradis and T. Postlewait (New York Academy of Sciences, 1981).

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31. Allen’s application to plants of the word ‘pedigree’, commonly associated with aristocrats and purebred animals, is playful, for the book provides common English plants like the daisy, wild strawberry, and cuckoo-pint with an evolutionary heritage that frequently emphasizes the importance of cross-fertilization and the role of insects in securing it. 32. [George Croom Robertson], “Prefatory Words,” Mind 1 (1876): 1, 3–4; W. R. Sorley, “Fifty Years of Mind,” Mind 35 (1926): 409–412. Croom Robertson may be hinting at his sense of Mind’s relationship to Nature in the following passage from his “Prefatory Words” (p. 4): “Whatever place may be claimed for [psychology] among the sciences in respect of its method, psychology in respect of its subject must stand for ever apart. Include Mind, as it may possibly be included, in the widest conception of Nature, and it is like one half of the whole facing all the rest. Oppose it, as more commonly it is opposed, to Nature, and again Mind is nothing less than one half of all that exists; nay, in a most serious sense, it extends to all that exists, because that which we call Nature, in all its aspects and all its departments, must have an expression in terms of thought or subjective experience.” 33. Allen, The Colour-Sense, p. vii. 34. Grant Allen, “Mr. Sully on ‘Physiological Aesthetics,’ ” Mind 2 (1877): 574–578. 35. On the importance of religion to Ruskin’s thought throughout his career, see Michael Wheeler, Ruskin’s God (Cambridge University Press, 1999). 36. John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. Cooke and A. Wedderburn (Allen, 1903–1912), vol. 4, p. 35. Subsequent references to Ruskin’s writings are from this edition and will be cited in the text. 37. Allen, Physiological Aesthetics, vii–viii. For the somewhat later and rather different form of physiological aesthetics developed by Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), see Barbara T. Gates, Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the Living World (University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 181–187. 38. Grant Allen, “Aesthetic Evolution in Man,” Mind 5 (1880), p. 446. 39. Allen, “Dissecting a Daisy,” p. 75. 40. See Patricia Ball, The Science of Aspects: The Changing Role of Fact in the Work of Coleridge, Ruskin, and Hopkins (Athlone, 1971); Dinah Birch, “Ruskin and the Science of Proserpina,” in New Approaches to Ruskin, ed. R. Hewison (Routledge, 1982); Birch, Ruskin’s Myths (Clarendon, 1988); Raymond E. Fitch, The Poison Sky: Myth and Apocalypse in Ruskin (Ohio University Press, 1982); Anthony Lacy Gully,“Sermons in Stone: Ruskin and Geology,” in John Ruskin and the Victorian Eye (Harry N. Abrams, 1993); Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder (Harvard University Press, 1982); Robert Hewison, John Ruskin: The Argument of the Eye (Princeton University Press, 1976); Frederick Kirchoff, “A Science against Sciences: Ruskin’s Floral Mythology,” in Nature and the Victorian Imagination, ed. U. Knoepflmacher and G. Tennyson (University of California Press, 1977); Paul L. Sawyer, Ruskin’s Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works (Cornell University Press, 1985); Sawyer,“Ruskin and Tyndall:

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The Poetry of Matter and the Poetry of Spirit,” Victorian Science and Victorian Values: Literary Perspectives; Beverly Seaton, “Considering the Lillies: Ruskin’s ‘Proserpina’ and Other Victorian Flower Books,” Victorian Studies 28 (1984–85): 255–282; Jonathan Smith, “Ruskin’s ‘Analysis of Natural and Pictorial Forms,’ ” in Fact and Feeling: Baconian Science and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (University of Wisconsin Press, 1994). 41. Tim Hilton, John Ruskin:The Later Years (Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 310–311. 42. Grant Allen, “The Origin of Fruits,” Cornhill Magazine 38 (1878), p. 175. 43. Allen, “The Origin of Fruits,” p. 188. 44. Hilton, Ruskin, p. 406.

13 The Butler-Darwin Biographical Controversy in the Victorian Periodical Press James G. Paradis

The Battle of the Biographies

The 1879–1882 controversy between Samuel Butler and Charles Darwin over Erasmus Darwin, a two-part biography written by Darwin and Ernst Krause, revealed a widening gap between the public critic and the midVictorian specialist. Sparked by reviews and letters in the periodical press, this bitter contest between Butler, a broad critic and satirist grounded in the humanistic tradition, and Darwin, the most eminent evolutionist of the age, was, on the surface, personally charged and one-sided. Whereas Butler aired his complaint in the periodical press and strove to pull Darwin into a public confrontation, Darwin mobilized an impressive network of distinguished supporters to speak on his behalf and to discredit Butler’s charges by refusing to enter into a public dialogue. The two biographical works at the center of the controversy were Butler’s Evolution, Old and New; or the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck, as Compared with That of Mr. Charles Darwin and Ernst Krause’s Erasmus Darwin, published respectively in May and November of 1879.1 These volumes offered competing interpretations of the work of Darwin’s grandfather and the history of biological thinking. Butler’s volume had promoted the mechanisms of hereditary change outlined in the writings of Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1772–1844) as alternatives to Charles Darwin’s concept of fortuitous variation. In Erasmus Darwin—a volume Darwin had commissioned, financially supported, and helped to write—Krause challenged this Lamarckism. In a prefatory note, Darwin had insisted that the Krause sketch was an accurate translation of an article that had appeared in the February 1879 issue of the German periodical Kosmos. The English translation, which appeared in November, unaccountably read as if its author was responding critically to Butler’s May volume. This opposition was epitomized by a witty envoi that ridiculed an unnamed reviver of Erasmus Darwin’s work for showing “a weakness of thought and mental anachronism which no one can

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envy”—an observation that, though not wholly unmerited, misrepresented Butler’s Lamarckism.2 Reviews of the two biographical works in early January 1880 in the pro-Darwin Popular Science Review drew attention to the fact that the Krause and Darwin volume was, among other things, an attack on Butler’s views on evolution and repeated Krause’s lines about Butler’s anachronistic mind, naming Butler as the target of Krause’s jibe. If Erasmus Darwin was the faithful translation, as Darwin had guaranteed, of an article published in February, Butler asked, how could his own as then unpublished volume be the target of Krause’s ridicule? An exchange of letters drew Darwin’s unsatisfactory reply that he had regrettably omitted to mention that Krause had expanded his sketch before Dallas had translated it. The Krause project, Butler concluded, was arranged by Darwin as an attack on his public credibility by a supposedly neutral party. Butler turned to the forum of the Athenaeum, the leading literary review of the day, charging Darwin with misrepresentations that amounted to an attack on him. Darwin pondered, fretted, wrote trial responses, but was unable to work out a satisfactory answer to Butler, and, with his very extensive scientific circle closed in ranks around him, chose to remain silent, leaving the issue unresolved. Maintaining the silence, however, required nearly as much effort on Darwin’s part as seeking publicity in the periodical press required on Butler’s. Though it is tempting to dismiss the contest as Butler’s exaggerated response to Darwin’s innocent footnote error, or even as Butler’s distastefully cynical quest for notoriety, such an approach fails to consider the deeper intellectual and cultural origins of the encounter.3 The conflict, for example, had intellectual roots in the ongoing debate over natural selection and the growing awareness among mid-Victorian naturalists of the history of evolutionary thought.4 Butler’s efforts in Life and Habit (1877) to complement natural selection with a set of Lamarckian arguments were offered in a spirit of criticism that could only have seemed unprofessional and crudely speculative to Darwin. His bid in Evolution, Old and New (1879) to fashion a historical framework in which to credit the contributions of early evolutionists to evolutionary thought conflicted with Darwin’s views on natural history methodology, as well as his desire to establish, at the end of his career, a biographical context for his own intellectual development. These differences between Butler and Darwin, however, lay submerged for the most part in books, and neither writer seems even remotely to have anticipated an outright public controversy. It was the periodical press and the public attention of reviews and letters

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that turned the differences between Butler and Darwin into a contest over the image of science and the legitimacy of the broad commentator’s engagement of science. Evolutionary Free Thinker

Butler began his long and controversial career of evolutionary commentary as a cultural critic and satirist, positioned between religious and scientific authority and the middle-class reading public. Converted to evolutionism by Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1860, he wrote his first pieces about evolution for the colonial press. After graduating from Cambridge with a classics degree, he had emigrated in 1859 to New Zealand, where he had parceled together a large sheep station of some sixty thousand acres and settled into a life of sheep breeding and general farm husbandry— subjects on which Darwin had launched the first chapter of The Origin of Species. One of his closest friends, Julius von Haast, was the provincial geologist of Canterbury and a strong advocate of Darwin’s work. Haast made Butler’s cottage and vast station on the Upper Rangitata his field headquarters in the New Zealand summer and fall months of 1861. Butler’s “Darwin on the Origin of Species: a Dialogue” appeared in December 1862 in the Christchurch Press as a succinct catechism that adapted the local phraseology of the sheep run to Darwin’s evolutionary terminology to illustrate the key points of Malthusian birth ratios, variation, competition, and selection as the basis for the divergence of forms over millions of years.5 Darwin was so struck by the “clear and accurate view of [his] theory,” when the article was sent to him anonymously, that he sought to have it re-published in England.6 Butler’s amusing, disarmingly simple dialogue between two upcountry sheep farmers was but the first of a series of increasingly speculative and ironic adaptations of Darwin’s terms to a pseudo-specialized language of teleological speculation. Other more ironical pieces, such as “Darwin among the Machines,” “The Mechanical Creation,” and “Lucubratio Ebria” had all wryly extended Darwin’s evolutionary arguments to machines through the simple analogy (patent in Paley’s Natural Theology) of organisms with mechanical devices.7 For example, in “Lucubratio Ebria” Butler argued that humans were evolving by incorporating with machines: Good apes begot good apes, and at last when human intelligence stole like a late spring upon the mimicry of our semi-simious ancestry, the creature learnt how he could of his own forethought add

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extra-corporaneous limbs to the members of his own body, and become not only a vertebrate mammal, but a vertebrate machinate mammal into the bargain.8

These articles on evolution mimicked the speculations of a latter-day natural theologian in the persona of mad Swiftian speculator, fascinated with the arguments of evolutionary selection and the seemingly endless naturalistic irony they generated within the conventions of Victorian religious, social, and intellectual culture. They were part of the broadly based movement Ellegård has traced to writers using the periodical press of the 1860s to consolidate the content of evolution and consider its wider implications.9 Butler’s early evolutionary articles were motivated by a self-styled secularism, the seeds of which he had taken to the colonies from his months during the summer of 1858 as a lay assistant to the rector of St. James’s Parish in Piccadilly. He was exposed to Victorian free thinking, to judge by his autobiographical novel, among the working classes of Regent Street and Piccadilly near his rooming house on Heddon Street, the Ashpit Place of The Way of All Flesh. He was also a frequent visitor to the London house of his wealthy Unitarian uncle, Philip Worsley, with whose son, Reggie, he shared a growing skepticism.10 His open questioning of religious authority and the inconsistencies of the Gospels earned him the reputation among the settlers of Canterbury Settlement of a “free thinker.”11 By the fall of 1864, he had completed his secularist pamphlet, “The Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ . . . ,” which reasoned from the inconsistencies of the Gospels that Christ had swooned but not actually died on the cross.12 Privately printed the February after he returned to London, this study was no doubt intended for street circulation. In July and August, Butler published both “The Mechanical Creation” and an initialed letter, “Precaution in Free Thought,” in George Jacob Holyoake’s The Reasoner and Secular World. In the latter, he warned that “those who have by patient thought emancipated themselves from a belief in that semitransparent, colossally gaseous, anthropomorphic existence which men mis-name Jehovah” should avoid sanctimony and the liability of becoming “spoiled Christian[s]” rather than “good Freethinker[s].”13 Freethinker remained one of the few labels he claimed for himself at the height of his evolutionary speculation and controversy with Darwin in 1882.14 In the satire of Butler’s Erewhon (1872), the culmination of all these early journalistic efforts, secularism and evolutionism found their most potent and brilliant Victorian accommodation. From the scorching

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anti-clericalism of the Musical Banks to the whimsical naturalism of the Erewhonian eugenics courts, and the exuberant theorizing on the evolutionary advance of machines, Erewhon, like Voltaire’s Candide, offered a generalized satire for the times. The target was the empty convention and orthodoxy that in Butler’s eyes increasingly gripped the lives of his contemporaries. Erewhonians, like so many sheep, shrank into their comforting, protective Ydgrunite conventionalism where mediocrity kept one safely within the mob. Like T. H. Huxley, who used naturalistic language ironically in Lay Sermons (1870) to satirize the orthodoxies of religious forms, Butler used it in the many voices of Erewhon—judges, Ydgrunites, professors of unreason—to satirize not only religious, social and intellectual orthodoxy, but also scientific orthodoxy, including the very scientific language and forms he was imitating. The evolutionary tropes that so permeated Erewhon both imitated the patient, earnest language of Darwin’s natural history for comic effect and converted its forms into the freethinking instruments of a secularizing cultural criticism. Up to the publication of Erewhon in late March 1872, Butler and Darwin had maintained a distant but respectful acquaintance, exchanging the occasional letter, Darwin praising the stylistic force of Butler’s “Evidences,” and Butler expressing his gratitude for the intellectual doors he felt Darwin’s Origin of Species had opened.15 When Erewhon appeared, however, Butler wrote a nervous, apologetic letter to Darwin, regretting that critics had interpreted the volume as a satire on The Origin of Species and restating his admiration for Darwin’s work and his conviction that Darwin’s position was “unshakable.”16 Darwin’s interest was sufficiently piqued to invite Butler to Down in early May, and, later that year in November, Butler returned as a guest of Francis Darwin. Butler and Darwin, however, had nothing in common intellectually and were not at ease with one another.17 In The Fair Haven (1873), from which he read in manuscript during his second visit to Down, Butler used the quest of an earnest religious seeker as an occasion to rehearse in convincing detail a broad sampling of secularist anti-theistic arguments. This satire on religious credulity secured Butler’s reputation as a brilliant but dangerous satirist, willing to toy with the convictions of his audience. Again, Darwin wrote cordially, commending Butler for his dramatic power and recommending that he try his hand at fiction. With Life and Habit (1877) and Evolution, Old and New (1879), Butler attempted to shift from the destructive critical stance of the satirist to a more constructive critical platform of the general commentator on evolution. Subtitled An Essay after a Completer View of Evolution, Butler’s Life

