Victorian science and literature: Part 1, v.1: Negotiating boundaries; v.2: Victorian science as cultural authority; v.3: Science, religion and natural theology; v.4: The evolutionary epic

2012 ◽  
Vol 49 (07) ◽  
pp. 49-3839-49-3839
Keyword(s):  
Natural Theology ◽  
Cultural Authority ◽  
Science And Literature ◽  
Victorian Science

Victorian Science

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 518-549
Author(s):  
Jude V. Nixon
Keyword(s):  
General Public ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Queen Victoria ◽  
Botanical Knowledge ◽  
The Common ◽  
Victorian Science ◽  
Female Audience

Abstract Now virtually unknown, Anne Pratt (1806–1893) remains an important Victorian illustrator, naturalist, and popularizer of science, whose Wild Flowers (1852) made a strong impression on Queen Victoria. While Pratt’s works addressed a largely female audience, their generic appeal, reflecting her profound botanical knowledge and astute insights into flower study, had an ever broader reach into the general public. Pratt authored over twenty books, among them Chapters on the Common Things of the Sea-Side (1850), which saw four editions in ten years. Hopkins was given a second edition as a gift for his tenth birthday. Though he nowhere acknowledges Pratt but for an obscure reference in a letter to his mother, a precocious Hopkins would have found in Chapters the keen attention to nature he would later observe in Ruskin. Pratt’s study would have been an important precursor for Hopkins’s detailed observations of nature in his journals, diaries, and notebooks. Especially pronounced are their attempts to connect the beauty in nature to a benevolent Creator and a natural theology in which everything in nature, to use a Hopkins expression, “speaks and spells” Christ. In their theology of the aesthetics, the divine plays in “ten thousand places.”

From Design to Dissolution: Thomas Chalmers' Debt to John Robison

1979 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Crosbie Smith
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Present Note ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Physical Sciences ◽  
Theory Of Evolution ◽  
Major Transition ◽  
Victorian Science ◽  
Design In Nature

The claim that the nineteenth century was a period of major transition for the relation between theology and natural science has become a historical truism. With its implications for the design argument and the doctrines of divine providence, Darwin's theory of evolution has rightly attracted the attention of scholars of Victorian science. Yet so much emphasis not only on Darwin himself, but on the life sciences generally, has tended to obscure some important issues concerning the relation of theology to natural science in the first half of the nineteenth century. As John Brooke has argued recently, natural theology in this pre-Darwinian period was far from being an essentially static, autonomous, and monolithic set of presuppositions about the existence of design in nature, but was, for various reasons, in a fragmented and disordered state. The general aim of the present note is to suggest some further dimensions to historical debates about the nature of natural theology, and in particular to emphasize the need for an examination of the physical sciences as well as the life sciences in this period.

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