Michael D Rectenwaldmdr2/classes/76-334/Roots of the Div… · Web viewEnglish Department. Carnegie Mellon University. 5000 Forbes Avenue. Pittsburgh, PA 15213. [email protected]

Michael D RectenwaldEnglish DepartmentCarnegie Mellon University5000 Forbes AvenuePittsburgh, PA [email protected]

Roots of the Divide: ‘Useful Knowledge’ versus Literary Culture

The roots of the “useful knowledge” movement can be traced to the gentlemanly

educational and social reformers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The

“philosophical radicals” developed new educational plans and systems, based largely on

the economic and social conditions emerging with nascent industrialism. This utilitarian

coterie, which included Jeremy Bentham, Francis Place, James Mill, John Stuart Mill,

and Henry Brougham, criticized the established educational institutions in Britain as

antiquated and deficient. These and other advocates helped to launch a new knowledge

industry whose primary emphasis was useful knowledge. Useful knowledge—associated

with an understanding of the material world as opposed to literature, classical languages,

and theology—was a precursor to the category ‘science’ to arise later in the century.

This paper addresses the bifurcation of useful knowledge and literary studies in early

nineteenth-century Britain, arguing that the sciences-humanities divide to develop by the

end of the century may have taken different shapes, depending on the interpretation given

to ‘usefulness.’ A consideration of the useful knowledge movement, I argue, is essential

for understanding the historical relationship between the humanities and fields of

scientific and technical expertise.

In this paper, I will discuss several stages in the developing relationship between

“useful knowledge” and literary culture. First, I discuss the rise of the useful knowledge

Rectenwald, Roots of the Divide

movement in early nineteenth-century Britain by considering the works and activities of

the “philosophical radicals”— Jeremy Bentham, James and John Stuart Mill, Henry

Brougham, and others—who sought to promote their version of a utilitarian education in

Britain. Then, I consider the uses made of the useful knowledge movement by plebian

and radical educationists, noting that the meaning of useful knowledge was different for

different reformers and educationists. I then turn to the impact that the useful knowledge

movement began to have on more conservative educational and publishing institutions,

by looking at the periodical writing of the budding geologist, Charles Lyell. I conclude by

discussing the rise of useful knowledge (and science) relative to the humanities in terms

of the interests represented by each.

This study of useful knowledge as distinguished from literary culture involves a tour

of nineteenth-century periodicals, in particular the Tory and gentlemanly Quarterly

Review, the ‘radical,’ middle-class Westminster Review, the plebeian Mechanic’s

Magazine, and the Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.

By locating tracing the knowledge movement through these periodicals, we can locate the

contributions that these various periodical publics made to the development of useful

knowledge relative to literary culture, as well as noting the effects of such developments

within several social and cultural milieus. The rise of science as a distinct educational

category is not surprisingly a history of struggle for social and cultural hegemony, and

likewise intersects with social class interests.

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Useful Knowledge

The roots of the “useful knowledge” movement can be traced to gentlemanly educational

and social reformers of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth century. The

“philosophical radicals” developed new educational plans and systems, based largely on

the changing economic and social conditions emerging with nascent industrialism. This

utilitarian coterie, which included Jeremy Bentham, Francis Place, James Mill, John

Stuart Mill, Henry Brougham, and others, criticized the established educational

institutions in Britain as antiquated and deficient.1 The mobilization of the terms “useful

knowledge” and “useful learning” can be traced at least as far back as the seventeenth

century,2 but it was primarily Jeremy Bentham and his associates who gave it its

nineteenth-century currency.3

In 1794, Bentham had proposed a serial encyclopedia (published in numbers) for the

“diffusion of useful knowledge” that would place readers in the center of the

“Academical Panopticon,” from within which they could readily survey and partake of

any and all knowledge of use to them.4 Although the “Panopticon plan” for education was

circulated amongst the philosophical radicals, it was never published. In 1814-15,

Bentham wrote Chrestomathia (published 1816-17), his only published work on

1 David Lee Robbins, A Radical Alternative to Paternalism: Voluntary Association and the Popular Enlightenment in England and France, 1800-1840, an unpublished doctoral thesis (1974): 10. According to Robbins the “philosophical radicals” included David Ricardo, James Mill, Jeremy Bentham, and Henry Brougham. This work is hereafter referred to as Robbins.2 Joseph Glanvill, Plus ultra, or, The progress and advancement of knowledge since the days of Aristotle in an account of some of the most remarkable late improvements of practical, useful learning, to encourage philosophical endeavours : occasioned by a conference with one of the notional way (1668). As early as 1800, Richard Phillips described his Juvenile Library, or Monthly Preceptor as a “complete course of useful knowledge, to be continued in every succeeding number” (I (1800): 143). James Mease published a serial Archives of Useful Knowledge in Philadelphia from 1810-1813. Noah Webster’s Elements of Useful Knowledge was published in Hartford in 1812. Also in 1812, Joseph Guy used it in his Pocket Cyclopedia. Other early prominent occurrences included William Bingley's popular encyclopedia, Useful Knowledge (1816).3 Robbins, 251.4 Robbins, 201.

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education, a sketch that served as a blueprint for the educational program that came to

bear its name.5 “Chrestomathia,” which Bentham explained was “a word, formed from

two Greek words, signifying conducive to useful learning,” came to stand as the model

for a new secondary day school for the children of the ‘middling and higher ranks’ of

society in London.6 Based on the work of educator Joseph Lancaster, a Quaker whom

James Mill and Francis Place regarded as the originator of the monitorial system, a

“chrestomathic” education, or education in useful knowledge, was distinguished from the

religious and classical education given at the National schools as informed by the

National Society for the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established

Church.7

For Bentham, “useful knowledge” generally signaled a differentiation between

knowledge that might be applied in action and to the “benefit” of society, as opposed to

the knowledge of the pedant, classical scholar, or theologian. The Chrestomathia

consisted basically of two learning tables along with the rationale and appendices for

explaining the plan. In the first Chrestomathic instruction table, Bentham listed the

courses of instruction along with “several STAGES, into which the course is proposed to

be divided: accompanied with a brief view of the ADVANTAGES derivable from such

Instruction: together with an intimation of the REASONS, by which the ORDER OF

PRIORITY, herein observed, was suggested.”8 The curriculum was divided into five

stages of difficulty, each arranged in order of decreasing utility, as well as taking into

consideration the relative degree of “preparedness” of the learner in relation to the

5 Jeremy Bentham, Chrestomathia, in J.R. Dinwiddy, ed., The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham (1983): hereafter referred to as Chrestomathia. 6 Jeremy Bentham, Chrestomathia, 19.7 Robbins, 251-94; “Editorial Introduction to Chrestomathia,” xi-xii.8 Chrestomathia, 18, emphasis in original.

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instruction. At each stage, the student first encountered the most useful and ‘naturally

pleasant’ knowledge. Thus, in part two of stage one, for example, “Mechanics at large”

are arranged not according to their logical relationship, but rather in terms of their

practical applicability, the preparedness of the students, and the pleasantness of the

instructions: “1) Mechanics in the limited sense of the word, 2) Hydrostatics, 3)

Hydraulics, 4) Mechanical Pneumatics, 5) Acoustics, and 6) Optics.”9 Hence, a student

who left school early would have received the benefit of the most readily applicable

knowledge.10

Numerous attempts to found the Chrestomathic school were undertaken. Bentham’s

garden at Queen’s Square Place was chosen as the site for a school. A fund was

established, and a committee formed (which included Mill, Place, and Ricardo) to found

and run the school. For various reasons, including infighting and problems over the site,

no Chrestomathic school was ever established. Yet the useful knowledge model on which

it was based informed other projects, including the Hazelwood School (f. 1819) and

Bruce Castle (f. 1827), both of which had been founded by Thomas Wright Hill and sons.

