Introduction

The Derby Arboretum and Loudon's publications encouraged the planting of greater varieties of trees and shrubs and the provision of arboretums in public parks and gardens and the formation of public arboretums. Public arboretums were partly inspired by the discourse of rational recreation as expressed by the Select Committee on Public Walks of 1833 and partly intended to ameliorate the problems of urban industrial expansion and to provide a taste of rural pleasures in urban settings. Like Ruskin's intentions for architecture, arboretums were an attempt to restore the ‘loss of fellowship with nature’, to bring a piece of the countryside into towns and provide an opportunity to experience the foreign and exotic. As the Walsall Observer put it after the formation of a local arboretum, the ‘tendency of the age is towards the creation of an artificiality … incompatible with natural and real life’; the park would help ‘restore that balance’ which ‘busy commercial and industrial life has rendered artificial and unnatural’. Arboretums were places for urban refreshment where, as Charles Kinglsey observed of galleries, town dwellers could escape the grim smoky ‘city-world of stone and iron’ by taking country walks and wandering ‘beneath mountain peaks, blushing sunsets … broad woodlands … green meadows … overhanging rocks [and] rushing brooks’. Rational recreational objectives help to explain similarities between arboretums as ‘living museums’ and other nineteenth-century civic institutions such as galleries, museums, libraries and mechanics’ institutions.

Introduction

Citizen participation in the management of science and technology became a key component of public and collective action. The participatory ideal is now mobilized at almost every level, by NGOs, watchdog groups, trade unions, by techno-entrepreneurs, science policy proponents, EU bureaucrats and even by candidates to presidential elections.

Since the end of the 1980s, the STS field has played a pioneer role in the promotion of public participation as a modernized way of governing science and technology. Most of the literature produced within this context was based on the hypothesis that more public participation would necessarily lead to the empowerment of public and to a democratization of science. This paper questions such correlation. Empowerment is analysed, in this frame, as a vague, even ‘powerless’ notion (despite the idea of power it incorporates), given the fact that it was largely ‘normalized’ by international bodies and industrial actors, thus differing from its first theorizations by the social movements (social workers, feminists, development NGOs, trade union movements ...) as a means to transform the social order and power relations. In line with recent critical work calling for a deconstruction of institutional discourses, for a critical analysis of the official framings, and for a re-evaluation of the participatory ‘ideal’ in relation to the politico-economic context that gave birth to it, this paper takes seriously the cases in which public participation does not necessarily allow a democratization of science, but rather serves to increase the social acceptability of a controversial innovation,6 to restore public trust vis-à-vis science, to dictate narrow frames of debate’ on technological innovation8 or to shift towards a lesser commitment of the state in public health protection, thanks to an increased commitment by ‘empowered citizens'.

To locate the end of Charles's evolutionary period and the beginning of his physiological period as occurring precisely in 1860, as Francis did, suggests that a sudden change overtook his father. No such abrupt change happened, of course, although Francis's essential message was nevertheless valid; a watershed had occurred in 1860 marking a fundamental change in his father's focus and method of working. There was, in reality, a slow and lengthy period of transition, full of hiccups. Throughout the 1860s and ’70s, Charles switched the focus of his attention from one group of plants to another, and then sometimes back again (see Table 6.1, overleaf). Projects overlapped with one another. First he would be concerned with insectivorous plants, next with orchids, then again with insectivorous plants – with attention to climbing plants being fitted in between. Capable of a seemingly obsessive interest in one group, he had an astonishing ability to keep several other interests ticking-over in the background. Whether it was by observation of the plants in his garden or greenhouse, or those in the countryside around Downe, he was always watching and noting what was happening to plants, often tinkering with them in ways that would one day lead to major investigations. Prize plants, sent by Hooker or some other botanical correspondent, were often kept on the windowsill in his study where he could watch them day by day, or even hour by hour, making notes that might be useful at some time in the future.

From his studies of climbing plants and of insectivorous plants he learned new facts about convergent evolution and about competition, facts that complemented his evolutionary studies, providing additional material for his regular revisions of On the Origin of Species. Little by little, however, his viewpoint changed. He became more and more aware of questions about possible links between structure and function. His observations of the circular movements of the shoot apices of climbing plants, for example, or the rapid movements of the sticky tentacles and snapping leaflets of insectivorous plants, led him to contemplate the physiology of the plant.

It is commonly assumed that the textbook emerged as a well-defined genre in the nineteenth century. Paradoxically, defining the ‘textbook’ has proved much more difficult for historians. A simple definition is: a book specifically conceived for instructional purposes. However, the textbook has a much more complex ontology, owing to the multiplicity of actors, purposes, and functions intervening in its making, and the transformative power of its use. Textbooks are not immutable objects: their defining qualities have changed over time and are affected by the ways in which they are used.

Since the early modern period, certain texts or books had acquired in Europe the category of the standard in teaching and learning, but they were merely used as a complement to the oral lesson. It was in the nineteenth century that the use of standard books became central in pedagogical practice, leading to the configuration of the textbook as a genre. A major reason for the rise of the textbook was its instrumentality in the development of national structures of education, in particular, the nineteenth-century implementation of secondary education. These two phenomena coincided in time with the expansion of science teaching. In this chapter I suggest that the major forces behind the establishment of physics as a discipline were secondary and medical education, and school examinations.

Textbooks served the purposes of educationists and politicians in the establishment of science education in a national context. They served to articulate the pedagogical practice of physics teachers and the learning experience of physics students.

In his famous 1880 essay, ‘The Experimental Novel’, Émile Zola modelled literature on the physiological laboratory. The writer, he proposed, should experiment with his fictive subjects, manipulate their feelings and alter their environments in order to grasp the laws of nature: ‘we should operate on the characters, the passions, on the human and social data … as the physiologist operates on living beings’. Zola drew extensively on Claude Bernard's 1865 Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, which described the central role of the laboratory for the production of scientific knowledge, the use of instruments to penetrate bodies and prise them apart, to intervene in the course of life, altering or destroying it: ‘One must be brought up in laboratories and live in them … stir the fetid and throbbing ground of life’. As physiology for Bernard was foundational to pathology and therapeutics, so the novel, after passing through the ‘long and ghastly kitchen’ of experiment, would acquire diagnostic and curative powers. Having successfully operated on his characters, the writer might go to work on his readers: ‘It will often be but necessary’, Zola writes, ‘to replace the word “doctor” by the word “novelist”’.

It is hard to imagine such an overt conjunction between literature and physiology in nineteenth-century Britain, or one that placed authors in such a deferential position towards scientific authority.