The period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, familiar to students of literature as the age of Romanticism, has been named by some historians of science "the second Scientific Revolution." The suggestion is of a transformation comparable in significance to the seventeenth-century movement in which Galileo, Descartes, and Newton played prominent roles. In the earlier period, the earth had been recognized as a planet orbiting the sun, and natural philosophy reshaped by applying experimental and mathematical methods. The later period saw the emergence of new scientific disciplines, including geology, biology, and physiology, and the reconfiguration of existing ones, especially physics and chemistry. Changes in disciplinary practices coincided with fundamental changes in scientific institutions. In Britain, the period also saw vigorous development of new means of popularization and new audiences; science attained a higher profile in the eyes of the general public than it had hitherto enjoyed. Scientific ideas circulated in general literate culture, communicated by public lectures in London and the provinces and periodicals and books addressed to middle-class readers. They even achieved a currency in working-class circles through the efforts of journalists, publishers, and educators. The "scientist"—to adopt the new term, first proposed by William Whewell at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1833—was a figure in the public eye.{1}

The fact that the public audience for science expanded significantly during this era undermines the notion that science and literature were already segregated into the "two cultures," famously lamented by C. P. Snow.{2} This chapter will not present a picture of the rise of an autonomous, specialist scientific worldview and the retrenchment of literary culture from engagement with scientific ideas. Rather, scientific and literary intellectuals will be shown to have shared a single cultural realm, exchanging concepts and metaphors and focusing jointly on certain issues of pressing concern. I shall propose that the agenda of learned discourse was substantially shaped by the political climate of the times, especially the almost continuous state of war between Great Britain and France, from 1793 until 1815, and the steady (and at times violent) pressure for an extension of political rights to the unenfranchised majority of the population. The campaign for wider political rights, resisted in part because of establishment fears that the upheavals of the French Revolution would jump the Channel, attained partial success with the passage of the first Reform Act in 1832. The whole period was characterized by a fundamental polarization of political opinion, dividing members of the different social classes, and setting reformers against conservatives within the literate middle class. The opening up of these profound political differences in the 1790s made for the "end of the Enlightenment" in Britain and the fragmentation of what seemed in retrospect like a fairly homogeneous public sphere of intellectual and social discourse.

In the first section of the chapter, I briefly survey the transformation of Enlightenment public science into the more extensive but more fragmented enterprise of the early nineteenth century. I then examine in turn four themes that featured centrally in scientific discourse of the period. These are, first, the appreciation of certain forces in the natural world as instances of the "sublime"; second, the growing sense of a very lengthy past in the history of the earth and other planets; third, the new awareness of the processes of life in their chemical, electrical, and physiological dimensions; and, fourth, the emergence of the figure of the scientific hero as a mediator between specialists and the wider public. Each of these themes was prominent in the scientific writings circulating within society at large. In each case, also, political issues reflecting the serious social tensions of the period were just beneath the surface of scientific discourse, influencing the form it took in middle-class and working-class communities.

By the 1830s, after decades in which the intellectual legacy of the Enlightenment had been fiercely contested, the public dimension of scientific activity had changed significantly from the situation prevailing in the eighteenth century. Small, self-organized societies devoted to learning and improvement had been a commonplace phenomenon throughout enlightened Europe; the reactionary scare of the 1790s placed many of those in Britain under unprecedented strain. In 1795, Prime Minister William Pitt introduced the first of a series of parliamentary measures against "seditious meetings," requiring all groups for intellectual debate to be licensed and forbidding them to discuss religion or politics. A lurid exposé by W. H. Reid, published in 1800, claimed that London was a hotbed of "infidel societies," propounding subversive doctrines under the influence of the writings of Voltaire, Thomas Paine, William Godwin, and Joseph Priestley.{3} Wariness and suspicion undermined the ideals of enlightened public science, of which Priestley had been the best-known spokesman. Priestley had insisted that the diffusion of learning should advance popular enlightenment, extirpating "all error and prejudice" and putting an end to "all undue and usurped authority."{4} When he emigrated to America, following the ransacking of his house in Birmingham by a loyalist mob in 1791, the most vigorous defender of public science as a motor of progress and enlightenment was silenced.

From the crucible of the 1790s, new forms of public science emerged. New institutions extended the size of middle-class audiences. New publications—periodicals and books—served an expanding readership, which included significant numbers of women. In many settings, however, the enlightened aspiration for social progress through the diffusion of knowledge was censored or denounced. Humphry Davy, who stood at the apex of scientific lecturing in London in the 1800s, as professor of chemistry at the Royal Institution, emphasized in his lectures how science lent support to social and religious authority. In his inaugural lecture in January 1802, Davy renounced "delusive dreams concerning the infinite improveability of man" and reassured his elite audience that the natural philosopher would always "be averse to the turbulence and passion of hasty innovations, and will uniformly appear as the friend of tranquillity and order." He proffered a sanitized vision of social progress, in which advances in the sciences would be passed down "from the higher classes of the community … to the labouring classes," and recruited natural theology to reinforce the language of stability and order.{5}

