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

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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,
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Ancient Astronomy and Celestial Divination

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 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 elec-
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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

1 Introduction 1
Sally Shuttleworth and Geoffrey Cantor

2 “Let Us Examine the Flower”: Botany in Women’s

Magazines, 1800–1830 17
Ann B. Shteir

3 Science, Natural Theology, and the Practice of

Christian Piety in Early-Nineteenth-Century
Religious Magazines 37
Jonathan R. Topham

4 Reporting Royal Institution Lectures, 1826–1867 67

Frank A. J. L. James

5 The Physiology of the Will: Mind, Body, and Psychology

in the Periodical Literature, 1855–1875 81
Roger Smith

6 Sunspots, Weather, and the Unseen Universe: Balfour

Stewart’s Anti-Materialist Representations of “Energy”
in British Periodicals 111
Graeme Gooday

7 “Improvised Europeans”: Science and Reform in the NORTH

AMERICAN REVIEW, 1865–1880 149
Crosbie Smith and Ian Higginson

8 The ACADEMY: Europe in England 181

Gillian Beer

9 Scientists as Materialists in the Periodical Press:

Tyndall’s Belfast Address 199
Bernard Lightman
Conte nt s vi

10 Science, Liberalism, and the Ethics of Belief:

The CONTEMPORARY REVIEW in 1877 239
Helen Small

11 Victorian Periodicals and the Making of William

Kingdon Clifford’s Posthumous Reputation 259
Gowan Dawson

12 Grant Allen, Physiological Aesthetics, and the

Dissemination of Darwin’s Botany 285
Jonathan Smith

13 The Butler-Darwin Biographical Controversy in the

Victorian Periodical Press 307
James G. Paradis

14 Understanding Audiences and Misunderstanding

Audiences: Some Publics for Science 331
Harriet Ritvo

About the Author s 351

Index 355
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 sub-
sequently 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 peri-
odical 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 audi-
ences. 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 Com-
panion for the Fair Sex (1770–1832) to Women’s Suffrage Journal (1870–1890).
S huttleworth and Cantor 2

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 con-
ceptions 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 self-
conscious group who studied the natural world but sought to distance
themselves from the outmoded term “natural philosopher,” with its con-
notations 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 indi-
cator of the growth of scientific knowledge and of increasing specializa-
tion. 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 Maga-
zine), 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
Introduction 3

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 “dif-
fusionist model,” which views science as the product of a discrete com-
munity 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 simpli-
fies and thereby distorts science in the process of molding it for the sci-
entifically 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 sci-
entific 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 nineteenth-
century 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 superfi-
cial 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 dis-
courses 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 rela-
tively small numbers who crowded the lecture theater at the Royal Insti-
tution. 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.
S huttleworth and Cantor 4

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 down-
ward diffusion by a process in which periodicals transmit science to spe-
cific audiences. According to this model, each periodical fashions its
response to science in the light of the intended readership. Two periodi-
cals 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 subse-
quent 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 explic-
itly 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 con-
ceits. We also need to explore the effects of placement and to consider
how reading and interpretation might have been affected by the interdis-
ciplinary structure of each periodical. Articles, once restored to their orig-
inal 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, philol-
ogy figured alongside physics and biology as an area of contemporary sci-
entific development.
Periodicals themselves also played a crucial role in the development
of scientific thought itself. As Roger Smith reveals, the discipline of psy-
chology was actively shaped in the public arena of debate offered by peri-
odicals. The conduit model must be revised to take account of the ways
in which science was not simply “transmitted” but was also given defini-
tion, to a greater or lesser degree, in the pages of the periodical press. Psy-
chology was not the only field in which debate was informed by moral
Introduction 5

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 circula-
tion. 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 reli-
gious 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 dif-
ferent 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
S huttleworth and Cantor 6

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 peri-
odicals. 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 diver-
sity 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 struc-
tures 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 periodi-
cals 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 inter-
est in the development of all aspects of science and culture, across the
breadth of Europe, was simply taken for granted in the initial organiza-
tion 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 mag-
azines 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 explo-
ration 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
Introduction 7

newspaper and periodical coverage of his experiments in hybridity, often

based on his own press releases, reading and interpretation were still gov-
erned 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 nec-
essarily 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 pat-
terns 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 Illustra-
tions 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 collec-
tion 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 populariz-
ers 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 theo-
logically 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
S huttleworth and Cantor 8

Although each periodical tended to have its own stable of writers, they
also ranged more widely, choosing to respond to articles in other period-
icals 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 moral-
ity had been grossly misrepresented by R. H. Hutton in Macmillan’s Mag-
azine. 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 con-
versations more clearly than books. They also operate according to differ-
ent temporal patterns and in response to a different range of external
pressures. Editors must fill each issue, publish it on time, keep the peri-
odical financially profitable, publish material that will attract readers, and
yet be careful not to offend them too much by disseminating unaccept-
able 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 impor-
tance 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 criti-
cal exchange between members of the scientific community, we should
adopt a broader perspective and appreciate how general periodicals estab-
lished both the platforms and necessary conditions for debate. Whereas
historians have tended to highlight developments in science, technology
Introduction 9

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 charac-
terized 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 dis-
cipline, 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 phys-
iology. 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 peri-
odical 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
S huttleworth and Cantor 10

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 lion-
ized Darwin. This controversy soon spilled onto the pages of the period-
ical press, where Butler could operate effectively and with impunity,
scoring some telling points against Darwin. As Paradis’s case study sug-
gests, the authority of the emergent scientific community remained a con-
troversial issue throughout the nineteenth century and was particularly
pertinent to the periodical press, which often functioned as an inter-
face 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 peri-
odicals 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 addi-
tion 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 scien-
tific 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 collabora-
tion but also recruited them to his stable of writers. They contributed to
Macmillan’s Magazine, to his textbook series, and to his new and impor-
tant venture into science journalism: Nature. In collaborating and writing
Introduction 11

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 idio-
syncratic 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 pub-
lishers—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 Contempo-
rary 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 peri-
odical debate, but became closely woven into the material conditions of
publication.
Closely related to these questions of the cultural politics of publica-
tion are questions of language. How writers on science framed their argu-
ments 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 rhetor-
ical 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,
S huttleworth and Cantor 12

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 encour-
aged 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 per-
meated 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 tech-
nical 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 chal-
lenge 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 tra-
jectory, 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
Introduction 13

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 reli-
gious 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 period-
icals presented their work, or how readers chose to interpret and under-
stand 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 Nineteenth-
Century Periodical) project, which had commenced in January 1999 at
the Universities of Leeds and Sheffield. We would like to record our grat-
itude 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.
S huttleworth and Cantor 14

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: Reflec-
tions 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,” Macmil-

lan’s Magazine 23 (1870): 24–37; idem., “Dreams as Illustrations of Unconscious Cer-
ebration,” 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’ Dis-
course Touching the Method of Using One’s Reason Rightly, and of Seeking Scien-
tific 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 impor-
tant 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 educa-
tion. 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 Maga-
zine, 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 par-
ticular tensions between aristocratic ideals of fashionable leisure and values
S hte i r 18

associated with wives, mothers, and moral management within the bour-
geois 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 maga-
zines 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, mag-
azines 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 intellec-
tual 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 daugh-
ters,” 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 univer-
sity textbooks.
“Let Us Examine the Flowe r” 19

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 aston-
ishment 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. Neverthe-
less, 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 empha-
sis 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 FOR THE FAIR SEX

(1770–1832)

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.
S hte i r 20

This lavishly illustrated monthly featured fiction and fashion, sewing pat-
terns, 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 termi-
nology 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 con-
genial 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 posi-
tion 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 exper-
iments 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-
“Let Us Examine the Flowe r” 21

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 chap-
ters 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 materi-
als were too elementary in content, or too juvenile in association, to sit
S hte i r 22

successfully within the pages of general interest magazines for women in

the 1820s?

The LADIES’ MONTHLY MUSEUM, OR POLITE REPOSITORY OF AMUSEMENT AND

INSTRUCTION (1798–1828)

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 pre-
scriptive 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 posi-
tioned 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 “introduc-
tory 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 botan-
ical 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,
“Let Us Examine the Flowe r” 23

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 clergy-
man, 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 nine-
teenth 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 AND FASHIONABLE MAGAZINE

(1806–1832)

Among magazines for women readers during the early nineteenth century,
La Belle Assemblée was by far the most substantive in both literary and sci-
entific 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, com-
munications 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, famil-
iar, 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
S hte i r 24

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 summa-
rized, 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 scien-
tific—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 maga-
zine 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
“Let Us Examine the Flowe r” 25

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 maga-
zine 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 pictur-
esque 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, angli-
cizes 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 double-
column, 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 com-
menting 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 popu-
larizer and an ardent but realistic Linnaean, Thornton could not avoid
sexual aspects of Linnaean botany, but for the most part he simply side-
stepped the topic. He located botany in his own version of an appropri-
ate 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
S hte i r 26

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 chem-
istry of plant processes to women readers. The writer identifies the likely
audience for this series as “fair readers . . . who are in the habit of attend-
ing 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 coquet-
tish 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 mytho-
logical 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 Mag-
azine 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 maga-
zines for ladies “vapid, uninteresting, and uninstructive,”29 it claimed to
stake out different territory from other magazines for women. The mag-
azine assumed a level of botanical activity among its readers, and provided
no specific instruction. Linnaean botany was neither specifically ear-
marked, promoted, nor contested. An extract from a book about improve-
ments in female education, for example, noted advances in women’s
knowledge across “history and belles-lettres, chemistry, botany, natural phi-
losophy,” and the author remarks: “Formerly, if a man knew enough of
botany to observe, that the petals of a particular plant are cruciform and
“Let Us Examine the Flowe r” 27

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 fre-
quent 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 com-
munication 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 arro-
gance 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 “court-
ing 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 impor-
tant 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
S hte i r 28

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 illus-
trated “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.
“Let Us Examine the Flowe r” 29

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 botan-
ical 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 con-
troversies 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 propri-
etors 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 Con-
troversies 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 like-
wise 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
S hte i r 30

county floras. Readers were informed that “Linnaeus had a mind so

philosophically constituted, that he seemed almost intuitively, by a defin-
itive 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 fea-
tures 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 theatri-
cal 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 fac-
tories, streets, and even our residences”). A few articles about botany were
included too. In July 1809 Le Beau Monde printed the text of William
“Let Us Examine the Flowe r” 31

Roscoe’s famous address at the Liverpool Botanic Garden about the advan-
tages 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 read-
erships 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
S hte i r 32

visibility. Because they are particularly subject to fashion and modulations

in audience tastes, magazines may register these changing cultural conver-
sations even more clearly than books.
During the opening decades of the nineteenth century, general inter-
est 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 instruc-
tional 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 bot-
any. 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 system-
atics at an introductory level. The British Lady’s Magazine avoided exposi-
tory 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 sub-
scribers. For nearly two decades, genteel readers could glean elementary
“Let Us Examine the Flowe r” 33

