Science in the Empire

Though we haven’t talked a lot about the British Empire in this course, since most British medical and scientific advances happened within Britain, the colonies underlay British politics and economics throughout the Victorian period. Raw goods from the colonies allowed manufacturing and industrialization to develop in Britain; Britain gained immense wealth through trade involving the colonies; the British army and navy were largely devoted to maintaining control in the colonies; the wars that bookended the Victorian era, the Napoleonic Wars and WWI, were global conflicts because of the colonies; and one could argue that the progress of the Victorian period was only possible because of the wealth and industry gained from the colonies.














Such an important feature of the Victorian life would certainly influence the realms of science and medicine, but British science also influenced the Empire. Superior technology in arms made occupation of the Empire possible in the first place, and natural science, the exploration and conquest of the unknown, used the colonies and helped justify them throughout the nineteenth century. If botany, the collection, naming, and classification of plants, was a kind of imposition of European, scientific order on the natural environment of a colony, then it might have foreshadowed the imposition of political order in the same area. Later in the nineteenth century, as science began to share some of the religion’s imaginative power, biological ideas about human evolution served to justify the domination of “lower” races. I don’t know enough about the history of the Empire to say how much scientific exploration and ideas affected colonization, but it seems like there is a fascinating interplay between the two. Darwin’s H.M.S. Beagle voyage, for example, only occurred because the Royal Navy wanted better hydrographical maps of South America to improve navigation throughout the Empire, and the data Darwin collected on that voyage gave him the raw material to shape his theory of evolution, which, by the end of the nineteenth century, was manipulated to defend colonization and maintaining the Empire.

The Human Animal

What are the implications of man being kin to ape? Adam Sedgwick felt so strongly about this issue that he wrote an enormous and scathing review of one of the first texts to propose this relationship, The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Adam Sedgwick and Thomas Henry Huxley
I couldn’t find the exact quote I was looking for within the review, it being 85 pages, but it went on for awhile with the general idea that “morality would be mincemeat, law laughable, order out the window, music mere mating calls, religion ridiculous, higher sentiments heathenish slavering, and the world generally drowned in despair, chaos, and ruin,” if humans were related to primates. I know I’m abusing Sedgwick’s sincerely and strongly felt reaction to this idea of human evolution, but I can’t help wondering what the big deal is—why did Sedgwick, and why do so many people today, care so much about our apish descent? To my mind, being a part of the wonderful, rich, complex natural world around us doesn’t make us any less human. But others have been and still are deeply worried and hurt by the idea that humans are just another animal. Something in the way that we define humanity, whether by its accomplishments or its origins, or perhaps just what we’re used to from learning about the world as children, must account for this divide. In one of my favorite passages in any of the readings for this course, Thomas Huxley responds to concerns about man’s descent in his essay Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature and attempts to persuade his readers that human dignity is not blasphemed by evolution, by comparing Darwinism to Lyellian geology:

We find it hard, Huxley writes, to believe a geologist when he says the grand mountain ranges “are of one substance with dullest clay, but raised by inward forces to that place of proud and seemingly inaccessible glory. But the geologist is right; and due reflection on his teachings, instead of diminishing our reverence and our wonder, adds all the force of intellectual sublimity, to the mere aesthetic intuition of the uninstructed beholder. And after passion and prejudice have died away, the same result will attend the teachings of the naturalist respecting that great Alps and Andes of the living world—Man. Our reverence for the nobility of manhood will not be lessened by the knowledge, that man is, in substance and in structure, one with the brutes…now he stands raised upon [Man’s intellect] as on a mountain top, far above the level of his humble fellows, and transfigured from his grosser nature by reflecting, here and there, a ray from the infinite source of truth.”

Atavism vs. Demonism

Today, the concept of each of us having a “dark side” is so common that I have a hard time appreciating the novelty of this view of human nature, just as the “surprise” ending of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is lost on a modern reader, since even the phrase “Jekyll and Hyde” is now part of everyday language. But to late-nineteenth century Londoners, the story of a respectable, rational, modern man with a bestial, evil alter ego struck some new chord in their understanding of humankind, and this story has remained a part of our consciousness ever since. The idea of alter egos, of different parts of one’s “self,” seems like a uniquely urban phenomenon—perhaps the anonymity within a city allows people to reinvent themselves in ways they could not in a small village. Or perhaps the appearance of Mr. Hyde in the British psyche has more to do with chronology than urbanity. Earlier in the nineteenth century, a “dark side” was simply sin or moral laxity. By the end of the nineteenth century, though, science was usurping religion in many areas, including ideas about morality. Humanity’s bestial origins, as revealed by human evolution, accounted for the evil tendencies that Dr. Jekyll attempts to suppress, and Mr. Hyde’s “ape-like” and “deformed” aspect suggests he is a lower order. “Our descent, then, is the origin of our evil passions!” Darwin wrote. “The Devil under form of Baboon is our grandfather!”