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and Habit sought to offer a set of ideas complementary to natural selection. Although the book was filled with rambling digressions, its quirky discussions of biological identity, variation, and hereditary transmission were thought provoking and called attention to shortcomings in natural selection theory, as well as a certain stiffness and rigidity in scientific discourse.The central proposition was that the repeated actions of organisms, responding to their needs, were internalized as habits. These habits were supposed by Butler to translate through some unspecified mechanism into heritable anatomical and psychological structures—limbs and instincts.The idea originated in Erewhon in the notion that man, the “vertebrate machinate mammal,” manufactured organs and limbs for his own evolutionary advantage.18 Using material on instinct from works by William Carpenter, Theodule Ribot, St. George Mivart, and Darwin, Butler extended this idea to organisms in general. Although most of Life and Habit was written before Edward Clodd introduced Butler to Mivart’s Genesis of Species (1870) in October 1877, Mivart’s critique of Darwin’s Origin of Species had an immense influence on Butler. It not only awakened him to the problems of fortuitous variation and the explanatory limits of natural selection, but Mivart’s determined tone of opposition to the scientific hierarchy demonstrated that the highest authorities were open to criticism.19 Reading Mivart with the sixth edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species at hand, Butler discovered a discussion of Lamarck’s purpose-driven program of evolution.20 The problem of fortuitous variation, Butler concluded, could be solved with a teleology based on the Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics: “Given the motive power which Lamarck suggested, and Mr. Darwin’s mechanism would appear (with the help of memory . . . and hence of inherited habit, and of the vanishing tendency of consciousness) to work with perfect ease.”21 Hence, unlike most of the criticism, including Mivart’s, aimed at The Origin of Species and natural selection, Butler’s was motivated by secular rather than theistic principles, replacing the teleological program of the natural theologian with Lamarckian self-fashioning.22 If Life and Habit was intended as a general critical commentary on evolution, Butler’s humorous irony never lurked far beneath its surface. The more sober prose discussion was continually interrupted by a series of satirical digressions on scientists and scientific theory making. For example, picking up Darwin’s discussion in The Origin of Species of hybridism and the failure of nearly 500 eggs in an experiment of crossbreeding, Butler attributed the loss to a clash between the memories inherited from the parent organisms. He then gravely warned that the Society

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for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals might have to intervene: “Five hundred creatures puzzled to death is not a pleasant subject for contemplation.”23 Butler’s digressions thus played in counterpoint with the decorum of specialized language, reverting to a demotic language of jokes and witty asides. Elsewhere, he warned of an emergent priesthood of experts whose ideas were highly rigid and outside the reach of common discourse. A reader familiar with Erewhon and The Fair Haven might reasonably take Life and Habit as another of Butler’s mock-serious performances, a satire on scientific—especially Darwinian—theory making. Life and Habit thus managed to impress and baffle reviewers like Alfred Wallace and Hermann Mueller, who discussed it seriously and quite generously, yet with less than full confidence in Butler’s intentions.Wallace, in a long review in Nature in June 1879, argued that Butler had made a valuable contribution to Darwin’s work. He found the book possessed of “scientific imagination and logical consistency to a degree rarely found among scientific men”; yet, “so full of strange fancies and witty conceits, so as to have led some readers to look upon the whole as an elaborate jest.”24 With Evolution, Old and New, Butler proposed to build a historical defense for the argument that organs are “living tools,” invented through cunning by the self-designed organism.25 In effect, he undertook to use a historical approach to biological thought to defeat the Darwinian method. Adopting the publishing strategies of the popular Naturalist’s Library series, he gathered together extended excerpts from the neglected memoirs and works of figures like Georges Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and Jean Baptiste Lamarck, with extensive translations of his own from Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle and Lamarck’s Philosophie Zoologique. In a running interpretive commentary on the miscellany entries, he attempted to show how evolutionary discussion had tended toward the conclusions of Lamarck, whose views he offered as the culmination of natural history thinking. He offered a Lamarckian critique of the idea of design in Paley’s Natural Theology, reprinted and offered a Lamarckian interpretation of Patrick Matthew’s 1831 statement on the struggle for existence, and revisited St. George Mivart’s discussions of the explanatory limits of Charles Darwin’s natural selection.This shifting of the center of evolutionary discussion from the work of Darwin to a lengthy tradition of prior speculation sought to diminish the force of Darwin’s views by shifting the authority over evolutionary argument from the specialized context of professional institutions to a historical framework governed by public discourse. Once again, Butler’s move was highly suggestive and surprising, if problematic. “He has

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prepared a perfect tour de force in his particular line,” Grant Allen wrote anonymously in the Examiner, “by writing a strikingly original book almost entirely with a pair of scissors.”26 Evolution, Old and New continued Butler’s protest against the “professional and orthodox scientist” and the “new orthodoxy which is clamouring for endowment, and which would step into the Pope’s shoes to-morrow, if we would only let it.”27 It was Darwin, the most illustrious naturalist of the age, who Butler singled out as the symbol of this increasingly inaccessible orthodoxy. Now focused on Darwin, Butler’s secularism led to misreadings that distorted Darwin’s work. As the “Lamarck book” took shape, the older naturalists seemed to be “discredit[ing]” Darwin, Butler remarked to his confidant, Eliza Savage. The lightness and sense of humor of Life and Habit vanished as its successor volume preoccupied itself with the theme of Darwin the obscurantist, manipulator of language, and “loophole” maker, who left behind an “inextricable tangle of confusion and contradiction.”28 Butler exaggerated Darwin’s claims for natural selection, read “descent with modification” as identical with Buffon’s “degeneration,” and derived “the struggle for existence” and “survival of the fittest” from the work of Erasmus Darwin. He found numerous conclusions in Lamarck that whiggishly anticipated the arguments of The Origin of Species, without recognizing or admitting that his own translations had put Darwin’s language into the mouth of Lamarck.29 Although he acknowledged Darwin’s higher standards of methodology and proof, he treated these as so much follow up to the higher originality of earlier natural historians. Then, after using Darwin’s language to inflate the achievements of pre-Darwinian evolutionary thinkers, he concluded that Darwin had hidden his considerable debt to these same more original evolutionary thinkers—including his own illustrious ancestor, Erasmus Darwin, one of the heroes of Evolution, Old and New. Although mixed, the many reviews of Butler’s volume—more than twenty between May 1879 and January 1880—considerably amplified his voice as a critic of Darwin and natural selection. In a second, signed, review in the Academy, Grant Allen approached Butler more skeptically as a pure ironist “who treats us to a dazzling flood of epigram, invective, and what appears to be argument; and finally leaves us without a single clear idea of what it has all been driving at.”30 Wallace, in his four-and-ahalf-thousand word review in Nature, welcomed Butler’s new historicism, crediting him with filling in a history “almost unknown to the present

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generation of Naturalists,” and “giving altogether a fair idea of the progress of modern thought on this important subject.”31 Yet, Butler’s Lamarckism was a disaster—”radically deficient,” full of errors and misreadings of Darwin’s work and petty quibbles over Darwin’s wording. Moreover, Wallace noted, the conflicts between Lamarck and Darwin were not nearly as severe as Butler was insisting. In the Athenaeum, the psychologist James Ward anonymously credited Butler with raising issues of “surpassing importance” and ushering in a “new phase” in the understanding of Darwinism.32 Not only had Butler shown more accurately and fairly than Haeckel, Huxley, or Darwin himself how advanced previous natural historians had been in their conceptual grasps of evolution, but also his criticism of Darwin’s thought was important for “the appositiveness of the questions it raises as to the difficulties and lacunae in the current form of the theory of evolution.” The reviews of Butler’s commentaries—some forty for the two volumes in under two years—all enormously increased Butler’s visibility as a broad critic and humorous commentator on evolution. Yet, Butler’s critique was also precipitating a crisis of interpretation in that it sought to apply the historical and critical methodologies of the humanist to intervene in the conduct of normal science. As Butler moved from his early experiments in periodicals at co-opting scientific discourse, through satirical appropriation of natural history topics for the satire of Erewhon, toward the revisionist criticism of Life and Habit and Evolution, Old and New, we see a mid-century secularist, grounded in the humanistic tradition, using satire and the publicity of periodical reviews to attempt to force science into a social and historical arena for public scrutiny and debate. But scientific thought could not, in the end, be adequately or competently negotiated in the public sphere of popular reviews or, even, in the higher criticism of the cultural critic. Underlying Butler’s populism was the selfstyled agenda of a satirist who had, in some sense, stumbled upon the enormous intellectual orthodoxy—terminological, methodological, and institutional—essential to the advancement of normal science. For Butler, this formalism led to the sense that contemporary science was becoming remote, unresponsive, and even priestly. Butler’s freethinking evolutionism thus arrived at an impasse with the very scientific forms that inspired it. His satire received a cold reception among men of science, where the hard-earned gains of the specialist had only recently been consolidated. With the notable exception of Wallace, the scientific community, including Darwin, invariably took his criticisms as ridicule.

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Darwin among the Biographers

At the very time that Butler had announced his plans to publish Evolution, Old and New, Darwin had begun collaborating with a German philologist on a project that was in many ways a rival to Butler’s—a family authorized biography of Erasmus Darwin. The kernel of the project was the translation, commissioned by Darwin, of a sketch titled “Erasmus Darwin, the Grandfather and Forerunner [Vorkampfer] of Charles Darwin: A Contribution to the Descent Theory,” published by Dr. Ernst Kraus in the February 1879 number of the German periodical Kosmos. The translator, W. S. Dallas, had already translated a German Darwinismus work for Darwin in his effort to boost the standing of natural selection.33 At 70, Darwin was keenly aware of his limited time and his status as a representative man of science, and had written a draft of his Autobiography.34 In piecing together the family history, he had read Anna Seward’s Memoirs of the Life of Dr. Darwin (1804), and, like many of the Darwins, was offended by her racy narrative, which revealed a brilliant and generous but frequently self-absorbed and insensitive autocrat. The collaboration, Darwin told Francis Galton, was an opportunity to correct Seward’s “calumnies.”35 The new biography, then, was partly an effort to reconstruct the Darwin family image, motivated by Darwin’s Galtonian view of biography as an opportunity “to show to what extent a man inherits and transmits his characteristic qualities.”36 This was an opportunity to project the family past and the history of evolutionary thought into the public realm. Krause, whose deferential correspondence showed complete dedication to Darwin, was also a strong defender of natural selection, and so it was reasonable to expect he would be easy to work with—especially with Dallas at the translation helm and John Murray ready to publish. A new volume about Dr. Darwin was also an opportunity to establish, in more detail than the historical sketch of his Origin of Species had been able to do, his grandfather’s evolutionary ideas and provide an authorized version of how the elder naturalist’s evolutionary speculations could be linked to—and differentiated from—his own. From the start, Darwin viewed Krause as an allyin-biography and wasted no time in warning him not to trust Seward’s Memoir, which was a “wretched account,” “full of inaccuracies,” “malignant,” and announcing his intention to publish a short preface to Krause’s account that would correct the record.37 There is little evidence to support Butler’s suspicion that Darwin undertook the joint project in response to the announcement of the

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forthcoming Evolution, Old and New.38 Still, the Examiner announcement of February 22 preceded Darwin’s March 9 proposal to Krause by two weeks. The promise that Butler’s new volume would compare the work of the older and younger Darwins, given Butler’s recent performance in Life and Habit, would almost certainly have attracted attention in the extensive Darwin circle. Darwin knew a good deal about Butler’s work, including Erewhon and The Fair Haven, of which he thought highly. He could hardly have been unaware that Life and Habit had been widely and quite favorably reviewed. Butler was a friend of Francis Darwin and had written him a startling letter at the end of November 1877, confessing his regret that the soon-to-appear Life and Habit had, under the influence of Mivart’s Genesis of Species, become “a downright attack upon your father’s view of evolution.”39 Mueller and Wallace had written enthusiastically about the book. Wallace’s review in Nature at the end of March 1879 had linked Butler to the German school of physiology, especially Haeckel, in attributing “psychic properties of sensitiveness (sensation) and movability (volition)” to protoplasm.40 In the estimation of Wallace, Butler and Darwin’s “theories” were in some sense on a par and were “in great part complementary to each other.” Such a generous endorsement by Darwin’s fellow natural selectionist of a scientific neophyte, especially one promoting the ideas of Lamarck, would not likely have escaped Darwin’s attention. When Evolution, Old and New appeared in early May, just a month and a half into the project, Darwin, uncertain how Krause would respond to the volume’s exuberant evolutionism, began cautioning him about Butler in strong terms. Krause and Dallas wrote independently to ask if Darwin wished to continue, since Butler’s lengthy sections on Erasmus Darwin had anticipated them. Darwin redoubled his commitment to the project. Butler, he wrote to Krause, though “a very clever man, knows nothing about science & throws everything into ridicule. He hates scientific men.”41 He continued: “Even if we grant memory and the power of wishing to cells, & this is an enormous admission, I do not see how cells are to modify themselves chemically & structurally either by wishing or remembering.” He wrote again in early June to send Krause a review, which he suggested Krause might “like to see & then burn,” and to caution him in battle metaphor “not to expend much powder and shot on Mr. Butler, for he really is not worthy of it.”42 The review for which Krause thanked Darwin profusely was Frederick Pollock’s scathing attack on Evolution, Old and New in the Saturday Review the previous week, which had begun by observing that Butler had spent fewer weeks

