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.

Brunel

Both Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s achievements and his faults seem to mirror those of his age. His capacity to dream for bigger and faster structures led to an awesome number of modern wonders, but it also led some failures on a Brunelian (i.e. enormous) scale. His optimism, his determination that humankind can overcome any obstacle with will and hard work, his enormous dedication, and the sheer scope of his imagination reflect the feel of his time, the early-to-mid Victorian age. This is an era of progress, of reform, and of excitement and hope for the future, where space could be conquered by railways and steamships and any obstacle bridged over or tunneled through. Unfortunately, Brunel and his time, hell-bent on improving the world, did not always think through the potential disadvantages of their new schemes, e.g. the maintenance of say, an enormous ship (Great Eastern) or grandiose madhouse (Colney Hatch). They were also shockingly dismissive, to modern sensibilities, of their plans’ human cost in suffering and in lives. Brunel viewed the men who died in making the first tunnel under the Thames (or any other river), or the two-mile long Box tunnel, or the 700 ft long Great Eastern as necessary evils to a “world’s first” engineering achievement. Of course, no one person can fully encapsulate all the multifarious feelings of their time, and some of Brunel’s traits, such as his economic impracticability, do not represent most early Victorians. Brunel’s time, the early to mid Victorian period, culminated, I think, in the Great Exhibition of 1851. Brunel died only eight years later, not living to see how many of the great dreams of the early Victorians, including his own ss Great Britain, were to be soiled by the passage of time, and their grand optimism replaced by the despairing sense that the world was not as they had hoped.

Collections

· We have seen many types of collections in our various excursions, including Wallace’s cabinet of tropical butterflies, Hunter’s huge range of human and animal curiosities, the Royal College of Surgeon’s pathological displays, and Edinburgh Botanical Garden’s exhaustive herbarium. Yet these collections are as different in their function and their arrangement as they are in their content. I suppose one generalist way to classify collections is into two groups: specimens of many different species, like butterflies or plants, and specimens of anatomy and pathology, usually human. The first type, natural history collections, emphasizes ordering between specimens—taxonomy—as well discoveries of new types and contributions of specific scientists—collected by so and so, at such a place, etc. The second type, anatomical collections, have an order—kidney diseases in this room, blackened lungs in that—but looser, so that Hunter’s display of elephant skulls preside peaceably above shelves of various human organs, which are near the skeleton of an Irish giant, which is near portraits of Italian and Irish dwarves. This suggests another difference: anatomical collections were more prone to becoming an eclectic group of curiosities, at worst still life freak shows, while Wallace’s exactly ordered insect collection has more of a dispassionate, professional feel. Even the Royal College of Surgeon’s pathology collection, used by the new ranks of professional surgeon apothecaries, is not above some more gruesome displays, including Burke’s skeleton and a pocket book made out of his skin (though this is probably a more recent public display). Finally, anatomical museums, aside from a few exceptions like Burke’s skin or Livingston’s humerus, were largely anonymous, with no indications of the person the organ belonged to or the doctor who collected it. Perhaps this is another indication of a new mentality of medicine, where the disease, as manifested in clear physical changes in specific organs, began to take precedence over the patients’ names and case histories.

(Ab)using our Dead

Attitudes towards our physical remains, our corpses, have varied hugely over the centuries, according to beliefs about the afterlife. If your body was to be carried to the afterlife by boat, with your various organs as well personal possessions and household staff, then the elaborate preparations—which at other times would have been mutilations—of Egyptian mummies are perfectly justified. Early Christians refused to have their earthly remains burnt, since the imminent return of Christ and their own oncoming resurrection required whole bodies, while Achilles would have considered anything less than a pyre an insult. Eighteen hundred years later, though, people must have held a less material vision of Christian resurrection, yet their objection to having their bodies disturbed, as by autopsies, demonstrates more veneration for corpses than we have today. In learning about Victorian disgust at the idea of autopsies, so that only executed criminals and later unclaimed paupers could be used for subjects of dissection, I found myself, in all my twenty-first century irreverence for bodies and their spiritual meaning, unable to understand what the fuss was about. Reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s short story, "The Body Snatchers," helped me comprehend this mindset, as revealed in the following passage:

To bodies that had been laid in earth, in joyful expectation of a far different awakening, there came that hasty, lamp-lit, terror-haunted resurrection of the spade and mattock. The coffin was forced, the cerements torn, and the melancholy relics, clad in sackcloth, after being rattled for hours on moonless by-ways, were at length exposed to uttermost indignities before a class of gaping boys….The wife of a farmer, a woman who had lived for sixty years…was to be rooted from her grave at midnight and carried, dead and naked, to that far-away city that she had always honoured with her Sunday best; the place beside her family was to be empty till the crack of doom; her innocent and almost venerable members to be exposed to that last curiosity of the anatomist.