The London University, founded in 1828, was arguably established on the Chrestomathic

model.11 The Benthamite useful knowledge campaign also supplied the apologetics for

the well-known educational projects that followed, including the mechanics’ institutes

and the SDUK.12 Furthermore, with Bentham’s Chrestomathia in hand, the philosophical

radicals were among the first champions of specifically ‘scientific’ education in Britain.

“Useful knowledge” was a vesicle within which a scientific curriculum circulated

9 Ibid.10 Washington, 87.11 Elie Halévy has argued that the London University represented the realization of the Chrestomathic model. (Elie Halévy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, trans. Mary Morris, London, 1972, pp. 296, 482).12 Robbins, 251; Washington, 81-2.

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through the capillaries of the social body. The useful knowledge movement was thus an

important precursor to the debates regarding the relative importance of ‘science’ versus

other cultural knowledge, including classical languages, literature, and theology.

Early nineteenth-century educationalists adopted Bentham’s emphasis on useful

knowledge, if not his exact system. In the Preface to A Pocket Cyclopedia, or, Miscellany

of Useful Knowledge (1812), the schoolmaster Joseph Guy similarly distinguished useful

knowledge from “what is termed a liberal or genteel education,” which left students

“ignorant of the nature and quality of numerous objects with which they have been

surrounded.”13 The departments of useful knowledge, or the study of “things” as opposed

to their “names” in the classical languages, consisted of “Man,” “Commerce,” “Civil

Polity,” and the “Arts, Sciences, Literature, Religion, &c.”14 “Useful knowledge”—

associated with an understanding of the material world as opposed to literature, classical

languages, and theology—was a precursor of the category ‘science’ to arise later in the

century.

The Westminster Review (f. 1824) was the primary Benthamite periodical organ,

representing most closely the strict utilitarianism of the philosophical radicals.15 In an

1825 review of the second edition of George Jardine’s Outlines of Philosophical

Education (1818), for example, the Westminster distinguished between “useless”

(classical) education, and what the review advocated as an education for “the business of

society:”

Directly and immediately, we have risen to the station which we occupy, not by literature, not by the knowledge of extinct languages, but by the sciences of

13 Joseph Guy, A Pocket Cyclopedia, or, Miscellany of Useful Knowledge (1812): 9. 14 Ibid., 7, xix-xx.15 Roger P. Wallins, in Alvin Sullivan, ed., British Literary Magazines: The Romantic Age, 1789-1836, vol. 2 (1983): 424-33. The Westminster, founded by Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, was funded by Bentham and his protégé, John Bowring. Early contributors included James Mills, John Stuart Mill, and W. J. Fox.

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politics, of law, of public economy, of commerce, of mathematics; by astronomy, by chemistry, by mechanics, by natural history. It is by these that we are destined to rise yet higher. These constitute the business of society, and in these ought we seek for the objects of education.16

The improvements in social and economic practice had been derived from knowledge

enterprises that were poorly, if at all, represented in the established institutions of

learning, least of all at Cambridge and Oxford. Thus, the success of nascent industrialism

and the extension of empire incited reformers to apply pressure to such long-standing

educational institutions. The “business of society” had changed, and the Westminster

wanted “the objects of education” to reflect such changes. The study of material “things”

(the sciences) as opposed to the study of their “names” (the languages) was the clarion

call for educational reform. A later reviewer made even stronger remarks, arguing that

the sciences—including astronomy, mechanics, and chemistry, and not “mere literature,”

had advanced civilization to its present heights. “To be literary,” the reviewer continued,

“is the disease of the age.”17 “Literary” study was the obsession of the English

universities of Cambridge and Oxford, as well as the preparatory educational systems that

resembled them, and included drilling in classical languages, literature, and theology, and

the neglect of natural history and philosophy. The useful knowledge movement thus

challenged an aristocratic system of education with one based on the new middle-class

industrial concerns.

The mobilization of “useful knowledge” as distinct from other cultural knowledge can

be gleaned in Thomas Peacock’s satire on Romantic poesy in his Four Ages of Poetry

16 Anon., “The Present System of Education,” the Westminster Review 1 (1825): 150, 151.17 Anon, Westminster Review 4: 147-76, qtd. in Alvin Sullivan, ed., British Literary Magazines: The Romantic Age, 1789-1836, vol. 2 (1983): 424.

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(1820).18 Poetry had once represented the sum total of human knowledge—historical,

“scientific” and cultural. Poetry’s golden age corresponded to the period of “barbaric

manners and supernatural interventions… remote from our ordinary perceptions.”19 Its

reign depended on plunder as the primary means of material gain, upon mystified

understandings of nature, and a lack of mastery over nature and its laws. In the age of

improvement, however, the only true knowledge was that which “can claim a share in

any one of the comforts and utilities of life of which we have witnessed so many and so

rapid advances.”20 That is, true knowledge has passed beyond the parameters of poetry

and into the province of the sciences.

“Useful knowledge” was generally seen as either a part or a product of the “positive”

sciences, including the physical sciences, Political Economy, the Benthamite science of

morals, but variations of this theme were of course in evidence. While useful knowledge

was not divided into “pure” and “applied” sciences, gentlemanly and plebeian reformers

often mobilized the term differently. Plebeian commentators appropriated the rhetoric of

“useful knowledge” and adapted it to their own particular ends. In an address to the

Banksian Society of Manchester entitled The Benefits of General Knowledge, (1829),

Rowland Detrosier, factory worker turned scientific lecturer and deist preacher, provided

a definition of useful knowledge that became common for plebeian radicalism in the

period.21 “Whatever tends to ameliorate the condition of man, or to increase his means of

happiness, is not merely profitable, but useful and necessary.”22 Any knowledge that

18 Thomas Peacock, The Four Ages of Poetry (1820) in John E. Jordan, ed., A Defence of Poetry, by Percy Bysshe Shelley. The Four Ages of Poetry, by Thomas Love Peacock (1965). 19 Ibid., 15.20 Ibid., 18.21 James Epstein, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual, and Symbol in England, 1790-1850 (1994): 128; hereafter referred to as Epstein.22 Rowland Detrosier, The Benefits of General Knowledge, More Especially the Sciences of Mineralogy, Geology Botany and Entymology (1829): 4.

