Science and Whig Manners: Science and Political Style in Britain, c. 1790-1850, and: Natural History Societies and Civic Culture in Victorian Scotland (review)

A few decades ago, much of the writing about nineteenth-century British science was shaped by the narrative of professionalization. The central theme concerned the achievement of professional autonomy by individuals who made their careers in scientific institutions. In recent years, this narrative has undergone fairly stringent criticism. The identity of scientific practitioners is no longer seen as determined solely by the institutions in which they worked, and those institutions no longer appear predestined to achieve the form familiar to us today. In the works of such leading scholars as Steven Shapin, Lorraine Daston, and Peter Galison, the scientist's identity is shown as a complex and contingent historical formation, its development by no means independent of wider forces in modern society.

The two books under review contribute further to this picture by illuminating the civic identity of the man of science in nineteenth-century Britain. They show how scientific avocations came to be recognized as expressions of a kind of public virtue. Joe Bord and Diarmid A. Finnegan use rather different approaches in pursuit of quite different subjects, but neither avails himself of the professionalization narrative. They offer alternative answers to the question of how men of science came to be seen as serving the general good, even when their preoccupations were not obviously or immediately useful. Intensive study of manure, mushrooms, or mollusks might not seem the most obvious path to social standing, and yet it proved to be a fairly reliable one in Victorian Britain. These two books help us understand how science came to have such moral authority in civic society.

Bord's focus is not on the history of science as such, but on the development of what he calls "political style" or "manners." "Manners (or style)," he writes—apparently conflating the terms—"comprise those values whose expression conveys group identity" (3). The group in question consists of leading members of the Whig party in the first half of the nineteenth century. Bord's aim is thus to shift away from a focus on political ideology, which tends to emphasize discontinuity and conflict, and to stress instead a continuity throughout the period in the prevailing mores of the political elite. The values he lists as components of Whig manners all indeed have roots in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. They are: a public stance of liberality or generosity, a claim to comprehensive knowledge transcending individual self-interest, participation in the georgic tradition of landownership and cultivation, and the practice of sociability around shared intellectual pursuits.

Bord shows how Whig intellectuals featured each of these values in their public personae. For example, he reads Henry Brougham's articles in the Edinburgh Review in the first decade of the century as displaying the kind of comprehensive knowledge associated with gentlemanly independence. He contrasts two styles of scientific sociability in the period: that prevailing in Lord Holland's metropolitan circle—urban, sophisticated, and tinged with religious skepticism—and that in the third Marquess of Lansdowne's gatherings at Bowood in Wiltshire, where geology and agricultural chemistry were discussed. In both cases, sociability was founded on the pursuit of factual knowledge, allowing individuals of different ideological persuasions to cooperate. Bord insists that agricultural improvement was an important preoccupation of leading Whigs, instancing John Russell, sixth Duke of Bedford, and his patronage of the chemist Humphry Davy. Davy's Elements of Agricultural Chemistry (1813) praised chemical science as an engine of progress within a fixed social order, a vision that was highly agreeable to the Whig aristocracy.

Bord's study is a selective one, characterized by what he calls a "pointillist approach" (135). He assumes a good deal of knowledge of political history on...