Victorian Science and Imagery
Victorian Science and Imagery

Author: Nancy Rose Marshall

Publisher: Sci & Culture in the Nineteent

Published: 2021-05-11

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 9780822946533

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The nineteenth century was a period of science and imagery: when scientific theories and discoveries challenged longstanding boundaries between animal, plant, and human, and when art and visual culture produced new notions about the place of the human in the natural world. Just as scientists relied on graphic representation to conceptualize their ideas, artists moved seamlessly between scientific debate and creative expression to support or contradict popular scientific theories--such as Darwin's theory of evolution and sexual selection--deliberately drawing on concepts in ways that allowed them to refute popular claims or disrupt conventional knowledges. Focusing on the close kinship between the arts and sciences during the Victorian period, the art historians contributing to this volume reveal the unique ways in which nineteenth-century British and American visual culture participated in making science, and in which science informed art at a crucial moment in the history of the development of the modern world. Together, they explore topics in geology, meteorology, medicine, anatomy, evolution, and zoology, as well as a range of media from photography to oil painting. They remind us that science and art are not tightly compartmentalized, separate influences. Rather, these are fields that share forms, manifest as waves, layers, lines, or geometries; that invest in the idea of the evolution of form; and that generate surprisingly kindred responses, such as pain, pleasure, empathy, and sympathy.

Victorian Science in Context
Victorian Science in Context

Author: Bernard Lightman

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1997-10

Total Pages: 516

ISBN-13: 9780226481111

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Victorian Science in Context captures the essence of this fascination, charting the many ways in which science influenced and was influenced by the larger Victorian culture. Leading scholars in history, literature, and the history of science explore questions such as, What did science mean to the Victorians? For whom was Victorian science written? What ideological messages did it convey?

Victorian Popularizers of Science
Victorian Popularizers of Science

Author: Bernard Lightman

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2009-10-15

Total Pages: 565

ISBN-13: 0226481174

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The ideas of Charles Darwin and his fellow Victorian scientists have had an abiding effect on the modern world. But at the time The Origin of Species was published in 1859, the British public looked not to practicing scientists but to a growing group of professional writers and journalists to interpret the larger meaning of scientific theories in terms they could understand and in ways they could appreciate. Victorian Popularizers of Science focuses on this important group of men and women who wrote about science for a general audience in the second half of the nineteenth century. Bernard Lightman examines more than thirty of the most prolific, influential, and interesting popularizers of the day, investigating the dramatic lecturing techniques, vivid illustrations, and accessible literary styles they used to communicate with their audience. By focusing on a forgotten coterie of science writers, their publishers, and their public, Lightman offers new insights into the role of women in scientific inquiry, the market for scientific knowledge, tensions between religion and science, and the complexities of scientific authority in nineteenth-century Britain.

Visions of Science
Visions of Science

Author: James A. Secord

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 022620328X

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The first half of the nineteenth century witnessed an extraordinary transformation in British political, literary, and intellectual life. There was widespread social unrest, and debates raged regarding education, the lives of the working class, and the new industrial, machine-governed world. At the same time, modern science emerged in Europe in more or less its current form, as new disciplines and revolutionary concepts, including evolution and the vastness of geologic time, began to take shape. In Visions of Science, James A. Secord offers a new way to capture this unique moment of change. He explores seven key books—among them Charles Babbage’s Reflections on the Decline of Science, Charles Lyell’s Principles ofGeology, Mary Somerville’s Connexion of the Physical Sciences, and Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus—and shows how literature that reflects on the wider meaning of science can be revelatory when granted the kind of close reading usually reserved for fiction and poetry. These books considered the meanings of science and its place in modern life, looking to the future, coordinating and connecting the sciences, and forging knowledge that would be appropriate for the new age. Their aim was often philosophical, but Secord shows it was just as often imaginative, projective, and practical: to suggest not only how to think about the natural world but also to indicate modes of action and potential consequences in an era of unparalleled change. Visions of Science opens our eyes to how genteel ladies, working men, and the literary elite responded to these remarkable works. It reveals the importance of understanding the physical qualities of books and the key role of printers and publishers, from factories pouring out cheap compendia to fashionable publishing houses in London’s West End. Secord’s vivid account takes us to the heart of an information revolution that was to have profound consequences for the making of the modern world.

The Victorian Palace of Science
The Victorian Palace of Science

Author: Edward J. Gillin

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-11-09

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 1108419666

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Edward J. Gillin explores the extraordinary role of scientific knowledge in the building of the Houses of Parliament in Victorian Britain.

