(Re)Creating Science in Nineteenth-Century Britain

by Amanda Mordavsky Caleb (editor)

This collection seeks to reconsider-and therefore recreate-histories of science in nineteenth-century Britain. Looking at science from an interdisciplinary perspective, the essays in this collection offer a fresh insight into how nineteenth-century science developed in Great Britain, suggesting the need for further research into this area. Moving away from a Darwin-focused history of science, these essays traverse the time span and disciplines, from history to religion to literature and art, to suggest how we can improve our understanding of scientific development in a particularly important decade in British scientific history.

350 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 2007

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction -Amanda Mordavsky Caleb

Part I: Recreating Science

Natural Sciences

1. The X Club: Romanticism and Victorian Science —John Holmes
2. Retailing scandal: the disappearance of Friedrich Accum —James Sumner
3. Charles Lyell, Uniformitarianism, and Interpretive Principles —Owen Anderson
4. Naturalizing Identity: Science, Location, and Desire in Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa and Nina Mazuchelli’s The Indian Alps —Ruth Jenkins
5. Bug-Hunting Editors: Competing Interpretations of Nature in Late Nineteenth-Century Natural History Periodicals —Jim Mussell
6. Beyond the Visible: Democratic Cells, Unruly Blobs, and the Circle of Life —Kate Hebblethwaite
7. Dr Moreau’s Crimes: H. G. Wells and the Victorian Vivisection Controversy —Simon Marsden

Medicine

8. The Lancet and the Campaign against Women Doctors, 1860-1880 - Claire Brock
9. Gynaecology Controversy and Victorian Fiction —Andrew Mangham and Greta Depledge
Mathematics and Technology
10. How to supersede Euclid: Geometrical Teaching and the Mathematical Community in Nineteenth-Century Britain —Amirouche Moktefi
11. Evolutionary Mathematics: The Discourse of Evolution, Variation, and Acquired Traits in William Kingdon Clifford’s Mathematics (1868-1879) —Josipa G. Petrunić
12. Ada Byron and the Language of Artificial Intelligence —Andrea Austin

Part II: Creating New Science

Psychology and Sociology

13. The Mechanical Age: Nineteenth Century Materialism and the Human Mind —Herbert Klein
14. Thomas Bakewell’s Poetry, Social Relationships, and Moral Management —Michelle Faubert

Racial Science and Eugenics

15. Apes and Artists: Science, Empire and Art in Nineteenth-Century Ireland —Miriam Rainbird
16. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Galton: The Literacy of Eugenics in Stevenson’s Strange Case —Amanda Mordavsky Caleb

Spiritualism and Occultism

17. Communication between Worlds: Scientific Imagery in Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism —Katie Wales
18. Occultism, Scientific Materialism, and Belief in Victorian England
—Susan Johnston Graf

Afterword -Jon Hodge and Greg Radick