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Victorian England, as is well known, produced an enormous amount of scientific endeavour, but what has previously been overlooked is the important role of geography on these developments. Naylor seeks to rectify this imbalance by presenting a historical geography of regional science. Taking an in-depth look at the county of Cornwall, questions on how science affected provincial Victorian society, how it changed people's relationship with the landscape and how it shaped society are applied to the Cornish case study, allowing a depth and texture of analysis denied to more general scientific overviews of the period.
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REGIONALIZING SCIENCE: PLACING KNOWLEDGES IN VICTORIAN ENGLAND
Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century Series Editor: Bernard Lightman Titles in this Series 1 Styles of Reasoning in the British Life Sciences: Shared Assumptions, 1820–1858 James Elwick 2 Recreating Newton: Newtonian Biography and the Making of NineteenthCentury History of Science Rebekah Higgitt 3 The Transit of Venus Enterprise in Victorian Britain Jessica Ratcliff 4 Science and Eccentricity: Collecting, Writing and Performing Science for Early Nineteenth-Century Audiences Victoria Carroll 5 Typhoid in Uppingham: Analysis of a Victorian Town and School in Crisis, 1875–1877 Nigel Richardson 6 Medicine and Modernism: A Biography of Sir Henry Head L. S. Jacyna 7 Domesticating Electricity: Expertise, Uncertainty and Gender, 1880–1914 Graeme Gooday 8 James Watt, Chemist: Understanding the Origins of the Steam Age David Philip Miller
9 Natural History Societies and Civic Culture in Victorian Scotland Diarmid A. Finnegan 10 Communities of Science in Nineteenth-Century Ireland Juliana Adelman
www.pickeringchatto.com/scienceculture
REGIONALIZING SCIENCE: PLACING KNOWLEDGES IN VICTORIAN ENGLAND
by Simon Naylor
london PICKERING & CHATTO 2010
Published by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited 21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH 2252 Ridge Road, Brookfield, Vermont 05036-9704, USA www.pickeringchatto.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior permission of the publisher. © Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Ltd 2010 © Simon Naylor 2010 british library cataloguing in publication data Naylor, Simon. Regionalizing science: placing knowledges in Victorian England. – (Science and culture in the nineteenth century) 1. Cornwall (England: County) – Historical geography. 2. Science – Social aspects – England – Cornwall (County) – History – 19th century. I. Title II. Series 306.4’5’094237’09034–dc22 ISBN-13: 9781851966363 e: 9781851966790
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This publication is printed on acid-free paper that conforms to the American National Standard for the Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. Typeset by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited Printed in Great Britain at MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements List of Figures
ix xiii
Introduction: A Biography of a Scientific Region 1 Confined to a Small Round 2 Healthy Recreation and Headwork 3 The Sweet Road to Improvement 4 The Depths of the Billows 5 A Large Natural Greenhouse of England 6 More Facts, More Remains 7 A Furious Tempest Conclusion
1 13 39 59 81 101 125 149 171
Notes Works Cited Index
183 217 237
For my grandparents, Avice and Stanley, Ernest and Jackie.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book has been a decade in the production. Along the way, versions of some of the material included in it have appeared in published journal articles. I am grateful to the publishers who have allowed me to reproduce some of the material in this book. Parts