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 ele-
mentary 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 cir-
cumstances 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. Depend-
ing on her entry level, a woman reader in England with botanical inter-
ests could get her bearings in general interest magazines for a genteel and
female audience, familiarizing herself with entry-level Linnaean systemat-
ics, and learning about new theories and methods that were emerging at
home and on the Continent. But if she wanted material beyond the ele-
mentary 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 peri-
odicals 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 sofa-
table 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.
S h te i r 34

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 Wis-
consin 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 infor-
mation 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, Culti-
vating Botany, chapter 4.
22. La Belle Assemblée 1 (1806), p. 42.
“Let Us Examine the Flowe r” 35

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
S hte i r 36

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” ques-
tioned, as historians have taken cognizance of a wider range of reading
audiences.2 It nevertheless remains a commonplace that, both in the peri-
odicals and more generally, natural theology fulfilled a decisive role in
mediating the natural sciences to a wider public.3 In what follows, I crit-
ically 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 all-
sufficient, 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
Topham 38

Then, as now, the theologically exact definition of natural theology

referred to the attempt to procure religious truths about God and his rela-
tion 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 gen-
erally 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 the-
ologian, 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 ques-
tion of epistemology was left undetermined. The bequest made no pro-
nouncement in regard to the capacity of unaided human reason to discover
evidence of divine attributes in the creation without recourse to revela-
tion. It was left to the authors to decide the question for themselves. More-
over, 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 dis-
course of design, and in others dwelling explicitly on the low epistemo-
logical 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
S c i e nc e, Natural Th e olog y, and C h ri st i an P i ety 39

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 sub-
sequently 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 some-
times found useful in evoking a sense of awe and wonder at divine activ-
ity 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 early-
nineteenth-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 maga-
zines far outsold other titles, including the highbrow monthlies and quar-
terlies, 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—
Topham 40

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 domi-
nant, 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 con-
tested across the Christian traditions, highlighting the fact that, where a
discourse of design was considered to have value, it was usually for non-
epistemological and non-apologetic reasons. Having shown that the his-
torical emphasis on natural theology is problematic, I argue in the second
part of the paper that other themes emerge when the religious periodi-
cals 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 prac-
tice 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
S c i e nc e, Natural Th e olog y, and C h ri st i an P i ety 41

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 peri-
odical is what the limits of acceptable opinion are and where the posi-
tions 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 reli-
gious culture of early-nineteenth-century Britain has shown, the legiti-
macy, 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 chang-
ing 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 strate-
gies 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 apolo-
getic function of natural theology was by no means its sole, nor even
Topham 42

necessarily its primary use within Christian traditions. To add to the com-
plexity 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 the-
ology, the most striking feature of these discussions from the perspective
of the history of science is the very limited extent to which natural the-
ology 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 apolo-
getic 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
S c i e nc e, Natural Th e olog y, and C h ri st i an P i ety 43

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, suggest-
ing that belief in the being and attributes of God was similarly “instinc-
tive” (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 philoso-
phy” 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 uni-
verse which is visible to us.”23 To the question whence one might ascer-
tain 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 theol-
ogy was of use only in raising questions, the answer to which lay in rev-
elation (pp. 223–224).
Topham 44

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 through-
out the regions of Natural Theology.” The whole project of natural theol-
ogy 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 con-
fronting 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” doc-
trine), 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 mountain-
ous induction, in order to overwhelm the Titans? Since there is no crush-
ing 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 theol-
ogy” 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 audi-
ence. The Christian Remembrancer reviewed all the Bridgewater Treatises,
S c i e nc e, Natural Th e olog y, and C h ri st i an P i ety 45

mostly in very favorable terms, and, while clearly stating the “true defects”
of natural theology, reviewers seemed to allow its arguments limited epis-
temological 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 “interest-
ing, 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 Trea-
tises 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 sur-
rounding Brougham’s notoriously rationalist Discourse, he took what he
thought of as a “via media” between extreme positions, stating that “pre-
vious 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 period-
icals is, perhaps not surprisingly, echoed in many of the evangelical peri-
odicals both of the established churches in England and Scotland, and of
old and new dissent. Indeed, it is so common to portray evangelical reli-
gion as a “religion of the heart” that Boyd Hilton has sought to redress
the balance by emphasizing the extent to which what he calls “moder-
ate” evangelicals sought to construct a religion that combined religious
feeling with rational thought.31 Focusing on the “moderate” evangelicals
Topham 46

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 sup-
plant 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 maga-
zines 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 dec-
laration 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 benev-
olence.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
S c i e nc e, Natural Th e olog y, and C h ri st i an P i ety 47

testimony of the Sacred Volume is of superior cogency to any laboured

reasoning . . . yet it is useful for the silencing of gainsayers, and the repul-
sion 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 so-
called “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 evi-
dence 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 con-
viction of the divine being and attributes owed more to the realm of sen-
timent 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
Topham 48

Scottish evangelicalism, it is clear that the Evangelical party had nothing

like an agreed position regarding the validity or utility of natural theol-
ogy.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 legit-
imacy 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 “mis-
represented 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
S c i e nc e, Natural Th e olog y, and C h ri st i an P i ety 49

“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 evan-
gelical 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 Trea-
tises. 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 doc-
trine 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 foun-
dational 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 exis-
tence 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 pro-
nounced a failure”48 —several contributors to the magazine asserted the
Topham 50

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 concili-
ate.”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 retain-
ing a Priestleyan commitment to the epistemological status of natural the-
ology, 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 ful-
filled 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 reli-
gious magazines suggest some important avenues for exploration. Of these,
I will select two which seem to me to be particularly suggestive. Firstly,
S c i e nc e, Natural Th e olog y, and C h ri st i an P i ety 51

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 prac-
titioner, and clearly suggests an important departure from a more ratio-
nalist 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 inad-
equacy of their arguments, should be recontextualized as works in a
particular genre, the object of whose rhetoric was to appeal to the imag-
ination 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 fre-
quently 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 devo-
tional context. Firstly, there was from the eighteenth century a burgeon-
ing trade in books on science intended initially for the rapidly growing
middle-class leisure market. Moreover, as the nineteenth century pro-
gressed the publication of cheap works on science increased at a rapid
pace, providing a growing range of literature at prices which lower-
middle-class and even working-class readers might afford. These develop-
ments 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 reli-
gious 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
Topham 52

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 neces-
sarily 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 “deduc-
tive reasoners,” habitually occupied with “tracing the consequences of
ascertained laws,” rather than with the discovery of new laws, were vul-
nerable 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 con-
victions 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 dis-
course of design by itself was dangerous. For many evangelicals, in partic-
ular, science could only be rendered “safe” by its explicit association with
scriptural sentiments. Without such associations, they considered that
S c i e nc e, Natural Th e olog y, and C h ri st i an P i ety 53

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 knowl-
edge of the Universe harmonizes with the belief of a most wise and
gracious God.”53 This was the more valuable, Le Bas noted, since “physi-
cal 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 writ-
ings (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. Com-
menting 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 spec-
ulations; 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 explic-
itly made, clearly lay behind reviews of the Bridgewater Treatises in the
other High Church periodicals, where the “religious spirit” in which the
Topham 54

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 scien-
tific 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 evan-
gelical 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 philosoph-
ical 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 audi-
tors 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”
S c i e nc e, Natural Th e olog y, and C h ri st i an P i ety 55

(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 lib-
erality, a passion for generalizing in religious sentiment, a desire to amal-
gamate 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 instru-
ments 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 merce-
nary 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 provi-
sion 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
Topham 56

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 Philos-
ophy of the Seasons (1837–38), drew heavily on the Bridgewater Treatises
for its materials.63 However, Duncan explicitly designed his work to coun-
teract a dangerous tendency which he clearly considered some of the trea-
tises 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 illumina-
tion 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 expo-
sition of “the various marks of divine wisdom and goodness, with occa-
sional 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 mag-
azines, 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
S c i e nc e, Natural Th e olog y, and C h ri st i an P i ety 57

“carried away from God, and from the feeling of its own natural wretched-
ness and helplessness, by a keen taste for the pleasures of science and lit-
erature,” 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, nev-
ertheless 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 sen-
sibility: “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
Topham 58

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 impres-
sion of the universality of His operation and His presence—and to
present him prominently to the awakened heart of devotion.”71 More-
over, 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 sen-
timents, 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 pro-
jection 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 practi-
tioners who have been supposed to share a similar, “liberal Anglican”
theology.
S c i e nc e, Natural Th e olog y, and C h ri st i an P i ety 59

Having established that natural theology was not the primary means
by which the sciences were framed in the religious magazines, the histo-
rian 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 hith-
erto 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 interconnec-
tions 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.
Topham 60

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
S c i e nc e, Natural Th e olog y, and C h ri st i an P i ety 61

Connexion of Natural and Divine Truth; or, The Study of the Inductive Philosophy Consid-
ered 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 theologi-
cal positions, when the object was to avoid religious and political discord”—a func-
tion of particular importance to socially vulnerable scientific practitioners in the
tumultuous early years of the century. Brooke, Science and Religion, p. 211. The argu-
ment was first expounded in Brooke, “Natural Theology of the Geologists.” For appli-
cations 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 fore-
word by David L. Hull, University of Chicago Press). Ellegård sought to use the opin-
ions 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).
Topham 62

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 Early-
Nineteenth-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
Sc i e nc e, Natural Th e olog y, and C h ri st i an P i ety 63

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 refer-
ences 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 Maga-
zine, 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.
Topham 64

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 Mag-
azine, 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.
S c i e nc e, Natural Th e olog y, and C h ri st i an P i ety 65

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 Evi-
dence 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 appreci-

ate—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; “Adap-
tation 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 sci-
entific authors in the evangelical periodicals during the 1830s was the Scottish evan-
gelical schoolteacher Thomas Dick, who, as William Astore has shown, rejected natural
Topham 66

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 reason-
able 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 audi-
ence 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 commit-
tee, 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
Jame s 68

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 stu-
dents 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 initia-
tive, 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
Re porting Royal Institution Lecture s 69

Royal Institution. During the period covered here nineteen Discourses

were normally delivered during the first six months of each year.To main-
tain 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 fol-
lowing 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 estab-
lished converzatziones on Friday Evenings which have been numerously
and well attended.”11 Faraday was clearly pleased with the success and
Jame s 70

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 secre-
taries of lectures committee. After Faraday had built up the average audi-
ence 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 expe-
rience 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 news-
papers. 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 signif-
icantly different. Furthermore, both these periodicals had a similar struc-
ture starting with reviews of the latest books and then moving on to the
reports of meetings, plays, and concerts, with occasional pieces of original
Re porting Royal Institution Lecture s 71