This passage evoked more horror to me than the discovery in the same story that other bodies were supplied to anatomists by murder, more than the final supernatural corpse-swap at the end of the story. Stevenson is giving a sense of the general Victorian disgust at autopsies and grave-robbing in general, not just the outrage against criminal abuses of the system by Burke and Hare. This disgust stems from both religion and personal dignity, so that the act of body snatching is at the same time a religious desecration and anindividual humiliation. No one would want a family member on display before these “gaping boys” and even the general public, who were also admitted to anatomy lectures if they were interested. But why the change? The increasing professionalization of medicine and the changing public perception that autopsies help understand a loved one’s illness as well as educate medical professionals have both made the dissection of corpses a more accepted procedure. “Dedicating your body to science” has a nice sound it, today, without the same kind of shame and horror Stevenson evokes in "The Body Snatchers."














Boris Karloff (Frankenstein's monster) and Bela Lugosi (Dracula) are both in this movie, which claims to be "not Hollywood bunk--but dramatized from unthinkable facts of record!" Click here to see the trailer.

Objections to Anesthesia

As we talked and read about the resistance to anesthesia, I was especially surprised by the concern that removing another person’s physical sensations was morally wrong (aside from the Biblically based concern that women ought to experience Eve’s postlapsarian sufferings during childbirth). One doctor mentioned in class wrote that giving anesthesia, disconnecting a patient from his body, was a serious invasion of another’s agency. Though I would be happy relinquish my right to feel pain during a surgery, I think that this nineteenth century concern of a loss in patients’ involvement in their own diseases and treatments is supported in other ways. Advances in diagnosis, especially using tools like a stethoscope or a sphygmomanometer, were more objective but also lessened the importance of the patient’s own account. Earlier in the nineteenth century, doctors used the patient’s story of his illness to recommend treatment. Later, a doctor was more likely to depend on his examination of palpation and auscultation, classify the patient as an example of a particular disease, and prescribe, thus emphasizing the disease over the patient. Anesthesia was one step further, not only discounting a patient’s knowledge of his body but removing the link between a patient and his body entirely. The physical dangers of anesthesia, though, prompted most concerns, as Martin Pernick explains in “The Calculus of Suffering.” Many doctors in the nineteenth century refused to use anesthetics because there was a chance it could harm their patient. The line between safety and comfort has shifted since the nineteenth century; anesthesia is now the most dangerous part of many surgeries, but there’s no question of withholding it for the sake of safety, and certainly not for patients’ right to physical sensations.

Sewage Sensbilities

In visiting Crossness Sewage Station, I was most struck by the pride with which it had evidently been constructed. Sewage is not something I have ever thought much about. The construction of sewers and sewer stations, underneath our streets and far into the countryside, encourages us to keep this essential part of modern urban life out of sight and mind. So I was a little surprised when Professor Durant picked not an architect of imposing buildings or an inventor of industrial technology, but the designer of London’s sewage system, Sir Joseph Bazalgette, as his example of an “engineer as hero.” But that was nothing compared my admiration in seeing Bazalgette’s work for myself, at the Crossness Sewage Station. True, at first glance and smell, the station didn’t seem remarkable, but then we saw the pumping room, one of whose pumps has been restored to its full Victorian splendor. These are machines with the most utilitarian, unglamorous of uses: after a long slow descent through Bazalgette’s enormous sewers, the waste was pumped up a few feet at Crossness before being released into a reservoir and then into the Thames at high tide. And yet, the machines were gorgeous. The restored pump, named the Prince Consort after Victoria’s husband, is painted in bright, even gaudy, colors and surrounded by columns and grates similarly decked in reds, blues, and greens, with, of course, painted iron flowers.



















(Click here to see the Prince Consort in action.) When put in motion, the pump had all the color and excitement of a carnival ride, and I then could see how the Victorians would indeed have considered Bazalgette a heroic figure. The juxtaposition of this festivity with the surrounding rusted building reflected the contrast between Victorian pride in and modern dismissal of a system that makes modern cities possible. I understand that being relieved from both a “Great Stink” and the recurrence of an epidemic would make Victorians especially proud and conscious of their achievement, and I certainly understand the modern attitude of not wanted to think about the messy bits and pieces that make cities work more than necessary. But I wish we could share some of that pride in improving urban life as we make our cities, especially their energy use, cleaner and healthier.

Therapeutic Pessimism

The nineteenth century idea of “therapeutic pessimism,” that a doctor’s role was not always to heal or even to cure, but to comfort, is shocking to my twenty-first century sensibility of medical science. During the height of French hospital medicine, the poor came to hospitals for care and the hope of cure, but I wonder if they had a sense that they were coming to the hospital to die. The French doctors made huge advances in diagnosis, but Byrnum’s statement that French doctors like “Corvisart, Laennec, and other leaders of the French school were equally at home in the bedside and the morgue” (54) suggests that their progress in the knowledge of tissues and their diseases did not do much to help the patients themselves. Granted, my image of a modern physician as a sort of scientific warrior, perhaps not very personable, even acerbic, but determined to fight death in practically all situations, derives mostly from the media, from television shows like House. But even in my limited personal experience as a patient, my doctors have offered knowledgeable diagnoses and treatments; in the Victorian era, it seems they could only do the former.