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than Darwin had years in the study of natural history. The review went on to demolish Butler’s efforts “to reconcile evolution and teleology at the expense of Natural Selection” and made a trenchant, scornful attack on Butler’s evolutionary views, which Krause promised to pass on to Herman Mueller “in order to cure him of his enthusiasm for Butler.”43 The battle metaphor of Darwin’s letter suggests that Darwin intended by proxy of Pollock to furnish Krause with a line of attack on Butler’s work. As the Darwin-Krause collaboration progressed through the summer, Darwin found it necessary to exert increasing control over content. He had clearly overestimated Krause, whose writing was duplicating his own part of the volume and, worse, was derivative of Seward’s. Reading over the translation he had received from Dallas in early August, Darwin wrote to ask Krause to cut “a large part” of his article. Anticipating the reviews, Darwin warned: “An English critic would say that your account of the life . . . was merely a condensation of Miss Seward’s Memoirs. Secondly, your history of the progress of evolution . . . is quite out of its proper place in a short life of Dr. Darwin.”44 That Krause had undertaken a new history of evolution suggests he had Evolution, Old and New firmly in mind. Unsatisfied with Krause’s repetitions and evolutionary history, Darwin insisted on extensive, specific cuts and threatened to publish privately if Krause did not agree. When it appeared in November, containing Darwin’s new biographical material, Erasmus Darwin immediately became the authoritative account of Dr. Darwin’s life and work. The Reviews were favorable and widely acknowledged Darwin’s Preliminary Notice to be well written, thoughtful, and even delightful. Darwin had added much new material, gathered from the family archives. Reflecting the habits of a long life in natural history, he traced the descent lines of various key family members and followed the passage of various characteristics—physical, mental, and moral—from Erasmus on down. It was biography worked out in the familiar Darwinian pattern of generalization followed by evidence. Darwin offered stanzas from Dr. Darwin’s poems and letters with correspondents to demonstrate his moral outlook: his temperance, opposition to slavery, charity, affectionate nature, freedom from vanity, and, even, his “[belief ] in God as the Creator of the universe.”45 He took up the many “calumnies” of Anna Seward, one by one, and offered evidence—more letters, more quotations—to refute them. These efforts to remake his grandfather’s robust Enlightenment reputation into something more acceptable to a

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Victorian audience showed Darwin struggling defensively with a sense of shame that burdened and disrupted his narrative.46 The reviews were warm and sympathetic. As the Pall Mall Gazette reviewer noted, the Darwin family had proved to be “a stronger example of hereditary genius than we already knew it to be.” Krause pursued a philological approach based on a variety of published works in the history of evolutionary thought. He was well read, intelligent, and exacting, if pedantic and overweening, and much more knowledgeable in natural history than Butler, whose Lamarckism he steadily opposed. The central themes were the extraordinary intellectual feats in evolutionary thought of the Darwins, and Erasmus Darwin’s many anticipations of Lamarck and Charles Darwin. “Almost every single work of the younger Darwin,” Krause wrote, “may be paralleled by at least a chapter in the works of his ancestor; the mystery of heredity, adaptation, the protective arrangements of animals and plants, sexual selection, insectivorous plants, and the analysis of the emotions and sociological impulses.”47 But, where Butler had used this argument in Evolution, Old and New to reduce Darwin to a footnote on his grandfather, Krause used it to establish the Darwins heroically, almost Biblically, as a grandson’s triumphal intellectual fulfillment of the grandfather’s prophecy. It was Darwin hagiography, pure and simple, composed from the same materials Butler used. Lamarck now became the footnote, one who “only carried out further the ideas of Erasmus Darwin.”48 As favorable reviews made clear, Erasmus Darwin was widely recognized as Charles Darwin’s work. Not only was his “Preliminary” account the longer (by 40 pages), but Darwin far outranked Krause in the public, not to mention professional, eye. Krause was an “appendix” to Darwin, Nature noted. Indeed, as The Athenaeum insisted, the true hero of the new biography was not Erasmus but Charles, with his “more powerful” method. Erasmus Darwin’s rejection by the scientific world, the Pall Mall Gazette reviewer held, was understandable, for he had not truly comprehended the mechanism of natural selection. The Academy observed, “It is the work of Charles, and not of Erasmus, that marks the passage from the dimness of the Middle Ages of scientific thought to the bright light of modern research.”49 Without mentioning Butler, these reviews roundly rejected his position on the Darwins in Evolution, Old and New. If Darwin had intended to counter the attacks of Butler’s volume without personally entering into the debate, he could hardly have fashioned a better instrument than the two-part biography, a fact that was not lost on Butler.

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Silent but Strenuous Controversy

The book reviewing that proliferated in Victorian periodicals became one of the primary means, as Ellegård has noted, by which the public followed developments in evolutionary thinking.50 Reviews in periodicals like the Saturday Review, the Athenaeum, the Academy, Nature, and the Popular Science Review, to name just a few involved in the Butler-Darwin controversy, summarized the content of scientific work, interpreted that content in the wider cultural context, and often evaluated an author’s scientific performance. Reviews circulated far more widely than the books themselves and could enhance or weaken the reception of an idea like natural selection or an author’s public reputation as a scientist or science commentator.Yet, because the estimations of science produced by these reviews were not subject to scientific peer review, they also allowed a wide range of interpretive responses.Through reviews of his work, a freelance evolutionist and critic like Butler, whose thinking developed outside the circles of organized science, could still attain public standing as a contributor to evolutionary thought. The very range of interpretation open to Butler as critic and freelancer, however, could also be seen as undermining an emerging orthodoxy, both popular and professional, that viewed science as a rational, factual discipline.51 By the end of 1879, Butler’s mounting evolutionary criticisms, cooptations, and interventions, all liberally reviewed in the periodical press, had primed the pumps of controversy. Coming as soon as it did after Evolution, Old and New, Krause and Darwin’s Erasmus Darwin gave rise to a body of commentary in the major reviews of December 1879 that counterchecked Butler’s work by supporting natural selection, dismissing Lamarck, and elevating Charles over Erasmus Darwin. Disappointing as these reviews were to Butler, whose revisionist efforts historically to enframe evolution were rebuffed, they were not an occasion for controversy. Despite the reviews, few readers, including Butler, would have imagined that portions of Erasmus Darwin were consciously written in rebuttal of Evolution, Old and New. For all anyone knew, assuming that he had got to the end of Krause’s sketch, the weak-minded, anachronistic revivers of Erasmus Darwin’s ideas were certain German evolutionists. The situation changed quickly, however, when two anonymous reviews in the January Popular Science Review drew attention to Butler’s work as the target of Krause’s sketch. This periodical, edited by Darwin’s translator W. S. Dallas, was a highbrow science review with a distinguished roster of contributors that included G. H. Lewes, P. H. Gosse, and Robert Hunt. Dallas’s decision to yolk reviews of the two

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books together, setting one against the other, created a Darwin-Butler affair. In front of an influential audience of intellectuals that was consistently pro-Darwin, it pitted the most renowned naturalist of the age against a satirist and evolutionary free-lancer with few scientific credentials. If it was decidedly an uneven match, it was also one that Darwin had been keen to avoid. Only an insider like Dallas who knew from the details of the translation process what Krause had intended could have written the reviews. The first review, after praising Darwin’s thoughtful “delineation of his grandfather’s character,” touched on Krause’s account of “the most wonderful resemblances” between the elder and younger Darwins. The trailing review, which was actually quite receptive to Butler’s historical treatment of evolution, opened with Krause’s envoi and identified the weak-minded writer as Butler, author of the book under review.52 As the disparaging comment was broadcast to its audience of science-minded readers, Butler awakened to the fact that he had been targeted by writers whose work Darwin had commissioned. Further investigation showed that Krause had gone to considerable trouble to take positions directly opposed to the main arguments of Evolution, Old and New. He had insisted that there were no grounds for “depreciating” the younger Darwin because of the grandfather’s achievements, used Butler’s thesis that Lamarck “was a Darwinian of the older school” to dismiss Lamarck as a mere extension of Erasmus Darwin, and borrowed a lengthy passage that Butler had translated from Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle.53 In light of the spirit of opposition of Krause’s expanded sketch, Darwin’s note, guaranteeing that it was an accurate translation of a work prior to Butler’s, now seemed deliberately misleading. A letter to Darwin mentioning the Krause passage and asking for an explanation of the apparent “condemn[ation] by anticipation” of Evolution, Old and New received Darwin’s polite but not very forthcoming reply that authors so commonly revised before having their work translated that he had not thought to mention it.54 Darwin ignored the condemnation by anticipation issue, probably on the principle that he could not be held responsible for what Krause had written. Grappling with the textual problems of determining what activities and intentions had led to Erasmus Darwin, Butler was both fascinated and appalled by the anonymity and opposition that seemed to confront him. Behind an anonymous book reviewer, an antedated translation, and an unreachable German savant, Darwin, the living icon of science, stood more untouchable than ever. This was not a target Butler could easily resist, given his preoccupation with authority figures.

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His letter to the Athenaeum ( January 31, 1880), London’s most distinguished literary review, joined the controversy, citing Dallas’s review and stating that Krause’s sketch had borrowed passages from his work and taken a condemnatory approach to its central ideas, all without acknowledgment or engagement of the work. Contrary to Darwin’s guarantee, he wrote, it was “incredible that [Krause] had written without my work before him.”55 The letter was accurate, although Butler had only circumstantial evidence to back his claims. Krause had indeed read Evolution, Old and New as he was writing Erasmus Darwin, and Darwin had written disparagingly and in detail about Butler to Krause, saying that Butler hated scientific men. Darwin had sent Krause Pollock’s attack on Butler’s volume. Although he told Krause not to waste “too much powder and shot” on Butler, these things were hard to control. He had given license to an attack that turned out to be more extensive than he had anticipated, which then had to be reversed by the extensive edits of August 1879. Sarcastically, Butler noted at the end of his letter to the Athenaeum that Darwin “with that ‘happy simplicity’ of which the Pall Mall Gazette declares him to be a master” had failed to respond to the charge that Krause had altered his article “with a view to” attacking Evolution, Old and New. Darwin’s supporters were to repay this sarcasm in kind. For Darwin, who had shunned controversy, being accused of duplicity publicly in the Athenaeum was profoundly disturbing. Worse, as two unsent letters of response proved, he had no simple, acceptable answer for Butler’s charges. He told his daughter, Henrietta, he believed that Butler was accusing him of having written Krause’s survey, which was not the charge, although Butler clearly was insisting that Darwin, who was viewed by everyone as the author of Erasmus Darwin, was somehow responsible for Krause.56 Darwin composed two letters in response to Butler, but each one, he thought, invited further speculations that would be sure to draw new charges from Butler in public. In the first, much longer letter, Darwin noted that Butler was charging him with “intentional duplicity” and gave the text of an original note in the first proof of Erasmus Darwin, stating that Krause had “added largely to his essay.”57 Krause, Darwin explained, had requested that he not mention that the essay had been expanded, and all reference to the fact that the essay had been altered was unintentionally dropped. Another, shorter letter also stated that Krause’s additions were accidentally dropped but added that mention of Krause’s “additions were made quite independently of any suggestion or any wish on my part.”58 Darwin and Butler were at an impasse, for Darwin insisted to the very end that he had merely failed to note that

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Krause had altered his sketch, which was a common enough practice not to merit mention. Butler insisted that in sponsoring Krause and not publicly stating that his work had been altered before translation, Darwin shared responsibility for Krause’s unacknowledged and prejudicial use of Evolution, Old and New to frame the attack and furnish some of the content of his sketch. Neither letter made it past the Litchfields, Henrietta and her lawyer husband Richard, who cautioned that Butler would take the letter as grist for the controversy mill. Legal experience told Litchfield that not one in a thousand would understand Butler’s charges anyway. Consultation with the lawyer and legal scholar Frederick Pollock, Litchfield wrote further, helped to confirm that Butler “was a virulent Salamander of a man,” “a wretched unscrupulous word-fencer,” and a “blackguard” whose character and tone, in effect, disqualified him from an answer. An appeal to Huxley for an objective opinion brought the predictable result: Butler, whom he had thought a gentleman, was a “son of a [female dog],” infected with Mivartian “Darwinophobia,” and deserved to die.59 The Butler-asblackguard approach appealed to Darwin. Relieved, as if delivered from the hangman, Darwin wrote to his collaborators to caution silence. He returned Krause’s response to Butler’s charges, ostensibly asking for a correction, but pointedly advising “not to write to the Athenaeum, because Mr. Butler is quite unscrupulous & he would in answer pick out some passages in your essay and say that they were borrowed from his book.”60 Krause agreed not to reply. Dallas, the instigator of the controversy, wrote back with a sense of relief to say that, since Darwin had chosen not to reply, he, too, would remain silent. The final test of the strategy of silence took place at the end of 1880 when Butler aired the issues of his complaint against Darwin and Krause in Unconscious Memory. After recounting how he came to write his two commentaries on evolution, Butler offered a detailed characterization of Krause’s borrowings and what he thought had occurred. If Darwin had simply noted his oversight in a letter to the Times or the Athenaeum and printed an erratum in the remaining copies of Erasmus Darwin that would have ended the matter, Butler insisted.61 Darwin’s letter, however, defended and continued the reticence that Butler saw as prejudicial to his work. Butler followed with translations of Prof. Ewald Hering’s lecture “On Memory” and a chapter on “The Unconscious in Instinct” from Von Hartman’s Philosophy of the Unconscious that continued his Lamarckian approach to evolution. Butler’s volume sent Darwin into a flurry of activity, with letters to and from Krause on an answer to Butler’s charge, to