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 fre-
quent 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 des-
perately short of material.
The Literary Gazette began publishing reports of Discourses in 1827,
while the Athenaeum commenced reporting two years later. The publica-
tion 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 pleas-
urable assemblies which are to be found in London.”15 Although other
lecture courses continued to be delivered at the Royal Institution, the Dis-
courses quickly emerged as the events that the press liked to report. In
many ways Discourses made an ideal story for the weeklies. Such report-
ing 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
Jame s 72

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 follow-
ing 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 inter-
esting” 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 Dis-
courses: “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 audi-
ence, ‘fit though few,’ at one or other of the Societies.”26 This came after
Re porting Royal Institution Lecture s 73

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 audi-
ence 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
Jame s 74

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
Re porting Royal Institution Lecture s 75

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 centime-
ters 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.
Jame s 76

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 evi-
dence 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 report-
ing 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
Re porting Royal Institution Lecture s 77

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 peri-
odicals 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 evi-
dence presented in this chapter does point to a decline in science cover-
age 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.
Jame s 78

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.
Re porting Royal Institution Lecture s 79

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 Con-
troversy: 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 pathol-
ogy 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 under-
mine 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 ques-
tions, 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 founda-
tion 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 phys-
iology 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 wide-
spread 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
R. Smith 82

agreed that understanding the will required both physiology and psychol-
ogy, since “will, as voluntary motion, is plainly neither exclusively a phys-
ical 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 begin-
ning 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. Never-
theless, 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 author-
ship.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
Th e P hys i olog y of th e Wi l l 83

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 exis-
tence 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 psy-
chology.”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 nego-
tiation 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 differentia-
tion of academic life; and it suggests that the periodicals played a major
part in this. Psychology was first and foremost a discourse of lived expe-
rience, 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
R. Smith 84

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 lit-
erature 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
Th e P hys i olog y of th e Wi l l 85

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 identify-
ing 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 con-
fusion 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 automa-
tism 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 psychologi-
cal 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. Refer-
ring to the upheavals of 1848, he wrote: “It was not long before every
R. Smith 86

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 republica-
tion of James Mill’s work on the mind in 1869 observed: “What makes
philosophers shrink from this obvious truth [that mind and body ‘recip-
rocally 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 neo-
Aristotelian 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
Th e P hys i olog y of th e Wi l l 87

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 judg-
ment 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 co-
ordinates suggests that “conflict” is a historically accurate way of describ-
ing 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 knowl-
edge].” 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 knowl-
edge 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,
R. Smith 88

acceptance of the definition of psychology as “the observation and gen-

eralisation 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: “Con-
sciousness 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 prin-
cipal writer for the National Review, in which the article appeared) argued
that the conditions of knowledge impose a division in bodies of knowl-
edge: “Mental Science is Self-Knowledge: Natural Science, the knowledge
of something other than Self.Their spheres are of necessity mutually exclu-
sive. . . .” 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
Th e P hys i olog y of th e Wi l l 89

mind into connection with new knowledge of the nervous system,38 it

was medical writers, as earlier it had also been phrenologists, who pro-
vided 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 illustra-
tions 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 individ-
ual 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
R. Smith 90

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 reas-
surance, 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 straight-
forwardly 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 under-
pinning, 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
Th e P hys i olog y of th e Wi l l 91

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 differ-
ences of opinion about this—about the constitution of personality. Neither
Stephen nor Clifford showed any sensitivity to the possibility that chang-
ing 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 sym-
bolism 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.
R. Smith 92

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 what-
ever 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 con-
sciousness, 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 philoso-
phy for its proper tasks, often had idealist and religious roots. The emerg-
ing 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
Th e P hys i olog y of th e Wi l l 93

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 anony-
mous 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 argu-
ment 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 ques-
tion 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 some-
thing beyond, something in harmony with intuitions of the sacred:“Induc-
tive 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 inves-
tigator, 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
R. Smith 94

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 invol-
untary 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 Sim-
ilarly, though some years earlier, a review of a popular book on physiol-
ogy 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 dif-
ferent 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 excep-
tion: “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 con-
sciousness 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
Th e P hys i olog y of th e Wi l l 95

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 conserva-
tion 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 conser-
vation 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
R. Smith 96

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 conscious-
ness”—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 sensa-
tion 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 achiev-
ing 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, sug-
gested 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 con-
ditions 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
Th e P hys i olog y of th e Wi l l 97

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 sharp-
ness 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 epis-
temological argument, which traced the idea of externality to conscious-
ness 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 correspon-
dence 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 under-
stood, 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 reli-
gion and the particular truths of science. Mozley made a similar point:
R. Smith 98

“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 contin-
ued 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 dis-
quiet 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 dis-
course 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 rela-
tion 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
Th e P hys i olog y of th e Wi l l 99

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, com-
mitted 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 litera-
ture 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 differ-
ent 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 real-
ization 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 discus-
sion—which it is hard to believe more than a few specialists digested—
and colorful anecdotes of individual cases. Who actually were the readers
R. Smith 100

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 spe-
cialists, 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 famil-
iarize themselves with new knowledge. In this sense, psychology was not
just the most accessible of sciences, it was a science constituted in the self-
understandings of readers.
Writers sometimes sharply disagreed about the intellectual ground-
ing 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
Th e P hys i olog y of th e Wi l l 101

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 con-
sciousness. 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.
R. Smith 102

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, “Mid-
Nineteenth-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 Inter-
ests 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 Phi-
losophy,” 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.
Th e P hys i olog y of th e Wi l l 103

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 orig-
inated 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 Nine-
teenth-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 period-
ical’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, “Mid-
Nineteenth-Century British Psycho-Physiology”; A. Leff, “Thomas Laycock and the
R. Smith 104

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
The Phys i olog y of th e Wi l l 105

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 Engage-
ment 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: His-
torical 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 legit-
imated 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.
R. Smith 106

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 philoso-
pher, 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.
The Phys i olog y of th e Wi l l 107

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 empiri-
cist 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 intro-
ductory 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.
R. Smith 108

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 Orga-
nization (Sutherland and Knox, 1860).
57. Francis Power Cobbe, “Unconscious Cerebration: A Psychological Study,” Macmil-
lan’s Magazine 23 (1870), p. 37. She continued her discussion in “Dreams as Illustra-
tion 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 person-
ality to be intrinsic to consciousness.
60. William Smith, “Knowing and Feeling. Part III.—Speculative Thought,” Contem-
porary 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,” Macmil-
lan’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
The Phys i olog y of th e Wi l l 109

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 review-
ers of Stewart and Tait still confused “force” and “energy.” See also Gooday’s discus-
sion 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 knowl-
edge of anything we know or feel, more, or less, than a knowledge of states of con-
sciousness,” 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,” Con-
temporary 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.
R. Smith 110

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 spir-
itualist 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 Edin-
burgh 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?” Macmil-
lan’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 can-
nonball. 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 identi-
fied 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 ten-
dency 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
G ooday 112

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 diffu-
sion of the vast preponderance of stellar energy into empty space seemed
to some—not least Alexander Herschel and William Thomson—to chal-
lenge 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, begin-
ning 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 per-
petual 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 char-
acterize organic life merely as the interconversion of gravitational, chem-
ical, 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 “read-
ings” of the new energy synthesis in the decades that followed the public
appearance of the North British synthesis. Early on, the North British the-
orists 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 “incon-
venience and error.”6 This piece stimulated a variety of responses, inspir-
ing the aspirant engineer James Alfred Ewing to become a disciple of
S unsp ot s, Weath e r, and th e U n se e n U n ive r se 113

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 Mag-
azine: “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 jour-
nalistic 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 long-
term 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 exami-
nation of his periodical writing and textbooks reveals that Stewart, a Chris-
tian 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 sanc-
tioned by William Thomson.10
Previous studies have focused on Stewart’s priority disputes with
Robert Kirchhoff over the equivalence of absorption and emission spec-
tra 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
G ooday 114

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 criti-
cisms 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 anti-
materialist energy physics, I examine his successive activities as magneti-
cian, 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 Macmil-
lan’s Magazine paper. From an early age Stewart had somewhat “inde-
pendent” 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 “vital-
ity” 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 mainte-
nance 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-
S unsp ot s, Weath e r, and th e U n se e n U n ive r se 115

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 identi-
fied 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 thermome-
ters 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 gib-
berish 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
G ooday 116

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 micro-
scopist,20 there were many Anglican clergymen among its regular con-
tributors. 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 sub-
ordinated 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 “strange-
ness 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
S unsp ot s, Weath e r, and th e U n se e n U n ive r se 117

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 cos-
mological 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 heav-
enly bodies approached each other—as had happened for many eons of
planetary motions around the sun. Thus, Stewart was by no means com-
pelled to share Thomson’s conclusions on the longevity of the sun. To
emphasize the significance of this disagreement, Stewart quoted the con-
clusion of their mutual collaborator P. G. Tait that this planetary interac-
tion 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
G ooday 118

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 evi-
dence of planetary interaction as an auxiliary source of the sun’s heat. A
similar point could be made when Stewart presented the new energy syn-
thesis 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 commen-
tary for the North British Review “rejoiced” that the thermometric, baro-
metric, and hygrometric measurements would enable the construction of
systematic records of atmospheric movements of air and water. Meteorol-
ogy 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. Never-
theless, to avoid morbid impropriety in his celebration of Kew’s future
prospects, Stewart deployed the social discourse of energy only in its tra-
ditional 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.
S unsp ot s, Weath e r, and th e U n se e n U n ive r se 119

The READER, MACMILLAN’S MAGAZINE, and the Origins of the Lockyer-

Stewart 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 astron-
omy 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 patholo-
gies. 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.
G ooday 120

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 mate-
rial 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 submit-
ted to the RAS concerning detailed observations on Mars was more con-
troversial, 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 Spec-
tator 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,
S unsp ot s, Weath e r, and th e U n se e n U n ive r se 121

documenting the variability of nebulae and the use of parallax measure-

ments 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 perse-
verance,” noting in particular the decreased death-rate of fishermen and
sailors since the recent introduction of meteorological telegraphy. Impor-
tantly, some distinctive editorial references to personal patronage are dis-
cernible 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 unfash-
ionable 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
G ooday 122

newly purchased Herschel-Browning spectroscope, Lockyer sought evi-

dence 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 Spec-
tator until his second breakdown in March 1867, he increasingly commit-
ted 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
S unsp ot s, Weath e r, and th e U n se e n U n ive r se 123

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 con-
structive publisher, Macmillan suggested in 1866 that as two contem-
porary 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 collabora-
tive 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 frustrat-
ingly 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 pub-
lished 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
G ooday 124

