Useful Knowledge: The Victorians, Morality, and the March of Intellect (review)

In Dickens's novel The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41), Miss Monflathers advises the unfortunate Little Nell to improve her mind "by the constant contemplation of the steam-engine." This absurd advice pokes fun at what Alan Rauch, in his informative Useful Knowledge, calls "the nineteenth-century knowledge movement." Rauch is referring here to the upsurge of interest in extending practical and "scientific" knowledge throughout large sections of the English public in the first half of the nineteenth century— knowledge that was widely thought to be morally improving and socially beneficial. This is the starting point for a study that follows popular interest in knowledge and science from the early nineteenth century up to the "knowledge crisis" of the 1850s and later, when scientific knowledge came increasingly into conflict with religion and with the accepted foundations of moral responsibility.

Rauch's first chapter provides an illuminating overview of the early-nineteenth-century knowledge movement and the "knowledge industry," when knowledge took on the role of commodity. The rest of the book traces the consequences of beliefs about the moral value of knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge, through a series of detailed readings of fictional works, with chapters on Jane Webb Loudon's The Mummy! (1827), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), Charlotte Brontë's The Professor (1846), Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke (1850), and George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860).

Rauch's approach is interdisciplinary, and he is keenly aware of the two-way traffic between text and context. He is a literary scholar by training, however, and I believe that his book's greatest value will be to students of nineteenth-century fiction. I cannot do justice here to his readings, which are impressively informed, intelligent, and carefully contextualized. I was particularly struck by his discussion of Frankenstein, in which he argues not only against the traditional idea that Frankenstein's fault was scientific hubris (transgressing the prescribed boundaries of human understanding) but also against the currently fashionable view of the novel as a feminist warning about usurping the reproductive role of the mother. He argues instead that the novel presents a critique of a science that lacks proper moral purpose, vision, and benevolence. The growing tensions between science and religion are fruitfully treated in Rauch's illuminating chapters on Alton Locke and The Mill on the Floss.

Most readers of this journal are likely to find the first chapter most relevant to their interests. Indeed, there were many important connections between the growth of technology and burgeoning popular interest in scientific and practical knowledge. Dionysius Lardner provides a case in point. Rauch notes that the first volume of Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia included John Herschel's Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1830). Lardner was not, however, only a literary entrepreneur with an eye for sifting knowledge; he was also one of the leading propagandists of steam, the emblematic technology of the industrial era, and his celebrated treatise on the steam engine had reached a seventh edition by 1840.

In his overview of the knowledge movement, Rauch focuses on three things: the mania for encyclopedias, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (Peacock's Steam Intellect Society), and efforts to provide knowledge for children. Some might object to Rauch's lumping together movements with different origins, motivations, and goals, but by observing the confluence of somewhat heterogeneous efforts he is able to highlight an important moment in the cultural shift from viewing knowledge as the exclusive preserve of a traditional elite (Coleridge's "clerisy") to viewing knowledge, and especially practical and scientific knowledge, as something valuable and morally uplifting for the public at large. This was part of the large shift that Macaulay had in mind when he contrasted an image of England centering on "rose-bushes and poor-rates" with an image centering...