Imperial Nature
Imperial Nature

Author: Jim Endersby

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2008-05-15

Total Pages: 443

ISBN-13: 0226207919

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Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817–1911) was an internationally renowned botanist, a close friend and early supporter of Charles Darwin, and one of the first—and most successful—British men of science to become a full-time professional. He was also, Jim Endersby argues, the perfect embodiment of Victorian science. A vivid picture of the complex interrelationships of scientific work and scientific ideas, Imperial Nature gracefully uses one individual’s career to illustrate the changing world of science in the Victorian era. By analyzing Hooker’s career, Endersby offers vivid insights into the everyday activities of nineteenth-century naturalists, considering matters as diverse as botanical illustration and microscopy, classification, and specimen transportation and storage, to reveal what they actually did, how they earned a living, and what drove their scientific theories. What emerges is a rare glimpse of Victorian scientific practices in action. By focusing on science’s material practices and one of its foremost practitioners, Endersby ably links concerns about empire, professionalism, and philosophical practices to the forging of a nineteenth-century scientific identity.

Strange Science
Strange Science

Author: Lara Pauline Karpenko

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 047213017X

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A fascinating look at scientific inquiry during the Victorian period and the shifting boundary between mainstream and unorthodox sciences of the time

Reforming Philosophy
Reforming Philosophy

Author: Laura J. Snyder

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2010-11-15

Total Pages: 397

ISBN-13: 0226767353

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The Victorian period in Britain was an “age of reform.” It is therefore not surprising that two of the era’s most eminent intellects described themselves as reformers. Both William Whewell and John Stuart Mill believed that by reforming philosophy—including the philosophy of science—they could effect social and political change. But their divergent visions of this societal transformation led to a sustained and spirited controversy that covered morality, politics, science, and economics. Situating their debate within the larger context of Victorian society and its concerns, Reforming Philosophy shows how two very different men captured the intellectual spirit of the day and engaged the attention of other scientists and philosophers, including the young Charles Darwin. Mill—philosopher, political economist, and Parliamentarian—remains a canonical author of Anglo-American philosophy, while Whewell—Anglican cleric, scientist, and educator—is now often overlooked, though in his day he was renowned as an authority on science. Placing their teachings in their proper intellectual, cultural, and argumentative spheres, Laura Snyder revises the standard views of these two important Victorian figures, showing that both men’s concerns remain relevant today. A philosophically and historically sensitive account of the engagement of the major protagonists of Victorian British philosophy, Reforming Philosophy is the first book-length examination of the dispute between Mill and Whewell in its entirety. A rich and nuanced understanding of the intellectual spirit of Victorian Britain, it will be welcomed by philosophers and historians of science, scholars of Victorian studies, and students of the history of philosophy and political economy.

Kew Observatory and the Evolution of Victorian Science, 1840–1910
Kew Observatory and the Evolution of Victorian Science, 1840–1910

Author: Lee T. Macdonald

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2018-06-05

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 0822983494

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Kew Observatory was originally built in 1769 for King George III, a keen amateur astronomer, so that he could observe the transit of Venus. By the mid-nineteenth century, it was a world-leading center for four major sciences: geomagnetism, meteorology, solar physics, and standardization. Long before government cutbacks forced its closure in 1980, the observatory was run by both major bodies responsible for the management of science in Britain: first the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and then, from 1871, the Royal Society. Kew Observatory influenced and was influenced by many of the larger developments in the physical sciences during the second half of the nineteenth century, while many of the major figures involved were in some way affiliated with Kew. Lee T. Macdonald explores the extraordinary story of this important scientific institution as it rose to prominence during the Victorian era. His book offers fresh new insights into key historical issues in nineteenth-century science: the patronage of science; relations between science and government; the evolution of the observatory sciences; and the origins and early years of the National Physical Laboratory, once an extension of Kew and now the largest applied physics organization in the United Kingdom.

The "creed of Science" in Victorian England
The

Author: Roy M. MacLeod

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13:

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The nineteenth century, which saw the triumph of the idea of progress and improvement, saw also the triumph of science as a political and cultural force. In England, as science and its methods claimed privilege and space, its language acquired the vocabulary of religion. The new 'creed' of science embraced what John Tyndall called the 'scientific movement'; it was, in the language of T.H. Huxley, a militant creed. The 'march' of invention, the discoveries of chemistry, and the wonders of steam and electricity culminated in a crusade against ignorance and unbelief. It was a creed that looked to its own apostolic succession from Copernicus, Galileo and the martyrs of the 'scientific revolution'. Yet, it was a creed whose doctrines were divisive, and whose convictions resisted. Alongside arguments for materialism, utility, positivism, and evolutionary naturalism, persisted reservations about the nature of man, the role of ethics, and the limits of scientific method. These essays discuss leading strategists in the scientific movement of late-Victorian England. At the same time, they show how 'science established' served not only the scientific community, but also the interests of imperial and colonial powers.