There is scarcely a Victorian fictional narrative without its ailing protagonist, its depiction of a sojourn in the sickroom. Although the twelve pivotal illnesses that traverse the length of Elizabeth Gaskell's Ruth may mark the upper limit, multiple sufferers are the rule rather than the exception. The Victorian sickroom scene, at its most typical, serves as a kind of forcing ground of the self – a conventional rite of passage issuing in personal, moral, or social recuperation. The scenes are precipitated by or fortuitously linked to moments of crisis during which the sufferers, or those who are called upon to minister to them, have become separated from the social roles and norms by which they previously defined themselves: Lucy Snowe in Villette, for instance, left alone during the long vacation without work or colleagues, without friends or family (“the insufferable thought of being no more loved, nor more owned” [V 15]); Pip, alone in his room, with Magwitch dying in prison, Estella married, Herbert in Cairo, and Joe and Biddy estranged (“I had no home anywhere” [GE 55]); Romola, in flight from Florence and her faithless husband Tito, her father and godfather dead, Savonorola, her spiritual mentor, compromised and about to be executed (“the bonds of all affection were snapped ” [R 61]); Alton Locke wandering through the streets of London following the ignominious collapse of the Chartist rebellion and the loss of his friend and protector, Sandy Mackay (“Sullen, disappointed, desperate… careless whither I went”). Isolated and incapacitated by their loss of socially determined status and in retreat from what they experience as disabling psychological conflict, these characters fall ill themselves or are urgently summoned to the sickbed of another.

One need look no further than the grim facts of Charlotte Brontë's own life to account for the ubiquity in her novels of states of fever, debility, hypochondria, and morbid decline: the unremitting toll of disease upon her family, the melancholy effects of frustration and grief, her own chronic ill-health and that of the ailing father she dutifully nursed until her own early death. Illness, as Brontë herself defines and portrays it, can also be a register of deviance or alienation from social and personal norms, and in this respect, too, she was in a critical position to judge from her experience the painful effects of marginality and social aberration. As Terry Eagleton puts it: “A crisis of social identity… was endemic in this Tory, socially respectable but none too affluent family.” The Brontë sisters in particular, as Eagleton sums up their situation, were genteel in the “rough-and-ready environment” of the West Riding in Yorkshire, educated but without social or geographical access to the world which might gratify their tastes and interests, and female, “trapped … between imaginative aspiration and … a society which could use them merely as ‘higher’ servants” (8). (“A private governess has no existence,” wrote Charlotte in a letter to Emily.) Even after the success of Jane Eyre brought fame to Charlotte, her extreme shyness, her “deep and exaggerated consciousness of her personal defects,” made her shrink from the wider world she longed for.

To feel oneself a victim (or reluctant beneficiary) of forces beyond one's control, captive to one's physical being, estranged from one's essence, and at the same time continually at variance with “proper” social adaptation and functioning, are the conditions of illness and the experiential medium of Brontë's characters.

The fate of the sickroom scene as literary convention and code was tied to the generic exigencies of the realist mode that made it requisite – the obligation to find and assert affirmative links between circumstance and consciousness, between self and society, between beginnings, middles, and ends. Illness and its succor provided a fragile organic link between felt oppositions, while doubling as the sign of what in fact could neither be accommodated nor redressed within the moderating tonalities of realist discourse. The explanatory malady conjured by Mr. Utterson in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde could provide shelter from the exorbitant alarms inscribed in Hyde's baffling deformities by yielding itself to known remedies and consolations. The unendurable agonies of loss, of self-estrangement, of alienation, or even of physical pain itself could be figured within the sickroom and then assuaged by the hallucinated appurtenances of cushioned beds, basins of weak tea, familial intimacies, and lavish kindness. If there was pain, there was reward, if there was loneliness, there was sanctuary, if there was loss there was restitution, if there was confusion, there was clarification – but until inner necessities conformed with outer circumstances – a realist requirement – the sickroom remained the necessary venue for the representation of such harmonies.

According to Harriet Martineau, her own emergence from the sickroom was enabled by a newly discovered law of nature which restored the harmony between her constitution and its environment. During the course of the century, however, the search for the grounds of continuity sanctioned by natural law ended in the exploration of inevitable disjunction. Separation, which in the sickroom scenes was a provisional condition pending a cure, became itself the newly discovered law of nature.