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 tele-
scopic discovery in the early seventeenth century that the sun could no
longer be regarded as an “exemplar of spotless purity.” Surveying the asso-
ciated disagreements among Galileo and his contemporaries about the
nature of sunspots, it moved quickly to the initially controversial conclu-
sion 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 con-
clusions 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 some-
what 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 partic-
ular region of the sun? Were increases and decreases in the size of spots
governed by any laws? And were spots connected with any other phe-
nomena on the earth’s surface or elsewhere? Quoting from researches
recently published by Stewart and fellow Kew observers in Proceedings of
S unsp ot s, Weath e r, and th e U n se e n U n ive r se 125

the Royal Society, he proceeded to the “astounding but apparently well-

proven fact” that the birth and behavior of sunspots were regulated by the
proximity of the planets Venus, Jupiter and Mercury. Such was the quasi-
astrological 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 whim-
sical notion, he reiterated Sabine’s claims that sunspot activity in turn gov-
erned 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 influ-
enced 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 sen-
sitive 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 commu-
nicated to “our luminary” and this could transmit a “thrill to the very
extremities” of the solar system. He then left his readers with a tantaliz-
ing 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 pre-
cluded 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 move-
ment. Importantly this problem would not have arisen for subscribers to
the traditional notion of energy as a quality of human mind or character
G ooday 126

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 per-
sonal 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 char-
acter 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 advan-
tage.” From such a social height (maintained by wealth and power) the
“man of position” would always have the resources to confound an ordi-
nary 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 con-
sidered 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
S unsp ot s, Weath e r, and th e U n se e n U n ive r se 127

treatment by the Secretary of State for War that demoted Lockyer to a

lower grade clerk and halved his salary.50 Stewart concurrently faced per-
sistent 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 con-
served. 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 (democrat-
ically) exercise their free will. A further condition was required that spec-
ified 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 organi-
zation.” 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 gunpow-
der). 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,
G ooday 128

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 con-
servation, 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 vari-
able 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 Intelli-
gence, 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 con-
struction 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 solar-
terrestrial interactions were enacted by an intelligent invisible deity con-
structed 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 evi-
dence from Lockyer concerning new cyclical patterns in terrestrial mete-
orology that enabled Stewart in the ensuing decade to develop a campaign
against materialist interpretations of science.
S unsp ot s, Weath e r, and th e U n se e n U n ive r se 129

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 meteoro-
logical phenomena, such as hurricanes in the Indian Ocean, happen
because certain positions of Mercury and Venus affect the sun’s atmos-
phere, 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 deli-
cacy 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 non-
technical 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 spe-
cialist 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 some-
times seemed to forget that he was merely the Editor of Nature, and not
its Author.59
G ooday 130

In contrast with Lockyer, Stewart’s career as a civil servant came to

a much unhappier end. Stewart’s job for the Governmental Meteorologi-
cal Committee was to supervise the tabulation of rain, wind-speed, and
barometric measurements arriving at Kew from field stations for publica-
tion by Sabine. Stewart wanted to correlate weather patterns into a form
that could capture global patterns, extending Sabine’s regime of measure-
ment 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 co-
operation 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 supervis-
ing 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 mete-
orological observation. But he kept the matter alive in his widely pub-
lished 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 con-
vinced that meteorology should be pursued in connection with terres-
trial 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 dis-
cussions with the editor of the Ceylon Observer in 1871, Lockyer found
that the rainfall and cyclone patterns of Ceylon [Sri Lanka] and its envi-
S unsp ot s, Weath e r, and th e U n se e n U n ive r se 131

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 over-
whelming 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 pub-
lished 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
G ooday 132

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 intel-
ligent life, but also that there were divine agencies in the unseen universe
that could make use of dissipated stellar heat to manage the sunspot-
weather 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 intelli-
gences 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 ill-
understood” cause of “trivial” magnitude. From the principle of “great del-
icacy” Stewart and Tait argued that there was strong evidence here of the
possibility at least of an unseen but intelligent agency since no known phys-
ical mechanism could have triggered this huge energy movement across
such vast distances with such speed. Those familiar with Maxwell’s fic-
tional 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 recep-
tion 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 solar-
terrestrial 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
S unsp ot s, Weath e r, and th e U n se e n U n ive r se 133

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 sup-
pressed 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 prop-
erties 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 intellec-
tual 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 publica-
tion 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
G ooday 134

form” of it called Christianity.79 Tait and Stewart thus contended that Clif-
ford’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 cru-
sades 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 con-
structing forecasts from solar evidence had given their enemies plenty of
ammunition. Richard Proctor, one of Lockyer’s most relentless journalis-
tic 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 finan-
cially successful scheme of long-term forecasting based on 22-year sunspot
cycles.84
S unsp ot s, Weath e r, and th e U n se e n U n ive r se 135

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 adopt-
ing 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 con-
struction, 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 har-
monious whole if not viewed merely as part of a physical universe. This
universe should rather be seen fundamentally as a spiritual product of intel-
ligent 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 collabo-
ration of Tait and Lockyer) were more than just an attempt to popularize
G ooday 136

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 con-
ceived 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 imma-
terial 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 exer-
cise benign intervention in the visible world. Stewart’s writings are thus
marked by a distinctive interest in the more transcendent human implica-
tions of energy physics.
There are two caveats to my interpretation, however. Stewart’s writ-
ings 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
S unsp ot s, Weath e r, and th e U n se e n U n ive r se 137

translations into French, German, Czech, and Icelandic) long after his
periodical writings and pursuit of “cosmical” meteorology had been for-
gotten. 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 analy-
sis, 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 techni-
cal 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 “prin-
ciple 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 polem-
ical 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.
G ooday 138

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 impor-
tant 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 ref-
erences to “conservation of force” with “conservation of energy”?89 Finally,
how did contemporaries interpret the journalistic activities of such self-
styled “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 char-
acter 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.
S unsp ot s, Weath e r, and th e U n se e n U n ive r se 139

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 Specula-
tions on a Future State (Macmillan, 1875). See below for analysis of this initially anony-
mous 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 Philosophi-
cal 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
G ooday 140

( 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 spiritual-
ism 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, superintend-
ent 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 Obser-
vatory 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
S un sp ots, Weath e r, and th e U n se e n U n ive r se 141

1865–1873 Stewart published ten empirical papers on this and related subjects in col-
laboration 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 pub-
lished 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 Meteorolog-
ical 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.
G ooday 142

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 seriali-
zation 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 Profes-
sor 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 Astronom-
ical 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 informa-
tion 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 Con-
troversy, 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
Sunsp ot s, Weath e r, and th e U n se e n U n ive r se 143

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 Contri-
butions 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.
G ooday 144

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 per-
petual 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
S un sp ots, Weath e r, and th e U n se e n U n ive r se 145

state.” Letter from G. B. Airy to B. Stewart, 7 October 1869 cited in Stewart’s testi-
mony 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, imme-
diately 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
G ooday 146

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 alto-
gether 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 ele-
ments 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 Depart-
ment; 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.
S un sp ots, Weath e r, and th e U n se e n U n ive r se 147

86. Balfour Stewart, “The Visible Universe—Is It a Physical or a Spiritual Produc-

tion?” 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 delin-
eations of Manners and of Nature, the highest Poetry and the most bril-
liant 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 dis-
covery, mechanical inventions, the creations of Fine Art, the Orations of
S m i th and H i g g i n s on 150

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 Litera-
ture 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 choic-
est 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 casu-
alty 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 His-
torical 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 consider-
able extent, throughout the Union.”7 One such periodical was the North
American Review (hereafter NAR), founded in 1815 as a quarterly and con-
tinuously 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 quar-
terlies. In what follows, we focus on the fortunes of this famous quarterly
under its last Bostonian editor (1870–1876), Henry Brooks Adams.
“Improvise d E uropeans” 151

Henry Adams and the Republic of Letters

Adrian Johns has argued that the Enlightenment gave rise to the first con-
sistent 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 (deliv-
ered 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 uninter-
mitted 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 human-
ity.”10 Equally confident was another reviewer writing on “The Tenden-
cies 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, geo-
graphical, chemical, botanical, and physiological were commonplace in
S m i th and H i g g i n s on 152

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 “His-
toric 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 geologi-
cal foundation: the earth might be represented as a balanced, steady-state
system, but in the living world there were clear evidences of upward pro-
gression.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
“Improvise d E uropeans” 153

environs provided a cultural home to many of America’s most celebrated

literary offspring. At the same time, modern scholars of American litera-
ture frequently attribute the origins of an “American Literary Renais-
sance” 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 char-
acterized 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 early-
seventeenth-century Massachusetts Puritans, whose Protestantism gave
birth to the Congregational values of New England.19 For almost two cen-
turies, Congregational clergy, their “authority built on learning,” formed
an “extremely aristocratic class” of “almost unrivalled authority and influ-
ence.”20 From the time of American independence, however, Enlighten-
ment 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 espe-
cially to the learned periodical literature, of which the NAR was the
supreme example. Embodying in its quarterly publication values of inde-
pendent thought and judgment, the NAR professed to present critical per-
spectives 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 intel-
lectual elite. Competing denominations such as the Methodists and the
Baptists offered a far stronger brew and appealed not to the intellect but
S m i th and H i g g i n s on 154

to the soul. Political, and especially economic, power was increasingly

vested not in a highly educated “clerisy” but in the industrial corpora-
tions. 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 impro-
priety. I want to tweak its nose.”21
Boston, in short, had seemingly become the embodiment of Enlight-
enment 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, physi-
cians, professors, merchants were classes, and acted not as individuals, but
as though they were clergymen and each profession were a church.” Exem-
plifying 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
“Improvise d E uropeans” 155

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” republi-
can 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 prin-
ciple seemed productive not of communal good but of private greed,
served to disturb the tranquil and complacent political ideology of gen-
tlemanly 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 Promo-
tion 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,
S m i th and H i g g i n s on 156

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 distin-
guished 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
“Improvise d E uropeans” 157

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 controver-
sial 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 occa-
sion for any conflict between the two.” But to assert “that complex organ-
isms 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 sci-
ences.” 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
S m i th and H i g g i n s on 158

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 hypothe-
sis 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 pale-
ontological 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 Pliohip-
pus. 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 ances-
tor” 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 superfi-
cially.” Marsh’s fossil horses fully confirmed the justice of such an expla-
nation. 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 embod-
iment 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 civ-
ilization and progress, had lifted the veil on the abuses of railroad power.
“Improvise d E uropeans” 159

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, ambi-

tion,—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 mil-
lions 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 machin-
ery 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 thor-
ough 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
S m i th and H i g g i n s on 160

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; sub-
jects 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 victori-
ous, 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 editor-
ship. 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 Com-
missioner 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
“Improvise d E uropeans” 161

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 con-
tribute 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 “per-
manence 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
S m i th and H i g g i n s on 162

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 pro-
vided the model for the scheming Senator Ratcliffe in Democracy and who
was Speaker of the House from 1869 to 1875, “had declared himself sat-
isfied 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) “deter-
mined 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 newspaper-
man, 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, address-
ing 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 par-
tisanship,” 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”:
“Improvise d E uropeans” 163