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and from the Litchfields on strategy and on eliciting support from Leslie Stephen, and to and from Francis Balfour for translation support. George Romanes, Darwin’s disciple, took up the cudgels in Darwin’s defense. In a withering review in Nature that in tone contrasted greatly with Wallace’s earlier reviews, he inveighed against Butler’s “vile and abusive attack on the personal character of a man in the position of Mr. Darwin” and sarcastically exaggerated Butler’s view of Darwin as a man of “deceit and depravity,” an “arch-hypocrite.”62 The Romanes review expanded on the Krause envoi of disparagement, underscoring the “vanity which has induced so incapable and ill-informed a man gravely to pose before the world as a philosopher” and dismissing all of Butler’s scientific commentary as the musings of “an upstart ignoramus,” even though Romanes would later propound theories highly similar to Butler’s.63 Romanes made one substantive criticism, pointing out, that Butler’s analogy of memory and heredity failed to indicate the mechanism by which “alterations” that gave rise to memory were transmitted through the generative glands to progeny. But the vast portion of the threethousand word review was a sustained attempt to dismantle by ridicule any claim Butler might have had to serious philosophical commentary. Romanes’s language, far more hostile than anything Butler had written, played over and over upon the differences between the expert and the amateur. Situating himself before his Nature audience as a scientific insider, Romanes cast Butler in the role of science antagonist. The strategy of the Darwin circle in regard to Butler’s public challenge, for which Darwin could find no simple, forthright reply he trusted, was thus set. The open letter to the public in the forum of the periodical was rejected. The letters, including Huxley’s (which Butler never saw), were preserved for posterity to contemplate, presumably well after any retort from Butler would be possible. Butler, all agreed, was an unscrupulous, malicious antagonist, exploiting the open publicity of the periodical press to serve his own vanity by fomenting high-profile public controversy with Darwin. This defense was exceedingly robust, for it was moral rather than intellectual, based on character rather than on issues and detail. It pitted Darwin’s prestige and the resources and colleagues available to him at the center of one of the most powerful scientific networks of the age against a relatively isolated critic, whose motives were unclear and whose sniping at the priesthood of science was highly irritating. To be sure, formulating the strategy of denying Butler play in the public forum he depended on went hand in hand with a whispering campaign through the network that he lacked moral character, but Butler’s freethinking past, not

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to mention his personal attacks on Darwin, made him a relatively easy target for such moralizing. Ironically enough, in the strategies of orthodoxy, the scientific had taken a chapter from the religious.To such a critic, whose resourcefulness at coopting natural history for his own satirical and revisionist purposes showed no signs of abatement, not even T. H. Huxley had an effective public retort. Butler’s effort to mount a vigorous secular critique of natural selection in the Victorian periodical press was thus thoroughly demolished by an extensive network of Darwin’s supporters, who effectively discredited him as a thinker and reasonable critic. Darwin remained silent. In his Autobiography, he wrote, with that happy simplicity of which he truly was a master:“Mr. Samuel Butler abused me with almost insane virulence. How I offended him so bitterly, I have never been able to understand.”64 Acknowledgments

Quotations from Darwin manuscripts in the Henry Huntington Library are reproduced with permission. Quotations from Darwin Papers in the Cambridge University Library are reproduced with permission of the syndics of the library. Dr. Anna-Katherine Mayer and the Darwin Correspondence Project kindly allowed me to use their print transcriptions of the Krause letters, and Vicky Russell helped me translate these into English. Notes 1. Dr. Ernst Krause (1839–1903) was a prolific German writer of books in general natural history, mythology, and aesthetics; he was also one of the editors of Kosmos, a pro-Darwinian German periodical on science. 2. Ernst Krause, Erasmus Darwin, with a Preliminary Notice by Charles Darwin (London: John Murray, 1879; reprint: Appleton, 1880), p. iii. In a second note (p. iv), Darwin stated: “Since the publication of Dr. Krause’s article, Mr. Butler’s work, Evolution, Old and New, 1879, has appeared.” For the Krause envoi, see p. 216. 3. Treatments of the controversy may be found in the following: Henry Festing Jones’s Pamphlet, “Charles Darwin and Samuel Butler: A Step Towards Reconciliation,” (London: A. C. Fifield, 1911), which is reprinted in Nora Barlow, “Appendix,” The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–82 (Norton, 1969); Henry Festing Jones, Samuel Butler: A Memoir (Macmillan, 1919); Clara Stillman, Samuel Butler, A Mid-Victorian Modern (Viking, 1932); Frank Turner, Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England (Yale University Press, 1974); Peter Raby, Samuel Butler: A Biography (Hogarth, 1991); Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (Knopf, 2002).

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4. For a treatment of the Butler-Darwin controversy as a challenge to the “Darwinian consensus,” see Philip Pauly, “Samuel Butler and His Darwinian Critics,” Victorian Studies 25 (1982): 161–180. 5. Samuel Butler, “Darwin on the Origin of Species: A Dialogue,” Press (Christchurch, New Zealand), June 13, 1863; reprint: A First Year in Canterbury Settlement and other Early Essays, vol. 1, Works of Samuel Butler, ed. H. Jones and A. Bartholomew (London: Jonathan Cape, 1923), pp. 188–194. References to Butler’s Works below are to the Cape edition. 6. S. Butler to C. Darwin, March 24, 1863, in S. Butler, A First Year, vol. 1, Works, p. 184. 7. S. Butler to C. Darwin, October 1, 1865, in Jones, Memoir, vol. 1 (Macmillan, 1919), pp. 123–124. The articles appeared respectively, in the Press (Christchurch, New Zealand) (June 13, 1863), the Reasoner and Secular World (July 1, 1865), and the Press (July 29, 1865). 8. S. Butler, A First Year, vol. 1, Works, p. 215. 9. Alvar Ellegård, Darwin and the General Reader: The Reception of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in the British Periodical Press, 1859–1872 (Göteborg, 1958; reprint: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 27, 54–59. 10. For the origins of the free thought movement and its use of science, see Edward Royle, Victorian Infidels: The Origins of the British Secularist Movement, 1791–1866 (Manchester University Press, 1974), pp. 19–23. 11. Sarah Shephard Cox, “Recollections of Sarah Shephard Cox,” unpublished manuscript (MS-0620), n.d., Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. Cox notes that Butler was well known as a free thinker in Christchurch and used to leave the room before family prayers were said. 12. [Samuel Butler], “The Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, as Given by the Four Evangelists, Critically Examined” (Williams and Norgate, 1865). 13. S[amuel] B[utler], “Precaution in Freethought,” Reasoner and Secular World, Part II, no. 10 (August 1, 1865); reprinted in A First Year, vol. 1, Works, pp. 238–241. 14. Butler called himself “an avowed free thinker” in an appendix to the second (1882) edition of Evolution, Old and New [1879]. See vol. 5, Works, p. 351. 15. Jones, Memoir, vol. 1, pp. 123–124. 16. Ibid., pp. 156–157. This letter was incorporated into the preface to the second edition of Erewhon. 17. See “My Visits to Charles Darwin at Down,” The Note-Books of Samuel Butler, vol. 1 (1874–1883), ed. H.-P. Breuer (University Press of America, 1984), pp. 129–130. 18. Butler, Life and Habit, vol. 4, Works, pp. 198–199. See also Samuel Butler to Thomas W. G. Butler, February 18, 1876, in S. Butler, Notebooks, vol. 20, Works (1926), p. 48.

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19. Edward Clodd, Memories (Chapman and Hall, 1916), pp. 144, 254–263. 20. Butler, Unconscious Memory, vol. 6, Works, pp. 24–25. 21. Butler, Life and Habit, vol. 4, Works, pp. 213, 206. For Lamarck, Butler used James Duncan, The Natural History of Foreign Butterflies . . . with a Memoir and Portrait of Lamarck, The Naturalist’s Library, vol. 36 (Edinburgh: W. H. Lizars, 1843). 22. On the two teleological principles, see David Hull, Darwin and His Critics: The Reception of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by the Scientific Community (Harvard University Press, 1973; reprint: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 55–56. 23. Butler, Life and Habit, vol. 4, Works, p. 142. For Darwin’s original statement, see The Origin of Species, A Variorum Text, ed. M. Peckham (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959), p. 448. 24. Alfred Wallace, “Organisation and Intelligence,” Nature 19 (June 12, 1879), p. 647. Hermann Mueller’s review appeared as “Samuel Butler’s Gedanken über die Rolle der Gedachtniss-Ubung in der Entwicklungsgeschichte,” Kosmos 3 (1879): 23–38. Like Wallace, Mueller found Butler’s discussion of Lamarckian use and disuse “profound,” if experimentally ungrounded, yet wondered if the author meant to be taken seriously. 25. Butler, Evolution, Old and New, vol. 5, Works, pp. 1–2. 26. [Grant Allen], “Evolution, Old and New. From One Standpoint,” Examiner 17 (1879), p. 647. 27. Butler, Evolution, Old and New, vol. 5, Works, pp. 317, 223. 28. Ibid., p. 315. 29. See ibid., pp. 63, 133 for Buffon’s “degeneration” as Darwinian “variation” and “descent with modification”; pp. 219, 312–315 for Darwin’s claims for natural selection; pp. 197, 201 for E. Darwin’s anticipations of the struggle for existence; pp. 241, 246–248 for Lamarckian “circonstances” as Darwinian “conditions of life” leading to a struggle for existence. 30. Grant Allen, review of Evolution, Old and New, by Samuel Butler, Academy 15 (1879): 426. 31. Alfred Wallace, review of Evolution, Old and New, by S. Butler, Nature 20 (1879), p. 426. 32. [James Ward], review of Evolution, Old and New, by S. Butler, Athenaeum, July 13, 1876, p. 116. For the identification of Ward as author, see Pauly, “Samuel Butler’s Darwinian Critics,” p. 175. 33. Krause’s sketch appeared in Kosmos 11 (February 1879), the entire issue of which was dedicated to Darwin on his seventieth birthday. Dallas’s translation of Fritz Muller’s Facts and Arguments for Darwin appeared in 1869. See Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist (Norton, 1991), p. 554.

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34. Ralph Colp, “Notes on Charles Darwin’s Autobiography,” Journal of the History of Biology 18 (1985): 360–362. 35. Anna Seward, Memoirs of the Life of Dr. Darwin, Chiefly during His Residence at Lichfield ( J. Johnson, 1804). For Darwin’s letter to Galton, see A Calendar of the Correspondence of Charles Darwin, 1821–1882, ed. F. Burkhardt et al. (Garland, 1985), p. 505. 36. First proof to Erasmus Darwin, Darwin Papers, Department of Manuscripts, Cambridge University Library, DAR 210.11.45, p. 2. See also Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences (Macmillan, 1869), which included a prominent listing for the Darwins. 37. C. Darwin to E. Krause, March 19 [18]79, HM 36177, Henry Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 38. For the announcement of Butler’s project, see “Stray Leaves,” Examiner, no. 3708 (February 22, 1879), p. 250: “Messrs Hardwicke and Bogue are about to publish a new work by Mr. Samuel Butler, author of ‘Erewhon’ and ‘Life and Habit,’ entitled ‘Evolution, Old and New,’ a comparison of the theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck, with that of Charles Darwin. The work will contain copious extracts from the first-named authors.” See also Samuel Butler, Unconscious Memory, vol. 6, Works, p. 38. Darwin wrote to Krause on March 9, 1879, to ask permission to have his article translated. See A Calendar of the Correspondence of Charles Darwin, no. 16920, p. 504. 39. Jones, Memoir, vol. 1, p. 257. 40. Alfred Wallace, “Organisation and Intelligence,” Nature 19 (1879), p. 480. 41. C. Darwin to E. Krause, May 14, 1879, HM 36184, Henry Huntington Library. 42. C. Darwin to E. Krause, June 9, 1879, HM 36187, Henry Huntington Library. 43. [Frederick Pollock], review of Evolution, Old and New, by Samuel Butler, Saturday Review, May 31, 1879: 682–683; E. Krause to C. Darwin, June 13, 1879, DAR 92: B29–B30, Darwin Papers, Cambridge University Library. 44. C. Darwin to E. Krause, August 13, 1879, Henry Huntington Library. Arabella Buckley told Butler in late 1880 that much of this material consisted of open attacks on him. See Butler, Note-Books, vol. 1, p. 123. Krause confirmed in a letter to Darwin dated January 2, 1881): “In the original manuscript I alluded particularly to Butler. . . . These parts were however subsequently deleted by you.” (DAR 92: B61) 45. Krause, Erasmus Darwin, p. 43. 46. See also Desmond King-Hele, Erasmus Darwin, Doctor of Revolution: The Life and Genius of Erasmus Darwin (Faber and Faber, 1977), p. 313. 47. Krause, Erasmus Darwin, pp. 132–133. 48. Ibid., p. 133.

