Science, Reform, And Politics In Victorian Britain: The Social Science Association 1857-1886

This page intentionally left blank SCIENCE, REFORM, AND POLITICS IN VICTORIAN BRITAIN The Social Science Association – Science, Reform, and Politics is a study of the relationship between social thought, social policy and politics in Victorian Britain. Goldman focuses on a remarkable organisation, the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, known as the Social Science Association. For three decades this served as a forum for the discussion of key Victorian social questions and as an influential adviser to governments, and its history discloses how social policy was made in these years. Its participants included many notable figures, among them politicians (for example, Gladstone and Russell), intellectuals (Mill and Ruskin), public administrators (Chadwick and KayShuttleworth), reformers (Brougham and Shaftesbury) and the pioneering feminists of the age (Barbara Bodichon and Bessie Rayner Parkes). The Association had influence over policy and legislation on matters as diverse as public health, crime and punishment, secondary education, class and industrial relations, and women’s legal and social emancipation. The SSA has an important place in the history of social thought and sociology, showing the complex roots of these disciplines in the non-academic milieu of nineteenth-century reform. Its influence in the United States and Europe allows for a comparative approach to political and intellectual development in this period. L A W R E N C E G O L D M A N is Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Peter’s College. He was awarded the Sara Norton Prize (University of Cambridge) for research in American History in , and the Thirlwall Prize and Medal for historical dissertation (University of Cambridge) in . He is the author of Dons and Workers: Oxford and Adult Education since . SCIENCE, REFORM, AND POLITICS IN VICTORIAN BRITAIN The Social Science Association – LAWRENCE GOLDMAN           The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom    The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org © Cambridge University Press 2004 First published in printed format 2002 ISBN 0-511-03711-2 eBook (Adobe Reader) ISBN 0-521-33053-X hardback To Madeleine Contents List of illustrations Acknowledgements Note on citations in the text List of abbreviations page ix x xiii xiv Introduction: the contexts of the Social Science Association  PART I : POLITICS . The origins of the Social Science Association: legal reform, the reformation of juveniles, and the property of married women in ‘the Age of Equipoise’  . The Social Science Association and the structure of mid-Victorian politics  . Organising the Social Science Association  PART II : REFORM . Liberalism divided and