. . . 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 audi-
ence 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, unpar-
tisan 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 partisan-

ship 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
S m i th and H i g g i n s on 164

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 politi-

cal 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 tech-
nique. 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 statesman-
ship.”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,
“Improvise d E uropeans” 165

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 con-
sequence: “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 neces-
sary 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
S m i th and H i g g i n s on 166

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 solu-
tion, 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 admin-
istration. 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
“Improvise d E uropeans” 167

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 Com-
missionership 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 build-
ing trustworthiness through literary labor. “A Chapter of Erie” in partic-
ular 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 pro-
gramme 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,
S m i th and H i g g i n s on 168

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 dif-
ferent 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 trust-
worthy 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 periodi-
cals like the American Whig Review with contributions such as “Some Words
with a Mummy” and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” mas-
querading under the guise of scientific progress but, to the more discern-
ing 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 sta-
bility 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
“Improvise d E uropeans” 169

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 reach-
ing 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 ven-
erable 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:
S m i th and H i g g i n s on 170

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 con-
taining 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 com-

mission 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 activ-
ity. 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 some-
thing 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
“Improvise d E uropeans” 171

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 publish-
ers 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 com-
pelled 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
S m i th and H i g g i n s on 172

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 contribu-
tors, selected by and large as men of “national reputation” or as represen-
tative 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 uni-
formitarianism of British geologists such as Lyell, Kelvin’s model appealed
“Improvise d E uropeans” 173

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 founda-
tions. 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 produc-
tive work and denounced the sin of “dissipation” or waste. Furthermore,
Henry’s grandfather, President John Quincy Adams, had rejected the opti-
mistic 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 mate-
rial power. As a consequence, the new religion was Energy, the material
manifestations of which reduced individual humans to seeming infinites-
imal 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
Sm i th and H i g g i n s on 174

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 late-
nineteenth and early-twentieth-century cultures. For its support through
a Fellowship (Crosbie Smith) and a Leverhulme Special Research Fellow-
ship (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.
“Improvise d E uropeans” 175

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 dif-
fering 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, Gen-
tlemen of Science: Early Years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Oxford
University Press, 1981), esp. pp. 17–29.
Sm i th and H i g g i n s on 176

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 Anglo-
American 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.

“Improvise d E uropeans” 177

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.

S mi th and H i g g i n s on 178

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.
“Improvise d E uropeans” 179

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 aspi-
rant, 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
Be e r 182

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 ambi-
tion 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 systemati-
cally 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 founda-
tion. 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 differ-
ences between French and German ideals of intellectual endeavor and
those then current in England. It also pays tribute to—and sometimes real-
izes—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 consum-
mation 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 knowl-
edge.” But equally, he argued, it “takes nothing for granted, not even, like
the celebrated Cogito, ergo sum, the thinking mind itself.” This paradox of
The A C A D E M Y 183

the search for an absolutely certain base to knowledge couples with a thor-
oughgoing 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 ‘thingumy-
tight.’ ”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 dis-
satisfied 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 informa-
tion 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 Ober-
mann, George Simcox on Baudelaire, and Mark Pattison on Classical
Be e r 184

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 jour-
nals, 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 impor-
tance.” 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 plen-
itude, 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
The A C A D E M Y 185

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 corre-
spondent 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 alpha-
betical 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 essen-
tially review essays. The Centralblatt offers pithy summaries of an extraor-
dinary array of books, with some few two paragraph reviews; the Revue
sweeps into long, argued analyses of works often in other languages, pre-
sented 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 “Con-
tents” 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,
Be e r 186

Figure 1
A page from the Academy. Reproduced with permission of Brotherton Collection,
University of Leeds.
The A C A D E M Y 187

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 philologi-
cal 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 Lec-
tures 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 activ-
ity 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
Be e r 188

of the journal emerged from the consort of named and unnamed con-
tributors, 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 posi-
tion 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 con-
straints 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
The A C A D E M Y 189

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 edu-
cated 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 intellec-
tual 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
Be e r 190

sustain it as an organ of disinterested integrity capable of carrying con-

viction 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 inter-
esting 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 main-
tenance 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 mate-
rials 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
The A C A D E M Y 191

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 resem-
bled 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 philo-

sophical ideas Appleton was, to this degree, in accord with Matthew
Arnold who had argued in his essay “The Literary Influence of Acade-
mies” 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 ques-

tions of intelligence and concludes his essay by arguing for a rigorous
Be e r 192

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 intellec-
tual 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 util-
itarianism: “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 wel-
comed more amateur contributors in their first volumes than did the
Academy.
The A C A D E M Y 193

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 pro-
fessorships, readerships and lectureships more concerned with the advance-
ment 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 immedi-
ately 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
Be e r 194

not, it survived, partly through donations from supporters including

Sidgwick and Ruskin. One of the gains of the new turn was the exten-
sive 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 remain-
der 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 Clif-
ford (“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 expec-
tation 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 evo-
lution, 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 sepa-
rated 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
The A C A D E M Y 195

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 chil-
dren than any other nationality—we need not stop to enquire. It is suf-
ficient 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 reader-
ship is this!—and how afflicting is the loss of his “power to gibbet mer-
cilessly 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 unrec-
ognizable 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 enter-
prise 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 con-
ception of science did not prevail. When H. G. Wells explored the absurd
enormity of commercialism in his novel Tono-Bungay he parodied an intel-
lectual 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:
Be e r 196

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 situa-
tion in the world at the present time . . . the contrasted notes of bold phys-
iological 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.
The A C A D E M Y 197

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 Roll-
Hansen, 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.
Be e r 198

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 out-
spokenness, there were protests as soon as his appointment to the presi-
dency 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 deliv-
ering 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 cul-
tural 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
Lightman 200

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 prob-
lems.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 pre-
sented 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 his-
torical survey, celebrating the achievements of Darwin in a section on evo-
lutionary 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 fruit-
ful 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 mate-
rialism 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
S c i e nti sts as M ate ri al i st s 201

of all terrestrial Life.”7 In the final section, Tyndall attempted to police the
boundaries between science and religion. Religion added “inward com-
pleteness 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 infi-
nite 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 trans-
ition from the comfortable orthodoxy of the early Victorian age to the
new equilibrium between old conviction and bold assumption, which char-
acterized the eighteen seventies.” Tyndall’s sin, according to Blinderman,
was that he upset the truce between science and religion “then being care-
fully and adroitly re-established after the blows delivered by Darwin and
Huxley.”11 Turner has argued that “no single incident in the conflict of reli-
gion and science raised so much furore.”12 Among the few substantial analy-
ses 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 intrica-
cies of Tyndall’s thought, following up on how Tyndall had unwittingly pre-
pared 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
Lightman 202

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 mate-
rialism. As I will show, the public perception of John Tyndall was signifi-
cantly altered as a result of the controversy—a controversy in which the
general periodical press played a key role and which led to the publica-
tion 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 mate-
rialism 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 sci-
entists in modern culture. The controversy over the Belfast Address pro-
vided 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 anti-
Christian doctrines.
Tyndall’s Belfast Address came at an opportune moment for protec-
tors of the religious establishment. It was during the early 1870s that the
social shift from a predominantly clerical to a secular and scientific cul-
tural 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
S c i e nti sts as M ate ri al i st s 203

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 dis-
posed 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 awk-
wardly 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 determina-
tion. 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 “Sci-
entific 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 hetero-
dox views were not a controversial issue prior to 1874. None of the major
weeklies or quarterlies ran articles on Tyndall’s “Scientific Materialism,” his
Lightman 204

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.
S c i e nti sts as M ate ri al i st s 205

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 pub-
lished, 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
Lightman 206

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 hos-
pitals 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 Assump-
tions 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 wan-
dering “beyond the domain which is specially their own into the meta-
physical 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.
S c i e nti sts as M ate ri al i st s 207

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 asso-
ciation with materialism. Poynting argued that there was no scientific evi-
dence for materialism as a philosophy. It consisted of “taking the vulgar,
unscientific notion of the nature of matter—a notion into which the sci-
entific laws of thought have not been carried—and grafting upon that,
and interpreting by it, the ideas as to natural evolution and other phenom-
ena 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 every-
thing. 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, sig-
nificantly, 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 bio-
graphical 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, sup-
ported 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
Lightman 208

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 deliv-
ered 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 materi-
alism.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 knowl-
edge of God. Hopps defended Tyndall from attack by Christian theolo-
gians. “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 “material-
ist” 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 con-
sequence 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 theol-
ogy, a response to Tyndall’s essay “ ‘Materialism’ and its Opponents” in the
November 1875 issue of the Fortnightly Review. Tyndall’s piece had con-
tained an attack on Martineau’s earlier essay on “Religion as Affected by
S c i e nti sts as M ate ri al i st s 209

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 evolution-
ary ideas to himself for 20 years because he was petrified of being con-
demned 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 anony-
mous author offered a favorable description of the Address but recoiled
when the reviewer encountered Tyndall’s pleas for a radical change in
Lightman 210

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 Chris-
tian 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 philos-
ophy and religion. Tyndall was a product of “English and German Ratio-
nalism,” 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 repu-
diate the grand traditions of English philosophy,” which allied the religious
spirit of Bacon, Newton, Locke, and Boyle with “courage and independ-
ence 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
S c i e nti sts as M ate ri al i st s 211

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.
Lightman 212

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 under-
mined 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 schol-
arly sources for his historical overview of atomic theory. In the Irish
Monthly, the author charged that Tyndall had repeated some of the his-
torical 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 plagia-
rism, 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
S c i e nti sts as M ate ri al i st s 213

rendering of a phenomenon which refuses to be determined by mechan-

ical 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 equiv-
alent 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 uncon-
scious fraud.”59
Materialism was not only morally corrupt, it was intellectually bank-
rupt. 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 scien-
tific 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 mate-
rialism undermined the very basis of rational thought and therefore of all
Lightman 214

truthful discourse. The Irish Monthly essayist argued that “almost every
thought we think, and every sentence we utter is an absurdity if Materi-
alism 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 cus-
tomary 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, ironi-
cally, 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 materi-
alism 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 excur-
sion 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, mistak-
ing 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
S c i e nti sts as M ate ri al i st s 215

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, mate-
rialism 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 com-
petency 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 rep-
utation. “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 valid-
ity of materialism, he was “‘quite at sea’” and without any authority.70
Lightman 216

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 “ques-
tioned 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 professional-
ization 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 promul-
gate 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 believ-
ing that he was “accredited” under “the name of Science” to deliver a
“message of death” at Belfast.“He speaks untruly when he boasts the com-
mission 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 theo-
ries.” 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 Asso-
ciation. 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 reputa-
tion and of the reputation of the British Association.”74
In the Edinburgh Review, Reeve contended that Tyndall had “com-
mitted 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
S c i e nti sts as M ate ri al i st s 217

