John Leigh, Lydia Becker and their shared botanical interests

2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-76
Author(s):  
Janis Antonovics ◽  
Mary Gibby ◽  
Michael E. Hood
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Medical Officer ◽  
British Association ◽  
Women's Suffrage ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Suffrage Movement ◽  
Scientific Papers ◽  
Institutional Norms ◽  
The Relationship

This article examines the relationship between John Leigh (1812–1888) and Lydia Becker (1827–1890). Leigh was a prominent figure in the scientific circles of Manchester in the mid-nineteenth century and the city's Medical Officer for Health. Becker was a botanist and Leigh's second cousin. She corresponded with Charles Darwin and became a pioneer in the women's suffrage movement. Previous studies have argued that Leigh patronized and discouraged Becker's botanical interests. However, newly-discovered correspondence shows that Leigh respected her abilities and encouraged her development as a botanist, including attendance at the British Association for the Advancement of Science meetings where she presented one of the first scientific papers by a female botanist in Britain. While social and institutional norms in the Victorian era discouraged women from entering science, these norms could be transgressed in interactions involving specific individuals.

The line of reason: Hugh Blair, spatiality and the progressive structure of language

2011 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew D. Eddy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Graphic Representation ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Hugh Blair ◽  
Early Humans ◽  
Power Of Language ◽  
The Relationship

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, words were seen as artefacts that afforded insights into the mental capacities of the early humans. In this article I address the late Enlightenment foundations of this model by focusing on Professor Hugh Blair, a leading voice on the relationship between language, progressivism and culture. Whereas the writings of grammarians and educators such as Blair have received little attention in histories of nascent palaeoarchaeology and palaeoanthropology, I show that he addressed a number of conceptual themes that were of central relevance to the ‘primitive’, ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ typology that guided the construction of ‘prehistoric minds’ during the early decades of the Victorian era. Although I address the referential power of language to a certain extent, my main point is that the rectilinear spatiality afforded by Western forms of graphic representation created an implicitly progressivist framework of disordered, ordered and reordered minds.

scholarly journals Fantasia e ciência na Amazônia: O mundo perdido, de Arthur Conan Doyle

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberto José Da Silva
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Amazon Basin ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Scientific Research ◽  
Fantasy Literature ◽  
Scientific Theories ◽  
New Novel ◽  
Arthur Conan Doyle ◽  
The Relationship

FANTASIA E CIÊNCIA NA AMAZÔNIA: O MUNDO PERDIDO, DE ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE   Resumo Em 1912 Arthur Conan Doyle publicou O mundo perdido, ingressando na ficção científica, a partir das pesquisas científicas realizadas pelos naturalistas, biólogos e zoólogos europeus que estiveram na Amazônia no século XIX. Nessa nova produção introduziu o Professor Challenger que se tornou personagem ícone de uma série de romances de ficção científicas que viriam a ser publicados a partir dessa obra. Maple White foi o nome dado à terra encontrada num platô na bacia Amazônica, onde habitavam seres pré-históricos e Arthur Conan Doyle recorreu como pressuposto para expor e discutir teorias científicas vigentes naquele momento como, por exemplo, a origem das espécies, de Charles Darwin. Desse modo, o objetivo desse trabalho é fazer um exame de O mundo Perdido à luz das descobertas científicas daquele momento, assim como estudar as relações entre ciência e ficção, tendo a Amazônia com cenário desse romance. Palavras-chave: Arthur Conan Doyle; ficção científica; Amazônia; literatura fantástica.         FANTAZY AND SCIENCE IN THE AMAZON: THE LOST WORLD, BY ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE Keywords In 1912 Arthur Conan Doyle published The Lost World, joining in the science fiction, from the scientific research conducted by Europeans naturalists, biologists and zoologists who went to Amazon in the nineteenth century. In this new novel Arthur Conan Doyle introduced Professor Challenger who became icon character of a series of scientific fiction novels that will be published from this work. Maple White was the name given to the land found on a plateau in the Amazon basin, where lived prehistoric beings and Arthur Conan Doyle appealed for granted to expose and discuss current scientific theories at that time, for example, the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. Thus, the aim of this study is to make an examination of The Lost World under the light of scientific findings that moment, and to study the relationship between science and fiction, been Amazon as scenary of this novel. Keywords: Arthur Conan Doyle; science fiction; Amazon; fantasy literature.            