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enabled such improvements was deemed “useful” and scientific. But narrow

interpretations of “useful knowledge” given by middle-class reformers were resisted and

revised by plebeian reformers who saw in such a restricted utilitarianism the desideratum

to limit the education of the working classes to middle-class industrial objectives—to

make “mere machines” of the workers.23 In An Address Delivered to the Members of the

New Mechanics’ Institution, Manchester (1831), Detrosier lamented the trend of limiting

“useful knowledge” to the “knowledge of mechanical arts” for the objectives of “one

redeeming virtue—industry! matchless industry!”24 Drawing on a social

environmentalism and utilitarianism resembling that of Robert Owen, James Mill, or

William Godwin in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), Detrosier called for

“the extension of knowledge” to include “moral and political knowledge”25 for the

“formation of character, and the development of mind,”26 in order that education reach its

rightful goals, “the melioration of the moral, physical, and intellectual state of the poorest

and most numerous class society,” and ultimately, “the happiness of all.” Instead of

acting from such a broad concept of usefulness, this new industry in knowledge—the

revenues of which he calculated at “nine millions a year”27 —had been reduced to “the

application of mechanics to the purposes of life.”28 In numerous lectures, Detrosier

challenged the useful knowledge industry conceived in more limited terms.29 Thus, for

23 The Mechanics Magazine 1 (1823): 196.24 Rowland Detrosier, An Address Delivered to the Members of the New Mechanics’ Institution, Manchester (1831): 7.25 Ibid., 15.26 Ibid., 9.27 Ibid., 8.28 Ibid., 6.29 Other addresses delivered by Detrosier to Mechanics’ Institutes include An address delivered at the New Mechanics Institution, Pool Street, Manchester, on ... Dec. 30, 1829; On the necessity of an extension of moral and political instruction among the working classes: an address, delivered to the members of the New Mechanics Institution, Manchester, on Friday evening, March 25, 1831; An address on the advantages of the intended Mechanics' Hall of Science (1832); and others.

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Detrosier and others, the question was not whether the knowledge movement should

include more than “useful knowledge,” but rather, what was meant by “useful.”

In calling for the expansion of useful knowledge, Detrosier may be seen as reclaiming

for plebeian education something of the original objectives as advocated by Bentham,

and as derived from the movement for the Chrestomathic education for the middle and

upper classes. Useful knowledge had been the ‘scientific’ knowledge of self, society and

environment for the advancement of the moral and rational society. “As it was used by

the Radicals, ‘Useful Learning’ meant not only the diffusion of usable knowledge, but

also the ability of the individuals to whom it was dispensed to make creative and

independent use of that knowledge.”30 The extent and the uses to be made of useful

knowledge were both very much at issue in the educational programs directed at the

working classes.

Early Useful Knowledge Periodicals: The Making of the Useful Knowledge Reader

This section examines the construction of the useful knowledge reader by considering the

new useful knowledge periodicals that began publication in the 1820s.31 In particular, I

focus on the Mechanic’s Magazine (f. 1823) and the Penny Magazine of the Society for

the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (f. 1832). Perhaps due to their reputed “matter-of-

fact” contents, these “knowledge texts” have been for the most part neglected by literary

and cultural historians.32 Other scholars have mined the contents and history of the

30 Robbins, 265-6.31 Here I am following Jon Klancher’s seminal discussion of the role of periodicals in the construction of reading audiences -- The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790-1832 (1987) -- and adding the dimension of knowledge as a marker by which readers were figured and constructed.32 Alan Rauch, Useful Knowledge: The Victorians, Morality, and the March of Intellect (2001): 21. Rauch’s study is in fact a recent exception. Rauch notes that such knowledge texts have been largely neglected: “For reasons that are not entirely clear, the rapid growth of periodicals, encyclopedias, and societies promoting knowledge is a phenomenon in English popular culture that has largely been ignored by students of

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publications,33 but little attention has yet been paid to the rhetorical, ideological and

political conditions under which the useful knowledge periodicals sought to engage their

readers, or in fact, how they aimed to construct their readerships in the first place. Nor

have historians considered the differential responses of the editors and publishers to these

conditions. A study of such rhetorical interventions should do much to illuminate the

character of the knowledge industry, as well as the importance of that industry to the

history of science culture and the relationship of science and literary studies.

The Mechanic’s Magazine: “Ours and for Us”34

The Mechanic’s Magazine was the first of its kind in Great Britain. The first number

appeared on Saturday, August 30, 1823. “The object proposed by this publication at its

outset, was one of entire novelty” when the magazine first undertook it—to diffuse

scientific knowledge specifically to the artisans and mechanics of Great Britain.35 literature and history” (22). However, after surveying the knowledge industry in the first chapter, Rauch goes on to study the industry’s impact on novels in the remaining chapters, in effect reinforcing the neglect he bemoans by privileging the study of literary to such knowledge texts. Instead, I treat the knowledge texts as objects of study in their own right, and provide a more detailed reading of such texts in the first two chapters of this study.33 Within the history of science, Susan Sheets-Pyenson has done remarkable work to recover the importance and summarize the contents and histories of useful knowledge periodicals. But given that immensity of her task, she was not able to offer anything like a close reading of their rhetoric. Working in the history of education, David Lee Robbins offered an excellent intellectual history of the “Popular Enlightenment” that includes a thorough tracing of lineages and intellectual partnerships across classes and continents, without which this essay would be missing important information and connections. However, given that his thesis was “primarily an essay in intellectual history” (ii, 22), he similarly was unable to pay much attention to the conditions of production. William Brock has done remarkable work on periodical publishing, particularly studying the commercial science journals of the nineteenth century (“Development of Commercial Science Journals” (1980)) and with J. Meadows, the prominent publishers of scientific material, Taylor & Francis, (Lamp of Learning (1984)). Taylor & Francis published the Philosophical Magazine (f. 1798). The editorial partner of Richard Taylor, Alexander Tilloch, was also a contributor, for a time, to the useful knowledge periodicals directed at mechanics and artisans, with the short-lived The Mechanic’s Oracle (f. 1824). Brock’s attention to the publishers, printers, editors, contents and history of scientific periodicals is indispensable to any worthy subsequent study. 34 The Mechanic’s Magazine, Museum, Register, Journal & Gazette; “ Our and For Us” was the first banner on the frontispiece of the bound Volume 1 of the Mechanic’s Magazine, as derived from the prospectus in the first number. The secondary slogan was “Knowledge is Power,” which the editors ascribed to Bacon (Mechanic’s Magazine 1, title page, 18, 99); this publication is hereafter referred to as MM. 35 MM 1, (1823): Preface, iii. Its priority was reasserted in the preface to the third volume, after others had entered the field. “The ‘Mechanic’s Magazine,’ it was, which first proposed to teach science to mechanics, and invited mechanics to lend their aid to men of science” (MM 3, ii). Brock, Robbins, and Sheets-Pyenson,

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Archibald Constable, the publisher of the Edinburgh Review and from 1826 of

Constable’s Miscellany, the first library of useful knowledge (conceived in conjunction

with John Murray),36 noticed the new class of such periodicals in 1824, lending further

credence to the claim of novelty by the Mechanic’s Magazine: “The present desire of

knowledge among mechanics and manufacturers in every part of the island … had

occasioned the publication of numerous works of a class hitherto unknown in this

country.”37 Edited at the outset by the Scots patent agent, John Robertson and the ex-

naval officer and pro-labor economist, Thomas Hodgskin,38 the Mechanic’s Magazine

aimed primarily to reach artisans and mechanics who might buy it for the same price as

the Mirror (2d.-3d.) and read it on their leisure time “in all towns within 150 miles of the

metropolis.”39 Its circulation has been estimated as from 15,000 to 16,000 readers in

1824.40 As a part of the new movement in cheap literature, its reach was sizeable relative

to other more established periodicals whose circulation it exceeded.