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 dis-
covery” 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 reputa-
tion 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 dis-
trict 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 ren-

dered 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 hazi-
ness 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 rep-
utation.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 lec-
turer, admired for his courageous ascents of the Alps, was now depicted as
a morally corrupt and intellectually bankrupt materialist. Although he had
Lightman 218

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.
S c i e nti sts as M ate ri al i st s 219

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) remark-
ably 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 the-
ologians. In 1875, the Academy reacted negatively to Tyndall’s essay “Mate-
rialism 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
Lightman 220

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
S c i e nti sts as M ate ri al i st s 221

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 material-
istic 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 material-
ism, and although Tyndall and his friends were sometimes accused of
implicit materialism, the move to openly brand them as materialists fol-
lowing 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 for-
mation 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 interpre-
tations 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
Lightman 222

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 sci-
entific 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 intellec-
tual 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 chal-
lenged Tyndall’s position that human evolution was accepted as fact by sci-
entists. “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 dis-
countenanced 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 physi-
cists no longer believed that “by pulverizing the world into its least par-
ticles, and contemplating its components where they are next to nothing,
we shall hit upon something ultimate beyond which there is no problem.”
S c i e nti sts as M ate ri al i st s 223

In support of his contention that physicists read no materialistic implica-

tions 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 sci-
entific 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 Maga-
zine 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 conclu-
sions 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 reli-
gious 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 scien-
tific authority.
Having denied that Tyndall and his allies spoke on behalf of science,
and rejected their authority outside the scientific domain, critics of scien-
tific 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
Lightman 224

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 sci-
entific men than any human institution that ever existed.”94 Tulloch con-
tended 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 evo-
lution was still “the wildest, most illogical, and most unscientific hypoth-
esis 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 tra-
ditional religious beliefs.100 Buchanan objected that “it is not right that we
should be construed as objecting to Science, or to its leading modern doc-
trine, 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-
S c i e nti sts as M ate ri al i st s 225

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 Evolution-
ists, 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, scien-
tific 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 sub-
versive 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
Lightman 226

in these countries,” the Times, could find no theological reason for recoil-
ing 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 peri-
odicals 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 under-
mining 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 infec-
tious 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 rev-
erence, “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
S c i e nti sts as M ate ri al i st s 227

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 Contem-
porary.” 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 lec-
tures. Wace, who was to become Dean of Canterbury in 1903, empha-
sized 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 apprecia-
tion and the progress of scientific truth. Just as the clergy inevitably dis-
credited 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 inevitabil-
ity 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 prop-
erly 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 scientifi-
cally informed who had enough knowledge to assess the validity of his
Lightman 228

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 guid-
ance.” Under such circumstances “it is surely a Lecturer’s duty . . . to
restrict himself to the elucidation of truths which he knows to be con-
clusively 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 audi-
ences, 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 forget-
ting 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 period-
ical 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
S c i e nti sts as M ate ri al i st s 229

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.
Lightman 230

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 author-
ity 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 por-
trayed 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 detrac-
tors 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 scien-
tific 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, Sep-
tember 24 [1873]. Scientific and General Correspondence, vol. 8, fol. 155.
S c i e nti sts as M ate ri al i st s 231

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 Connec-
tion,” 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. disserta-
tion, 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 litera-
ture 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
Lightman 232

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 Esti-
mate 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 (Addison-
Wesley, 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.
S c i e nt i st s as Mate ri al i st s 233

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,” Contem-
porary 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 Move-
ment 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
Lightman 234

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 “suffer-
ing 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 sup-
posed anti-religious beliefs. He attacked Tyndall’s claim in On Heat that the discover-
ies 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 exclu-
sively from scientific minds would be utterly dreary. It was to the poets, “the inven-
tors 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 Pigeon-
English 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 per-
ceived 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.
S c i e nt i st s as M ate ri al i st s 235

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
Lightman 236

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 Quar-
terly 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,” Con-
temporary 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.

S c i e nti sts as M ate ri al i st s 237

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 natu-
ralist to undermine the philosophical claims of religion and metaphysics,
and (for many) worrying evidence of the growing influence of an agnos-
tic 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 extend-
ing scientific principles beyond science itself into all regions of intellec-
tual 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 peri-
odical 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 suc-
cessful 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
Smal l 240

difficulty with the definition of credibility, both in mid-to-late-nineteenth-

century science generally and, more specifically, within the liberal period-
ical 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, dis-
comfitingly, 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 repu-
tation 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
Scie nce, Libe ralism, and the Ethics of Be lie f 241

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 contin-
ually 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 con-
texts, 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 good-
ness”—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 char-
acter, 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
Smal l 242

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 mani-
pulations of observed facts—his opposition to the residual metaphysics in
Whewell’s philosophy leading him to misrepresent his opponent’s think-
ing (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 presen-
tation 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 philo-
sophically defensible” to preserve an “indulgent hope” that the world pro-
gresses 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 apos-
tasy by turning the clear-sighted empiricism of the younger Mill back on
the “twilight hopes and tepid possibilities” of the late Mill.20 The Con-
temporary, 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 bring-
ing morals within the domain of scientific rationalism. One of the reasons
Scie nce, Libe ralism, and the Ethics of Be lie f 243

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 entice-
ments of hope to the moral virtue of skepticism, and to find room, within
his conception of the philosophy of science, for the demands of con-
science. 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 else-
where. 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 benev-
olent 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
Smal l 244

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 be-
tween 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 com-
mercially by the disaster.” The Saturday Review columnist objected, simi-
larly, 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 ques-
tion 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 con-
temporaries 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 empiri-
cism 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 repu-
tation 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
Scie nce, Libe ralism, and the Ethics of Be lie f 245

made by putting together other substances in certain proportions and sub-

jecting them to a known process, I am justified in believing him unless I
know anything against his character or his judgment.” (p. 301) His pro-
fessional 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 collec-
tive “character” of scientists generally.
“The Ethics of Belief ” begins to look still less comfortably empiri-
cist 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 “aggre-
gate of beliefs” which stamps an individual character, and second, it nec-
essarily 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.
Smal l 246

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 neces-
sity of continually turning the instinctive wish to do good into the ques-
tion, 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 experi-
ence 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. Else-
where 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 ques-
tion: “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
Scie nce, Libe ralism, and the Ethics of Be lie f 247

Clifford’s cases is bluntly empiricist—we may infer the existence of hydro-

gen 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 reinforc-
ing 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 experi-
ence 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 con-
tradicted 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 philo-
sophical rebuke, even if the instances discussed steered carefully away from
Christian theology and church practice. But the indignation of “believ-
ing” readers of the Contemporary Review was also a distraction from the
more fundamental challenges posed by the article to the definition of sci-
entific 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 “sub-
jectivism” 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.
Smal l 248

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 editor-
ship 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 arrange-
ments 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 Con-
gregationalist minister John Brown Paton, from Samuel Morley: hosiery
magnate, influential member of the Liberal party, and prominent Evangel-
ical.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:
Scie nce, Libe ralism, and the Ethics of Be lie f 249

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 con-
verting 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 Con-
temporary 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 impres-
sion 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 Con-
temporary 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.
Smal l 250

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 individ-
ual 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 pos-
sessed, of setting up a publication on his own account; it was really mar-
vellous, said his Lordship, that his conduct should have been made the
subject of the long discussion which had arisen upon it.” As for the adver-
tisements 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 main-
stream press, and the trade journals, for more than a month. Both men
energetically sought endorsement of their positions from the Contempo-
rary’s contributors through private letters and personal interviews, but also
public statements to the press, and (in Strahan’s case) at least three pri-
vately printed pamphlets. In a pamphlet dated February 7, 1877, circulated
by Strahan among former writers for the Contemporary Review, he explic-
itly 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 specifi-
cally 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 advertise-

ment 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 your-
selves from The Contemporary they will do the same. If you abide by
it, so will they.35
Scie nce, Libe ralism, and the Ethics of Be lie f 251

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 “liber-
alism” of his periodical. Strahan besieged him with long letters of self-
justification, 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 submit-
ting 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 charac-
ter”—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
Smal l 252

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 periodi-
cal 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 estab-
lished names, at the expense of that openness to rational ideas, irrespec-
tive 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:
Scie nce, Libe ralism, and the Ethics of Be lie f 253

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
Smal l 254

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 agnosti-
cism, 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).
Scie nce, Libe ralism, and the Ethics of Be lie f 255

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 Dis-
covery,” 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 sci-
entific 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’ reac-
tions, 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
Smal l 256

skepticism, from the 1860s, about the ability of science to supply “precise and nec-
essary 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.
Scie nce, Libe ralism, and the Ethics of Be lie f 257

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 con-
trariwise 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, speci-
fying 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 believ-
ers,”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 Exam-
iner 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
Daws on 260

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 self-
consciously 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 inno-
vative mathematician and pedagogue.5
Once the 33-year-old’s mortal remains were interred in the un-
consecrated 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 natura-
listic 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 intel-
lectual and cultural authority away from the monopolistic Anglican estab-
lishment. 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 memo-
rialized after his death in ways that largely excluded his connections with
Victori an Pe ri odicals and Clifford’s Re putation 261

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 sub-
sequent 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 gen-
erally 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 recov-
ered from the great “tragedy of my . . . life,”10 was able to shape aspects of
Clifford’s reputation in accordance with her own views, which, signifi-
cantly, 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 posthu-
mous 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 mathe-
matical 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, adver-
tisements for posthumously published books, reviews and notices, gossip
and reader’s letters appeared in almost every sector of the late Victorian
Daws on 262

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 dis-
tinctive 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 mate-
rial 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 terri-
ble 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 (includ-
ing 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
Victori an Pe ri odicals and Clifford’s Re putation 263

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 suitabil-
ity 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 associ-
ated 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 hereti-
cal 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 com-
munity.”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 jour-
nalist 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
Daws on 264

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 dis-
avowed 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 through-
out 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 musi-
cians,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 consis-
tent persona, he nevertheless on occasion transgressed the limits of per-
sonal 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 instru-
mental 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 Contempo-
rary 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 expres-
sion to “Cosmic emotion,” the feeling of veneration engendered by the “uni-
verse of known things” and the “universe of human action,” which could
Victori an Pe ri odicals and Clifford’s Re putation 265

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 con-
troversial figure during the 1870s, and was rarely commended in the press
except by his small clique of aesthetic friends.32 His most recent collec-
tion of poems, Songs Before Sunrise, had championed atheism, republican-
ism, 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 state-
ments, 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
Daws on 266

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 dis-
solution 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 evolu-
tion.”39 Meanwhile, Fraser’s Magazine weighed in with the wholly inaccu-
rate 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 controver-
sial 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 like-
wise suggested in the Contemporary Review that the “prevailing tone of sen-
timent” 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
Victori an Pe ri odicals and Clifford’s Re putation 267