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49. Review of Erasmus Darwin, by Ernst Krause, Athenaeum, no. 2719 (December 6, 1879), p. 723; review of Erasmus Darwin, Pall Mall Gazette (December 12, 1879), p. 12; Alfred Bennett, review of Erasmus Darwin, by Ernst Krause, Academy (December 6, 1879), p. 411. 50. Ellegård, Darwin and the General Reader, p. 27. 51. For a study of the tendencies of organized Victorian Science to establish orthodoxy, see Bernard Lightman, The Origins of Agnosticism: Victorian Unbelief and the Limits of Knowledge (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). 52. Review of Erasmus Darwin, by Ernst Krause, Popular Science Review 19 (1880), p. 68. 53. Krause, Erasmus Darwin, p. 133. For Butler’s detailed account of Krause’s borrowings, see Unconscious Memory, vol. 6, Works, pp. 44–50. Butler’s marginalia identifying borrowed passages may be viewed in the British Library, London, under Krause, Erasmus Darwin, Shelfmark 10854.b.2. 54. Butler, Unconscious Memory, vol. 6, Works, pp. 51–52; Jones, Memoir, vol. 2, p. 448; Barlow, Autobiography, p. 179. 55. Samuel Butler, “Evolution, Old and New,” Athenaeum, January 31, 1880, p. 155. See also R. A. Copeland “A Side Light on the Butler-Darwin Quarrel,” Notes and Queries 24 (January-February 1977), pp. 23–24. Copeland argues that Krause, by adding on p. 135 of his translated sketch a footnote reference to his original piece in Kosmos, showed that he was not trying to conceal from readers the fact that he had made changes to the translated version. The footnote, however, makes no suggestion that the two sketches are different and simply establishes that the original German version appeared much earlier. 56. Barlow, Autobiography, p. 202. 57. Darwin’s note appears in the first proof of Erasmus Darwin, Manuscript Room, Cambridge University Library, DAR.210.11.45. 58. Jones, Memoir, vol. 2, pp. 451–453; Barlow, Autobiography, pp. 182–186. 59. For Richard Litchfield’s two letters of February 1, 1880 and Huxley’s letter of February 3, 1880, see Barlow, Autobiography, pp. 203–206, 210–211. 60. C. Darwin to E. Krause, February 9, 1880, Henry Huntington Library. 61. S. Butler, Unconscious Memory, vol. 6, Works, p. 52. 62. George J. Romanes, review of Unconscious Memory, by Samuel Butler, Nature 23 (1881): 285–286. 63. See Pauly, “Samuel Butler and His Darwinian Critics.” 64. Barlow, Autobiography, pp. 134–135.

14 Understanding Audiences and Misunderstanding Audiences: Some Publics for Science Harriet Ritvo

In June 1900 the annual show of the Royal Agricultural Society of England took place at York. Since 1839, the RASE shows, which, like the meetings of the BAAS, migrated from city to city each year, had served as a focus for agricultural achievement, marketing, and sociability. As highly visible and festive occasions, they also reminded citizens without direct connections to the land of the importance of agriculture in the life of the nation. Both farmers and non-farmers regularly flocked, or so the show’s organizers hoped, to watch the judging of numerous classes of cattle, sheep, horses, pigs, and poultry, to admire the latest in agricultural implements and machinery, and to enjoy the holiday atmosphere. But during the 1880s and, especially, the 1890s, these high hopes were seldom realized.1 Attendance at the shows and, therefore, gate revenue were in decline.The 1899 show at Maidstone incurred a large deficit, and the officers of the RASE counted on the turn-of-the-century show in 1900, to be held in a populous area well served by rail and road, to recoup their balance. But at least from a financial point of view, York too proved disappointing. Although the rings set up on the Knavesmire show ground— located conveniently near the town center—could be intermittently described as “crowded with spectators,”2 overall attendance fell significantly below the rosy expectations. Not even fine weather and the conspicuous presence of royalty produced throngs of the required magnitude. The show was held under the presidency of the Prince of Wales, and both he and his venerable mother took first prizes in the shorthorn classes. The Prince won the “old bull” competition with a “fine, massive animal” called Stephanis, while the Queen’s “Royal Duke, . . . a really grand beast, square typical and handsome” was judged the best two-year-old bull, and awarded the overall championship as well.3 Possibly one problem was the absence of the pig classes, “always a popular feature,” which had been canceled on account of an outbreak of swine fever.4 Or public attention may have been distracted and public spirits depressed by the war news from South Africa,

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which crowded the RASE show out of the pages of the Illustrated London News. In any case, only 87,511 people paid to see the show (admission was 5 s., 2 s. 6 d., or 1 s., most expensive on judging day, least expensive as the show wore on), which was, with the exception of Maidstone, the worst turnout in eighteen years.5 Rather than canceling the Maidstone deficit, the 1900 York show increased it by £3,500.6 The picture was not entirely bleak, however. The shorthorn classes “were more attractive than ever” and the Highland cattle had never displayed “finer heads.”7 And if attendance looked relatively sparse to those responsible for the RASE balance sheets, an audience of nearly 90,000, many of whom were not professionally engaged in agriculture, was far from negligible in absolute terms. Further, paying customers constituted only a fraction of the show’s ultimate audience. The ILN to the contrary notwithstanding, the publicity function of the annual RASE display was enhanced by extensive reportage in newspapers, popular magazines, and periodicals catering to various specialized audiences. One particular exhibit attracted the attention of journalists and their readers, as it appealed to viewers on the spot. Many show visitors chose to pay an additional sixpence (a charge regretted by the agricultural correspondent of the Manchester Guardian as imparting a “particular showmanlike flavour”) to view what was noted in the Times as a “very popular attraction”—the “zebra hybrids” (figures 1, 2).8 The show organizers signaled their sense of the significance and attractiveness of these animals by assigning them a very prominent and accessible location. Housed in their own special building on the central axis of the show, the zebra hybrids were close to the Royal Pavillion, the large refreshment area, and the public conveniences.9 The offspring of a handsome Burchell’s zebra stallion named Matopo and mares representing a variety of domestic horse and pony breeds, these creatures seemed exotic indeed among the familiar farmyard animals competing for RASE prizes, emissaries from the more glamorous world of sideshows and menageries. The display was mounted, however, in sober scientific terms reminiscent of a natural history museum. For purposes of comparison, the hybrids were accompanied by their mutual sire Matopo, who was praised as “wonderfully quiet and friendly,”10 along with several of their nonhybrid half siblings (that is, animals whose fathers were of the same breed—for example an Arab horse or a Shetland pony—as their mothers, who had previously borne Matopo’s offspring). Other equines (horses, donkeys, and zebras) were represented either by their painted or photographic images, or by their skins. In addition the display featured live

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Figure 1 Ewart with his zebras. Reproduced with permission of Edinburgh University Library.

pigeons of several recognized breeds—fantails, owls, archangels, barbs, turbits, and jacobins—along with the offspring resulting from various crosses between them, several rabbits whose recent forebears included both domestic and wild animals, and a white cat with her litter of four kittens. The father (and uncle) of the litter was also white. They were included because only half the kittens resembled their white parents in color; the other two recalled one of their great grandmothers.11 The press reflected public enthusiasm in lavishing attention on the hybrids; it echoed the explicit tone of the exhibition by emphasizing its scientific purpose, or at least the fact that it had a scientific purpose. Even the Guardian correspondent reluctantly admitted that “the animals are worth seeing,” although he could not explain exactly why. Instead he grumbled that “while one has no doubt the display is purely biological, one fails to see its practical or utilitarian value.”12 If this dour journalist had parted with a further shilling, and purchased the Guide to the Zebra Hybrids on sale at the exhibit, he might have been less mystified. The booklet’s brief introductory note identified

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Figure 2 Ewart with his zebra hybrids. Reproduced with permission of Edinburgh University Library.

its primary audience as “the members of the Royal Agricultural Society of England,” and then proclaimed both its own didactic purpose and that of the eye-catching display it described: “to indicate to all interested in the problems of Heredity that, as our knowledge increases, many prevalent views will require to be either discarded or profoundly altered.”13 That is, it was intended to make the scientific understanding of the mechanisms of heredity available to members of the other specialized community most interested in the subject—animal breeders. Indeed, the Guide was noticeably modest in characterizing its intended readers. The previous and subsequent public career of the hybrids, both in person and in print, made it clear that their lesson was meant for a much broader set of audiences. The author of the Guide was the owner and creator of the exhibit, James Cossar Ewart (1851–1933), a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Regius Professor of Natural History at the University of Edinburgh. The animals on show at York had resulted from four years of experimentation at his farm at Penicuik, in the Midlothian countryside south of Edinburgh.

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From the inception of this elaborate research project Ewart had been as interested in publicizing his results as in achieving them. Thus the display itself also represented a culmination of sorts. Before showing them to the diverse national audience gathered at York, Ewart had exhibited his hybrids to a range of local audiences—agricultural, zoological, and simply curious. For example, in 1897 he responded to what a local newspaper characterized as “desire on the part of the general public” by displaying some of his animals in the Edinburgh Cattle Mart, where they attracted “much attention and favourable comment.”14 At the Highland Agricultural Show in 1899, “no exhibits attracted a greater amount of attention and interest than the large number of zebra hybrids” (among their admirers was the Prince of Wales, who consequently proposed them for the next year’s RASE show).15 Specially organized groups could get a more comprehensive view of the experiments in progress by visiting the animals at home. In the summer of 1898, a hundred visiting scientists paid 2 shillings apiece for a day out that included lectures on hybridity and breeding, a tour of the stud, and afternoon tea, as well as a return rail ticket from Edinburgh.16 Later in the year, fifty agricultural students from the Glasgow and West of Scotland Technical College enjoyed a similar program, but without refreshments.17 Ewart also put himself on show in the service of publicizing his research, most notably in a series of three lectures on “Zebras and Zebra Hybrids” delivered at the Royal Institution in the spring of 1899. Their content was further disseminated through reports in newspapers and magazines.18 Ewart was doubtless gratified by this attention, both in amount and in variety. He respected the power of the press—he subscribed to a cutting service and kept extensive cutting books—and he seems to have been especially conscious of the ability of journalism to engage the attention of readers outside his own natural audience of scientists and intellectually inclined agriculturists. In his quest for sympathetic coverage, he sent photographs of his animals to journalists, and invited them to his farm for private views if they found themselves in the vicinity of Edinburgh. This strategy often produced gratifying results. For example, an account of “The Zebra Stud Farm at Penicuick” in the Polo Magazine, characterized the author’s visit as a “pleasure,” the zebra Matopo as “one of the finest specimens of the breed,” the pony Mulatto as “the heroine of the piece,” and their hybrid colt Romulus as “our little striped friend.” The piece was illustrated by a photograph of Ewart’s ten-year-old son astride a zebra.19 Ewart’s most comprehensive presentation of his work with the zebra hybrids was in a series of free-standing publications that appeared between

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1897 and 1900, of which a small book entitled The Penycuik Experiments was the most substantial. Reviews of these publications disseminated Ewart’s ideas to a large and diverse body of readers. Or at least, depending on the zoological self-confidence of the reviewers, they disseminated the fact that these ideas existed. Thus the Sportsman’s reviewer of A Critical Period in the Development of the Horse modestly claimed that “it is almost idle to attempt to deal with Professor Ewart’s work at all, when one is so entirely behind him in regard to scientific knowledge,” while nevertheless suggesting that any breeder would be “the better for possessing it.”20 Reviews of the Penycuik Experiments emphasized the book’s relevance to the interests and predilections of various audiences: “a volume which cannot fail to arrest the attention of stock-breeders” (Times); “all biologists will agree in looking with eagerness for more” (Natural Science); “of interest to more than one class of readers” (Lancet); “offers the public an intellectual treat” (Morning Post); “lovers of animals . . . will devour the contents . . . with avidity” (Scottish Farmer). The Irish Naturalist explained its inclusion of a review of work done in “a small Scotch town” with “no direct connection with Irish natural history,” on the grounds that Ewart’s experiments were “of general interest and importance,” and, moreover, that “several Irish horses” had participated.21 The Quarterly Review published a combined notice of the book and the Royal Society paper, which provided a comprehensive and sympathetic of Ewart’s work in relation both to scientific theory (the review began with a somewhat contrarian invocation of Darwin) and to practical farmyard problems (the deterioration of the English racehorse, the consequences of inbreeding), concluding that “the book cannot fail to attract both the man of science and the practical breeder.”22 Thus the coverage of Ewart’s work at Penicuik was both broad-based and promiscuous.That is, the significance of Matopo and his offspring was discussed in a wide variety of periodicals, appealing to very different audiences, from technical or scientific specialists to casual general readers. Although the emphasis and interpretation varied according to the journal, they did so less markedly than might have been predicted from their divergent audiences. Subscribers to the Manchester Guardian were exposed to much of the same material that the Lancet presented to its medical readers. The similarity of reports from periodical to distinct periodical may have had something to do with the difficulty of repackaging—even of paraphrasing—technical material; it certainly meant that the scientific core of Ewart’s work was block-boxed for many readers. But this similarity may also have signaled that the focus of interest lay elsewhere. To some extent

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the fact that Ewart’s research on zebra hybrids appeared nearly universally newsworthy was a reflection of his own character and the shape of his career, a large part of which had been devoted to public service and to bridging the gap between zoology and animal husbandry. Further, as was demonstrated at the RASE show, the enthusiastic reception accorded his experiments also owed something to the charisma of his experimental animals, and perhaps also to the fact that their lives seemed so different from those of most creatures who were devoted to science. An account of the treatment of vivisection in the nineteenth-century periodical would emphasize opposition between specialist and general audience coverage rather than convergence. In this context it may be significant that none of the descriptions of the zebra hybrids highlighted the fact that Ewart fatally exposed several of his engaging young animals to the tsetse fly, and most completely overlooked these sacrifices to science. Although the topic of heredity was of great theoretical concern to biologists, of great practical concern to stock breeders, and of a good deal of interest to the public at large in the late nineteenth century, these audiences overlapped less frequently than might have been imagined. Ewart was unusual in attempting to address them all. Even within the field of zoology, his range of interests was notably broad. As a young researcher, he had collaborated with George John Romanes in investigating the echinoderm locomotor system. His responsibilities as Chair of Natural History at the University of Edinburgh beginning in 1882 led him to publish on practical anatomy and on the care of collections; he lectured on both vertebrate and invertebrate zoology. (His student audiences may have been among his least appreciative, however. Sir Maurice Yonge, a distinguished invertebrate zoologist who was a doctoral candidate at Edinburgh in Ewart’s later years, recalled that in their youthful high spirits they frequently drowned him out, so that only the persistent movement of his walrus mustache indicated that he was still talking.)23 He worked extensively on the embryology and development of vertebrates, especially the horse and the sheep. As a result of his interest in these fields, the University of Edinburgh established a lecturer’s position in genetics at the University of Edinburgh (the first in Britain) in 1911. Toward the end of his career he turned his attention to the deciduous feathers of such birds as mallards and penguins. Ewart was always ready to apply his zoological expertise to pragmatic issues of public concern. As a founding member (1882) of the Fishery Board for Scotland, for example, he made extensive comparative