On a side note, I’d like to mention John Addington Symonds, a friend of Robert Louis Stevenson and a sort of Victorian gay rights activist. Here is the first paragraph of his letter to Stevenson after reading Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde:

At last I have read Dr. Jekyll. It makes me wonder whether a man has the right to scrutinize the “abysmal depths of personality.” It is indeed a dreadful book, most dreadful because of a certain moral callousness, a want of sympathy, a shutting out of hope. The art is burning and intense….As a piece of literary work, this seems to me the finest you have done…But it has left such a deeply painful impression on my heart that I do not know how I am ever to turn to it again.

I can’t help but wonder how much Addington associated Hyde with forbidden, homosexual desire; in this light, his opening seems like a deeply touching plea for understanding. Learning a little about Addington’s attempts to normalize gay culture in the late Victorian era (as by writing about homosexuality in the classical world) also makes me wonder how Victorians perceived homosexuality—as moral perversion or medical problem?
(Click here to read Addington’s entire letter .)

Natural Theology and Natural Selection

There is an immense appeal of this world-view, that all nature is in fact not really “natural” at all, but a work of art constructed for our use by a benevolent Father, a work that we can study, as we would a painting, to better understand the Artist. William Paley (1743-1805) wrote his Natural Theology; or, Evidence of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity (1802) at a time when doubt of the complete harmony between Scriptures and science began to waft over the Channel and down from the Scottish highlands. With this threat of secular science, Paley felt the need to open his defense of natural theology with a logical argument for the existence of God. He first generalizes the following: if all the interdependent parts of a watch are the product of a watchmaker, then everything with parts that work together must have a maker. If everything with interdependent parts has a maker and if living beings have interdependent parts, then living beings must have a maker—God. Aside from his first generalization, going from watches to the entire natural world, Paley’s logic is sound. This argument can be even readapted to advances in science, by saying that God used natural laws like gravity or evolution as a means to create a smoothly ordered solar system or the huge diversity of living beings. Darwin uses this idea to introduce On the Origin of Species, in an epigraph from William Whewell’s Bridgewater Treatise: “events are brought about not by interpositions of Divine power, exerted in each particular case, but by the establishment of general laws.” For Darwin, his law of natural selection is to be just another of these general laws of nature established by God. Why then does natural selection spur so much religious worry and doubt? Because, if natural selection is seen in the light of natural theology, as a way to understand our Creator through his creation, then God is suddenly no longer a benevolent Artist and Father but a cold and distant Deity, who uses struggle, suffering, death, and waste to effect his creation. But then again, the new discordance that “survival of the fittest” brought to the harmony between science and religion may not be so new after all. Reconciling the incredible beauty and order of the natural world with “nature red in tooth and claw,” has always been difficult, so having problems reconciling a loving God and His harsh means of creation seems, well, only natural.

Victorian Railways and World-Views

The impact of the railway, as discussed in class, cannot be overestimated, whether in terms of Victorian or human history. After all, we had for millennia travelled on land only by foot or horse before, so this first mechanized transport had an effect that no other advance can claim. Railways literally mobilized countries from being agricultural to industrial societies. Such a radical societal transformation had a corresponding effect on Victorians’ world-views, as explored in great detail by Michael Freeman in Railways and the Victorian Imagination. The Victorians’ environment was now something that could be conquered, bridged over or tunneled through. Their cities were now closely connected, while the countryside was for the first time seen in all its variety, though inevitably with a sense of the unimportance of a “ride-over zone” compared to urban centers of industry. People themselves became less rooted and more anonymous, creating the polite reserve of stranger-commuters stuck together in a railway car. Finally, the machines themselves inspired a huge diversity of reactions. The railway's very novelty, I suppose, encouraged a variety of responses to it, but were there other grounds for people's reactions to the railway? Why did some people see a train as a great hulking demonic beast, while others associate it with exhilarating flight? Does this variety correspond to class, education, gender and the like? Or perhaps chronology, as people became used to trains and lost some of their nervousness about them? Or did the same people think of trains with both fear and a sense of exhilarating freedom? Why did none of the reticence about trains, about their smoky, devilish general character or their possible ill effects on human health, transfer to investors, who funded enormously rapid growth of railways across Britain? Two paintings, W.P. Frith's The Railway Station and J.M.W. Turner's Rain, Steam, and Speed, show especially well the enormous variety of people who used and were influenced by the railway and the emotional impact of seeing a train's massive black form hurdle unthinkingly through space.

