A Vision of Modern Science: John Tyndall and the Role of the Scientist in Victorian Culture by Ursula DeYoung (review)

As Ursula DeYoung points out in the introduction to her new monograph, John Tyndall is among those peculiar Victorian scientific characters whose reputations during their own lifetimes were immense but who have largely fallen from view as far as contemporary historians are concerned. Most (probably all) historians of Victorian science know something about Tyndall. He appears as a bit player in many of our narratives, usually in the context of his notoriously materialist Belfast Address of 1874. Historical literature dealing directly with Tyndall as the main actor is, however, rather thin on the ground. Tyndall even escaped the biographical attentions of his own contemporaries. There is no monumental Life and Letters, no equivalent for Tyndall of the eulogizing memoir that he wrote for his own mentor, Michael Faraday. It seems as if Tyndall, so significant a scientific figure during his own lifetime, faded into obscurity almost as soon as he had left the picture. Given his eminence, and the eminence of close allies such as Charles Darwin’s Bulldog, T. H. Huxley, this sudden disappearance is puzzling. It leaves the historian wondering what might be wrong with the operation of a historical gaze that can blink and miss such an important character.

DeYoung is determined to correct the oversight and here sets out to reposition Tyndall at the center of our historical narratives about the place of science and its practitioners in Victorian culture. Given the wide range of Tyndall’s activities this is not an easy task. As Faraday’s successor at the Royal Institution he was the public face of science to many. As a member of the X Club (a scientific coterie of like-minded radicals) he was at the forefront of agitation for the reform of science. He made important contributions to the science of heat and, as a keen Alpine mountaineer, to the science of glaciology. And he delivered the Belfast Address, inducing fury in his opponents and dismaying some of his closest allies. DeYoung’s strategy, by and large, is to trace the genealogy of ideas and arguments. She sets out to trace the pedigree of debates and situate them in the intellectual culture of the age. The emphasis, therefore, is on reading and philosophical exchange.

DeYoung commences her overview of Tyndall’s influence and significance with an overview of his work as a scientist. Starting with a brief survey of his background, the first chapter follows Tyndall’s institutional career. There is surprisingly little here about what many might regard as his actual scientific practice, his experimental laboratory work. Scientific work for DeYoung means lecturing and publishing. Subsequent chapters focus on Tyndall’s philosophy and theology of science. DeYoung carefully dissects influences from Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe on Tyndall’s philosophy, as well as the influence of Faraday, his scientific mentor at the Royal Institution. Theology might appear a rather peculiar category to apply to Tyndall’s outpourings, but what DeYoung has in mind is Tyndall’s efforts to demarcate between scientific and religious discourse and carve out a distinctive cultural space for scientific authority. DeYoung’s discussion of Tyndall on reform and scientific education expands on this theme. She also places Tyndall’s educational campaigns firmly in the context of broader campaigns for educational reform during the second half of the nineteenth century. The final chapter charts the decline of Tyndall’s influence following his retirement from the Royal Institution in 1887 and the rise of a new generation of scientific men with a different sense of where science belonged in society.

DeYoung is anxious to properly classify Tyndall. She is concerned to remove the stigma of materialism. As far as this goes, this is a perfectly laudable ambition—and it is certainly true that many historians of Victorian science (myself included) have been a little...