Robertson had been a partner of Thomas Byerley, the editor of the Mirror, a cut and

paste compendium of material previously published in more expensive journals for

middle-class readers. Robertson copied the Mirror’s format for the Mechanic’s

amongst others, have all asserted that it was the first of its kind. 36 James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation (2000): 46; Samuel Smiles, A Publisher and His Friends: Memoir and Correspondence of the Late John Murray II (1891): 295-6. See chapter three of this dissertation.37 Archibald Constable, qtd. in Low Scientific Culture, 63.38 Practical Observations, 3; Patricia Hollis, The Pauper Press: A Study in Working-Class Radicalism of the 1830's (1970): 101; William H. Brock, “British Science Periodicals and Culture: 1820-1850,” in Victorian Periodicals Review, 21, 2 (1988): 47-55, at 48; Elie Halevy, Thomas Hodgskin edited in Translation with an Introduction by A.J. Taylor (1956): 84, originally published in French, in 1903; hereafter referred to as Halevy. According to William Brock in “British Science Periodicals,” Hodgskin and Robertson had a falling out after only three weeks of co-editing the magazine (48). Hodgskin went on to found the Chemist and probably to edit the rival London Mechanics’ Register in 1824. For Karl Marx’s debt to Hodgskin, see Halevy, esp. the Translator’s Introduction, 9-27, esp. at 22-7, and the Conclusion, 167-81. A discussion of Hodgskin’s economic and knowledge politics follows, below.39 MM 1, 16.40 T.F. Dibdin, The Library Companion (1824): xv; Altick, English Common Reader, 393.

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Magazine, while making “a supremely significant modification: he decided to make the

subject matter of the MM primarily technical and scientific.”41

Meanwhile, Thomas Hodgskin, soon to be Robertson’s co-editor, had established

connections to the Westminster radicals (Bentham, James Mill, Godwin, Francis Place, et

al.), by virtue of an epistolary friendship with Francis Place.42 Place asked James Mill to

help the young and struggling Hodgksin, and Mill obtained for him a position as a

reporter on the Morning Chronicle, which brought Hodgskin to London in 1823.43 In

London, Hodgskin and Robertson met, and established the Mechanic’s Magazine in the

same year.44 Thus, the Mechanic’s Magazine owed its existence, to some extent, to the

influence of the Westminster “philosophical radicals.”

The Mechanic’s Magazine positioned itself in the context of expectations for

‘popular’ science as a potentially radical discourse. Given the contradictory demands of

the discursive field into which the magazine entered—including the plebeian demand for

educational independence, middle class industrial objectives, and the upper-class fears

over plebeian education—the Mechanic’s Magazine negotiated this difficult rhetorical

terrain to develop a tenuous amalgam. The editors adopted the strategy of positing useful

knowledge as disinterested and value-neutral, thus facilitating cooperation between the

otherwise suspicious social orders, “where opposed groups readily perceived the moral

and political presuppositions of their opponents in their most favourite cosmologies.”45

41 Robbins, 203-4. The relative individual importance of Robertson and Hodgskin to the magazine remains somewhat unclear, although W. H. Brock maintains that they split as joint editors after only a few weeks, leaving Robertson as the sole editor of MM. See the next two sections, below.42 Halevy, 34-82, and passim. According to G.D.H. Cole in his Introduction of Labour Defended, “it was probably the Essay on Naval Discipline that gained for Hodgskin his friendship with Francis Place, and an introduction to the circle surrounding Jeremy Bentham” (9). 43 Halevy, 82.44 Ibid., 84.45 Barry Barnes and Steven Shapin, “Science, Nature and Control: Interpreting Mechanics’ Institutes,” in Social Studies of Science 7 (1977): 31-74.

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While repeatedly denying political motivation and condemning party politics as “party

and factious purposes,”46 the editors nevertheless advocated knowledge as a political tool

in the hands of the artisans and mechanics for whom it was intended. Knowledge was the

rallying cry for a new movement for the working classes that partially escaped the

charges associated with other forms of organization, such as the “combination” (or

unionizing) of workingmen for higher wages or shorter hours. “Amongst other things, we

have taught them to combine, though not for the small purposes which have often (we say

not always) marked the combinations of Mechanics, but for that more general and noble

purpose—the acquisition of knowledge, and the action and reaction of the intellect.”47

The term “combine” was provocative, suggesting that knowledge was figured as a new

political tool for the union of workers, with the ultimate objective of improving their

position in the social order. Thus the editors made it clear that their sympathies lied with

the workers’ interests, and they suggested that education was the most important,

“general” means by which they could pursue such interests.

The magazine vigorously asserted the importance of working-class “independence,”

especially with regards to education.48 The most striking assertion came in its “Proposals

for a London Mechanic’s Institute” published on October 11, 1823, in which Hodgskin

and Robertson launched their public appeal for a Mechanics’ Institution in London, like

those at Glasgow, Edinburgh and Liverpool. Trumpeting such institutions, they argued

that the education of the mechanics and artisans had to be “in their own hands,” and not

in those of the masters of industry and trade, or the government:

46 MM 1, 32.47 MM 3 (1825): iv, emphasis in original).48 Ibid., 99-102, Cobbett, qtd. in MM 1, 190; MM 2, 422-3, 437.

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The education of a free people, like their property, will always be directed most beneficially for them when it is in their own hands. When government interferes, it directs its efforts more to make people obedient and docile, than wise and happy. It desires to control the thoughts, and fashion even the minds of its subjects; and to give into its hands the power of educating the people, is the widest possible extension of that most pernicious practice which has so long desolated society, of allowing one or a few men to direct the actions and control the conduct of millions. Men had better be without education—properly so-called, for nature of herself teaches us many valuable truths—than be educated by their rulers; for then education is but the mere breaking of the steer to the yoke; the mere discipline of a hunting dog, which, by dint of severity, is made to forgo the strongest impulse of his nature, and instead of devouring his prey, to hasten with it to the feet of his master.49

The magazine was a forerunner in expressing the value of an independent working-class

education.50 Brougham would echo this proclamation closely in his Practical

Observations. Some gentlemanly aid was accepted as a necessary evil at the outset of

adult education, but “gratuitous” lectures were anathema to a truly working-class

educational independence. Independence was figured in terms of ‘manliness,’ a virtue

that could not easily be denied, and extended to the management of the mechanics’

institutions themselves. According to the editors, the Glasgow Mechanic’s Institution,

founded on July 26, 1823, provided the first example of a mechanics’ institution

“established by mechanics themselves.”51 The Edinburgh School of Arts had also been

founded in April, 1821, and the Liverpool Mechanics and Apprentices’ Library in July,

1823.52 The Mechanic’s Magazine called for their emulation by a similar institution for

London.

49 Ibid., 99-102, at 100.50 In his “Introduction” to Thomas Hodgskin’s Labour Defended Against the Claims of Capital (1825), Cole credits Hodgskin for being “the pioneer of the idea of ‘Independent Working-Class Education,’ though he was soon to have successors in that field” (10).51 MM 1, 101, emphasis in original.; Hudson argues, however, that “to the Glasgow and Liverpool Institutions may be awarded the honour of being established by the working-classes; but to the latter alone belongs the credit of having existed solely by their support” (42). The Edinburgh School of Arts had been founded in April, 1821, and the Liverpool Mechanics and Apprentices’ Library in July, 1823 (39, 45).52 Hudson, 39, 45, 42.