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investigations of fisheries policy in both Europe and North America, and also conducted scientific research on the maintenance and propagation of fish stocks. When his scientific focus shifted to hoofed animals, his extraprofessional activities followed suit. In 1897, as part of a commission to survey the horses and ponies of Ireland, he made a set of recommendations which were considered by breed aficionados to have preserved the Connemara pony. He was one of the first vice presidents of the (Royal) Zoological Society of Scotland (the parent organization of the Edinburgh Zoo), and a co-founder of the Park Sheep Society, dedicated to saving seven threatened ovine breeds, including the multi-horned Jacob. His work with the zebra hybrids, theoretically driven and even eccentric as it might have seemed, had similarly practical implications. These striking creatures were produced in the course of an experiment designed to test several widespread assumptions about heredity, which formed the basis of stock breeders’ choices of sires and dams. By correcting these assumptions and replacing them with more accurate understandings, Ewart hoped to offer breeders the means to improve their matchmaking, and thus the quality of their flocks and herds. The primary target of Ewart’s experiments at Penicuik was the concept of telegony or “influence of the previous sire” (also termed “infection” or “saturation” depending on the way its supposed operation was explained) as a result of which, it was widely believed by both farmers and zoologists, the father of a female’s first child was able to influence her subsequent offspring by different fathers. This belief encouraged breeders to mate each virgin female animal with the best possible male, so that his superior qualities would continue to grace her later foals, lambs, or puppies, no matter who sired them; it reciprocally dictated that an inappropriate initial mate (worst of all, one of the wrong breed or of no breed) would cast a pall over a female’s entire reproductive career. The evidence for this belief was anecdotal rather than systematic; voluminous rather than scientifically persuasive.The most famous and best documented instance of telegony (although the documentation consisted mainly of repeated retellings of the original story) was an animal called “Lord Morton’s mare,” who had flourished 80 years before Ewart displayed his zebra hybrids. She had borne her first foal to a quagga (a less dramatically striped relative of the zebra), and her subsequent foals to ordinary horses. Not only the initial hybrid, but all her later offspring were reported to exhibit striping or barring, especially on the legs, which was interpreted as evidence of the persistent reproductive influence of the quagga.24 (It should be noted that other interpretive options were available; for example,

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breeders would have known that such striping is fairly common in horses, especially duns.) And if evidence for the occurrence of telegony was not well grounded, explanations of the way it worked—that is, of how her first sexual partner “infected” or “saturated” a virgin female—left still more to be desired. Ewart intended to replicate this long ago series of events at Penicuik, at least as far as he could. The experiment he designed was elaborate, requiring a financial outlay large enough to buy between thirty and forty animals, as well as the means of feeding and housing them.25 (Doubtless this was one reason that he was eager for results; four years was a relatively short period in which to complete an experiment based on breeding equines.) But expenses and logistics proved to be his least challenging problems. By 1895, when he stocked his farm with the prospective parents of his hybrids, there were no more quaggas to be purchased; they had become extinct rather suddenly several decades earlier. He had to settle for zebras, which were still available on the exotic animal market. Zebras’ close relation to the erstwhile quagga and their more prominent coloration made them good substitutes. They also resembled quaggas in being natives of a milder climate, however, and Midlothian did not necessarily suit them. Of the three zebra stallions Ewart acquired, only one—Matopo— survived his first Scottish winter. And physical acclimatization turned out to be only the first step toward procreative success. There were also psychological barriers to overcome. In his initial season among the horse and pony mares, Matopo managed to sire only one foal. But by the next year he and his companions had adjusted to each other, and soon “quite a number of hybrids” made their appearance, although not as many as might have done.26 Quite a number of potential hybrids also failed to make their appearance, with Ewart reporting that of four Shetland ponies mated with Matopo, only one produced a hybrid foal; of five Iceland ponies, only one produced a hybrid foal; and of eight full-sized mares (seven thoroughbreds and one Arab), only one produced a hybrid foal. Attempts to cross Matopo with Welsh, Exmoor, New Forest, Norwegian, and Highland ponies were total failures; that is, although mating took place, no offspring resulted.27 If Ewart thus made sure that Matopo gave full value for money, he kept his horses and ponies equally hard at work. Once a mare had given birth to a hybrid, she was then mated repeatedly with a stallion of her own breed, to see whether the purebred horse or pony foals that resulted would betray any trace of Matopo.Thus, in effect, Ewart ran several simultaneous replications of the breeding history of Lord Morton’s mare,

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scrutinizing the successive offspring of an Irish mare named Biddy, an Iceland pony named Tundra, a Shetland pony named Nora, and a West Highland pony confusingly named Mulatto. Nor were the zebra hybrids themselves intended as mere by-products of this research. As a secondary goal of his work, Ewart hoped that they would turn out to be supermules: hardier than their mothers and tamer than their father, and therefore valuable on their own account as pullers of artillery and transporters of supplies in hot imperial locations for which ordinary mules were unsuitable. This subsidiary project looked rather promising at the beginning. One observer admitted that he could “fully confirm all the praise Professor Ewart lavishes on his pets,” which were “the most charming and compactly built little animals possible.” But although they possessed great stamina and proved generally disease resistant in comparison with full horses and ponies, they were not significantly better able to resist the bite of the tsetse fly. They were nevertheless tested for possible military use by the governments of both India and Germany, but “zebrule” breeding farms on the plains of East Africa remained a fantasy.28 By 1899, after only a few breeding cycles, Ewart felt that he had collected sufficient evidence. The skepticism which with he had begun his experiments had been confirmed. Although he would not absolutely deny that “ ‘infection of the germ’ ” might occur in unspecified anomalous cases, none of his mares had produced subsequent offspring who resembled Matopo (the “previous sire”) in any way. Of Circus Girl, a full-blooded pony borne to Tundra after she had produced two zebra hybrid foals, Ewart stated “there is nothing whatever about her that suggests . . . the zebra”; he went on to assert that “the other half brothers and sisters of the hybrids . . . agree with her in failing to give any support whatever to the . . . telegony doctrine.”29 He confidently attributed the widespread acceptance of “the Mortonian hypothesis” to “the spirit of mediaevalism which is everywhere evident when the application of scientific methods falls to be considered in England.”30 By “spirit of mediaevalism” he meant the instinctive conservatism of agriculturists—their reluctance to replace practices based on their own traditional wisdom with those suggested by modern zoological research. In order to combat both the particular error and the generally retrograde spirit, Ewart publicized his results as widely as possible. He addressed his elite scientific colleagues in a paper presented to the Royal Society, which included a technical explanation of why telegony could not occur in

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horses, asses, or zebras. (“All my observations point to its being impossible in the Equidae for the unused male germ cells of the first sire to infect the unripe ova. The spermatozoa lodged in the upper dilated part of the oviduct of the mare are dead, and in process of disintegrating, eight days after insemination; they probably lose their fertilizing power in four or five days. There is no reason for supposing that in the Equidae they survive longer in or around the ovary.”)31 He addressed colleagues with more focused interests in articles in the Zoologist and the Veterinarian, which were subsequently republished in a form that made them available to broader audiences. His speeches to special interest groups were often refracted through the periodical press. For example, a few months after the RASE show at York, the Times carried a detailed account of his keynote address to the National Veterinary Association of Ireland, where the ensuing discussion had focused on the possibility of reversion to ancestral characteristics, especially in the Connemara pony.32 The next year, as president of the zoological section of the BAAS, he spoke on “The Experimental Study of Variation,” using his Penicuik data.33 He also embraced opportunities to explain his work in person to interested members of the general public. W. Fream, who reported on the York show for the Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England (devoting about one fifth of his article to the zebra hybrids, another indication of the Society’s sense of their significance), praised Ewart’s kindness in attending, and noted that he was “unwearying in his efforts to afford to the visitors who inspected the display any information they sought,” even if they could have extracted the same information from the Guide without much trouble.34 But neither the distinctive attributes of Ewart and his animals nor a reciprocal commitment to improve stock-breeding practices completely accounted for the public response to the Penicuik experiments. The widespread interest that they evoked and the relative consistency of presentation from one periodical to another also characterized the treatment of a set of related topics. Hybridity in general exerted a sustained fascination over nineteen-century audiences. Ewart’s half-zebras may have been in the running for hybrid superstardom, along with the litters of lion-tiger cubs that had toured Britain in the 1820s and the 1830s as part of Thomas Atkins’s menagerie, but almost any hybrid was liable to receive at least brief notice in both general audience and specialized periodicals. Their newsworthiness was ordinarily taken to be self evident, so that such reports, wherever they appeared, frequently offered a mere statement of mixture, or even intended mixture, supplemented by a few interesting

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details about the circumstances (if available). Thus in 1824 the Annals of Sporting and Fancy Gazette observed that the Earl of Derby kept “two of those animals of the hog-tribe called the peccary . . . for the purpose of trying some experimental crosses”; in 1851 Notes and Queries reported that a French “she-wolf ” that had been reared with a hound pack “has had and reared a litter of pups by one of the dogs, and does duty in hunting”; in 1888 a correspondent of the Zoologist wrote that “it may interest some of your readers if I briefly describe the appearance of some equine Mules which I saw in Paris”; and the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London noted in 1899 that “some living specimens of supposed hybrids between the Stoat (Mustela erminea) and the Ferret (M. Furo)” had been exhibited at a recent meeting.35 The discussion of the Penicuik experiments by Ewart and others clearly demonstrated that the reliable appeal of hybrids also reflected their relation to several large scientific subjects.They provided fodder for debates about the so-called species question, since one traditional, if always problematic, criterion for species difference between two animals was their inability to produce offspring (or fertile offspring, as in the case of everyday horse-donkey mules). This violation of received categories was in fact the source of much of the attractiveness of hybrids, and continued to be so through the end of the nineteenth century, despite the fact that by then, in the view of most zoologists, evolutionary theory had largely mooted the basic problem. Thus Ewart acknowledged the transgressive dimension of hybridity in his Guide to the York exhibition by including a detailed illustrated history of equine hybrids of all sorts, even though the rest of his presentation, and, indeed, the design of his experiments, assumed that the issues presented by the zebra hybrids were exactly the same as those presented by crosses between ordinary domestic animal breeds, or, for that matter, by animals whose parents were of indistinguishable heritage.36 That is, the distinctive striping of the zebra Matopo, as of Lord Morton’s earlier quagga, along with a few other obvious characteristics such as the form of the mane, made it seem relatively easy to distinguish their contribution to their half-horse offspring from that of the mothers, and from that of the sires of the mares’ subsequent foals. The processes illuminated by the production of these hybrids were not, therefore, specially relevant to interspecies crosses; on the contrary they were identical to those that determined the outcome of intraspecies and intrabreed matings. The accident of hybridity—and of coloration—made it possible to examine what would otherwise have been obscured by the physical similarity of the actual and putative parents.

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Thus Ewart used his zebra hybrids to address general questions of heredity and reproduction, which were of even broader interest, and of much greater practical consequence, than was the species question. His equine research came at the end of a period during which a great deal of zoological attention had been illuminatingly focused on mammalian reproductive physiology. As a result, science could offer answers to some questions that had long perplexed breeders, such as what was the contribution of the male and the female parent to the offspring? and (as Ewart both demonstrated and explained) was it possible for the first sire to “infect” or “saturate” a female so as to affect her subsequent offspring? (Answers to the related questions of why did offspring frequently not resemble either parent? and why did they sometimes resemble grandparents or still more distant forebears? had to wait a little longer.) Like the results of Ewart’s work on telegony, these advances in understanding were disseminated to the general public, as well as within the scientific community. They were not, however, readily integrated into the practice, or even the discourse, of those who stood to profit from them most. Ewart was not alone in his critique of the recalcitrance of the “mediaevalism” of animal breeders. He had a few sympathizers even within this regrettably retrograde group. For example, Everett Millais, a prominent kennel expert who was sometimes known as the father of the English basset hound, shared Ewart’s opinion. In his frequent contributions to the kennel press, he bemoaned the failure of his fellow breeders to assimilate the implications of zoological research and to apply them to their own pursuits. He asked, “Why is it that the scientific world accept Darwin’s theory, and the unscientific refuse it?” The explanation that he proposed was brutally frank: “It is simple want of power of intellect—a want of education,” as was also his characterization of the likely consequences of these failings.37 He was particularly worried about the extreme inbreeding practiced by some basset hound fanciers, which he considered to violate Darwin’s principle of natural selection. If continued indefinitely, he feared, it was likely to result in deterioration of the quality of his favorite breed (that is, the abstraction recognized by show prizes), as well as in unhealthiness and sterility; he predicted that persistent violation of natural laws would invoke an inevitable retribution:“is it likely that Nature . . . will accept such gross liberties with her prerogatives as we breeders take?”38 But dog fanciers were no more frightened by Millais’ threats, than stock breeders were persuaded by Ewart’s demonstration of the impossibility of equine telegony. They continued to mate their prize animals

