In 1865 John Gray, a founding member of the Natural History Society of Glasgow, published a sketch of the celebrated eighteenth-century Scottish naturalist, the Revd David Ure. In his potted biography Gray cast Ure as a heroic explorer fully equipped for the scientific investigation of local natural history. Ure, Gray noted, entered the field with,

In Gray's telling Ure's life provided a ‘romance of improvement’ in which fieldwork played an important part. Ure overcame not just the elements but also, in his single-minded pursuit of scientific truth, ignorance of nature and nature's God. In this way Gray's account reflected a widely shared set of assumptions about fieldwork which, as a moral as well as a scientific pursuit, aided the development of a sound mind and a healthy body.

As the example of Ure demonstrates, excursions with the purpose of exploring local natural history had a longer history and the outdoor work of nineteenth-century natural history societies participated in a rich and venerable tradition of fieldwork. David Allen, by identifying the earliest mentions of specialist equipment, outlets for publication and institutional supports, has uncovered fieldwork's rich and diverse past. In the eighteenth-century, fieldwork as a social rather than solitary pursuit received impetus from the ‘herbarizing’ associated with the Society of Apothecaries and from the need to supply a growing number of botanic gardens. Field excursions were employed from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to teach natural history at the University of Edinburgh and, later, at other British universities.

Introduction

The popularity of botanical gardens and private tree collections during the 1820s and 1830s helps to explain why the latter played an important role in the provision of Victorian public parks providing both a general model and an inspiration for more varied planting schemes. Instructed by the donor, the industrialist Joseph Strutt (1766–1844), Loudon intended the Derby Arboretum to promote his vision of public arboretums and provide a living spatial realization of the Arboretum Britannicum (1838) and the Candollean natural system. In so doing they created one of the first specially designed Victorian public parks. But there were tensions between the need to preserve a botanically-significant tree collection and the demands of public access mirroring those experienced by botanical society gardens, which impacted upon the management of all public arboretums. However, for about thirty years the Derby Arboretum management committee was able to reconcile these demands whilst regularly holding some of the largest festivals in the region. The Derby Arboretum also demonstrates the importance of provincial scientific culture and rational recreation, and provides an example of how local initiatives in provincial towns, as well as government legislation, fostered Victorian municipal innovation. It was supported by a local group of scientific activists known as the Derby philosophers because of their association with the Derby Philosophical Society and other scientific institutions. In encouraging the foundation of other public parks and arboretums, the Derby Arboretum helped to set the pattern for Victorian public urban parks, although it remained only a semi-public institution.

During the spring of 1862, two years after their death, the preserved corpses of the hirsute Julia Pastrana and her infant child were exhibited to popular audiences in London at the price of one shilling. During her life Pastrana had toured extensively around Europe as the ‘Nondescript’. Popular and scientific audiences alike were drawn to her performances, which showcased not only her body covered in dark hair, but also her talent as a singer. It was the intervention of Professor Sokolov of Moscow University that enabled Pastrana's show-life to continue. Having bought the bodies of both Pastrana and her son (both had passed away shortly after the birth) from her showman and husband Theodore Lent, Sokolov tried an experimental embalming process to preserve the bodies in a lifelike manner. Unlike other preservation techniques, both corpses retained their colour and texture giving them an appearance ‘exactly like an exceedingly good portrait in wax’. Upon hearing of this success Lent regained ownership of the bodies and returned to England for the 1862 tour. In their natural appearance the corpses were deemed suitable for public consumption in much the same manner as waxworks, while their innovative preservation captured the interest of scientific audiences. In life and death Pastrana's body simultaneously served as a public curiosity and as a specimen of investigation for the learned disciplines. Such freak bodies were often borrowed to enrich medical knowledge and provide points of reference for future cases of the conditions they presented.

Special places for the cultivation and display of a wide variety of both deciduous and coniferous trees, arboretums developed during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They were a combination of plantation, which usually consisted of a few varieties of trees, and botanical garden. Humphry Repton adopted the idea for his landscape gardening commissions followed by John Claudius Loudon. Repton included an arboretum in his red book for Woburn in 1804 and in his design for Ashridge Park, Hertfordshire between 1813 and 1815 alongside a pomarium, rosarium and other eclectic features. Loudon mentioned arboretums in his Treatise on Country Residences (1806) but did not take a special interest in them until later. In his Hints on the Formation of Gardens (1812), for instance, Loudon carefully defined the differences between groves, woods and plantations, without mentioning arboretums whilst in the third book on arboriculture in the Encyclopaedia of Gardening (1824) they were not separately categorized and the term was hardly used. The arboretum idea was always intimately related to written textual manifestations from which it had arisen. Loudon's Arboretum Britannicum (1838),with its wealth of drawings and information, was only the most famous of a series of works that were, in effect, virtual page-bound arboretums, but which were based on detailed observations of trees and collections in specific places.

In the opening of Little Henry's Holiday at the Great Exhibition (1851), Henry and his little sister Rose tell their father about their struggle to form a mental picture of the Great Exhibition and its purpose-built home, Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace:

This little sketch operates foremost as a handy framing device for the rest of the story. The notion that the Exhibition simply ‘must be seen to be believed’ provides the narrative impetus for a family outing to the great show in Hyde Park, and the rest of the picture book offers detailed didactic descriptions of the Exhibition displays, as the reader follows Henry, Rose and Papa around the Palace.