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The initial Proposal had been made in October, 1823. Preliminary meetings were

held over the next two months. The London Mechanics’ Institute was founded on

December 2, 1823. Although they had been provisional secretaries of the Mechanics’

Institute, neither Hodgskin nor Robertson won election to any permanent office on

December 15, 1823.53 In the following month, Birkbeck, having been elected President,

delivered the opening address to several hundred members of the institute.54

A bitter and heated struggle soon broke out over the control of the institute, and the

conflict was reflected in the pages of the Mechanic’s Magazine. After launching the

Institute from their pages and securing the support of both gentleman subscribers and

working-class members, Hodgskin and Robertson soon found the control of their

brainchild passing into the hands of such benefactors as Birkbeck and Place, and

regretted giving up their ideal of ‘popular’ control. “No doubt they realized that, with

every important figure who lent his support to the institution, their own influence would

further diminish.”55 Indeed, such was the case. The managers chose a “gentlemanly

place”56 for their headquarters, which served to alienate the working class members and

discourage their visits. The managers proceeded to conduct a “clandestine”57 meeting for

the selection of a permanent residence. The latter was secured on the basis of an interest-

charging debt to George Birkbeck. Not made during an official General Meeting, this

business deal had been conducted “illegally.” As the Mechanic’s Magazine saw it, this

was precisely the sort of indebtedness to the upper classes that would undermine any

independent education for the working classes.

53 Halevy, 88.54 Hudson, 49.55 Ibid., 87.56 MM 2, 309.57 MM 2, 307.

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The Penny Magazine: “The Finder”58

After the early useful knowledge periodicals had established their readerships, later

useful knowledge periodicals were able to build on and extend the reach of useful

knowledge dissemination. They were aided by the addition of the steam press,

stereotyped printing and the widened readerships in useful knowledge that had begun in

the early 1820s. The early 1830s marked the take-off period for the first mass reading

market in Britain, with the emergence of the new mass periodicals,59 the most important

and successful of which were the Penny Magazine, Saturday Magazine, and Chambers’s

Edinburgh Journal.60

Owing perhaps to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge’s (SDUK’s)

“noisy role in the nineteenth century march of the mind,” the Penny had more immediate

and widespread success than its rivals in the field of popular literature.61 It has been often

noted that the Penny Magazine was the first genuinely mass periodical in Great Britain.

But less noticed and perhaps more important is the fact that the first mass periodical was

a useful knowledge periodical. Charles Knight, its publisher and editor,62 took special

58 From the first article of the first number entitled, “Reading for All”: “[I]n this point of view our little Miscellany may prepare the way for the reception of more elaborate and precise knowledge, and be as the small optic-glass called “the finder,” which is placed by the side of a large telescope, to enable the observer to discover the star which is afterwards to be carefully examined by the more perfect instrument” (1). My suggestion here is that The Penny was also a “finder” of mass reading audiences.59 Scott Bennett, “Revolutions in Thought,” 226. 60 Ibid., 245.61 Washington, iii. Washington’s is the only book-length study devoted to The Penny Magazine, although he claims to trace the lineage of such popular literature as The Penny from the Renaissance, and focuses three and a half chapters of six on its intellectual and cultural forebears, devoting only the remaining to its history and contents. Washington’s dissertation director was none other than Richard Altick.62 As Washington notes, Knight was the editor and publisher of The Penny Magazine, but a Penny Publications Committee of the SDUK superintended it. The Committee consisted of Matthew Hill (who conceived of the publication), Thomas Falconer, David Jardine, Henry B. Ker, George Long, John Wrottesley, B.H. Malkin, W. H. Ord, John Ward (the nephew of Thomas Arnold), William Allen, J. Whitshaw, and G.B. Greenough. “At least three members of this sub-committee were responsible for the examination and approval of each number of the publication before it went to press” (152-155, 155).

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notice of this important phenomenon in the beginning of the Preface to the first bound

volume:

It was considered by Edmund Burke, about forty years ago, that there were eighty thousand readers in this country. In the present year it has been shown, by the sale of the “Penny Magazine,” that there are two hundred thousand purchasers of one periodical work. It may be fairly calculated that the number of readers of that single work amounts to a million. If this incontestable evidence of the spread of the ability to read be most satisfactory, it is still more satisfactory to consider the species of reading which has had such an extensive and increasing popularity.63

The species of reading that Knight referred to was useful and edifying reading. Such

reading was opposed to romance, vicious rumor-mongering, and partisan politics. In

contradistinction to these classes of reading, the Penny was to appeal to the same readers

with calm reason. As we shall see, the Penny defined useful knowledge widely. Like its

precursors, the Penny included the useful arts, basic science, and Political Economy

under the rubric of “useful knowledge.” But it also included “moral” and “religious”

knowledge. Knight contrasted the useful knowledge vended in the Penny with reading

calculated to excite the passions, “inflame a vicious appetite,” “minister to prejudices and

superstitions,” or “appeal to the lovers of the marvelous.” In the Penny, there was none of

the “tattle or abuse for the gratification of a diseased personality—and, above all, no

party politics.”64 Knight was particularly concerned with the passions of political

journalism fed by radical and other partisan periodicals. In his autobiography, he claimed

that periodical purveyors had contributed to and exploited political fervor to the detriment

of the social order.65 Under his editorship and the superintendence of the Society for the

Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK), the Penny would construct a discursive space 63 “Preface,” PM 1 (1832): iii, emphasis added.64 Ibid.65 Charles Knight, Passages of a Working Life During Half a Century, with a Prelude of Early Reminiscences (1864, 1865): vol. 1, 235.

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removed from political ideology. But the Penny, I argue, was no less an advocacy

magazine than those it sought to counteract. Fundamental to the construction of the

Penny’s mass audience was the positing of an idealized reader abstracted from socio-

political context, left with only an “innocent” desire for knowledge.66 The putative

apolitical character of the Penny was also instrumental in helping to extend the belief in

“value-neutrality” that would prove invaluable as a credo of science as the century

progressed. However, to accept such “value-neutrality” at face value would be to take the

educationists and reformers at their word.67 Value-neutrality was an ideology that served

to advance, while masking, various socio-political interests, harbored within the notion of

“useful knowledge.”

In the case of the Penny, these interests involved the values of the philosophical

radicals, such as James Mill, Henry Brougham, and Francis Place, in conjunction with the

religious advocates who were also prominent members of the main Committee of the

SDUK.68 Based largely on Brougham’s Practical Observations, the aim of the SDUK

had been “strictly limited to what its title imports, namely, the imparting useful

information to all classes of the community, particularly to such as are unable to avail

66 PM 1 (1832): 1.67 In “The Editorial Character and Readership of The Penny Magazine,” Bennett relies on mostly quantitative analysis of the content, paying almost no attention to the context in which such content was purveyed and assuming that the mere quantity of various types of articles can be used to determine the magazine’s editorial character. While appropriately re-examining the dominant scholarly thinking on The Penny Magazine—that it was simply an organ for disseminating middle-class, Whig values amongst the “petit bourgeoisie and perhaps upwardly mobile members of the labor aristocracy” (135-6)—he ends by suggesting that the periodical was ideologically neutral: “The magazine met the need of its readers to know in a simple, pragmatic way about the world that was emerging about them. The Penny Magazine did this, did it well, and did it almost always with no appeal to an ideological position. It was the competitive value of The Penny Magazine, not its power to define or champion a given position, that led to the ten million individual decisions made in 1832 to buy the magazine” (137-8). Bennett fails to acknowledge that the very definitions of terms like “pragmatic” and “competitive value” are under ideological formation during the very period in question. The Penny itself had a large role in this work.68 The SDUK was careful to avoid the topics of religion, however. Thomas Arnold was rejected as a Committee member due to his interest in promoting Christianity through the Society. See Washington, esp. 134.