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within the smallest possible family circles and to guard their maiden females against inappropriate “infection.” In their resistance to scientific expertise, they were, perhaps, playing for different stakes. At the beginning of the Victorian period, naturalists and agriculturalists had faced the mysteries of heredity and reproduction on a roughly equal footing. With little understanding of reproductive physiology and none of the mechanism of heredity, both groups were likely to refer these mysteries to a higher authority. Thus, for example, Thomas Eyton speculated in the Magazine of Natural History that since “all true hybrids that have been productive have been produced from species brought from remote countries, and in . . . a state of domestication,” it was likely that “it is a provision of Providence, to enable man to improve the breeds of those animals almost necessary to his existence,” and John Fry, discussing canine hybrids in the Hippiatrist and Veterinary Journal, asked “why should we entertain any doubt that the dog is not a distinct species . . . why question its being formed by the Almighty Framer of the Universe on the sixth day?”39 Indeed, the fact that the operation of heredity was mysterious, while its effects were ubiquitous and obvious more than leveled the playing field. The experience and observation of farmers provided at least as firm a basis for speculation as did the experience and observation of naturalists. Well into the nineteenth century, the speculations of breeders tended to resemble those of naturalists. Both groups were apt to explain the hereditary transmission of characteristics in domestic livestock in terms drawn from other areas of their shared experience. In particular, as was perhaps inevitable when the subject was reproduction, proposed explanations reflected contemporary understandings of human gender relations.Thus the breeders’ stubborn belief in telegony, with its corollary imperative of protecting pedigreed virgin females and constraining their choice of partners bore an obvious relation to Victorian social mores, as did the credulity of scientists in this regard and their own hesitation to jettison the concept completely. Even Ewart left a small loophole, after undertaking elaborate experiments that he regarded as conclusive. Similar preconceptions underlay frequent assertions that “the influence of the male greatly exceeds that of the female, in communicating qualities to the offspring” and that “the male gives the locomotive and the female the vital organs.”40 Such wisdom appeared most frequently in the agricultural and pet fancying press, because it was most directly relevant to the pursuits of its readers, but when naturalists addressed these issues their views were often similar. Most famously, with regard to Lord Morton’s mare, Charles Darwin was persuaded that

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“there can be no doubt that the quagga affected the character of the offspring subsequently begot by the black Arabian horse.” He further believed that “many similar and well-authenticated facts . . . plainly show . . . the influence of the first male on the progeny subsequently borne by the mother to other males,” attributing this phenomenon to some undetermined action of “the male element . . . directly on the female.”41 By the time that Ewart put his hybrids on display, the scientific situation was greatly changed. No longer was it possible to think of the zoological and agricultural discourses of animal breeding and reproduction as parallels or alternatives; scientific research had decisively trumped breeding tradition.The completeness of this triumph reverberated in the smugly confident tone that characterizes both Ewart’s and Millais’s denunciations of agrarian backwardness. In consequence, no matter how affable his public persona, how sustained his service to agricultural and veterinary causes, or how earnest his desire to improve British cattle, sheep, pigs, and horses, Ewart came to the breeders assembled at York as an emissary from a world of more authoritative expertise. He may have owned a farm at Penicuik, but he was also a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a prominent participant in many of the institutions of elite science. The response to any such powerful ambassador is apt to be ambivalent, part gratification and part resentment. So why did the visitors to the RASE show at York throng to admire Ewart’s exhibit? And why was it featured so prominently in the layout of the show ground and in published accounts? The Guardian’s dubious correspondent may have offered a clue. He accorded Ewart and his animals a kind of respect that was both grudging and skeptical—both Ewart’s own professional stature and the conspicuous position accorded the zebra hybrids suggested that the exhibit was important, and yet he could not put his finger on exactly why. His reluctance to commit himself, like the uniformity of reportage on Ewart’s work at Penicuik, almost irrespective of which journal did the publishing, and even of whether Ewart or someone else had done the writing, underlined the importance of context in determining the meaning of an exhibition or an experiment or an article. Access to the press, and even strong influence on what was published, did not necessarily imply control of the outcome. The same words could have different implications for an audience of naturalists, for an audience whose major commitment was to agricultural tradition, and for an audience in pursuit of simple amusement. The planning committee for the RASE show may well have included the exhibition of zebra hybrids as part of an effort to make the

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fruits of zoological research more accessible to agriculturalists. The application of science to agriculture had, after all, been part of the Society’s charter since its foundation, and the annual show, “the most generally popular feature of the Society’s work,” offered the best opportunity to realize this goal—certainly a far better opportunity than the rather dry Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England.42 Ewart’s debunking of telegony and suggestion of alternative principles, more firmly grounded in science, on which to base breeding decisions was also consistent with the more immediately pragmatic purpose of the shows: to allow farmers to see “in what respects their practice or system of breeding is susceptible of improvement.”43 But the men who ran the RASE lived in a more rarefied atmosphere than most rank and file members (or non-member farmers) who attended the show in order to enjoy themselves for a few early summer days admiring prize animals and large new machines. Millais to the contrary notwithstanding, they were not persuaded that their allegiance to traditional breeding practices had deleterious, or even suboptimal results, with regard to the resulting animals. And such allegiance offered some intangible benefits, bolstering communal self esteem, and offering a kind of passive resistance to the suggestion that they knew less about their own business than did a zoologist whose major experience, when all was said and done, was in the laboratory. Reports of the exhibition do not suggest that the main impression it made was scientific. On the contrary, the lasting image carried away by show visitors was usually of the hybrid animals themselves, and the same was almost certainly true of those whose experience was mediated by reports in the periodical press. Even the RASE ultimately contributed to this response. Although Ewart’s display received a disproportionate amount of ink in the official account of the show published in the Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England, most of the coverage consisted of an annotated list (essentially a reproduction of part of Ewart’s Guide) of some of the items on display, supplemented by photographs of the animals.The article offered no discussion of the critique of telegony. Indeed, its author provided only the vaguest indication of the purpose of Ewart’s experiments, merely stating with some evasiveness that they had “a direct bearing . . . upon the many questions that confront the stock breeder” and that Ewart’s “explanatory notes . . . convey a clear idea of the problems upon the solution of which he is engaged.”44 Ewart was thus refigured as an impresario surrounded by his exotic creations—a source of wonder and entertainment, but not necessarily of instruction.

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Notes 1. For an extended analysis of the financial problems besetting the RASE shows, see “Report of the Special Committee on the Society’s Show System,” Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England 11, third series (1900): 65–85. 2. “Royal Agricultural Society’s Show,” Times, June 21, 1900. 3. “The Royal Show at York,” Manchester Guardian, June 19, 1900. 4. “Royal Agricultural Society’s Show at York,” Times, June 16, 1900. 5. “The Royal Show at York,” Times, June 25, 1900. A good turnout would have been over 120,000. “Report of the Special Committee on the Society’s Show System,” p. 79. 6. J. A. Scott Watson, The History of the Royal Agricultural Society of England 1839–1939 (Royal Agricultural Society, 1939), p. 64. 7. “The Royal Show at York,” Manchester Guardian, June 19, 1900. 8. Ibid.; “Royal Agricultural Society’s Show,” Times, June 21, 1900. 9. W. Fream, “The York Meeting, 1900,” Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England 11, third series (1900): 412–413. 10. James Cossar Ewart, Guide to the Zebra Hybrids, Etc. on exhibition at the Royal Agricultural Society’s Show,York, together with a Description of Zebras, Hybrids, Telegony, Etc. (Constable, 1900), p. 6. 11. Ewart, Guide, pp. 1–8. 12. “The Royal Show at York,” Manchester Guardian, June 19, 1900. 13. Ewart, Guide, “Introductory Note.” 14. “The Penicuik Zebra Hybrids,” Evening Dispatch, October 4, 1897. 15. W. B. Tegetmeier, “Zebra Hybrids at the Highland Agricultural Show,” Field, July 15, 1899, p. 100. 16. “Excursion to Penicuik,” Scotsman, July 30, 1898. 17. Cutting from unidentified newspaper. Cutting Book 1896–97. Gen 134. James Cossar Ewart Papers. Special Collections, Edinburgh University Library. 18. For example, the Times, the Daily Graphic, the Field, the Sketch, the Live Stock Journal, and Land and Water all carried accounts of the Royal Institution lectures in April and May 1899. 19. “The Zebra Stud Farm at Penicuick,” Polo Magazine, November 1896. 20. Sportsman ( January 15, 1898), quoted in J. C. Ewart, The Penycuik Experiments (Adam and Charles Black, 1899).

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21. R. F. S., “Penycuik Experiments,” Irish Naturalist 8 (1899), p. 116. 22. Arthur Shipley, “Zebras, Horses, and Hybrids,” Quarterly Review 190 (1899), p. 422. 23. Natural History Collections, University of Edinburgh. 24. For detailed discussions of telegony, see Harriet Ritvo, The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Harvard University Press, 1997), chapter 3 and Richard W. Burkhardt, “Closing the Door on Lord Morton’s Mare: The Rise and Fall of Telegony,” Studies in the History of Biology, vol. 3, ed. W. Coleman and C. Limoges (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979). 25. Shipley, “Zebras, Horses, and Hybrids,” p. 422. 26. J. C. Ewart, “Experimental Contributions to the Theory of Heredity. A. Telegony,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 65 (1899), p. 248. 27. Ewart, “Experimental Contributions,” pp. 250–251. 28. Shipley, “Zebras, Horses, and Hybrids,” pp. 420–422; “Scientific Notes and News,” Science 18 n.s. (July 24, 1903), p. 128. 29. Ewart, Guide, p. 45. 30. Ewart, Penycuik Experiments, p. 35; Ewart, Guide, p. 50. 31. Ewart, “Experimental Contributions,” p. 245. 32. “Ireland,” Times, August 25, 1900. 33. J. Playfair McMurrich, “On the Glasgow Meeting of the B.A.A.S.,” Science 14, n.s. (October 25, 1901), p. 637. 34. Fream, “York Meeting,” p. 414. 35. “A Visit to Knowsley Hall, in Lancashire, the Seat of the Earl of Derby,” Annals of Sporting and Fancy Gazette 6 (1824), p. 224; “Cross between a Wolf and Hound,” Notes and Queries 3 (January 18, 1851), p. 39; J. J. Weir, “Equine Mules in Paris,” Zoologist 12, third series (1888): 102–103; A. H. Cocks, “Hybrid Stoats and Ferrets,” Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London 67 (1899): 2–3. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London was probably the most inveterate chronicler of such crosses, noting an unremitting stream of mixed bears, monkeys, cattle, and felines over the years. 36. Ewart, Guide, pp. 24–35. 37. Everett Millais, The Theory and Practice of Rational Breeding (“Fanciers Gazette,” 1889), p. ix. 38. Everett Millais, “Basset Bloodhounds. Their Origin, Raison D’Etre and Value,” Dog Owners’ Annual for 1897, p. 20. 39. Thomas C. Eyton, “Some Remarks upon the Theory of Hybridity,” Magazine of Natural History 1 (1837), p. 359; John Fry, “On Factitious or Mule-Bred Animals,” Hippiatrist and Veterinary Journal 3 (1830), p. 136.

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40. Adam Ferguson, “Some Practical Hints upon Live Stock, in Particular as Regards Crossing,” Quarterly Review of Agriculture 1 (1828), p. 34; “The Physiology of Breeding,” Agricultural Magazine, Plough, and Farmers’ Journal (June 1855), p. 17. For an extended discussion of the influence of human gender relations on animal breeding, see Harriet Ritvo, “The Animal Connection,” Humans, Animals, and Machines: Boundaries and Projections, ed. J. Sheehan and M. Sosna (University of California Press, 1991). 41. Charles Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868; Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), vol. 1, pp. 435–437. 42. Scott Watson, History of the RASE, pp. 18–19; “Report of the Special Committee,” p. 69. 43. “Report of the Special Committee,” p. 72. 44. Fream, “The York Meeting, 1900,” p. 414.

About the Auth or s

Gillian Beer is a former King Edward VII Professor of English Literature and a former president of Clare Hall at Cambridge. Her previous books include Arguing with the Past: Essays in Narrative from Woolf to Sidney (1989), Forging the Missing Link: Interdisciplinary Stories (1992), Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (1996), Virginia Woolf: the Common Ground: Essays by Gillian Beer (1996) and Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1983; second edition, 2000). Alice in Space is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. Geoffrey Cantor, Professor of the History of Science at the University of Leeds, is co-director of the Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical (SciPer) project. Among his publications are Michael Faraday, Sandemanian and Scientist (Macmillan/St. Martin’s, 1991) and, with John Hedley Brooke, Reconstructing Nature:The Engagement of Science and Religion (Clark, 1998).The holder of a Leverhulme Major Fellowship, he is engaged in research on attitudes toward science among religious minorities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Gowan Dawson, Lecturer in Victorian Literature in the Department of English at the University of Leicester, previously held a Research Fellowship on the SciPer Project and has published articles on the interrelations of Victorian science and literature. He is preparing a book on aestheticism, immorality, and obscenity in the debates over Darwinism. Graeme Gooday, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Leeds, is engaged in research on later-nineteenth-century physics and electrical engineering, looking at the connections between laboratories, quantification, and instruments and at the socio-cultural issues of education, space, and gender. His first book, The Morals of Measurement: Accuracy, Irony and Trust in late Victorian Electrical Practice, will be published in 2004 by the Cambridge University Press.