When Fedalma, in George Eliot's The Spanish Gypsy says, “I will take / this yearning self of mine and strangle it” (xxiv: 163), it is preparatory to making the difficult choice of abandoning her lover, Don Silva, for her historical and racial destiny as a leader of the gypsy people in their search for a homeland. When Lucy Snowe in Charlotte Brontë's Villette says, “in catalepsy and a dead trance I studiously held the quick of my nature” (12), it is to steel herself against the pain of living in a society which could offer her neither satisfying love, stirring vocation, nor compelling identity. The promptings of the self for expression and fulfillment and the apparent necessity for their repression are at issue in both of these quotations and in the work of both Eliot and Brontë generally, but the differing circumstances and considerations involved in the adjudication of this dilemma indicate a central distinction in these writers' respective preoccupations and concerns. Brontë, as we have seen, is far more absorbed in wresting a personal settlement, however meager, from an intractable world ruled by fate, and brutally careless of the single life, than she is in “the growing good of the world” (MM 86) or any other of “the tempting range of relevancies” (MM 15) to which Eliot was so deeply committed. Eliot is more akin to Dickens in the scope of her concerns and commitments, as well as in her sense of the interdependence of human destinies.

“Wishin' you lots of sickness ” (MC 29), Sairey Gamp's parting salute to her colleague, Betsey Prig, has a wider application and significance in Dickens's fiction as a whole than its immediate comic context would suggest. There is “lots of sickness ” in his novels, and the profits to be gained by it are neither solely nor primarily confined to those for whom it provides a ready source of income. Sairey's mercenary reversal of the usual parting expectations of good health, however rich a source of humor, corresponds to the consistent reversal of illness from curse to blessing in the lives of most of the major and many of the minor characters who inhabit the Dickens world. Illness in Dickens's fiction is the sine qua non both of restored or reconstructed identity, and of narrative structure and closure.

Dickensian patients, like their counterparts in other Victorian fiction, move from the extremities of personal crisis in “the fevered world” to the protective sequestration of the “fevered room” (LD ii, 33) where a loving nurse or sequence of nurses stands by with soothing remedies at hand and where the barriers between hitherto estranged loved ones, or between aspects of their own divided selves, collapse under the leveling power of physical distress. In just such a manner is Eugene Wrayburn united with Lizzie Hexam, Arthur Clenham with Little Dorrit, Dick Swiveller with the Marchioness, and Oliver Twist with, first, Mr. Brownlow, then the Maylies. It is thus that Pip is reconciled with Joe, Esther Summerson with Lady Dedlock, Martin Chuzzlewit with Mark Tapley, and, of course, all of them with themselves.

The emergence of science policy

In spite of their rugged individualism and celebrated independence of mind, scientists have always sought, and often gained, government patronage. Indeed, in many countries of Continental Europe the academic scientists were mostly, in a technical sense, civil servants, although their ‘freedom to teach and to learn’ was usually well protected by long-established traditions of operational autonomy for state universities and scientific academies. Paradoxically, in France and Germany, where these traditions are still very much alive, academic science has resisted ‘collectivization’ more successfully than in countries such as Britain, where academics are not (at least in principle) government employees, and have always been very chary of putting themselves directly in the power of the state.

In the Anglo-Saxon countries, however, it was customary for state support for basic research to be very limited, except in fields such as medicine and agriculture with direct connections to major sectors of governmental responsibility. This custom changed radically in and after the Second World War [§4.2]. Public funds soon became so vital to the advancement of science – especially the academic research carried out in universities and other higher education institutions – that they largely determined its direction and shape.

One might say, however, that until the early 1970s the scientific community largely dictated the terms on which this support was provided.

Science is reaching its ‘limits to growth’. It is expected to contribute increasingly to national prosperity, yet national budgets can no longer support further expansion to explore tempting new research opportunities, by larger research teams, equipped with increasingly sophisticated apparatus. As a result, science is going through a radical structural transition to a much more tightly organized, rationalized and managed social institution. Knowledge-creation, the acme of individual enterprise, is being collectivized.

This transition is pervasive, interlocking, ubiquitous and permanent. It affects the whole research system, from the everyday details of laboratory life to the politics of national budgets. Changes in one part of the system, such as the abolition of academic tenure, have repercussions elsewhere, for example in the commercial exploitation of scientific discoveries. A new policy language of ‘accountability’, ‘evaluation’, ‘input and output indicators’, ‘priority-setting’, ‘selectivity’, ‘critical mass’, etc. has become commonplace throughout the world, from Finland to Brazil, from Poland to New Zealand, from the United States to Papua New Guinea. Indeed, science is becoming a truly international enterprise, organized systematically on a global scale.