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themselves of the experienced teachers, or may prefer learning by themselves.”69 The

SDUK was to provide for the first prong of Brougham’s plan for the education of the

people, the production of cheap publications, which was to be combined with the second

prong, the establishment of libraries and reading societies. The latter would be effected

mostly by local efforts.70 The Penny Magazine was launched to extend the reach of the

first prong, the aim of which had been considered by the Committee to be unmet by the

Society’s erstwhile efforts: the Quarterly Journal of Education (f. 1831), the Library of

Useful Knowledge, the Library for the Young, the Working-Man’s Companion, the

Farmer Series, and especially the Library of Entertaining Knowledge.71

Throughout the first volume, the Penny posited useful knowledge as a

transcendent, universal value that could tie together a vast public with reading that

superseded partisanship and social strife. In the first number of The Penny Magazine,

published on Saturday, March 31, 1832, the magazine included no less than three articles

on knowledge and its imagined readers. In the first article, “Reading for All,” the fear of

the spread of cheap literature was considered analogous to an earlier fear of the stage-

coach. The stage-coach, it had been argued, should be banned—otherwise, “‘will any

man keep a horse for himself and another for his man, all the year, for to ride one or two

journies,’” when the stage-coach can take him on many more journeys for “‘four

shillings.’”72 Although it might be initially lamented like the stage-coach had been, the

69 See the prospectus for “The Society of the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge,” which followed the first treatise of the Society in first bound volume of the Library of Useful Knowledge (1829). This section will not retrace in detail the institutional history of the SDUK. To date, the most comprehensive institutional studies of the SDUK are Monica C. Grobel, The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge 1826-1846 (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation), and Harold Smith, The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge 1826-1846: A Social and Bibliographical Evaluation (1974).70 Practical Observations; Robbins, 215. The third prong was the establishment of Mechanics’ and other educational institutions.71 Washington, esp. 152.72 PM, 1, 1.

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Penny would do for “all classes”—in terms of knowledge—what the stage-coach had

done for the middle classes in terms of “communication.” It would effectively end the

upper class “monopoly of literature” by catering to readers without the time, means, or

reading habits for extensive study. The other publications of the SDUK had been directed

to “diligent readers—to those who are anxiously desirous to obtain knowledge in a

condensed, and in most cases, systematic form.” But the Penny was to be a “useful and

entertaining Weekly Magazine, that may be taken up and laid down without requiring any

considerable effort.”73 That is, the Penny would serve as light reading, providing an easy

introduction to useful knowledge for the unlearned reader or the reader without either the

time or energy for difficult study. The Penny figured its reader not as a serious student

but rather as an occasional and superficial forager for information. While the Penny

would improve readers, far from promising them any expertise, like the finder on the

telescope, it would merely indicate to the more arduous observer where more knowledge

might lie:

Whatever tends to enlarge the range of observation, to add to the store of facts, to awaken the reason, and to lead the imagination into agreeable and innocent trains of thought, may assist in the establishment of a sincere and ardent desire for information; and in this point of view our little Miscellany may prepare the way for the reception of more elaborate and precise knowledge, and be as the small optic-glass called “the finder,” which is placed by the side of a large telescope, to enable the observer to discover the star which is afterwards to be carefully examined by the more perfect instrument.74

“The finder” would only help readers find the objects of study. But the Penny can also be

seen as a finder of readers, creating a mass market for knowledge and fashioning subjects

to properly receive it, by cultivating the proper disposition for its reception. The Penny

73 Ibid., emphasis in original.74 PM 1,1.

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would then direct a segment of its readers to other publications, especially its own

Library of Useful Knowledge.

As another article in the same number suggested, however, very few readers could

hope to become distinguished discoverers of knowledge in their own right. As the latest

entrant into the new knowledge industry, the Penny was quick to establish its position on

the diffusion of knowledge among the people. In “Excellence Not Limited by Station,”

the Penny warned of the dangers attendant upon such “self-deception” as the “habit of

considering our stations in life so ill-suited to our powers.” The artisan or mechanic

should not expect his attainments to remove him from his current station, nor should they

make him dissatisfied with it. Middle and upper class readers need not worry about such

consequences either:

As society is constituted, there cannot be many employments which demand very brilliant talents, or great delicacy of taste, for their proper discharge. The great bulk of society is composed of plain, plodding men, who move “right onwards” to the sober duties of their calling… England, happily for us, is full of bright examples of the great men raised from the meanest situations; and the education which England is now beginning to bestow upon her children will multiply these examples. But a partial and incomplete diffusion of knowledge will also multiply the victims of that evil principle which postpones the discharge of present and immediate duties, for the anticipations of some destiny above the labours of a handicraftsman, or the calculations of a shopkeeper.75

Unlike the early volumes of the Mechanic’s Magazine, the Penny intended to draw a

distinction between claims for knowledge as a means of self-improvement for its own

sake, which it promoted throughout, and knowledge as a sure means to improve one’s lot

and by extension, the lot of the working classes in general. From the outset, the new

magazine sought to reassure the wary and warn the overly ambitious that the acquisition

75 PM 1, 5.

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of knowledge, properly understood, should not turn the social order upside-down, as

some had feared and others had hoped.76 The partial and incomplete diffusion of

knowledge was indeed dangerous if such diffusion was considered as a guarantee to

change the social status of the average worker. While some knowledge seekers would

attain greatness, those who became derelict in their duties as a result of a few attainments

were not among them:

Of the highly-gifted men whose abandonment of their humble calling has been the apparent beginning of a distinguished career, we do not recollect an instance of one who did not pursue that humble calling with credit and success until the occasion presented itself for exhibiting those superior powers which nature occasionally bestows. Benjamin Franklin was as valuable to his master as a printer’s apprentice, as he was to his country as a statesman and a negotiator, or to the world as a philosopher. Had he not been so, indeed, it may be doubted whether he ever would have taken his rank among the first statesmen and philosophers of his time. One of the great secrets of advancing in life is to be ready to take advantage of those opportunities which, if a man really possesses superior abilities, are sure to present themselves some time or other.

Thus, the hope for the “distinguished career” is held out as a possibility, but the

abandonment of one’s “humble calling” is the one sure way to miss the “opportunities”

that may present themselves to the truly superior adherent. According to this formulation,

the only way of knowing whether or not one might rise above one’s current station was to

remain at work, to improve oneself, and to wait and watch patiently for opportunities to

advance. Thus, a model for the diffusion of knowledge was proposed—one that claimed

to shore up the status quo, while at the same time, expanding the market for knowledge.

76 Washington argues that The Penny Magazine was, following James Mill’s essay “Education,” primarily directed at the middle classes. See Washington, esp. 124. If this was the case, then the rhetoric in such articles as this must be interpreted both in terms of the palliating effects they must have had on its middle-class readers, as well as in consideration of its more plebeian readers. For an example of such plebeian readers, I point to George Holyoake, who in his autobiography, Sixty Years of an Agitator’s Life (1892), acknowledged reading The Penny and giving it away as a payment for room and board to his artisan-class lodgers. See page 70. The Penny furthermore claimed that the publication was meant for “the poor, or the labouring body in England—that class of society to whose wants and improvement our humble labours are mainly directed” (PM 1, 170).