“DEEPLY INDEBTED TO THE TEA-PLANT”: REPRESENTATIONS OF ENGLISH NATIONAL IDENTITY IN VICTORIAN HISTORIES OF TEA

2008 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 531-547 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie E. Fromer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Tea Plant ◽  
Personal Account ◽  
British India ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
English National Identity ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship

These words were penned by a professor of the Royal Medico-Botanical Society in the late 1830s to commemorate the “recent discovery in British India of the Tea Plant” (vii). Yet although written near the beginning of the Victorian era, their sentiment – that tea was both an element of national self-definition and a stimulator of the individual prosperity and wellbeing on which that polity was based – nonetheless epitomizes the broader sweep of the nineteenth century's engagement with that article of consumption. How tea came to occupy this role, and why, is the subject of this essay, which focuses on the book-length tea history – a slightly peculiar genre that blurs the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, advertisement and travelogue, personal account and scientific treatise. These histories appeared throughout the nineteenth century and often were explicitly funded by various segments of the tea industry (thus resembling the nineteenth-century equivalent of an infomercial). Because of their direct relationship to commercial and trading concerns, their role in recording and shaping the taste for the beverage, and their dissemination across a fairly broad public, tea histories offer an important, intertextual index of the Victorians' relationship to the beverage, as well as the way in which the relationship between home and Empire was constituted and changed over the course of the century.

Preaching at the British Association for the Advancement of Science: sermons, secularization and the rhetoric of conflict in the 1870s

2011 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
CIARAN TOAL
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
British Association ◽  
Complex Dynamic ◽  
Association Meeting ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

AbstractMuch attention has been given to the science–religion controversies attached to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, from the infamous 1860 Huxley–Wilberforce debate at Oxford to John Tyndall's 1874 ‘Belfast Address’. Despite this, almost no attention has been given to the vast homiletic literature preached during the British Association meetings throughout the nineteenth century. During an association meeting the surrounding churches and halls were packed with men of science, as local and visiting preachers sermonized on the relationship between science and religion. These sermons are revealing, particularly in the 1870s when the ‘conflict thesis’ gained momentum. In this context, this paper analyses the rhetoric of conflict in the sermons preached during the meetings of the association, exploring how science–religion conflict was framed and understood through time. Moreover, it is argued that attention to the geography of the Sunday activities of the British Association provides insight into the complex dynamic of nineteenth-century secularization.

TENDING TO OLD STORIES:DANIEL DERONDAAND HYSTERIA, REVISITED

2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 443-465
Author(s):  
Doreen Thierauf
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
Reciprocal Relationship ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Daniel Deronda ◽  
Herbert Spencer ◽  
New Novel ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
The Relationship

The appearance of the word‘dynamic’ on the first page of George Eliot's novel,Daniel Deronda(1876), to describe Gwendolen's unsettled/unsettling glance famously elicited critique from her publisher John Blackwood as well as from an anonymous reviewer at theExaminer, both of whom challenged Eliot's use of scientific jargon that had not yet entered her audience's everyday vocabulary. In line with this often-cited vignette, critics usually understand Eliot to respond thoughtfully and prophetically to late-nineteenth-century scientific trends. In the words of theExaminerreviewer, Eliot's “culture is scientific” (“New Novel” 125), probably more so than any other Victorian novelist's. Studies investigating the reciprocal relationship between Eliot's fiction, particularlyMiddlemarchandDaniel Deronda, and nineteenth-century scientific writing suggest her familiarity with notable works by Henry Lewes, Alexander Bain, William Carpenter, Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, James Sully, and others. Scholarship of the past three decades has largely focused on Eliot's application of Victorian theories regarding epistemology, evolution, and the relationship between mind and body. However, scholars have not yet fully examined Eliot's utilization of mid-nineteenth-century medical knowledge concerning the female body's proneness to hysteria, a connection that emerges prominently in her final novel.

scholarly journals FEMINIST POLITICAL THOUGHT AND ACTIVISM IN REVOLUTIONARY IRELAND, c. 1880–1918

2017 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 193-209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Senia Pašeta
Keyword(s):  
Political Life ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
Women's Suffrage ◽  
Home Rule ◽  
Irish Nationalism ◽  
The Third ◽  
Suffrage Movement ◽  
Cultural Terms ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Women’S Suffrage