Many scientists and scholars look back regretfully to a more relaxed and spacious environment for academic research. But nostalgia is a fruitless sentiment. What all scientists know is that science cannot thrive without social space for personal initiative and creativity, time for ideas to grow to maturity, openness to debate and criticism, hospitality towards innovation, and respect for specialized expertise.

The multinational tradition of science

On ceremonial occasions, scientific notables congratulate each other, and themselves, on being members of a world-wide community that has always ‘known no frontiers’. This is an admirable sentiment, but what does it mean in practice? Paradoxically, on other occasions, the same scientists say that science nowadays is ‘going international’. This apparent inconsistency is yet another manifestation of the transition to a new regime in science.

It is quite true that science has always been a multinational activity. It has never been realistic to consider science in the UK independently of science in other countries, particularly its European neighbours. One of the features of the Renaissance was the rapid diffusion of new scientific discoveries and theories across the Continent, carried by scholars, churchmen, artists, craftsmen, mountebanks, diplomats and other travellers, as well as by printed books.

Since the seventeenth century, scientists have sought international recognition for their discoveries. The European market for scientific ideas set both the goals and the standards for research. Scientific journals, such as the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in London and the Comptes Rendues of the Acade-mie des Sciences in Paris, were published nationally, but they circulated freely and were cited indiscriminately throughout the scientific world.

A history of rapid, unimpeded growth

Ever since modern science ‘took off’ in the seventeeth century, it has been a growth industry. Knowledge and technical capabilities have not only accumulated steadily: the rate of accumulation has also accelerated over time. The scale of all scientific and technological activities has continually expanded. Every measure of these activities – numbers of people engaged, resources employed, output of published papers and patents, commercial and industrial impact, etc. – seems to have been increasing exponentially for the best part of three centuries.

Of course, that same period has seen immense growth in many other parameters of national life: population, industrial production, ‘gross national product’, education, and so on. Nevertheless, the overall growth rate of science throughout this whole period has been exceptional. In the 1680s, for example, England had a total population of about 5 million: nowadays, the United Kingdom has a population of about 50 million – ten times greater. Even if we multiply this by another factor often, to allow for the fact that people are now much richer individually than they were before the Industrial Revolution, we still fail by a whole order of magnitude to match the thousandfold growth of scientific and technological activity in Britain since that time.

Much the same elementary historical calculation could be made for other European countries such as France and Germany.

The unabdated advance of knowledge

The origins of our science and technology lie in the mists of antiquity. Most of the essential features of the present way of doing science were already established in seventeenth- century Europe. People such as Isaac Newton and Anton van Leeuwenhoek devoted their lives to observation, experiment and theory, and contributed their discoveries to a common pool of knowledge. Institutions such as universities, academies, learned societies, and scientific journals provided the means by which scientists could publicly recognize or criticize each other's work. The knowledge acquired by research could thus be tested, consolidated and made the basis for further advances.

The systematic accumulation of knowledge by this process has been going on for more than three centuries. We look back now in astonishment at how far we have come. How exciting it must have been to hear for the first time about the spiral galaxies, the age of the dinosaurs, the germs that carry disease, or the atomic nucleus. In all that time, there has been no significant break in the history of science as a human undertaking. Scientists still celebrate the lives of their great predecessors almost as if they were former colleagues – earlier members of the firm, now regrettably retired and, alas, passed on.

A game with moving goal posts

We began this book with the visible evidence that science was passing through a period of radical structural change. Subsequent chapters presented a deeper analysis of the origins and extent of this change, showing in detail how it affects every aspect of scientific life and work. To give substance to the analysis, I have focussed on the UK, where a transition to quite a new regime started in the mid-1970s, and is still going on. But the history of UK science in recent years is only part of a larger story, involving scientific activity throughout the world. Science has always been a multinational cultural form. The same forces for change are at work everywhere, and many of the same features have emerged in other countries.

The notion that a distinctive new regime is emerging may be too simple. In some countries, the transformation process is apparently only beginning, and may take a different turn. Everywhere, the scientific world still seems like the Irishman's impression of New York: ‘Sure, it'll be a fine city when it's finished.’ On the other hand, scientific activity is becoming increasingly transnational, both for general political and economic reasons and in response to the pressures of the ‘steady state’. UK science, for example, is now inextricably caught up in the complex of interconnected institutions that is developing in Europe.