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 point-
edly 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 con-
summate discretion has never yet been recognized as a necessary or even
a very appropriate element of moral heroism.” This, he advised the poten-
tial 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 eti-
quette, may seem harsh and violent.”45 Those readers who had not pre-
viously 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 admis-
sion (removed in all subsequent editions of the book) that “certain pas-
sages 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,
Daws on 268

Stephen, and Huxley] for advice.”49 Although it was confidently insisted

that Clifford would have “willingly” assented to them, the significant edi-
torial 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 cir-
cumstances 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 scien-
tific 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 other-
wise 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 insin-
uations of incontinent impetuosity made against him in the general peri-
odical press were clearly perceived by Clifford’s defenders to be no less
Victori an Pe ri odicals and Clifford’s Re putation 269

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 spe-
cialist 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 cor-
respondence 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 asper-
sions 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 mathemati-
cal 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 phys-
ical 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
Daws on 270

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 prac-
tices 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 posthu-
mous 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
Victori an Pe ri odicals and Clifford’s Re putation 271

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 well-
known 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 posi-
tion and contacts at the anonymous Athenaeum to ensure favorable cover-
age 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 jour-
nalistic 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 increas-
ingly 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
Daws on 272

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 obliga-
tion to protract sexually dysfunctional marriages, “lay the only real solu-
tion 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 relation-
ships in particular) and ribald heresy was precisely the kind of provoca-
tive “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
Victori an Pe ri odicals and Clifford’s Re putation 273

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 por-
trayal 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 sub-
jects 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
Daws on 274

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 accus-
ing 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 affirm-
ing 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 modi-
fications of Lectures and Essays, it seems highly unlikely that the peremp-
tory 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 involve-
ment 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 prob-
lematic early paper.
Victori an Pe ri odicals and Clifford’s Re putation 275

“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 safe-
guard against it.” Every “man and woman,” he continued, “would prob-
ably 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 unrecog-
nised 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 acci-
dental. 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 our-
selves.”85 Moreover, when Pearson’s paper was reprinted (without the foot-
note) 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 sup-
press 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
Daws on 276

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 cul-
tivated 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 pro-
mulgation of his known opinions, no matter how repugnant they might
be. Rather, as has been argued throughout this chapter, she subtly re-
fashioned 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 natu-
ralists 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 inter-
views,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 pub-
lished “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
Victori an Pe ri odicals and Clifford’s Re putation 277

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 com-
mented 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 ortho-
dox . . . 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
Daws on 278

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 reproduc-
ing 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 posthu-
mous 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 sup-
pression of awkward early writings. This aspect of Clifford’s brief career
and much lengthier afterlife, furthermore, proffers a highly apposite illus-
tration of the wider cultural politics involved in the presentation of
scientific naturalism to its several different audiences. Above all, then, his-
torians 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.
Victori an Pe ri odicals and Clifford’s Re putation 279

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 Dar-
winism: 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.
Daws on 280

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.
Victori an Pe ri odicals and Clifford’s Re putation 281

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 ‘disinter-
est,’ 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.

Daws on 282

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 exu-
berance of language and imagery, . . . wild luxuriance of merely metrical diction” and
“feverish sensuality,” all of which made his poetry so dangerously alluring to “the ill-
governed 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 mathe-
matician 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.
Victori an Pe ri odicals and Clifford’s Re putation 283

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 accom-
plished and zealous of English ‘advanced thinkers’ [i.e., Pearson],” who considers mar-
riage “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)
Daws on 284

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 inscrip-
tion 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 cross-
fertilization 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 expli-
cated its importance for a new understanding of the origin and develop-
ment of the human sense of beauty, an understanding that challenged the
influential views of Victorian England’s most famous art critic, John
Ruskin.3
J. Smith 286

Physiological Aesthetics and Darwin’s Botany

Allen’s physiological and evolutionary understanding of aesthetics synthe-

sized 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 subjec-
tive corollary of the normal functioning of bodily tissue, painful sensations
of its destruction or privation. Aesthetic pleasure is thus, for Allen, the sen-
sation 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 com-
munity, 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
Alle n, Physiolog i cal Ae sthetics, and Darwin’s Botany 287

existence of an aesthetic sensibility throughout the animal world. Birds

were the classic example. The tail of the peacock was the result of gener-
ations of peahens selecting males with the most brilliant colors and elab-
orate 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 Move-
ments 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 Dif-
ferent 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
J. Smith 288

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 con-
tributions. And he saw clearly the importance of Darwin’s work for aes-
thetics, 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 scien-
tific 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 refer-
ence 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 evolu-
tionary change. The prehistoric world, Allen contended, had once been
Alle n, Physiolog i cal Ae sthetics, and Darwin’s Botany 289

unremittingly green. The development of other colors, and of color con-

trast, 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 pres-
ence 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 human-
ity.” 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 asso-
ciation 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 repro-
ductive 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 pres-
entation 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
J. Smith 290

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 specifi-
cally 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 con-
troversy, 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 sub-
jects being re-examined in relation to it.18 By foregrounding his popular-
ization of Darwin’s botanical work, in which the interest was great,
Allen was able to make his own views on physiological aesthetics avail-
able 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
Alle n, Physiolog i cal Ae sthetics, and Darwin’s Botany 291

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 botan-
ical 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 month-
lies, 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 ex-
plicitly 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 Mag-
azine 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 evolu-
tionists 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
J. Smith 292

prominent themes is the physiological and evolutionary character of aes-

thetics, 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 acci-
dental causes—causes, that is to say, into which the deliberate design of
the production of beautiful effects did not enter.” In an essay on “Butter-
fly Aesthetics,” Allen makes even more specific claims.The response of but-
terflies 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 contrib-
utor on science to the National Reformer, regarded Allen’s success as a pop-
ularizer 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
Alle n, Physiolog i cal Ae sthetics, and Darwin’s Botany 293

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, pub-
lisher 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.” Nonethe-
less, 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 manu-
script 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 Mag-
azine 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 acknowl-
edged 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
J. Smith 294

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 scien-
tists 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 origi-
nal 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 Corn-
hill 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 col-
lection 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 phys-
iological 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 phys-
ical science, Croom Robertson argued, would constitute “A true psychol-
ogy” 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
Alle n, Physiolog i cal Ae sthetics, and Darwin’s Botany 295

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 Physio-
logical Aesthetics.34
Allen’s desire to reach both professional and popular audiences with
his writing on evolutionary botany and physiological aesthetics is also sig-
naled 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 popular-
ization 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 enter-
taining 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 popular-
ize, 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 physi-
ological understanding of aesthetics. Allen endeavored to make those
aesthetic implications clear to various segments of a primarily middle-
class audience, adjusting his presentation for different levels of scientific
understanding and moving with ease between book and periodical
publication.
J. Smith 296

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 condi-
tion 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 vig-
orous 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 sensa-
tions of insects, Allen “degraded” aesthetics far more than Ruskin thought
possible in 1846. Indeed, in his preface to Physiological Aesthetics, Allen
Alle n, Physiolog i cal Ae sthetics, and Darwin’s Botany 297

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 “psycho-
logical 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 procla-
mation, Allen echoed the blunt statement with which he had closed “Dis-
secting 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
J. Smith 298

“pretty imaginative theories.” His repeated claim to have based his criti-
cism 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 analy-
sis 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 aes-
thetics 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 vituper-
ative 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 inten-
sity, 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
Alle n, Physiolog i cal Ae sthetics, and Darwin’s Botany 299

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 sex-
uality or his obsession with Rose La Touche, we need also to acknowl-
edge 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 condemna-
tion 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 selec-
tive development, etc., etc.” (Works, vol. 25, p. 264). One of these publica-
tions 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 opera-
tions 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 implica-
tions 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” sug-
gests how directly the two men’s botanical and aesthetic views were
opposed.42
Indeed, Allen closed “The Origin of Fruits” with a stirring perora-
tion, 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:
J. Smith 300

What a splendid and a noble prospect for humanity in its future evo-
lutions may we not find in this thought, that from the coarse animal
pleasure of beholding food mankind has already developed, through del-
icate 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 sci-
entific naturalism: not that it rejected the moral, the aesthetic, the imagi-
native, 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 ini-
tially, 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 Pros-
erpina’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 com-
plains, 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 aes-
thetics, 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-
Alle n, P hysiolog i cal Ae sthetics, and Darwin’s Botany 301

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. Subse-
quent 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: Clin-
ical 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 Consid-
ered in Relation to Insects (Macmillan, 1874) and Ants, Bees, and Wasps: A Record of Obser-
vations 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 diffu-
sion of specialist research, see Roger Cooter and Stephen Pumphrey, “Separate Spheres
and Public Places: Reflections on the History of Science Popularization and Science
J. Smith 302

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 Knowl-
edge 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, introduc-
tion 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).
Alle n, Physiolog i cal Ae sthetics, and Darwin’s Botany 303

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 Nineteenth-
Century 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).
J. Smith 304

31. Allen’s application to plants of the word ‘pedigree’, commonly associated with aris-
tocrats 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 fre-
quently 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 com-
monly 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 Apoc-
alypse 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 Mythol-
ogy,” 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:
Alle n, Physiolog i cal Ae sthetics, and Darwin’s Botany 305

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 mid-
Victorian 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 sup-
ported, and helped to write—Krause challenged this Lamarckism. In a
prefatory note, Darwin had insisted that the Krause sketch was an accu-
rate 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
Parad i s 308

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 anachronis-
tic mind, naming Butler as the target of Krause’s jibe. If Erasmus Darwin
was the faithful translation, as Darwin had guaranteed, of an article pub-
lished 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 distaste-
fully 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 selec-
tion 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 contri-
butions 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 in-
tellectual 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
The But le r-Darwin Biog raphical Cont rove r sy 309

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 commen-

tary as a cultural critic and satirist, positioned between religious and sci-
entific 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 geol-
ogist of Canterbury and a strong advocate of Darwin’s work. Haast made
Butler’s cottage and vast station on the Upper Rangitata his field head-
quarters 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, competi-
tion, 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 upcoun-
try 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 organ-
isms 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
Parad i s 310

