While fictions were clearly interventions in scientific debate, as argued in the previous chapter, they were also, in certain specific texts and on particular occasions, conscious creative efforts to contribute to scientific knowledge more directly. As this chapter will show, popular fictions did make attempts to become popular science and to employ certain epistemological categories of knowledge-making in the same way as professional scientific practitioners. At the same time, scientific knowledge-makers employed creative fictional tactics to enhance their understanding of scientific objects under scrutiny.

Sometime during the opposition of Mars in 1894 Percival Lowell began to write a long verse poem entitled ‘Mars’. The poem draws on his experiences of nightly observations of the planet and although it is not obviously a work of science it should be read as one part of his many reflections on the dissemination of astronomical knowledge. In the early stages of the poem, where Lowell's untidy versification suggests a process of speedy writing under the influence of an immediate inspiration, Lowell stresses his desire to know the answers to his many questions about Mars:

Using ‘we’ and ‘our’ Lowell regards his quest for understanding as one shared by everyone.

Introduction

What if policymakers took the fact that we live in a permanently polluted world seriously, rather than considering pollution to be harmless, negligible or easily manageable? What would be the consequences of such an attitude? Since the end of the 1990s, the rediscovery of chlordecone in the surface waters of the French West Indies has given us a small laboratory with which to answer these questions by looking at how authorities have attempted to ensure that people live in safety. Chlordecone is a pesticide which until 1993 was used to fight banana weevils; it remains almost permanently in the soil and is only very slowly drained away. Whilst environmental pollution is not disputed as and when it is discovered, the issue of the health consequences of such pollution continues to be hotly debated. The toxicity of high doses of chlordecone is well established, due to the massive production of epidemiological and toxicological knowledge following the Hopewell factory disaster in 1975, leading to chlordecone being banned in the United States. The West Indian case raises the issue of its possible harmful effects (cancers, fertility problems) at low doses, following exposure over a very long period.

Charles and Emma Darwin had no favourites among their children, excepting perhaps Annie who died when she was only ten years old, but it is difficult to believe that they did not have a special feeling for Francis, their third son, for it was he whose life and spirit was closest to theirs. It was not just that Francis was the biologist among their children. He and his parents shared similar feelings; he shared his father's love of dogs, and he shared his mother's love of music – she played the piano each day at Downe, while he graduated from the penny whistle of boyhood, to the flute and then the bassoon of adult life. And it was Francis who was the first of Charles and Emma's children to marry, and the first to make them grandparents. These first shared joys, followed so soon by Amy's death, forged unique bonds between the parents and their third son. It was fitting then that it was Francis who became his father's biographer.

In the years after Charles's death, Francis presented to the world a sanitized version of his father's life. The first of a series of publications was the Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887), a book strictly censored by other members of the Darwin family. Edited by Francis, it was based on Charles's autobiography, plus a selection of his letters. Francis also supervised the reprinting and, in some cases, the extensive revision of Charles's publications. The bulk of this work fell into the six years, 1882– 8, immediately after his father's death; these were the same years in which Francis was writing and delivering both new lectures and practical teaching in Cambridge, caring for son, Bernard, marrying Ellen and becoming a father for a second time.

The professional lives of academics, particularly of scientists, tend to be calibrated by the dates of their publications, which can be misleading when those lives are viewed in retrospect. There is often a lengthy gestation period between the framing of a question, the conception of an investigation and its culmination in a printed article.

More than twenty years ago, the late Carleton Perrin likened the current state of our scholarly understanding of the Chemical Revolution to the parable of the blind men and the elephant. While historians of this complex event have a shared sense of being in the presence of a great beast, they mistake the part each of them has touched for the whole thing and hence cannot agree on its nature or identity. As a historical event, the Chemical Revolution is readily identified. It occurred towards the end of the eighteenth century and involved some of the finest scientific minds of Europe in an upheaval of considerable scope and consequence. What is not so easy to determine is the meaning or significance of this event, both for its participants and for subsequent commentators. Nineteenth and early twentieth-century historians of chemistry identified the Chemical Revolution with the conflict between the English natural philosopher Joseph Priestley and the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier over the nature of combustion, with Priestley defending the traditional view that burning substances emit ‘phlogiston’ (the principle of inflammability) against Lavoisier's innovative suggestion that they absorb oxygen. But the issues joined in this debate went well beyond the question of the empirical adequacy of competing scientific explanations, encompassing methodological, epistemological, ontological, linguistic and institutional issues that related to the very identity of chemistry as a scientific discipline.

