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  • The Organisation of Knowledge in Victorian Britain
  • Thomas William Heyck (bio)
The Organisation of Knowledge in Victorian Britain, edited by Martin Daunton; pp. viii + 424. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, £55.00, $99.00.

Published in conjunction with the centenary of the British Academy, this long, elegantly printed volume shows how far study of the cultural and institutional contexts of Victorian intellectual life has come in the last forty years. The book analyzes "academic, official and legitimate knowledge" in the Victorian period (9); half the chapters deal with emerging professional disciplines and the rest with institutions. The chapters are not of equal quality, and there are some surprising omissions; nevertheless, the volume is an impressive introduction to elite intellectual life as it moved toward professionalization and specialization.

Martin Daunton introduces the eighteen chapters and sets out the themes of the book as a whole: the volume investigates the processes of "shaping official knowledge" (10) and claims to intellectual authority (1, 175). Some chapters actually address these admirable aims, and all help scholars understand main themes of Victorian intellectual life: the shift from museums and voluntary societies to universities; the change from description and analysis to research; the mixed sources of funding for intellectual work; the emergence and definition of particular specialized disciplines; the transfer of intellectual authority from generalists to professional scholars; and the expansion of the role of the state in knowledge production after the mid-Victorian years. The authors in this volume deepen our knowledge of all of these themes.

Addressing the rise of natural science in his excellent essay, John Pickstone shows that while the actual locales and practices of nineteenth-century scientists were diverse, their politically-motivated representations of science claimed unity. New analytical disciplines began to crystallize in the early nineteenth century, including chemistry, mineralogy, geology, comparative anatomy, and even phrenology; and museums, state institutions such as the School of Mines, medical schools, and the ancient universities all provided different settings for scientific work. Led by T. H. Huxley, scientists agreed that their work offered a public good because of its utility to social progress, and therefore the state should provide increased support for science in the name of national efficiency.

Lawrence Goldman also emphasizes the diversity of intellectual practices, using this observation to reject the view that nineteenth-century British sociology was a failure. British social scientists did not produce a single grand theory on the continental model, but, Goldman argues, that was not because of any failure of the sociological imagination but because such a theory was not necessary. In Britain, social scientific thinking pervaded the culture. Indeed, Goldman argues, the influence of social science peaked in the 1850s and 1860s, before the founding of the discipline of sociology, for social science was a public practice, not an academic field.

Mathematics was another vital field in the nineteenth century, especially in the area of symbolic logic. Daniel Cohen places its development in the context of the Victorian crisis of faith. To George Boole, Augustus De Morgan, and W. S. Jevons, symbolic logic was a form of reasoning without ambiguous or contingent terms; therefore, it could either solve or transcend theological disputes as well as avoid the atheism that seemed a necessary derivative from materialist induction.

Along with mathematics, classics was one of the twin central fields in Victorian higher education. Two excellent chapters show how classicists maintained their high prestige in an age of industrialization and utilitarianism and at the end of the century [End Page 165] broadened the boundaries of the field in the process of professionalization. With his customary clarity, Frank Turner explains that classicists exploited their position as gatekeepers to higher education and the professions to sustain the centrality of the classics, making the field the training ground for political and imperial leaders. And, as Mary Beard and Christopher Stray show in their essay on the founding of the British School at Athens, classicists redefined their discipline by widening its boundaries, so that by the early 1900s classics resembled an early version of cultural studies.

One of the most controversial developments in academic specialization was the emergence of English studies as a legitimate university subject...

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