Introduction.

Victorian writers such as Thomas Macaulay, Charles Kingsley, and William Whewell celebrated the scientific and technological Utopia that they thought British scientists had created for the benefit of humanity. In the course of doing so they also explained the importance to them, as they perceived it, of the work of Francis Bacon (1561-1626) whom Macaulay described as both ‘a great philosopher who had made new discoveries in moral and political science’(Whyte, p. 79) and the ‘great apostle of experimental philosophy’ (p. 87). In examining relation between Victorian idea of inductive science and utopia, I shall address the way in which Victorian scientists, who adopted Baconian inductive scientific methodology, claimed they had triumphed over all previous scientific work and thereby improved the quality of life not only for the British people but also for people on a global scale. Others thought differently.

I also examine the natural scientists’ project of accumulating masses of facts and observations, for it was the latter activity that Bacon had promoted in his scientific writings. The gaining and classifying of specimens and observations to inform an ever-increasing database formed a crucial part of the development of nineteenth-century science. Leading Victorian scientists followed post-Baconian natural philosophers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in pursuing Bacon’s program and seeking to base their scientific theories on the data and observations being collected at a seemingly exponential rate – theories many of which they applied to the practical business of industrializing society.

The following discussion includes some relevant but necessarily brief explanations of the ways British imperial expansion affected British scientists’ collection of human artefacts, observations of the workings of the natural world, geological, botanical and other specimens and how therefore it contributed to their development of ‘a constantly increasing body of positive truth’ (Houghton, p. 28). I will touch on two other matters of concern here: the phenomenon of the Commodity, and the relationships between the Beautiful and the Useful, a question which is an essential feature of much Victorian aesthetic theorizing in which Art and Science are so closely related as to resemble Castor and Pollux. In a second article I hope to comment on the ways in which for some writers such Utopian dreams turned into Dystopian nightmares.

The first matter to consider is the importance of Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) whose work Thomas Macaulay, among others, acclaimed as a precursor of the Victorian need to expand their knowledge in order to better the human condition. For many, this philanthropic vision sat in an easy alliance with their grand scale acquisitiveness and the predominance of the profit motive, but it proved ultimately to be an unholy alliance resulting in the massive expansion of possessions and commodities that became a leading feature of the lives of those who could afford it. The original dream of bettering the human condition may have been inspired by Bacon, but the reality was a kind of progress that benefitted the few at the expense of the many.

Serendipity and applied science

Bacon pictures a world in which science has been systematically applied to the development of processes that benefit mankind. The innovations that drove British industrial activity in the first half of the nineteenth century were rather ad hoc, very much a business of serendipity, to borrow the term coined by Horace Walpole (1754) and a rather more complimentary term than that used by William Whewell (1794-1866) when he described pre-nineteenth century scientific work as ‘blind gropings’. Certainly, a great deal of Britain’s early industrial achievement may look like the result of applied science, and there were apologists, William Whewell prominent among them, who thought that Britain’s Industrial Revolution was a triumph of the inductive scientific methods proposed by Bacon. However, in the early days, opportunism and improvisation were just as important if not more so than the systematic application of scientific principles that reached its heyday in the second half of the century. The Dugans quote Simon Schaffer’s observation that

part of the solution to the Industrial Revolution riddle lies in the British technical expertise in three apparently unrelated areas: cannons, clocks and beer. To take the example of steam locomotives like the Rocket: British cannon-makers had pioneered the kind of precision engineering needed to make pistons to fit exactly inside their cylinders to form an airtight seal. British clock-makers knew how to translate the up and down movement of big levers into a circular motion. And British brewers had worked out how to keep steam pressure constant, so it did not blow up in your face [Dugan, p.25].

In effect, Schaffer argues that Robert Stephenson (1803-1859) produced one of the most important revolutionary developments in the early British Industrial Revolution more by amalgamating other people’s tried and tested experimental procedures rather than by applying scientific principles. Whewell, however, and others proud of national achievements thought otherwise, arguing that Victorian scientists and engineers answering Bacon’s call for progress by means of inductive science. And Baconian inductive science, as they understood it, it could progress only through possessing a database of significant observations, experiments, and verified facts. In this respect the Victorians enjoyed a rich inheritance from their predecessors. Pace Whewell, not everything in pre-nineteenth century science had been ‘blind gropings’.

