Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science ed. by David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers (review)

Over the past two decades there has been a growing concern in the historiography of science with the spatial nature of scientific knowledge and its production and circulation. As historical geographers, David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers have led much of this work. “Geography, like time and embodiment, is an essential thing,” they argue, and “coming to terms with science’s somewhere is as vital as surveying and explaining its sometime and its somebodies” (3). Following on from volumes on the Enlightenment and revolution, in Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science Livingstone and Withers turn their attention to the period between the French Revolution and the Great War, bringing together fifteen contributors to examine the placed nature of the making of science and its reception.

Arising out of a conference held at the University of Edinburgh in 2007, the range of the book is broad. From the lecture rooms of Edinburgh and the domestic and theatrical spaces of electrified London, to the collision of knowledges in colonial Ceylon and the framing of the American West at the Smithsonian Institution, the chapters reach out beyond the laboratory and the cabinet to embrace the various places and practices that helped constitute ways of knowing in the nineteenth century. They examine the construction of scientific status and reputation, the processes by which meanings were acquired, the role of sites and places, the performed character of knowledge claims, and the ways these claims were experienced and understood by various kinds of audiences. In doing so the contributors to this volume consider the social in connection with the spatial and highlight the inherently relational and therefore situated character of scientific meaning.

For those interested in the Victorian period there are some standout contributions. Samuel J. M. M. Alberti’s chapter on London museums focuses on the relationship between objects, space, and the construction and expression of authority and expertise. The Victorian museum was never simply a place in which objects were catalogued and displayed, he argues. Rather, its status was closely linked to the knowledge, memory, and experience of its curators: it “was dependent on the intense association between keeper and things kept” (63). This interest in the connection between institutions and individuals also runs through Donald L. Opitz’s piece on the country house and its role in the early history of genetics. Opitz contests the notion that the late nineteenth century witnessed a shift from older forms of field work to newer, laboratory-based forms of experiment, showing how the foundation of the Whittingehame Lodge research station at the University of Cambridge “co-opted both field and laboratory” and drew upon longer traditions of gentlemanly natural history. This marriage, Opitz suggests, worked to bolster “the authority of the Mendelian approach in a socioeconomic milieu shaped by a widespread concern over the British agricultural depression” (74).

Indeed, the notion of “reputational geographies” is developed by several contributors (150). Diarmid A. Finnegan’s chapter on the spaces of scientific speech in mid-Victorian Edinburgh sets scientific alongside other forms of oration. By focusing on the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution’s Queen Street Hall, he shows the ways in which its existing cultures of rhetoric and performance shaped what counted as science within its walls. His piece reflects the growing interest—also evident in Withers’s chapter on the local enactment and reception of the meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science—in “the reciprocal relationship between location and locution” (8). Questions of performance and reputation also underpin Graeme Gooday’s wonderful chapter on electricity and fear in the homes and on the stages of Victorian England. In these domestic and public exhibition spaces, Gooday suggests, the bodies of dancers, servants, and demonstrators’ assistants became crucial sites in which the safety of electricity was put to the test.

These chapters focus explicitly on the Victorian period, but...