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“Useful knowledge,” as I have suggested, was a contested category, with different

meanings imputed to it by various interlocutors. The Penny expanded the strict utilitarian

sense of the phrase, placing itself “in direct opposition to those who believed that

education was only useful in proportion to the amount of money it brought the learner.”77

In this, the magazine appeared to agree with the artisan lecturer Rowland Detrosier, for

example, for whom happiness and not productivity was the primary object of plebeian

education, rather than with the early Mechanic’s Magazine, which promoted knowledge

as a source of political and economic power. But the Penny’s idea of happiness and

Detrosier’s idea of happiness were quite different. For the Penny happiness was not, as

for Detrosier, the product of a holistic change in social conditions as the result of

collective moral and political knowledge, but rather the result of prudence on the part of

individuals faced with existing conditions. Further, if “knowledge is power,” for the

Penny it was only in the most individualistic sense—as a means for the “prudent” to

choose wisely. As I argue elsewhere, this appropriation of useful knowledge would force

those who sought social change from the useful knowledge movement to seek other

venues for the dissemination of knowledge amongst plebeian readers. These

propagandists would find smaller readerships amongst the “aristocrats” of working-class

education. In the meanwhile, the issues at stake revolved around questions of knowledge

—what knowledge was to be disseminated, who controlled its dissemination, who

authorized and gained authority by it? What was the role of readers—were they active

participants, or passive recipients? As we shall see in the following section, from the late

1820s, the new knowledge movement attracted the attention of gentlemanly publishers,

who also attempted to appropriate it for their own ends.

77 Washington, 180.

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The Quarterly Review and Charles Lyell: A Scientific Turn

Charles Lyell’s career as author did not begin with his notorious Principles of Geology,

but in the Quarterly Review, where he published articles on science and education

beginning in 1825.78 In Lyell’s first article for the periodical, the Quarterly continued in

its usual response to the educational reform questions of the day, and its ideological

opponent, Henry Brougham, at the Edinburgh.79 Brougham and the Edinburgh had

campaigned heavily for a new, London University, ruthlessly attacking the exclusive,

classical education at Oxford and Cambridge.80 In response, the Quarterly had

commissioned Lyell to defend the English universities, and by implication his own

Oxford education, which he did, calling only for gradual modifications in light of the

campaign for London. But in the process, he began his research for what would become a

criticism of the university and educational system in England. In terms of class, Lyell’s

educational politics were relatively conservative and remained so; true education

remained the sole property of the wealthy. But in light of his own circumstances as a

fledgling graduate trying to eek out a living as a lawyer, he began to consider university

reform, and also, the newly emergent scientific and literary institutions cropping up

across the country.

His first reformist contribution was an article published in the Quarterly Review,

entitled “Scientific Institutions.” Here, Lyell heralded a scientific revolution.81 In this 78 [Charles Lyell], “London University,” Quarterly Review 33 (1825-6): 257-75; [Charles Lyell], “Scientific Institutions,” Quarterly Review 34 (1826): 153-79; [Charles Lyell], “State of the Universities, Quarterly Review 36 (1827): 216-268.79 [Charles Lyell], “The London University,” Quarterly Review 33 (1825-6): 257-75, at 259.80 [Henry Brougham], “New University in London,” The Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal 42 (1825): 346-67, esp. at 354-5; idem., “The London University,” The Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal 43 (1825-6): 315-41.81 While historians of science have generally seen the 19th development of science as a second scientific revolution, the first occurring in the 17th century, recent commentators suggest that it was in fact the first scientific revolution. See Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine, eds., “Introduction: The age of

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early notice of a scientific revolution in Europe, Lyell connected the growth,

specialization, and professionalism of natural knowledge to the status of empire.82

England’s colonial possessions, being “more diversified in climate and local character

than those of any other,” should, Lyell argued, greatly advantage her for acquiring

collections of “proportional extent and magnificence,” especially as “England is not only

the most affluent of modern nations, but the grand centre of commercial activity and

communication between the most distant portions of the globe.” Yet relative to imperial

status, England’s natural collections, especially at the British Museum and library, were

“wholly unworthy of the present age.” Given the greatness of her empire, “we may ask

why her museums do not display a proportional extent and magnificence.” The answer

was “not difficult.” The fault lay with the “opinion of the enlightened and educated

classes [who exercised] a predominant sway” over the “whole resources of the state.”

They had not developed a “general taste for promoting physical science,”83 and for this

reason, the scientific collections (and science itself) in England lagged behind that of

inferior nations. Lyell chided the elites for their neglect of science, and called upon them

to reassess their commitments.

reflexion,” in Romanticism and the Sciences (1990): 1-9; and David Knight, Humphry Davy: Science & Power (1992): xii.82 William Whewell later made the same connection: William Whewell, Astronomy and General Physics Considered With Reference to Natural Theology, Third Bridgewater Treatise (1833). Whewell connected commerce and colonialism to the growth of knowledge. The stimulus to trade and colonialism was the variety of vegetables and animals that God had placed in the various regions of the earth. In fact, God had placed them as such in order to encourage such trade and colonialism: “The intercourse of nations in the way of discovery, colonization, commerce; the study of the natural history, manners, institutions of foreign countries; lead to most numerous and important results. Without dwelling upon this subject, it will probably be allowed that such intercourse has a great influence upon the comforts, the prosperity, the arts, the literature, the power, of the nations which thus communicate. Now the variety of the productions of different lands supplies both the stimulus to this intercourse, and the instruments by which it produces its effects. The desire to possess the objects or the knowledge which foreign countries alone can supply, urges the trader, the traveler, the discoverer to compass land and sea; and the advantages of civilization consists almost entirely in the cultivation, the use, the improvement of that which has been received from other countries” (62-3). 83 Ibid., 155, emphasis added.

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Lyell expressed “great satisfaction” that the National Gallery of Pictures “is not to find

a place…at the British Museum.” The collections of the fine arts and the sciences should

be housed in separate museums and libraries, so that they are not forced to compete for

space and patrons, or suffer the misappropriation of funds. Given the closer connection of

the arts to the human passions, patrons tend to overemphasize the arts. But the natural

sciences required their own province and protection, if their full development was to be

adequately encouraged.84

The article was ostensibly a review of the transactions of the new scientific societies

in Cambridge, Cornwall, Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol and Yorkshire. But Lyell used

the occasion to deliver his own assessment of the state of science in 1826 England, and to

offer his views for the reform of its knowledge enterprises. After the founding of the

Royal Society in 1663, nearly a century lapsed before “a national museum of Natural

History [the British Museum] was founded in our metropolis” in 1759.85 “From the

institution of the Royal Society in 1663, to the year 1788…no subdivision of scientific

labour was attempted in our metropolis,” until the founding of the Linnaean Society,

which undertook the “prosecution of the studies of zoology and botany in all their

details.”86 But soon after the founding of the Royal Institution in 1799, Lyell reported,

numerous societies devoted to one or another division of natural philosophy had sprung

into existence. The first decades of the century were marked by a veritable explosion in

scientific activity and its specialized, metropolitan institutions: the College of Surgeons in

1800, the Horticultural Society in 1804, the London Institute for the Advancement of

Literature and the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in 1805, the Geological Society in

84 Ibid., 155-6.85 Ibid., 155.86 Ibid., 159.

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1807, and the Astronomical Society in 1821.87 Despite such a burgeoning of scientific

institutions in England, the educated elite remained seemingly indifferent to the sciences,

and instead continued to focus on literature and the fine arts. Lyell paraded this list to

underscore the lack of appropriate interest and support from the educated elite. Lyell

provided no figures to support his claim that the fine arts and literature yielded greater

patronage than did the sciences, but he made clear his sense of the situation. Yet, given

such a revolution in science and the benefits derived from it, who could afford to remain

indifferent? What institutions could remain unchanged? Why was science still lacking in

patronage as compared to the fine arts and literature? The educated elite and the elite

institutions remained complacent at their own peril. Lyell wanted to provoke them to

reform.

