The Strange Late Birth of the British Academy

The British Academy was founded in 1902. In November 1899, the Council of the Royal Society sent a letter to prominent scholars suggesting the formation of some body to represent Britain in disciplines other than the natural sciences. A meeting of the scholars gave its support for a suggestion that the Royal Society might give room to literary and human sciences in a special section, or support the foundation of a separate body. For over a year, the Royal Society deliberated, but concluded in June of 1901 that it could neither include the literary sciences within it, nor initiate the establishing of a British academy. It was thus the scientists who provided both stimulus and constraint for the mobilisation of human knowledge in the British Academy and to welcome all branches of intellectual enterprise within one temple.

Intimacy, Imagination and the Inner Dialectics of Knowledge Communities: The Synthetic Society, 1896–1908

Knowledge communities are formed at the interstices of university and metropolitan life. They help produce some of the intangible features of social capital and are also considered as engines of change. This chapter examines the knowledge community — the Synthetic Society — in more detail. It discusses the Rules of the Synthetic Society, which consider existing Agnostic tendencies and contribute toward a working philosophy of religious belief. Their objective was to expose various views and to seek in them not only mutual understanding but to identify which of those concepts they held in common.

‘Old Studies and New’: The Organisation of Knowledge in University Curriculum

This chapter focuses on the organisation of knowledge within the university and the transfer of power over curriculum. Universities make the ultimate decisions on how knowledge should be organised, and what status should be attached to different knowledge areas. The success of the universities and of scholars in transmitting knowledge was due to two factors: the inherited authority that the curriculum gave within and without the universities and the growing organisation of university curriculum that developed and extended over the century.

Chapter Eight The Evolution and Dissemination of Historical Knowledge

This chapter discusses the nature and development of historical knowledge and understanding in Victorian Britain. It describes the pervasive tendencies within the period as a whole with respect to what needed to be taught and learned. Historians preserved an eighteenth-century tradition throughout the 1820s — the parliamentary history and Catholic vision of English history from the Romans to the Glorious Revolution. Narratives concentrated on the Norman conquest, Magna Carta, the reign of Henry VII, the seventeenth-century constitution, the English Civil War and the apotheosis of whiggery in the eighteenth century. Later versions faltered in face of the need to demonstrate deeper knowledge of events and a denser narrative texture. Thereafter, histories of England, written in the grand manner and across many centuries, petered out until after the turn of the century, and prompted treatments of more modern periods.

Political Economy and the Science of Economics in Victorian Britain

This chapter looks at the historical understanding of political economy. It also describes the transformation of political economy as a general understanding of wealth and its distribution to a new science of economics. This transition can be linked to the expanding system of public education during the later end of the nineteenth century and the reorganisation of university life around teaching and research in modern subjects. The movement for wider access to higher education was associated with the formation of new university subjects in the humanities. Among these modern subjects, commerce and economics were prominent as new disciplines of study relevant to the modern world.

Victorian Classics: Sustaining the Study of the Ancient World

This chapter provides an overview of the history of Victorian classical studies. The teaching and knowledge of the Classics in Britain had expanded throughout the Victorian era as the number of educational institutions grew and as the numbers of people with the aspiration for social mobility through education had similarly expanded. More people wanted some kind of knowledge of the classical languages and the classical world because they provided avenues for advancement in secondary schools, the universities, the church, the military, the professions and the civil service. The chapter also describes the major role played by George Grote in British and European classical study. Grote forged a progressive intellectual identity for the study of ancient languages, literature, philosophy and history. He introduced dynamic modern ideas into classical scholarship and sustained the Classics as a force of modern instruction.

Victorian Social Science: From Singular to Plural*

This chapter provides an overview of the history of social science in Britain and the ways in which it was institutionalised in the nineteenth century. Nineteenth-century social science was the product of three great changes, intellectual, material and spiritual. The European Enlightenment stimulated the development of and institutionalisation of the natural sciences, creating a new model for the study of human societies. The material changes include the expansion of population, growth of industries and manufacturing and development of mass culture and democracy. Rationalism and industrialisation caused the third change, the decline of conventional Christian belief and worship. The chapter also analyses the ‘statistical movement’, a dominant genre of social science up to 1860, and social evolution, which provided the leading paradigm for sociological thinking from the mid-century onwards.

Classifying Sciences: Systematics and Status in mid-Victorian Natural History

This chapter discusses mid-Victorian natural history sciences, focusing on the disputes over the classification within both the zoological and botanical communities. Zoologists argued over the merits of William Macleay’s quinary system, claiming that all organisms could be classified in groups of five. Botanists attacking the Linnaean or sexual system were divided over what should replace it; the most widely used of its rivals was known as the natural system. Several metropolitan naturalists felt the need to bring stability by settling these arguments. Hugh Strickland was the most prominent zoological stabiliser, an opponent of quinarianism and other forms of classificatory radicalism. Strickland established the world’s first formal rules of zoological nomenclature and attempted to use the authority of the British Association to impose them on naturalists.

Introduction

This book places the establishment of the British Academy in the context of the Victorian organisation of knowledge. In this introductory chapter, the nature of academic, official, and legitimate knowledge in the Victorian period is discussed. It also considers the epistemological sites of Victorian Britain and how they were ordered. These sites included social networks, clubs, or societies such as provincial literary and philosophical societies and archaeological societies, national bodies such as the Royal Geographical Society, and the most exclusive, closed bodies of the elect, such as the Royal Society and the British Academy. These bodies have their own distinctive structures of power and authority. The Royal Society and British Academy for example, were designed to stabilise knowledge and the status of those claiming knowledge.

Civic Cultures and Civic Colleges in Victorian England*

This chapter discusses the role played by civic colleges in the emergence of autonomous professional groups associated with new disciplines between 1860 and the Great War. It also discusses the role of local learned societies, particularly literary and philosophical societies in the founding and support of the young colleges and their impact on college growth and curricula.