About the Auth or s

352

Ian Higginson is Research Fellow in the Centre for History and Cultural Studies of Science at the University of Kent at Canterbury. His work in literature and science and polar studies includes publications on Edgar Allan Poe, Bret Harte, Jack London, Paul Theroux, and Henry Adams. He is preparing a monograph on thermodynamics in twentiethcentury cultures, and he is working on the AHRB project “The Ocean Steamship: Towards a Cultural History of Maritime Power,” both with the collaboration of Crosbie Smith. Frank A. J. L. James is Reader in the History of Science at the Royal Institution, where he edits the Correspondence of Michael Faraday (of which four volumes, out of six, have been published). He has written many papers on the physical sciences in the nineteenth century, particularly in relation to the state, religion, and art. He has also edited books ranging over various aspects of the history of science. He is editing a collection of essays titled “The Common Purposes of Life”: Two Centuries of Science and Society at the Royal Institution. Bernard Lightman, Professor of Humanities at York University in Toronto, is a member of the interdisciplinary Program in Science and Society and of the Graduate History Program. His publications include The Origins of Agnosticism (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987) and the edited collection Victorian Science in Context (University of Chicago Press, 1997). He is working on a monograph on important popularizers of Victorian science and their relationship to professional scientists. James G. Paradis is Professor in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he teaches courses in Victorian studies and communication in the sciences. His research focuses on nineteenth-century science and literature. He is the author of T. H. Huxley: Man’s Place in Nature (1979) and a co-editor of Victorian Science and Victorian Values: Literary Perspectives (with T. Postlewait: 1985), T. H. Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics (with G. Williams, 1989), and Textual Dynamics of the Professions (with C. Bazerman, 1991). He is a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. Harriet Ritvo, Arthur J. Conner Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the author of The Animal Estate:The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Harvard University Press, 1987), of The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Harvard University Press, 1997), and of numerous essays on environmental history, the history of human-animal relations, and the history of natural history.

About the Auth or s

353

Ann B. Shteir, Professor in Humanities at York University in Toronto (where she also is affiliated with the School of Women’s Studies), is the author of Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, 1760 to 1860 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), and a co-editor (with Barbara T. Gates) of Natural Eloquence: Women Reinscribe Science (University of Wisconsin Press, 1997). Her essays have appeared in Victorian Science in Context, edited by Bernard Lightman (1997), and in Women, Gender, and Science: New Directions, edited by Sally Gregory Kohlstedt and Helen Longino (1997). Her current project is titled Figuring Flora: Women in the Cultural History of Botany. With Bernard Lightman, she is editing a collection of essays about science, gender, and visual culture. Sally Shuttleworth, Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield and co-director of the SciPer Project, has worked extensively on the relations between science and literature. Her books include George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science (1984), Charlotte Bronte and Victorian Psychology (1996), Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science (edited with Mary Jacobus and Evelyn Fox Keller, 1990), Nature Transfigured: Literature and Science, 1700–1900 (with John Christie, 1989), and Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts, 1830–1890 (with Jenny Bourne Taylor, 1998). Helen Small, Lecturer in English at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Pembroke College at Oxford, is the author of Love’s Madness: Medicine, the Novel, and Female Insanity, 1800–1865 (1996), a co-editor of The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (1996), and the editor of The Public Intellectual (2002). The holder of a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, she is writing a book on the literature and philosophy of old age. Crosbie Smith, Professor of History of Science and Director of the Centre for History and Cultural Studies of Science at Canterbury, is coauthor (with Norton Wise) of Energy and Empire. A Biographical Study of Lord Kelvin (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 1990 winner of the History of Science Society’s Pfizer Award. His book The Science of Energy. A Cultural History of Energy Physics in Victorian Britain (University of Chicago Press, 1998) won the 2000 Pfizer Award. He has edited the British Journal for the History of Science since 1999. The award of a Leverhulme Fellowship (2000–2001) made possible his work on Henry Adams and the North American Review.

About the Auth or s

354

Jonathan Smith is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Michigan at Dearborn. He is the author of Fact and Feeling: Baconian Science and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1994). His articles on Victorian literature and science have appeared in Victorian Studies, in Nineteenth-Century Literature, in Victorian Periodicals Review, and in Victorian Literature and Culture. He has recently completed a book-length manuscript titled Seeing Things: Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture. Roger Smith, Reader Emeritus in the History of Science at Lancaster University, now lives in Moscow, where he is a consultant to the Institute for the History of Science and Technology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He continues to research the history of relations between the natural and human sciences. He has published Trial by Medicine: Insanity and Responsibility in Victorian Trials (1981), Inhibition: History and Meaning in the Sciences of Mind and Brain (1992), and The Fontana History of the Human Sciences (Fontana, 1997; also published as The Norton History of the Human Science). Jonathan R. Topham is an AHRB Institutional Research Fellow on the SciPer Project. From 1993 to 1997 he served as an editor of the Correspondence of Charles Darwin (Cambridge University Press, 1985–2001). He is working on a book about scientific publishing and the readership for science in early-nineteenth-century Britain.

Inde x

Abercrombie, John, 43 Academy, 181–196 Adams, Charles Francis, 163–168 Adams, Henry Brooks, 149–173 Aesthetic sensibilities, 286–301 Agassiz, Louis, 155 Allen, Grant, 285–301 Allingham, William, 223, 226 American Association for the Advancement of Science, 155 Appleton, Charles Edward, 181–194 Archibald, E. Douglas, 134 Athenaeum, 70–77, 270, 271, 308, 322 Atlantic Monthly, 149–152, 156 Audience, 6, 30, 31, 40, 41, 51, 52, 136, 137, 149–150, 162, 331–346 Bain, Alexander J., 92–93, 97 Barry, William Francis, 210, 220, 224–227 Baxendell, Joseph, 125 Beau Monde, 30, 31 Belfast Address, 131, 132, 199–230 Belief, formation of, 239–253 Besant, Annie, 263 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 212, 215, 217, 223 Blaine, James Gillespie, 162 Blind, Mathilde, 274 Boston, 152–154 Botany, l7–33, 285–295 Brande, William Thomas, 67 Breeding, 332–345 Bridgewater Treatises, 37–59 British Association of the Advancement of Science, 155, 216, 217 British Critic, 42–46

British Lady’s Magazine, 17 British Lady’s Magazine and Monthly Miscellany, 26–28 British Magazine, 45 British Quarterly Review, 221, 222 Brougham, Henry, 43, 54, 55 Browne, John Hutton, 208 Buchanan, Robert, 214, 215, 224 Butler, Samuel, 307–325 Calderwood, Henry, 92 Carpenter, William Benjamin, 96–99, 242 Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, 150 Chalmers, Thomas, 43, 47, 48 Christian Examiner, 47 Christian Observer, 46–48, 54, 55 Christian Observer and Advocate, 220, 224 Christian Reformer, 57, 58 Christian Remembrancer, 44, 45, 54 Christian Teacher, 49, 58 Church, 153, 154, 202, 203, 209, 210, 224, 225 Clifford, Lucy, 261, 268–271, 276, 277 Clifford, William Kingdon, 90, 91, 99, 133, 245, 259–271, 275 Cobbe, Francis Power, 94 Collier, James, 84 Colour Sense, 289, 290 Conder, Josiah, 1, 3 Conduit model, 4–6 Contemporary Review, 135, 206, 208, 213, 214, 239–253, 264 Conybeare, William D., 53 Cooke, Mordeecai C., 288 Cornhill Magazine, 262, 263, 291 Cox, Jacob D., 161

Inde x Dalgairns, John Bernard, 86, 87, 101 Darwin, Charles, 113, 157, 158, 209, 285–295, 307–325 Darwin, Erasmus, 307–325 Davy, Humphry, 67 Deane, George, 221–224 Deism, 44, 58 Delicacy of construction, 113, l23, 127, 128, 132 Democracy, 160 Diffusionist model, 3, 6 Dublin Review, 212, 220, 224, 226 Duncan, Henry, 56 Eclectic Review, 49 Edinburgh Christian Instructor, 48 Edinburgh Review, 210–217 Elam, Charles, 214, 224 Ellegård, Alvar, 4 Empiricism, 87, 241, 242 Energy, 94–99, 111–138, 172, 173 Erasmus Darwin, 316–325 “Ethics of Belief,” 239–253, 264 Evolution, 84, 158, 224, 225, 286–290, 309–313, 320, 342 Evolution, Old and New, 307, 313–325 Ewart, James Cossar, 333–343 Faraday, Michael, 67–72 Ferrier, James F., 87 Fields, James T., 156 Fiske, John, 157, 158 Force, in psychology, 95–98 Fortnightly Review, 206, 208, 239, 263, 264, 267 Fraser’s Magazine, 223, 226, 266 Freethinking, 271, 272, 275, 310, 311 Galton, Francis, 316 Gauss, Karl Friedrich, 115 Gender, 31, 32 Gentleman’s Magazine, 28, 29 Geology, 152, 172, 173 Gladstone, William E., 250–252, 290 Gore, Nathan, 160 Gould, Jay, 166–168 Grant, Ulysses S., l59–161 Greg, William R., 242

356 Hackney Phalanx, 42–45 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 149–150 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 286 Herbert, Thomas Martin, 95, 96 Herschel, Alexander, 114, 115 Hilton, Boyd, 45, 46 Hopps, John Page, 208 Hutton, Richard H., 96, 244 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 85, 95, 96, 199, 200, 221, 252, 253 Hybridization, 332–335, 341, 342, 346 Ibbetson, Agnes, 20, 21, 32 Induction, 87, 241, 242 Intellectual Observer, 114–118 Irish Monthly, 212–216, 225 James, William, 276, 277, 289 Jerdan, William, 71, 72 Jones, Henry Bence, 68, 69 Kant, Immanuel, 43 Kelvin, Lord. See William Thomson Kew Observatory, 115–118, 123 King, Clarence, 172, 173, 248–250 Knowles, James, 239, 248–252 Krause, Ernst, 307, 308, 316–325 La Belle Assemblée, 23–26 Lady’s Magazine, 19–22 Lady’s Monthly Magazine, 22, 23 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 307, 308, 312–315 Lang, Andrew, 181 Laycock, Thomas, 93 Le Bas, Charles W., 53 Lewes, George Henry, 86 Linnaeus, Carl, 19, 21, 24, 28–30 Litchfield, Richard and Henrietta, 323 Literary Gazette, 70–77 Lockyer, Norman, 111, 118–135 Longman’s Magazine, 291 Lyell, Charles, 152 Macmillan, Alexander, 122, 129, 137 Macmillan’s Magazine, 118–128, 291 Mallock, William H., 213, 221, 266, 273 Marsh, Othniel C., 158

Inde x

357

Martineau, James, 88, 89, 96, 97, 208, 209, 214, 220–223 Masson, David, 92, 93 Materialism, 85, 86, 90–98, 131–137, 200–202, 209–212, 221–223 Maudsley, Henry, 92 Maxwell, James Clerk, 132, 217 Meteorology, 113 Mill, John Stuart, 87, 99, 101, 241, 242 Mind, 82, 90, 294, 295 Mivart, St. George, 206, 266, 312 Month and Catholic Review, 213, 215, 224 Monthly Magazine, 29, 30 Morley, John, 206, 242 Morley, Samuel, 248 Mozley, John R., 83, 89, 92, 97, 98

Quarterly Review, 265, 273

National Reformer, 209, 263, 264 Naturalism, scientific, 90–98, 202, 225, 228–230, 259–278 Nature, 129–132, 207, 208, 269–271, 317 Nineteenth Century, 248–250, 264–265 North American Review, 149–173 North British philosophers, 111–113 North British Review, 118

Sabine, Edward, 115, 130 Salisbury, Richard, 29 Saturday Review, 221, 244 Savile, Bouchier W., 220, 224 Scientists, authority of, 10, 221, 222, 228, 324 Scribner’s Monthly, 150 Seward, Anna, 316, 318 Simpson, Richard, 85, 86, 97 Smith, William, 85, 94 Spectroscopy, 121–124 Stephen, James Fitzjames, 240 Stephen, Leslie, 90, 91, 262, 263, 267, 274 Stewart, Balfour, 111–l38 St. James’s Gazette, 291–293 Strahan and Co. Ltd., 248–252 Sun, 112, 113, 117, 135 Sunspots, 113–116, 121–134 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 265–267

O’Ferrall, Michael, 216 Osler, Timothy S., 84, 87, 97 Pall Mall, 291–293 Peard, George, 228 Pearson, Karl, 268–276 Perception, sensory, 286–290 Periodical press, 1–13, 31, 32, 39–52, 82, 188, 225–230, 259–278, 320 Philology, l87 Phrenology, 89 Physiological Aesthetics, 289 Poe, Edgar Allen, 153, 168 Pollock, Frederick, 267, 274, 317–323 Popular Science Review, 308, 320 Powell, Baden, 41 Poynting, Thomas Elford, 207 Presbyterian Review, 48, 49, 54 Proctor, Richard, 295 Progressivism, 151, 152, 156–160, 173 Psychology, 81–101, 294, 295 Punch, 205, 206, 217–220, 225, 230

Rationalism, 43, 47, 240, 241, 245–250 Reader, 120, 121 Reassurance, 90–98 Reeve, Henry, 210, 212, 216, 217, 226 Reeve, Lovell, 74 Religion, 37–59, 84, 85, 90–98, 111–113, 131–137, 199–230 Religious magazines, 40–50, 53–58 Rice, Allen Thorndike, 171 Romanes, George, 324 Royal Agricultural Society of England, 331–334, 345, 346 Royal Institution, 67–77 Ruskin, John, 296–301

Tait, Peter Guthrie, 112, 131–135, 269, 270 Textual economy, 5, 6 Theological Review, 206–208 Theology, 37–59, 84–87, 92, 94, 96, 132–137, 173, 225 Thomson, William, 112, 113, 172, 173 Thornton, Robert John, 24, 25 Tobacco Parliaments, 120 Transcendentalists, 153

Inde x Tulloch, John, 215, 216, 222–225 Tyndall, John, 199–230 Uniformitarianism, 152 Unitarianism, 49, 50, 57, 58, 153–155, 207 Vanity Fair, 203, 204 Wace, Henry, 2l4, 222, 227, 228 Wakefield, Priscilla, 24 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 290, 314, 315 Ward, James, 315 Webb, Thomas W., 116 Wells, David Ames, 160, 161 Wells, Herbert G., 195, 196 Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, 49, 55, 56 Whewell, William, 42, 52, 53, 241, 242, 245, 246 Wilberforce, William, 46 Will free, 81, 125, 126 of God, 96 psychology and, 89, 94, 96, 97 Will force, 96, 99 Women, education of, 17–27, 33 Women’s magazines, 17–33

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