Historians and philosophers of science first voiced their dissatisfaction with the positivist-Whig interpretation of the Chemical Revolution in the 1950s and 60s. In his seminal study Lavoisier – The Crucial Year, published in 1961, Henry Guerlac challenged the prevailing opinion that Antoine Lavoisier was ‘the father of modern chemistry’ because it overlooked ‘the most significant ingredient of the Chemical Revolution’, which concerned Lavoisier's scientific heritage and not his creative genius. Guerlac argued that:

Following Guerlac's lead, subsequent scholars developed ‘thematic analyses of the Chemical Revolution from the perspective of larger developments in eighteenth century science’. New interpretations of the Chemical Revolution appeared when the positivist-Whig interpretative framework gave way to interpretive schemata associated with the rise of postpositivism, which shifted the epistemological centre of gravity of science from individual experimentalists to theoretical traditions.

Postpositivism emerged in the 1960s and 70s as a critical philosophy designed to modify or replace positivism. The dialectic between innovation and tradition was a productive one, which yielded in two or three decades almost as many studies of the Chemical Revolution as appeared in the previous century.

At the beginning of this book I set out to answer the question of what nineteenth-century physics is. I proposed to deal with this complex question through a case study of the communication of physics in nineteenth-century France and England, focused on the production, circulation and appropriation of Ganot's and Atkinson's textbooks. Ganot's physique was born in the margins of the French scientific and educational elite and it has occupied a marginal position in the current historiography of physics. However, as we have seen, this is not historically accurate, for Ganot's physique and Atkinson's physics were granted a canonical status in nineteenth-century French and British culture.

The study of Ganot's textbook physics tells us that nineteenth-century physics was more medical, chemical and pedagogical than considered by the standard historiography of nineteenth-century physics. It defines physics as a subject based on experimental and instrument design, in which theory and conceptual unification played a secondary role. It shows that the making of physics as a discipline was a business driven by the interaction of research and pedagogy, and the tension between pedagogical practices, practices of book production and reading practices. And it stresses the key role that persistent communication across different cultural, social and national contexts had in the making of physics.

The medical and chemical character of nineteenth-century physics is clear in taking into account the major educational reforms which shaped the development of a workforce in the making of physics as a discipline.

The debates that surrounded writings on Newton from the 1820s to the 1860s were the result of the interest of an identifiable number of individuals and the availability of relevant manuscripts. They also show that interest in his moral character was the product of a period in which the structures of science were increasingly specialized, secularized and even professionalized. The preceding chapters illustrate Newton's recruitment in defence of a variety of positions, particularly when these were threatened by change. As supporters of the corpuscular theory of light, both Biot and Brewster were in an increasingly isolated position when they highlighted Newton's use of that hypothesis. More positively, Brewster also used Newton's biography in campaigns for government-funded science and against over-large claims for ‘Baconian’ methodology. However, because Newton had come to represent both Anglican and theoretical science, Baily and his supporters found an alternative hero in Flamsteed, who could be made to characterize their vision of the modern scientific labourer. The analysis of writings on Newton from this period has therefore proved a fruitful means of examining individual strategies and positioning within the scientific community at a key period in the development of modern science.

Newton's scientific and symbolic importance sparked research into his life, but it was the results of this research that generated a period of sustained debate. This was largely concluded by the publication of Brewster's 1855 biography, which, despite many similarities to his 1831 Life, provided evidence to confirm the truth of many of the suspicions regarding Newton's character. At least some details of his quarrelsome, secretive and suspicious nature, his interest in alchemy and his Antitrinitarianism were available to the interested reader. It should be remembered, however, that many other texts written at this time continued to propagate a less complex and more idealized image of Newton. As suggested in the final chapter, the depictions that were informed by original research or by knowledge of innovative scholarship coexisted with more traditional accounts of Newton's life. The texts examined in Recreating Newton represent the aims and struggles of authors who either chose or were forced to confront the sources relating to Newton's life.

The previous chapter examined what domestication meant for the first few decades of electrification in Anglo-American culture. This chapter examines the diverse meanings of ‘electricity’ for the period in question. What was it that was being – or not being – domesticated under the name of electricity? There was quite a variety of answers to this question, and not only different answers but also different kinds of answers; cultural, material, metaphysical and iconographical. This proliferation of different meanings of electricity matters if we are to understand why so little common understanding of electricity was actually shared among contemporary householders, engineers and electrical promoters first discussing its domestication. Different groups had distinctively different concerns here; the identity of electricity mattered very much for those who were considering whether to allow it in their home. Was it a benign and well-understood servant who would respond in an orderly way to the householder's wishes, as claimed by the supplier of electrical generators implicated in the much publicized death of one of Lord Salisbury's labourers in December 1881 (see epigraph)? Or was it an insidious stranger with uncertain credentials who brought hazard and discomfort into the very heart of the home?

One foggy evening in Switzerland in September 1883, John Tyndall noticed an odd phenomenon. As he described it in a letter:

Tyndall tested the ‘halo’ phenomenon by bringing the lamp outside the door, replacing the lamp with a candle, and using a light in a room that he had filled with artificial fumes. He then put pen to paper and sent his observations to a friend he thought might be interested: George Gabriel Stokes.

We might be surprised to see Tyndall corresponding with Stokes in this informal and friendly manner. Although both were Irish-born physicists, in background, temperament, religious views and especially scientific affiliations, they had little in common.