In the later Victorian era, wealthier English patients were treated by their family doctors with more tenderness, perhaps, than their destitute French counterparts in Paris hospitals, but hardly more effectiveness. Calling a doctor almost seemed a means of marking a relative’s death rather than preventing it, and death must have been more familial, with a loved one passing away at home with family gathered around. Today, I think, we are more distanced from death, as Lewis Thomas writes in Lives of a Cell. A dying person is whisked away with flashing lights, blaring sirens, shouting, and perhaps the shocks of a defibrillator. Perhaps modern increased efficacy and scientific basis of medicine, then, has necessarily also made medicine more impersonal. One current popular image of medicine, in Hugh Laurie’s cold and analytical blue stare as Dr. House, certainly seems a long way from the Victorian house doctor.

Wallace and Darwin

I can understand the pique of a Wallace scholar encountering the neglect of his subject. Imagine going through the effort of an Amazonian expedition, the pain of seeing the fruits of that expedition destroyed, the hardship of ten days adrift on a lifeboat, the strain of constant economic insecurity, the effort of another, equally remote and dangerous expedition to Southeast Asia, and the suffering of malaria, all to envisage, finally, the key to understanding evolution. What would it feel like to have to share that discovery? Probably not too bad at first—after all, Wallace returned to England as a naturalist’s hero. I wonder, though, whether Wallace saw Darwin’s fame grow and his diminish through his long life. I noticed this morning at the museum that one of the books Wallace wrote was called Darwinism—I doubt that Darwin ever wrote Wallacism. Was there any kind of Salieri/Mozart dynamic between them (with slightly less drama)? Or was Wallace so well-known during his life, and Darwin’s work for On the Origin of Species so meticulous and complete, that Wallace didn’t mind seeing his colleague praised or lampooned in the press rather than himself? In this case, then, the hurt pride of unjust obscurity is inherited by Wallace historians.

On another topic, I loved seeing Wallace’s insect collection. I think of collections as very common hobby in Victorian times, with gentlemen in their book-lined studies poring over their fossils, beetles, Egyptian artifacts, and whatnot. I can imagine Wallace proudly showing his guests the prey strategy of mimicry demonstrated in his butterfly case. While I’m sure people still do collect rocks, butterflies, etc, I doubt whether we collect artifacts and involve ourselves in science to the same extent as the ordinary Victorian. Perhaps their avidity for collections speaks to the excitement of science when it held a little more mystery—new species of insects and birds cropping up all the time, even mysterious skeletons of long-dead “sea-dragons.”

Huxley's "On the Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge"

In his essay, “On the Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge,” Huxley claims a new revolutionary role for science, over spiritual as well as physical domains: “natural knowledge, in desiring to ascertain the laws of comfort, has been driven to discover those of conduct, and to lay the foundations of a new morality” (7). This is as brave new world, where the universe and our place in it will be understood rationally, finally fulfilling our spiritual needs and thus ending any need for religion. Yet Huxley’s essay suggests doubts about science’s ability to take up this awful responsibility, which was formerly assumed by divine will. Huxley writes that men “were themselves the author of both plague and fire [of the 1660’s], and that they must look to themselves to prevent the recurrence of future calamities” (2). Science, then, should not only be praised for overcoming natural calamities, but also blamed for everything it doesn’t do—the diseases it hasn’t eliminated, the natural disasters it hasn’t safeguarded against. Also, before expounding on the earth-shaking advances in astronomy, physics, and biology, Huxley admits the inability of science to replace religion in explaining our universe in former eras, as “the little light of awakened human intelligence…seems so insufficient to do more than illuminate the imperfections that cannot be remedied, the aspirations that cannot be realized, of man's own nature” (8). Huxley talks of the injurious effects of blind belief, yet he did trust in the ability of “natural knowledge” to make the world right, when in fact it was and is far from it.

The Great Exhibition

· A few years ago I read a book, Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, about the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, which showed both the brilliancy and darkness of the modern city. The fairgrounds, the awing “White City,” displayed advances of humankind (including America’s counterpart to the Crystal Palace and the Eiffel Tower—the Ferris wheel), but it also harbored the darkest manifestation of the urban environment, a serial killer, H. Holmes, who used the anonymity and the sheer size of Chicago during the World’s Fair to find his victims. Did the Great Exhibition have a similar dark side, if not of crime then of imperialist or class injustice? From what we’ve learned, the Great Exhibition actually seemed very progressive and egalitarian: all countries were invited to show their cultural richness and industrial strength, and all classes were welcome to experience the Exhibition, through low priced days. There was even a designated time for the infirm to visit. True, the displays of Turkish and Indian grandeur could be seen as imperialist boasting—the world at London’s fingertips and under its thumb—and even Albert’s rhetoric about the exhibition, that it would serve to promote “the unity of mankind,” holds a possible imperialist interpretation—unity under whom? But the Great Exhibition seemed to be more about the optimism of the mid-Victorians, the wonderful possibilities that this “period of most wonderful transition” would hold for the city outside, whose smoky disorder teeming with poverty and disease must have seemed a world away from the rational order and beauty of the Crystal Palace.