Nervous Conditions: Science and the Body Politic in Early Industrial Britain

THREE Provincialism and Color Blindness

THREE Provincialism and Color Blindness Methinks I see him, how his eye-balls rolled Beneath his ample brow, in darkness paired, But each instinct with spirit; and the frame Of the whole countenance alive with thought, Fancy, and understanding; while the voice Discoursed of natural or moral truth, With eloquence and such authentic power, That, in his presence, humble knowledge stood Abashed, and tender pity overawed. —William Wordsworth JOHN GOUGH’S CAMEO APPEARANCE in Wordsworth’s “The Excursion ” (above)1 marked his status as a minor legend in the Georgian period. A childhood bout with smallpox left Gough blind. Undeterred, he embarked on a career as a mathematics tutor and botanist. He could distinguish plants according to their tastes and smells, and even said he could taste color. While Wordsworth used Gough’s example to illustrate the power of “thought, / Fancy, and understanding” to rise above physical limitations, the blind man’s skill also extended to those pursuits thought to rely almost solely on the power of sight. David Brewster marveled that Gough could apply his mind so fruitfully to all manner of highly visual sciences, including astronomy, chemistry, medicine, optics—even the nature of vision.2 Gough’s former pupil, John Dalton , admired “what genius, united with perseverance and every other subsidiary aid, can accomplish, when deprived of what we usually reckon the most valuable sense.”3 In the Victorian period, after his death, fascination with 55 Gough peaked thanks partly to the success of two of his pupils, Dalton and William Whewell. That two such acutely observant natural philosophers could have received their earliest education from a man without the faculty of sight, suggested how far genius could transcend physical debility.4 Among the lessons John Dalton must have learned from his early patron was this power of transcendence. In fact, in many ways Dalton succeeded even more at this feat than Gough did. Granted, Dalton’s problem was less serious. His color blindness simply limited the hues he could see to yellows and blues. Still, the limitation was potentially damaging enough for a young natural philosopher interested in chemistry. The fact that Dalton became lionized in nineteenth-century Britain as the father of modern chemistry signified his victory over not only his physical circumstances, but also his humble, Quaker, provincial upbringing. In fact, I argue in this chapter that early-nineteenthcentury reformers closely associated all of these potential limitations (provincialism , Quakerism, and color blindness). Reformers in the British scientific community forged this association as a way of both understanding Dalton’s particular case and addressing the problem of subjective knowledge described in the previous chapter. Dalton served as an exemplar in early industrial Britain of how to use the tools of natural philosophy to manage subjectivity. One reason that color blindness captured natural philosophers’ interest was that several prominent colleagues besides Dalton shared the condition, to include moral philosopher Dugald Stewart, instrument maker Edward Troughton, and civil engineer William Pole.5 To understand what this vision problem meant to that community, however, we first need to take a broader view of the connections between color blindness and provincialism in British culture, and why these two issues posed particularly thorny problems for natural philosophers. Color blindness served as an important site for clarifying how to obtain reliable , local, empirical data and how to organize these local facts into universal scientific knowledge. As explained in the previous chapter, during the early industrial age provincial towns began to challenge traditionally dominant London culture. In response to this pressure, two social groups pushed to reconvene centralized power: metropolitans jealously guarding their former political and cultural monopoly, and liberal and moderate reformers seeking to standardize and centralize governance through such diverse mechanisms as the census, sanitary commissions, and national scientific surveys. Natural philosophers, and particularly those interested in color blindness, generally fell into the latter camp. They saw standardization as a key tool for generalizing subjective experiences of those such as the color-blind or the provincial. 56 NERVOUS CONDITIONS ❘ The centrifugal force exerted by the provinces pulled so powerfully that it began to act on issues that we might now think had nothing to do with provincialism . Take, for example, the specific case addressed here: color blindness. Reports on the subject from this period tended to emphasize the epistemological tension between the isolation of subjective experience and the ultimate goal of universal knowledge. How...