Scientific Culture and Urbanisation in Industrialising Britain (review)

The analysis of scientific culture has become one of the liveliest areas of Victorian studies, attracting those who might once have dismissed botany, statistics, or thermodynamics as specialist preserves of the history of science. To find equal excitement in this field it would be necessary to turn back to the 1970s. With the outpouring of studies of Mechanics’ Institutes, Owenite Halls of Science, and provincial literary and philosophical societies, a social history of Victorian science became possible for the first time, as the faded gallery of heroes inherited from science textbooks was replaced by a dizzying panorama of early-Victorian scientific life. In the Introduction to this retrospective collection, Ian Inkster recalls how in 1971 he abandoned plans to study Japanese industrial development, to take up the challenge of understanding urban scientific culture in Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century.

Inkster’s research, like most of the best history of science begun in the 1970s, appeared as articles rather than books. With the passage of time, the significance of this work has been obscured by the difficulty of searching out the diverse publications in which it appeared. Attempts to make the older literature easily available are therefore to be welcomed. Cambridge University Press reissued Robert M. Young’s Darwinian essays in 1985 and an important collection from Frank Turner in 1993. Recently (and more expensively), the “Variorum Collected Studies Series,” which began by reprinting articles from classical, medieval, and Renaissance scholarship, has begun to include work on science and technology in the nineteenth century. Titles published so far include volumes by such familiar names as John Brooke, William Brock, Trevor Levere, Roy MacLeod, and Jack Morrell.

The present volume, Number 602 in the Variorum series, reproduces in facsimile eleven of Inkster’s articles first published between 1973 and 1990. These essays first appeared in places as diverse as the Transactions of the Hunter Archaeological Society and Essays in the Economic and Social History of South Yorkshire, so it is helpful to have them brought together. Although the title states that the collection deals with Britain, there is nothing on Scotland, Ireland, or Wales. It begins with three general essays, which are followed by studies of scientific and technological culture in Sheffield, Liverpool, Rochdale, and London, with a transatlantic excursion to Philadelphia. Reprinting four previously separate essays on Sheffield proves to be especially valuable, as these hundred-plus pages offer one of the most detailed accounts available of intellectual life in a single city. My favorite chapter in the book deals with the short-lived (1796–1807) Askesian Society, which inter alia provides a fascinating tour of scientific institutions in late-Georgian London.

The obvious virtue of Scientific Culture and Urbanisation in Industrialising Britain is convenience: the main arguments are not systematically developed as in an ordinary book, and there is some repetition. The volume, however, does add up to more than the sum of its parts. Together, Inkster’s essays make a case for the substantive contribution of provincial scientific culture to the industrial revolution. As summed up in the opening chapter, “Mental Capital,” transfers of skill and knowledge benefited those nations prepared to assimilate new techniques. England, with its vigorous informal networks of scientific association, was in a peculiarly advantageous position. As Inkster points out, this view of the contribution of scientific culture to industrialization is broadly familiar from the writings of Sidney Pollard and Peter Mathias. His research fleshes out their work with a rich—sometimes overpowering—feast of facts.

In addition, Inkster develops the line charted by Arnold Thackray in his classic study of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society to show that science was pursued disproportionately by men who were marginal to the dominant social, political, and commercial elite. As practitioners became incorporated within the elite, they lost their marginal status and local scientific activity tended to “decline,” especially from the 1840s. (To avoid anachronism about definitions of science, it might be better said...