But Lyell was careful to compensate for such risky remarks, by noting the “rise and

progress of similar institutions in the provinces,” which for him were perhaps more

important than the metropolitan. Such a complimentary reference to the provinces served

in part as flattery of the rural readers, and a swipe at the Edinburgh, with its recent

campaigning for a London University based largely on supposed metropolitan

superiority.88 The new provincial societies included those in Manchester (f. 1781),

Cornwall (f. 1814), Liverpool (f. 1814), Cambridge (f. 1819), Bristol, (f. 1820),

Yorkshire (f. 1822), as well as “many other institutions in our provinces, such as those of

Newcastle, Bath, Leeds, and Exeter.”89 Thousands thereby gained exposure to the natural

sciences; but more importantly for Lyell, “a new class of lecturers” had been born whose

employments in the branches of natural knowledge had allowed them “to enlarge and 87 Ibid., 162-3.88 [Henry Brougham], “New University in London,” The Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal 42 (1825): 346-67, esp. at 354-5.89 Ibid., 163-71.

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perfect their own knowledge.” Lyell saw the possibilities for a “certain class of the

community, to direct their minds and devote their lives professionally to these studies.”

The provincial societies offered new theatres for “native talent,” and perhaps did more for

knowledge production than their metropolitan counterparts.90 Eventually, the rank of such

societies would secure their place as objects of ambition even for men from the nobler

classes.

By 1826, therefore, Lyell had already begun to delineate a model for the division of

natural knowledge from cultural (and religious) enterprises, arguing that such a division

was a prerequisite for the development of natural knowledge. Further, he outlined a

system of professionals located throughout the land, lecturing to an enlarging public, and

contributing original research to their fields of knowledge. This professional lecturer and

researcher in natural sciences would be differentiated from the older model for natural

philosopher. No longer an amateur, he would pursue scientific matters exclusively. Such

a situation in science would benefit men like Lyell, who, although aristocratic,

nevertheless struggled to earn an independent living. One would pursue natural science in

an institutional setting in which both the production and exchange of knowledge would

be accelerated. Additionally, the new breed of naturalist could effectively eschew

religious affiliation, and eventually even the necessary conciliation between natural and

revealed truth, as represented in the usual framework of natural philosophy, Natural

Theology. Lyell’s criticism and recommendations are prescient in terms of the history of

“science and culture” and “science and religion”—and the eventual division of these

spheres by the last quarter of the century.

90 Ibid., 172, emphasis mine.

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Lyell’s correspondence shows that he was amused at having gotten a reformist article

published in the Tory Review. “I must not sport radical,” he joked in a letter to his friend,

Gideon Mandell, “as I am become a Quarterly Reviewer. You will see my article just out

on ‘Scientific Institutions,’ by which some of my friends here think I have carried the

strong works of the enemy by storm.”91 Lyell was being playful and triumphant, as he had

already ‘sported radical,’ within the Quarterly Review itself, into which he had carried

“the strong works of the enemy,” referring undoubtedly to the kinds of educational and

institutional reforms being proposed at the Edinburgh Review by the utilitarian and Whig,

Henry Brougham. Lyell’s gentlemanly status,92 coupled with his skilled rhetorical

maneuverings, had permitted him to smuggle a reformist article into a bastion of

periodical conservatism. Likewise, it might have looked as if the Quarterly had finally

conceded to, or in fact was proposing, some relatively ‘radical’ change.

He immediately set to work on his next project, an article about the Royal inquiry of

Scottish universities. The article “State of the Universities” represented another important

first for the Quarterly, amplifying Lyell’s earlier revision of scientific educational

institutions, and extending it to the ancient university structure. Ostensibly, the article

was a review of the publications relating to a Royal Commission established to

investigate the Scottish universities. Lyell used the occasion to undertake an historical

and geographical survey of university education, and to evaluate English and Irish

universities in particular. Not only did the Scottish universities resemble each other on

basic assumptions, they also resembled the French, German, and Italian. Further, it was in

91 Letter to G. Mantell, June 22, 1826, L&L, I (1881): 164-5.92 James A. Secord, Introduction, Principles of Geology (1997): xiii.

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the very points of agreement that they all differed from the English and the Irish. As

such, the English system exhibited peculiarities not seen in any of the others:

There are three striking peculiarities in the system of education in England and Ireland without parallel in any of the other nations of modern Europe: First, the length of preliminary education, and the limited extent of the subjects it embraces: Secondly, the virtual exclusion of a regular course of study in the faculties of theology, law and medicine: Thirdly, the very incomplete subdivision of sciences among those on whom the whole burden of teaching is cast.93

These three points of difference were the objects of Lyell’s criticism. Lyell objected to

the length of preliminary education, its limitations, and finally, the lack of the

specialization in the departments of natural knowledge. Finding the English and Irish

universities deficient in comparison with other systems and indeed, in terms of their own

history, he argued for the introduction of professional studies, and in particular, the

increase in scientific studies, as well as their inclusion in the examinations. The upshot

was the recommendation for new professors in the various departments of knowledge,

especially in natural knowledge, thus enlarging the new natural knowledge class that

Lyell envisioned.

As might be expected, what Lyell lamented most about the English system was the

absence of studies in the natural sciences. While the taste for natural sciences is weak in

most students, others have “an irresistible, and as it were, instinctive propensity to

cultivate such studies, and if no elementary knowledge be communicated in a scientific

form, they will, nevertheless, follow the bent of their inclination; and what might, under a

proper direction, have led to the improvement and exercise of the mental faculties, must

often degenerate into a frivolous amusement.”94 Such “frivolous amusement” referred to

93 [Charles Lyell], “State of the Universities,” the Quarterly Review 36 (1827): 216-68, at 218.94 Ibid.

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the amateur status of the naturalist in England and implied the need for a dedicated class

of science practitioners who might be remunerated for their pursuits.

Lyell’s Quarterly articles of 1826-7, taken together, outlined a model for the reform

and modernization of knowledge enterprises within English educational and scientific

institutions. First, Lyell called for the division of the spheres -- of the sciences from other

cultural enterprises, i.e., the fine arts and literature. The division of natural and cultural

knowledge enterprises had to do partly with the requirement that institutions keep pace

with the growth of knowledge, but the separation of the spheres was also necessary in

order to steer patronage to the sciences. Secondly, he called for a new professionalism in

the sciences – a new class of lecturers, stationed both within the new provincial

institutions and at “Oxbridge.” Third, he called for increased specialization in the

branches of natural knowledge. Specialization was required by the growth of knowledge,

but it also yielded more professional positions within the emerging and older institutions.

Given the Quarterly’s former conservative resistance to almost all education reform, the

model represented a significantly altered view of education for the publication and its

readers.

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Michael D Rectenwaldmdr2/classes/76-334/Roots of the Div… · Web viewEnglish Department. Carnegie Mellon University. 5000 Forbes Avenue. Pittsburgh, PA 15213. [email protected]