Art and Madness

I was most marked on my visit to the Bethlem Royal Hospital by its collection of paintings and poetry, works by twentieth-century patients at the hospital. Click here to see Bethlem's online art gallery. I was expecting a historical exhibition of Bethlem only, so it was surprising and moving to see the personal experience of mental illness portrayed in art. One poem, “The Enemy Without,” was by an anorexic patient and emphasizes the distance between her and her caretakers’ view of her illness:

Oh you think that life is precious and you fight to keep me breathing
Yet you hold me nearer death than the life that I am living.
Don’t think that I am sad for all the living I am losing,
I am not crying but for pain that comes from all my being.
Allow me to break free of the chains in which you bind me
And I will find freedom in the silence of my death.

Poems like this as well as paintings reminded me of the personal, emotional—the human side—of the story of Bethlem. There some paintings of children whose gray drawn faces and dull black sockets drew you in to the experience of depression.

This aspect of Bethlem could have been easily lost among the facts of its four different locations, its visiting policies of the eighteenth century that gave rise to the human zoos of “Bedlam,” and its consequent reforms in the nineteenth century. But with this display of art (and with our examination of a nineteenth patient’s “file”), Bethlem showed great sensitivity to the experience of mental illness in an institutional setting. Perhaps the lingering stereotype of “Bedlam” encourages the hospital now to treat its patients, past and present, with especial compassion.
The art was displayed in a smaller room that also housed the museum’s historical artifacts, including the statues of Melancholia and Mania that used to adorn the hospital’s gate, some of the leather and iron restraints used on patients, photographs of former sites, and a copy of William Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress, in which two ladies twitter behind a fan as they gawk at the vice-ridden patients, struck mad as punishment after years of debauchery. Though the reality of 18th century Bethlem was better than the stereotype of Bedlam, the horror of what it must have been like was illustrated by juxtaposition of patients’ inner lives, as shown in their art, with the instruments of treatment used on patients like them in earlier centuries.

Steaming Questions

I’d like to look into how captains learnt to handle the enormous sailing-steamships of the early Victorian era. They were well versed in the immense technical knowledge of handing a large sailing ship, but maneuvering a paddle-wheel or propeller driven ship is entirely different. How did they know what to do? Mechanics could teach them how the engine itself worked, but then, mechanics wouldn’t have known much about ships. And, no one would have known how the two technologies—ships and steam engines—would work together, because no one had put the two together before. What rpms would produce what speeds? how would the engine respond to the constant pitch, roll, and yaw, as well as increased salt and humidity, of the sea? how would the boat respond to changes in the engine? how would boats handle going to new speeds with the use of propellors? For that matter, what kind of speeds did ships reach with steam engines? The ss Great Britain museum pointed out that steam-driven paddlewheels or propellers on a ship would create an ever-present headwind. How would the sails function in this case? Wouldn’t they just create more air resistance and slow down the boat? Or, if angled, they would carry the boat away from the designated course. There must have been a period in which captains and mechanics had to partner together and learn from each other. Brunel did confer with a former captain from the Royal Navy, Christopher Claxton when he designed the ss Great Britain and the Great Eastern, so there was a good deal of consulting going on, if not collaboration. I don’t know the answers to all these questions I’ve been asking, though, and I probably don’t know enough about boats or engines to understand the answers. But I think all these basic questions in this entry demonstrate how mysterious this new technology of steam must have been. What did it feel like, to put this strange iron contraption in a cart or on a boat for the first time, and then to pull a lever and see what happened?

This is the ss Great Britain steaming/sailing through the icebergs of the South Atlantic.