ABSTRACTFeminist thought and activism was a feature of Irish political life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Because the women's suffrage campaign coincided with and was at times influenced by wider debates on the national question, it has often been understood almost entirely in relation to Irish nationalism and unionism, and usually in the specific context of acute political crisis such as the third Home Rule. The Irish suffrage movement should instead be understood both in terms of wider political developments and in particular Irish contexts. This paper surveys aspects of feminist political culture with a particular emphasis on the way that nationalist Irish women articulated and negotiated their involvement in the women's suffrage movement. It argues that the relationship between the two was both more nuanced and dynamic than has been allowed, and that opposition to women's activism should be understood in structural and cultural terms as well as in broadly political ones. The relationship should also be understood in longer historical terms than is usual as it also evolved in the context of broader political and social shifts and campaigns, some of which predated the third Home Rule crisis.

The Huxley-Wilberforce Debate: A Reconsideration

1981 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 325-340
Author(s):  
Sheridan Gilley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
British Association ◽  
Television Series ◽  
Origin Of Species ◽  
Television Screen ◽  
Stark Contrast

Viewers of the recent television series ‘The Voyage of Charles Darwin’ must have been amused at the portrayal of Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford, at the famous meeting of the British Association at Oxford in 1860, at which Wilberforce condemned the evolutionary doctrine of Darwin’s Origin of Species. This Wilberforce is the vaudeville villain of the Victorian stage, saturnine and leering in his initial triumph, and with more than the suggestion of horns and tail, as he stalks off scowling darkly after his discomfiture by T. H. Huxley. In the vulgar mythology of the television screen, Huxley and Wilberforce are not so much personalities as the warring embodiments of rival moralities, Huxley, the archangel Michael of enlightenment, knowledge, and the disinterested pursuit of truth; Wilberforce, the dark defender of the failing forces of authority, bigotry and superstition. The picture has the stark contrast and attractive simplicity of traditional legend. As a debate, it dramatizes a great conflict of principle. With its Victorian setting, only the stock conventions of melodrama can do it justice, and so it lives on in the popular mind as the best known symbol of the nineteenth century conflict of science and religion.

Disease and Civilization: A Scottish Atlantic Network of Physicians in the Enlightenment

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-216
Author(s):  
Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
Practice Of Medicine ◽  
Benjamin Rush ◽  
American Physician ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
A Current

Through an examination of the extensive papers, manuscripts and correspondence of American physician Benjamin Rush and his friends, this article argues that it is possible to map a network of Scottish-trained physicians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These physicians, whose members included Benjamin Rush, John Redman, John Morgan, Adam Kuhn, and others, not only brought the Edinburgh model for medical pedagogy across the Atlantic, but also disseminated Scottish stadial theories of development, which they applied to their study of the natural history and medical practices of Native Americans and slaves. In doing so, these physicians developed theories about the relationship between civilization, historical progress and the practice of medicine. Exploring this network deepens our understanding of the transnational intellectual geography of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century British World. This article develops, in relation to Scotland, a current strand of scholarship that maps the colonial and global contexts of Enlightenment thought.

Siren canora: the mermaid and the mythical in late nineteenth-century science

2008 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. BRINK-ROBY
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Focus Of Attention ◽  
British Association ◽  
Social Boundaries ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Darwinian Theory ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Century Science

This paper argues that, for a number of naturalists and lay commentators in the second half of the nineteenth century, evolutionary – especially Darwinian – theory gave new authority to mythical creatures. These writers drew on specific elements of evolutionary theory to assert the existence of mermaids, dragons and other fabulous beasts. But mythological creatures also performed a second, often contrapositive, argumentative function; commentators who rejected evolution regularly did so by dismissing these creatures. Such critics agreed that Darwin's theory legitimized the mythological animal, but they employed this legitimization to undermine the theory itself. The mermaid, in particular, was a focus of attention in this mytho-evolutionary debate, which ranged from the pages of Punch to the lecture halls of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Crossing social boundaries and taking advantage of a range of venues, this debate arose in response to the indeterminate challenge of evolutionary theory. In its discussions of mermaids and dragons, centaurs and satyrs, this discourse helped define that challenge, construing and constructing the meanings and implications of evolutionary theory in the decades following Darwin's publication.

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