From the 1880s to the 1920s, electricity was personified in remarkable range of literary and iconographic forms in industrial cultures across Europe and North America. Just as the ‘what is electricity?’ debate was more or less coextensive with the arrival of electricity in everyday public life, the flourishing pictorial culture of anthropomorphized electricity was also more or less coextensive with attempts to domesticate electricity in the home. Just as there were many mutually incompatible answers to the question ‘what is electricity?’, the promoters and popularizers of the electrical life generated an extraordinarily diverse and dissonant array of quasi-human forms in which to present electricity. While indicative of the fertile yet elusive character of this mysterious agency, the more important point for this book is that the effort of producing recognizably human images of electricity in this period was clearly tied to the project of presenting electricity as a congenial presence in the home – rather than a perturbing ‘mysterious stranger’.

This final chapter extends the theme of a gendered visual culture of electricity explored in the previous chapter by mapping the diverse sources and forms of electrical personification, both male and female. In contrast to much extant scholarship on this topic I show that this iconography was not necessarily dominated by female forms (fairies, angels, servants goddesses etc.), nor necessarily always sexualized.

In 1829, a slim volume of poetry appeared on the shelves of a small Penzance bookseller's, printed by local subscription and named after a nearby natural land-mark: The Mount's Bay. The book's opening pages ‘appealed’ to its ‘courteous reader’, its author claiming:

The desultory rambler, and author of the text, was Robert Hunt (1807–87): a twenty-two-year-old aspiring poet, who would later be remembered as a chemist, folklorist, geologist, writer, critic and photographer, a ‘self-elevated’ and multifaceted ‘man of talent’. In this chapter I shall argue that the words quoted above, some of the very first Hunt addressed to the world, encapsulated sentiments that would resound throughout his later life, work and writings. An appeal to the active forces of nature, and the nature of the activities in which Hunt hoped his reader to engage, would undergird his numerous writings on the sciences and reconcile his diverse employments and interests.

In 1885, two years after Hewett Cottrell Watson's tirade against the error-strewn reports of provincial natural history societies, the President of the Aberdeen Natural History Society James Trail, Professor of Botany at the University of Aberdeen, and the Secretary, John Roy, Aberdeen schoolmaster, published a paper in the Society's Transactions entitled ‘Additions and Corrections to Topographical Botany for the Counties from Forfar to Elgin Inclusive’. The errors and gaps in Watson's own publication were pointed out by two botanists committed to the kind of provincial society that Watson had attacked. Trail and Roy were careful to correct Watson either on the basis of ‘personal investigation’ or ‘information supplied on trustworthy evidence’. In addition to contributing data advancing botanical science, the two provincial botanists reasserted the value of local naturalists’ societies to science.

This book has argued that natural history societies were shaped by an overriding aim to simultaneously interest local publics and contribute to science. This chapter, building on Chapter 5, examines further the kinds of scientific aspirations exemplified by Trail and Roy without losing sight of more exoteric cultural concerns. By looking more closely at how members worked to establish the scientific reputation of their societies, alternative sets of negotiations between social and scientific agendas are brought into view. Alongside such locally negotiated collaborations, the tensions created between the work of the members to present their societies as significant bodies in local civil society and their efforts to offer work that was scientifically credible will also become increasingly apparent.

The chapter is divided into three sections. The first section takes two particular research routines central to the scientific efforts of the societies – recording and mapping – and examines at the level of scientific praxis the tensions generated between epistemic and moral imperatives. The second section recounts an individual scientific field project, namely the investigation of the Clava shell-bed near Inverness.

In the early twentieth century, the priest and novelist Canon Patrick Sheehan wrote a fictional account of an intellectual society in Cork. Founded through the exertions of a priest, a Catholic doctor and his wife, the society aimed at a mixture of social integration, entertainment and self-education. The participants included a college professor, an English engineer, two single women, the local bank manager and his wife. They had been selected not just for their intellectual attributes, but for their ability to contribute to providing an acceptable social mix. As the doctor's wife remarks, advocating for further Protestant members, ‘I hate this spirit of intolerance amongst Catholics. Really, Protestants are quite as nice, and sometimes much superior.’ Despite such precautions regarding the admission of members, the society's history followed a familiar trajectory from an enthusiastic foundation, through struggles with member fatigue (the ladies crave dancing and music) to dissolution. Each stage was characterized by a tension in aims: the desires to create an intellectual community, to overcome political and religious divides and to provide amusement often clash with one another. Sheehan's The Intellectuals drew on his personal experience as a member of one of Ireland's oldest scientific societies, the Scientific and Literary Society of Cork. His preface claimed that the book would provide a blueprint for the future of Irish society when ‘the barriers of racial and sectarian prejudices may be broken down’ through the development of intellectual pursuits.

Voluntary societies, and particularly scientific societies, are representative of the Victorian urge to combine recreation with higher purposes such as reform and education.

With a busy medical practice to service and so many friends and disparate interests, not to mention his own botanic garden to maintain, Erasmus Darwin's busy life left little time for practical investigations on plants. Through his translation into English of the original Latin texts of Linnaeus, and the precision he had given to botanical language, he had managed however to move botany forward in a very practical way. If he had contributed nothing else to botany, he had helped to bring long needed order to existing knowledge. But it was through his book, Phytologia; or the Philosophy of Agriculture and Gardening, published just two years before his death, that he made his greatest contributions to the progress of botany.

Its significance is twofold. Firstly, it anticipated the mood of the approaching Victorian age for improvement through greater knowledge. The thrust of much of Phytologia is that a better knowledge of plant function can play a key role in improving the growth of crop plants, whether in the garden or the field. There was certainly a desperate need for improvement, for in fourteen of the twenty-three years from 1793 to 1815 there were exceptionally poor harvests in Britain and much of Europe, farmers’ problems being exacerbated from 1804 by the Napoleonic wars that engulfed the continent.

Phytologia is significant secondly, because, with its emphasis on measurement and the practical works of the best investigators of the age, it brought together the latest advances in chemistry and botany. It updated what Erasmus had written in The Loves of Plants, providing a mature synthesis which – even if it contained as much speculation as it did hard fact – proved seminal, being widely quoted by authors and teachers who followed in the next two or three decades. For the modern reader, Phytologia summarizes the state of botany at the start of the nineteenth century. Tellingly, it demonstrates that Erasmus clearly anticipated the emergence from within botany of a separate discipline, the study of function in relation to form.

The historical literature on science in colonial India is a rich and expanding field. However, while astronomy in earlier periods of Indian history has interested Indologists and Nehruvian scholars for some time, astronomy in the colonial period has attracted relatively modest attention, and indeed fostered little consensus. The existing literature on astronomy in colonial India includes works that see astronomical endeavour as part of the imperatives of the English East India Company, the principal agency of British rule in India until 1858. However, the historical literature also includes works that identify an interaction of traditional (Indian) and modern (Western) astronomical knowledge, again within the context of colonialism. In general, earlier authors seeking to chart the advent of modern astronomy in India described the spread of Western science. However, later authors stressed that astronomy in the colonial period could be about a coalescence of Indian and Western scientific ideas, and as such, representative of a dialogue within the colonial encounter. So, from a reading of this historical literature on astronomy in colonial India, it becomes clear that there are some fundamental, and as yet unresolved, questions. These relate to how Europeans and Indians engaged with astronomy in colonial India, and how this changed over the period, and whether modern astronomy was just representative of diffusive Western science, or whether there was greater scope within its practice for a cognitive interface between Europeans and Indians.