Michael Combrune's Essay on Brewing of 1758 looks like a convenient milestone. It is the first brewery publication structured as a chemical treatise, and the first to discuss thermometry. It is also the first whose author was an active commercial brewer: indeed, it is dedicated to ‘the Master, Wardens, and Members of the Worshipful Company of Brewers in London’, to which Combrune belonged. It is tempting, therefore, to see the Essay as signifying a shift in brewers' attitudes away from the closed conventions of craft mystery, towards the systematic public development of useful knowledge. This temptation is one we should resist. The Company's dominance was waning by the 1750s, with corporate leadership of the trade passing to well-capitalized gentlemen-proprietors from diverse backgrounds; and, although Combrune had his imitators, few brewers published anything before 1800.

Nonetheless, Combrune's publication is an important marker of two significant changes in philosophical culture: a revised trades improvement agenda and the increasing availability of systematic chemical texts.

This chapter discusses the style of ‘palaetiology’. The term is Whewell's, set out in his 1837 History of the Inductive Sciences to denote the historic sciences. In palaetiology one investigated how the present state of things had emerged from its origins. Just as Bentham suspected of analysis:synthesis, it is likely that palaetiology has been with humanity for a very long time, although there are differences of opinion on this point.

The next two chapters note how palaetiology grew in importance in British life science, becoming an acceptable alternative to analysis:synthesis only in the early 1850s. It provided a different set of interlocking assumptions and explanations. A new group of British life researchers used it not only to reinterpret exemplary animal cases but also to overthrow analytic:synthetic science, which they felt was antiquated.

One of the key distinctions between analysis:synthesis and palaetiology in the life sciences was a difference in the direction in which development was believed to proceed. Again, analysis:synthesis depicted development occurring centripetally, from a circumference inwards to a centre. But palaetiology instead showed development as occurring centrifugally, starting from a central point and ramifying outwards. Though there were attempts at compromise, researchers seem to have been constrained to commit to one style or the other. It is shown below that even when an analytic:synthetic researcher appropriated work or methodology from palaetiology, he turned it to analytic:synthetic ends and vice versa.

These commitments tended to pull life researchers into two different camps. They differed on what kinds of evidence to use to solve various puzzles. Indeed each camp valued certain problems over others. Clashes heightened the differences between the groups. When members from each style argued, sometimes they could not even agree on what it was they were arguing about. The infamous Owen-Huxley disputes can therefore be seen as fights between representatives of two different camps and thus two different styles of reasoning.

In 1818, a House of Commons Committee heard evidence of suspicious goings-on at Barclay Perkins, the greatest of London's huge industrial breweries. A carpenter working for the young managing partner, Frederick Perkins, who had private rooms alongside the brew house, had noticed a still, bottles and containers of various chemicals, and had tipped off the officers of the Excise. Called before the Committee, Perkins explained that the apparatus had no connection with his business.

The field excursion of the third annual meeting of the Northern Scientific and Literary Societies held in Banff in 1883 provided a public spectacle for the town. The Banffshire Journal recorded that:

The rendezvous for the excursionists, the Fife Arms Hotel, provided a grand civic backdrop to the spectacle being adjacent to, and in architectural competition with, the Town House. Fieldwork, for all the accompanying rhetoric of escape from the town, could provide a ceremony that drew crowds and provoked, as the report testified, public excitement. What was more often considered an event organized for members of a natural history society became a public rite that transposed science into the language of civic pride and progress.

This chapter offers an account of the public lives of Scottish natural history societies in the civic realm and examines the ways in which their activities were orientated towards local civil society. The societies’ imprint on a local urban environment was registered in numerous ephemeral and more permanent ways. Here I investigate the various sites, occasions and advertising strategies by which the societies were made recognizable and accessible to a local public. The chapter's first section examines conversaziones and exhibitions. Society members regarded such events as useful for recruitment purposes and as a way of fulfilling educational goals. Yet conversaziones were defined not only by the organizers but also by the attendees. As a common cultural event, the meanings attached to conversaziones thus extended beyond those associated with the aims and objectives of natural history societies. The second section looks more closely at the fundraising strategies employed by the societies beyond the small income generated by regular entrance fees and annual subscriptions.

The chemists of the nineteenth century did not embrace Watt as one of their number, but the case was very different with its engineers. In fact not only did the engineers ‘pull’ Watt into their company but the chemists, and other elite scientists, as we saw, ‘pushed’ him in that direction. Watt was, according to the likes of James David Forbes, an indifferent chemist but a ‘profound’ engineer. He was characterized as a ‘philosophical engineer’ because of his understanding, command and use of physical law.