The Natural Philosophers interpret Bacon’s programme

As the Victorians advanced their industrial and scientific revolutions, they found themselves in ‘a new age possessing and profiting from a constantly increasing body of positive truth’ (Houghton, p. 28). For much of the spade-work, literally as well as metaphorically, in accumulating the scientific data necessary to the development of Victorian inductive science rather than ad hoc inventiveness had been undertaken by the likes of Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), who interpreted the Baconian program as the ‘complete discovery of the face of the earth’ (1767: p. xvii.). Certainly the breath-taking accumulation of data by post-Baconian natural philosophers and the astonishing breadth of their interests was a most ambitious attempt to realise the dream that Bacon had articulated in his The Advancement of and Proficience of Learning Divine and Human (1605), Instauratio Magna (1620), The New Atlantis (1627), and Sylva Sylvarum or Natural History (1627).

For instance, Robert Jameson (1774-1854), Regius Professor of Natural History and Keeper of the Museum in the University of Edinburgh, left behind him forty thousand specimens of rocks and minerals, ten thousand fossils, eight thousand stuffed birds and many more insects and flowers (Gillispie, p. 66). Joseph Priestley himself wrote about theology, history, education, politics, psychology, optics, electricity, botany and pneumatic chemistry (p. 23). Thomas Young (1773-1829), who succeeded Humphry Davy as Professor at Rumford's Royal Institution, learned Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Chaldae, and Samaritan, and he discovered the principle of hieroglyphic writing through his study of the Rosetta Stone. Davy, who could grind lenses and turn a lathe, founded actuarial science, studied physics and physiology, and identified colour-blindness and astigmatism (Gillispie 411). Finally, Thomas Foster (1789-1860), one of the founders of meteorology, studied astronomy, mechanics, and aerostatics. He also had extensive interests in anatomy, physiology, and phrenology and well as in colours, the life of birds, the violin, and the law. He also edited Songs of the Germans and, apart from his own poems, and his metaphysical treatises, published a translation of the poems of Catullus and edited the original letters of Locke, Shaftesbury and Algernon Sydney which he had inherited. When he fell ill in 1810, his attention was directed to the influence of the atmosphere on health and diseases; in 1811 he took up the study of astronomy after the appearance of a comet, and in 1812 published his Researches about Atmospheric Phaenomena. In July 1819 he discovered a comet. Five years later he founded, with Sir Richard Phillips, a Meteorological Society (which lasted only a short while however), returned to his experiments on the influence of the atmosphere on the origins of diseases, especially cholera, and in 1831 made a balloon ascent. Characteristically, he did not omit to publish an autobiography and two volumes of Epistolarum Fosterarium. This list of accomplishments is but a fragment of his activity. In the catalogue of the Royal Society alone he is represented with thirty-five papers.

Inductive Science and Commerce

In the Victorian age, as in any other, one cannot not divorce the applications of applied science and their results from commercial considerations. In fact, Whewell celebrates the achievements in the land sciences in part because skilled surveying by geologists saves potential investors in mining projectsfrom ruin by not investing in schemes for digging coal where none is to be found. But, one wonders, given that Victorian culture was deeply penetrated and shaped by obsessions with gross material accumulation, how deeply was it shaped by men like Whewell? Were the businessmen, the investors and the consumers aware of the propositions which Whewell was advancing? Were they concerned about them at all? The answer is probably not. They were probably far more interested in the results of the work of men like Sir Roderick Murchison whom Whewell praises for accurately calculating the existence of gold in abundance in Australia years before the actual digging began. Perhaps, for investors and speculators, material gain was simply far more important than a Cambridge academic singing the praises of inductive science.

In providing what he obviously thinks is a convincing case for the triumph of applied science, Whewell, as I noted above, feels obliged to provide a plethora of examples. In this, he is following Bacon’s principle that ‘General statements depend on the accumulation of accurate observations and careful experiments’ (Moffett, p. 119). Thus, on the basis of the evidence which he has accumulated, Whewell offers a triumphal ‘general statement’ on the present condition of the national sciences: i.e. ‘clear and theoretical insight’ has replaced ‘blind trial’. Michael Faraday’s work certainly exemplified this ‘general statement’.