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 reli-
gious authority and the inconsistencies of the Gospels earned him the rep-
utation among the settlers of Canterbury Settlement of a “free thinker.”11
By the fall of 1864, he had completed his secularist pamphlet, “The Evi-
dence 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 ini-
tialed 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 semi-
transparent, colossally gaseous, anthropomorphic existence which men
mis-name Jehovah” should avoid sanctimony and the liability of becom-
ing “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
The But le r-Darwin Biog raphical Cont rove r sy 311

anti-clericalism of the Musical Banks to the whimsical naturalism of the

Erewhonian eugenics courts, and the exuberant theorizing on the evolu-
tionary 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 con-
temporaries. Erewhonians, like so many sheep, shrank into their comfort-
ing, 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 intellec-
tual orthodoxy, but also scientific orthodoxy, including the very scientific
language and forms he was imitating. The evolutionary tropes that so per-
meated Erewhon both imitated the patient, earnest language of Darwin’s
natural history for comic effect and converted its forms into the free-
thinking 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 “Evi-
dences,” 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 reli-
gious 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 recom-
mending 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 evo-
lution. Subtitled An Essay after a Completer View of Evolution, Butler’s Life
Parad i s 312

and Habit sought to offer a set of ideas complementary to natural selec-

tion. 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 dis-
course.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 machi-
nate 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 vari-
ation and the explanatory limits of natural selection, but Mivart’s deter-
mined 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 discus-
sion 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 cross-
breeding, Butler attributed the loss to a clash between the memories inher-
ited from the parent organisms. He then gravely warned that the Society
The But le r-Darwin Biog raphical Cont rove r sy 313

for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals might have to intervene: “Five

hundred creatures puzzled to death is not a pleasant subject for contem-
plation.”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 per-
formances, 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 inter-
pretive 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 evo-
lutionary 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
Parad i s 314

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 illus-
trious 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 “dis-
credit[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 “inex-
tricable 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 exis-
tence” 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 illus-
trious 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-a-
half-thousand word review in Nature, welcomed Butler’s new historicism,
crediting him with filling in a history “almost unknown to the present
The But le r-Darwin Biog raphical Cont rove r sy 315

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 his-
torians had been in their conceptual grasps of evolution, but also his crit-
icism 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 inter-
vene in the conduct of normal science. As Butler moved from his early
experiments in periodicals at co-opting scientific discourse, through satir-
ical 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 sci-
entific thought could not, in the end, be adequately or competently nego-
tiated in the public sphere of popular reviews or, even, in the higher
criticism of the cultural critic. Underlying Butler’s populism was the self-
styled 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, includ-
ing Darwin, invariably took his criticisms as ridicule.
Parad i s 316

Darwin among the Biographers

At the very time that Butler had announced his plans to publish Evolu-
tion, Old and New, Darwin had begun collaborating with a German philol-
ogist 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 Autobiogra-
phy.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 gener-
ous but frequently self-absorbed and insensitive autocrat. The collabora-
tion, 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 biogra-
phy as an opportunity “to show to what extent a man inherits and trans-
mits 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 rea-
sonable 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 grand-
father’s evolutionary ideas and provide an authorized version of how the
elder naturalist’s evolutionary speculations could be linked to—and differ-
entiated from—his own. From the start, Darwin viewed Krause as an ally-
in-biography and wasted no time in warning him not to trust Seward’s
Memoir, which was a “wretched account,” “full of inaccuracies,” “malig-
nant,” 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
The But le r-Darwin Biog raphical Cont rove r sy 317

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, confess-
ing his regret that the soon-to-appear Life and Habit had, under the influ-
ence of Mivart’s Genesis of Species, become “a downright attack upon your
father’s view of evolution.”39 Mueller and Wallace had written enthusias-
tically 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
Parad i s 318

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. Unsat-
isfied 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 biogra-
phical 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 famil-
iar 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
The But le r-Darwin Biog raphical Cont rove r sy 319

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 pub-
lished 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, insec-
tivorous 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 tri-
umphal 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 recog-
nized 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.
Parad i s 320

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 perform-
ance. 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 inter-
pretive responses.Through reviews of his work, a freelance evolutionist and
critic like Butler, whose thinking developed outside the circles of organ-
ized science, could still attain public standing as a contributor to evolu-
tionary 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 peri-
odical 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 sup-
porting 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
The But le r-Darwin Biog raphical Cont rove r sy 321

books together, setting one against the other, created a Darwin-Butler

affair. In front of an influential audience of intellectuals that was consis-
tently 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 trans-
lation 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 trans-
lated 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 appar-
ent “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 transla-
tion, 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.
Parad i s 322

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 acknowl-
edgment 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 circum-
stantial evidence to back his claims. Krause had indeed read Evolution, Old
and New as he was writing Erasmus Darwin, and Darwin had written dis-
paragingly 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 sup-
porters were to repay this sarcasm in kind.
For Darwin, who had shunned controversy, being accused of duplic-
ity 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 “inten-
tional 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
The But le r-Darwin Biog raphical Cont rove r sy 323

Krause had altered his sketch, which was a common enough practice not
to merit mention. Butler insisted that in sponsoring Krause and not pub-
licly 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. Consulta-
tion 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-as-
blackguard 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 cor-
rection, 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 activ-
ity, with letters to and from Krause on an answer to Butler’s charge, to
Parad i s 324

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 three-
thousand 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 chal-
lenge, 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 periodi-
cal 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 unscrupu-
lous, 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
The But le r-Darwin Biog raphical Cont rove r sy 325

to mention his personal attacks on Darwin, made him a relatively easy

target for such moralizing. Ironically enough, in the strategies of ortho-
doxy, 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 thor-
oughly 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 Corre-
spondence 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 Sci-
entific 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).
Paradi s 326

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 man-
uscript (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.
The But le r-Darwin Biog raphical Cont rove r sy 327

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 “pro-
found,” 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 selec-
tion; 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.
Paradi s 328

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, Heredi-
tary 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.

The But le r-Darwin Biog raphical Cont rove r sy 329

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 ortho-
doxy, 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 borrow-
ings, 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 offi-
cers 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 dis-
appointing. 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 pro-
duced 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 hand-
some” 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 dis-
tracted and public spirits depressed by the war news from South Africa,
Ri tvo 332

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 dis-
played “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 cor-
respondent of the Manchester Guardian as imparting a “particular show-
manlike flavour”) to view what was noted in the Times as a “very popular
attraction”—the “zebra hybrids” (figures 1, 2).8 The show organizers sig-
naled 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 stal-
lion named Matopo and mares representing a variety of domestic horse
and pony breeds, these creatures seemed exotic indeed among the famil-
iar 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 remi-
niscent 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 non-
hybrid 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 photo-
graphic images, or by their skins. In addition the display featured live
U nde r standi ng and M i sunde r stand i ng Aud i e nc e s 333

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 corre-
spondent 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 pur-
chased the Guide to the Zebra Hybrids on sale at the exhibit, he might
have been less mystified. The booklet’s brief introductory note identified
Ri tvo 334

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 mech-
anisms of heredity available to members of the other specialized commu-
nity 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.
U nde r standi ng and M i sunde r stand i ng Aud i e nc e s 335

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 character-
ized 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 comprehen-
sive 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 mag-
azines.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 atten-
tion of readers outside his own natural audience of scientists and intel-
lectually 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
Ri tvo 336

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, depend-
ing on the zoological self-confidence of the reviewers, they disseminated
the fact that these ideas existed. Thus the Sportsman’s reviewer of A Crit-
ical 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 inter-
est to more than one class of readers” (Lancet); “offers the public an intel-
lectual treat” (Morning Post); “lovers of animals . . . will devour the contents
. . . with avidity” (Scottish Farmer). The Irish Naturalist explained its inclu-
sion 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 exper-
iments 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 pro-
vided a comprehensive and sympathetic of Ewart’s work in relation both
to scientific theory (the review began with a somewhat contrarian invo-
cation 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 practi-
cal 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 audi-
ences, 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 diver-
gent 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 para-
phrasing—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
U nde r standi ng and M i sunde r stand i ng Aud i e nc e s 337

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 biol-

ogists, 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 audi-
ences 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 prag-
matic issues of public concern. As a founding member (1882) of the
Fishery Board for Scotland, for example, he made extensive comparative
Ri tvo 338

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 extra-
professional activities followed suit. In 1897, as part of a commission to
survey the horses and ponies of Ireland, he made a set of recommenda-
tions 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 “infec-
tion” 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,
U nde r standi ng and M i sunde r stand i ng Aud i e nc e s 339

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 rela-
tively short period in which to complete an experiment based on breed-
ing 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 psy-
chological 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 simul-
taneous replications of the breeding history of Lord Morton’s mare,
Ri tvo 340

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 valu-
able on their own account as pullers of artillery and transporters of sup-
plies 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 com-
pactly 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
U nde r standi ng and M i sunde r stand i ng Aud i e nc e s 341

horses, asses, or zebras. (“All my observations point to its being impossi-

ble 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 dis-
cussion had focused on the possibility of reversion to ancestral character-
istics, 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 sig-
nificance), 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 pres-
entation from one periodical to another also characterized the treatment
of a set of related topics. Hybridity in general exerted a sustained fasci-
nation 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
Ri tvo 342

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 prob-
lematic, criterion for species difference between two animals was their
inability to produce offspring (or fertile offspring, as in the case of every-
day 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 inter-
species crosses; on the contrary they were identical to those that deter-
mined 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.
U nde r standi ng and M i sunde r stand i ng Aud i e nc e s 343

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 repro-
ductive physiology. As a result, science could offer answers to some
questions that had long perplexed breeders, such as what was the contri-
bution 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 under-
standing 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 promi-
nent 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 conse-
quences 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 impossi-
bility of equine telegony. They continued to mate their prize animals
Ri tvo 344

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 hered-
ity 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 hered-
itary 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 pro-
tecting 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 under-
lay 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 natu-
ralists addressed these issues their views were often similar. Most famously,
with regard to Lord Morton’s mare, Charles Darwin was persuaded that
U nde r standi ng and M i sunde r stand i ng Aud i e nc e s 345

“there can be no doubt that the quagga affected the character of the off-
spring 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 undeter-
mined action of “the male element . . . directly on the female.”41
By the time that Ewart put his hybrids on display, the scientific sit-
uation was greatly changed. No longer was it possible to think of the zoo-
logical and agricultural discourses of animal breeding and reproduction as
parallels or alternatives; scientific research had decisively trumped breed-
ing 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 partici-
pant 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 cor-
respondent 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 pub-
lished, did not necessarily imply control of the outcome. The same words
could have different implications for an audience of naturalists, for an audi-
ence 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
Ri tvo 346

fruits of zoological research more accessible to agriculturalists. The appli-

cation 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 atmos-
phere 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 con-
trary notwithstanding, they were not persuaded that their allegiance to tra-
ditional 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 repro-
duction of part of Ewart’s Guide) of some of the items on display, sup-
plemented 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 neces-
sarily of instruction.
U nde r standi ng and M i sunde r stand i ng Aud i e nce s 347

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).
Ri tvo 348

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,” Zool-
ogist 12, third series (1888): 102–103; A. H. Cocks, “Hybrid Stoats and Ferrets,” Pro-
ceedings 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.
U nde r stand i ng and M i sunde r stand i ng Aud i e nc e s 349

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 Fellow-
ship on the SciPer Project and has published articles on the interrelations
of Victorian science and literature. He is preparing a book on aestheti-
cism, 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 in-
struments 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 twentieth-
century 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 Humanis-
tic 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 environmen-
tal 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 Em-
bodied 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 phi-
losophy 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 co-
author (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 Corre-
spondence 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
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
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
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
357
Quarterly Review, 265, 273
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
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
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 358

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