My argument in this chapter is that Watt was made into an ‘engineer’ in the nineteenth century – perhaps it would be better to say ‘engineers’ since he was constructed as multiple manifestations of the type during that period. The implication of this process of construction is that Watt was not an engineer in the late eighteenth century, during his own lifetime. To divest Watt of the status of engineer may seem perverse and I do not mean this literally. His contemporaries often referred to Watt, and he designated himself, as an engineer. Indeed, ‘James Watt, Engineer’ was the extended identifier that he used in his published papers in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. His collaborative publication on pneumatic medicine with Thomas Beddoes used the same phrase on the title page. But it is only apparently perverse to problematize this self-identification because the term ‘engineer’ underwent a remarkable evolution from the mid-eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth. In understanding Watt's self-designation as ‘engineer’ we need to understand, I suggest, what that term meant in his own time. Having done that we can then comprehend something of the way that Watt habitually presented himself to the world, and how he sought to negotiate the ambiguous status that ‘engineer’ then brought with it. For Watt was no ordinary engineer, and he and his friends wanted to make that clear.

In May 1853, Charles Dickens wrote to his friend and illustrator John Leech asking him to join him for dinner. Afterwards he intended to pay a visit to the ‘savages at Hyde Park Corner’. The exhibition Dickens was so keen to see consisted of thirteen recently imported Zulus (eleven men, one woman and a baby born en route to London) singing, dancing and performing ceremonies designed to showcase their ethnic distinctiveness for the British public. With three performances a day, the Zulus proved to be the biggest hit of the season and the show's London run was extended a number of times before the promoters embarked on a provincial tour. Just over two weeks later, Dickens penned the most famous eye-witness account of such a show. Published in his weekly periodical Household Words, ‘The Noble Savage’ proved to be an angry and sarcastic tirade that aired his disapproval of missionary philanthropy, the theory of the noble savage and his annoyance with other patrons of the show. Other reviewers had been impressed; however, Dickens simply vented that the show was little more than ‘general stamping, ramping and raving’. Dickens was not alone in taking advantage of the opportunity to see a group of living foreign peoples perform at the local theatre. Throughout the nineteenth century, an enormous range of peoples, from Arabs to Aztecs, were especially imported and could be seen in museums, theatres, lecture halls and zoos – where they competed for public patronage with other forms of human and natural history displays, from dead Egyptian mummies to mermaids and talking fish (see the essays by Fiona Pettit, Caroline Radcliffe and Beverley Rogers in Chapters 2, 7 and 11, respectively).

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a man of outstanding talent might sometimes achieve success even if his origins were humble, but he stood a much better chance of success if from birth he was assured of financial security and a good social position. The Darwins were blessed with both security and position. They had no need of patronage. Their exceptional talents were free to blossom in whatever sphere of endeavour they chose, their comfortable well-regulated lives being disrupted only by ill health and, occasionally, by an untimely death.

Plants were a hobby for Erasmus Darwin, the busy general practitioner in Lichfield, a small town in the English Midlands some fifteen miles from the city of Birmingham. They formed an essential part of the studies of Charles, the gentlemen natural scientist, secluded in his large house in the quiet countryside of Kent, and they were the basis of a profession for Francis, the laboratory scientist who did his best work in a university environment. The transition during those two centuries from Erasmus the theorizer to Francis the experimenter mirrored changes happening in the wider world of botany, and happening too in most of the nascent sciences. The significance of those changes is explored in later chapters, but first we need some perspective. This chapter explores the personal lives of Erasmus, Charles and Francis because, as for all men, the twists and turns of their careers, their triumphs and failures, were rooted in the background of their family, in the human cycle of birth, marriage and death.

The Darwins’ capacity to regulate and control their lives stemmed from the family's modest wealth which was itself derived from ownership of estates in Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire since at least the seventeenth century. Indeed, ownership may have stretched much further back for the family was granted heraldic arms in the sixteenth century. This pattern of squiredom was disturbed early in the eighteenth century by one Robert Darwin who tried his hand, rather unsuccessfully, as a lawyer in London before retiring to Elston, just north east of Nottingham, to adopt a life of relative indolence.

On 29 November 1843, readers of the Manchester Guardian would have seen a letter from the young solicitor and geologist Edward Binney, headed ‘Scientific Men in Humble Life’. Addressed to the editor of the newspaper, the letter begins:

Five years later, the far wider readership of a new novel Mary Barton, by way of being introduced to the fictional working-class naturalist Job Legh, learned that:

The aim of Binney's announcement was to found a public society with the immediate purpose of saving several ‘scientific men in humble life’ from utter destitution. He could never have guessed that his petition would mark a decisive moment in the middle-class creation of the image of the artisan naturalist, the most enduring form of which is Elizabeth Gaskell's character Job Legh.

The sense of revelation in the statements by Binney and Gaskell reflects not only the incredulity with which they were likely to be met, but also a way of representing working-class individuals that challenged the dominant middle-class perceptions of the poor.