Advertising: a radical and necessary change in practice

The new industrial (and imperial) world, being, after all, an essentially commercial enterprise, had already developed more effective ways of advertising itself and its products than lectures and articles by scholarly writers no matter what prestige such writers might have enjoyed. As the industrialists prospered and cottage industries gave way to manufactories in which mass production created a seemingly exponential supply of products, advertisers, who had to develop new strategies, began to move their operations into spaces which were not available to the general public, such as sessions in which they planned and agreed with the retailers the advertising copy which they would then make available publicly. With this stage complete, the retailers moved into enclosed spaces such as shopping malls and large stores into which they welcomed their would-be customers, and which replaced the public thoroughfare described by Carlyle (p. 46). But then openly advertising and selling your commodities in the streets had long been considered as something rather dirty, hence the connotations of the term sales ‘pitch’. When Ruskin opened a teashop in Paddington Street he refused to put up a sign announcing that he was open for business (Richards, p.40).

The producers, who were often the advertisers, created and supplied a seemingly never ending multiplicity of commodities to ever-expanding markets. Ironically, in view of Ruskin’s aesthetic claim that the greater the number of the truths offered in a painting, the greater the painting, just so the greater the supply of commodities on offer, the healthier the market. And, whereas it had been a remarkable variety of natural specimens and observations which the scientists had collected and it was a remarkable natural fecundity and richness which both Darwin and Ruskin in their different areas celebrated, so it was an equally impressive man-made cornucopia which the organisers of the Great Exhibition displayed in 1851.

Other parts of “Francis Bacon, Inductive Science, Empire, & the Great Exhibition”

Select bibliography: Primary sources

Bacon, Francis: ʻEssays, Advancement of Learning, New Atlantis and Other Piecesʼ: ed. R. F. Jones. New York: Odyssey Press, Inc: 1937.

Bacon, Francis: ‘Distributio Operis’ (1620) in ʻSelections from the Works of Lord Bacon: e. Thomas W. Moffettʼ. Dublin University Press: 1847.

Baines, Edward: ʻHistory of the Cotton Manufactureʼ. London: H. Fisher, R. Fisher, P. Jackson: 1835.

Carlyle, Thomas: ʻPast and Presentʼ London: Oxford University Press: 1960.

Darwin, Charles: ʻThe Origin of Speciesʼ. London: Harmondsworth: 1968.

Darwin, Charles: ʻNaturalists’s Voyage Round The Worldʼ. London: John Murray: 1890.

Faraday, Michael: ’The Chemical History of a Candle.’ Printed in Great Britain by Amazon.

Kingsley, Charles: ʻHistorical Lectures and Essaysʼ. London: MacMillan: 1902.

ʻThe London Illustrated Newsʼ.

Macaulay: ‘Sir James Mckintosh’ in ʻCritical and Historical Essays: volume 1’: London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd.1907.

Macaulay: ‘Essay on Bacon’ edited by H. Whyte. Clarendon Press: Oxford: 1915.

Ray, John: ʻHistoria Plantarum Historia Plantarum.ʼ (1686-1704).

Ruskin, John: ʻModern Painters I.ʼ: Cook and Weddeburn: Volume 8: Library edition: London: George Allen: 1903-12.

Whewell, William: ʻHistory of the inductive sciences, from the Earliest to the Present Times.ʼ (/span>) London 2nd, edition: 1847. https://doi.org/10.5962/bhl.title.1863.

ʻTHE WORLD’S FAIR: OR, CHILDREN’S PRIZE GIFT BOOK OF THE GREAT EXHIBITION.ʼ Gutenberg: Release Date: November 19, 2004 [eBook #14092].

Select bibliography: Secondary sources

Ferguson, Niall: ʻEmpire: How Britain Made the Modern World.ʼ London: Allen Lane an imprint for the Penguin Press: 2003.

Wyhe,John van:‘Wiliam Whewell (1794-1866) gentleman of science’The Victorian Web.

Gere, Charlotte: ʻThe Exhibition Years.ʼ The Victorian Web.

Gillispie, Charles: ʻThe Edge of Objectivity.ʼ Princeton: The Princeton University Press: 1960.

Gillispie, Charles: ʻGenesis and Geology.ʼ Cambridge: Harvard University Press: 1969.

Landow, George P: ʻThe Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin.ʼ Princeton New Jersey: Princeton University Press: 1971.

Houghton, Walter E: ʻThe Victorian Frame of Mind 1830-1870.ʼ New Haven and London: Yale University Press: 1963.

Richards, Thomas: ʻThe Commodity Culture of Victorian England.ʼ Stanford: Stanford University Press: Verso edition 1991.

Wulf, Andrea: ‘A Generation of Gentlemen Naturalists and the Birth of an Obsession.ʼ London: Vintage Books: 2008.


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Last modified 7 January 2018