Elsewhere, however, the traditions of enlightened scientific communication and education lived on, encouraging the emergence of new publications and forms of instruction. William Nicholson, a writer and teacher of chemistry, brought out his Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry and the Arts in 1797. Nicholson’s Journal presented an accessible mix of original research reports and news of lectures and meetings of scientific societies. It established the model for a scientific periodical accessible to a broader readership than the somewhat intimidating Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. The following year, it was joined by the rival Philosophical Magazine, edited by the Scottish journalist and printer Alexander Tilloch. In 1813, another Scot, Thomas Thomson, published the Annals of Philosophy, which forced a merger between Nicholson’s and Tilloch’s publications in an increasingly crowded field. Further competitors and consolidations followed, but the seed planted by Nicholson had taken root. In the first three decades of the nineteenth century, a commitment to public education was still seen by many as integral to the advancement of science. These publications spoke to the proliferation of scientific and learned societies throughout the land, such as the Literary and Philosophical Societies established in many provincial cities. Scientific content was also increasingly to be found in general periodicals from the beginning of the century. The Edinburgh Review, from its first appearance in 1802, reflected the outlook of the Scottish universities, in which the sciences were treated as part of general letters and discussed in connection with political and moral issues. Geology, botany, chemistry, and exploration were all treated in the Edinburgh Review, which subjected scientific writings—as much as literary ones—to informed criticism. When the rival Quarterly Review appeared in 1809, countering the Edinburgh’s Whig orientation with a metropolitan Tory alignment, it was obliged also to provide scientific coverage. The two periodicals each claimed a circulation of 12,000 copies during the years 1812-14; they only began to lose their dominant position to new rivals in the middle-class market after the end of the Napoleonic wars.{6}

By the 1820s, the Scottish Whig Henry Brougham, a frequent contributor to the Edinburgh Review, was beginning to organize public education initiatives that extended beyond the middle-class readership of the literary journals. Brougham’s Practical Observations upon the Education of the People (1825) spoke on behalf of the growing movement to found mechanics’ institutes, where working people could be educated to help them improve their prospects in society. Within a few years, institutes were founded in Edinburgh, Newcastle, Carlisle, Derby, and many other cities, all of them featuring such sciences as chemistry prominently in their curricula. The movement was a highly controversial one, inevitably reawakening conservative fears of the social upheaval that popular education might produce. Brougham’s foundation of the Society for Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (in 1828) again raised these concerns among the elite. Brougham was a middle-class reformer who disavowed any aims of radical social change, but Tories feared his efforts would prepare the ground for the subversive propaganda of agitators like Richard Carlile, a publisher of atheistic and materialist tracts aimed at the working class. Participants in the mechanics’ institute movement provoked this reaction by criticizing the exclusive orientation of the scientific establishment toward a middle-class audience. For example, the short-lived periodical, The Chemist, published for just over a year between 1824 and 1825, did not hesitate to attack Davy as representative of "a sort of royal science." The journal was edited by Thomas Hodgskin, a writer and activist associated with popular education and the mechanics’ institutes. Davy was unrelentingly denounced in its pages for having "no appearance of labouring for the people" and indeed excluding them from his lectures. "Fortunately, however," The Chemist insisted, "the spirit of the age does not accord with the views of the dandy philosophers" like Davy. For those associated with this journal, the spirit of the Enlightenment lived on: science should be a democratic enterprise, available to all, as it had been in the age of Priestley, Benjamin Franklin, and other heroes.{7}

While the idea that scientific communication should serve the cause of general enlightenment still had its defenders, the chastening experience of the 1790s had made return to the era of Priestley and Franklin impossible. Public science was now deeply divided along social and political lines. Those who were fearful of social change looked for reassurance that scientific ideas did not carry subversive implications, that they rather reinforced the conception of an ordered and lawful nature, presided over by an omnipotent God. On the other hand, intellectuals who sought social reform frequently saw education as an indispensable tool to channel the aspirations of the working class into self-improvement. Science could play its part in fitting working men and women for respectable employment, but only if it was not so obviously aligned with Anglican theology as to exclude Dissenters and others who resented the power of the established church. To conservatives, the reformers seemed to be sailing far too close to the wind, encouraging the appalling excesses of the radical materialists and atheists, who had been suppressed in the 1790s but were making their voices heard again by the 1820s. Thus, scientific knowledge was invested with the hopes and fears of different groups in a period of prolonged social tension. Readings of the religious implications of science frequently reflected this social context; and, as we shall see, even its aesthetic dimension was often politicized.

The "sublime" has been much discussed by scholars of literature and the arts in the Romantic period. The term was frequently used at the time in discussions of philosophy and literary criticism. It named an effect deliberately cultivated by visual artists, poets, and prose writers. As a key aesthetic category, it linked the products of human art with the nature they represented. Human creations might be sublime on their own account, but, applied to the arts, the term generally referred to the natural phenomena whose power they communicated. Scientific lecturers and writers sought to elicit feelings of the sublime in their audiences—just as visual artists and poets might—with various ends in view. Invocations of the sublime, for example in descriptions of the dramatic scenery of foreign lands, might serve to inspire further efforts to conquer nature, to subdue it to human knowledge. On the other hand, the sublime was also a way to draw attention to the enigmas of the natural world, sometimes with the suggestion that they would continue to elude human curiosity. As a feature of nature—nature in certain aspects or moods—the sublime evoked the theological dimension of natural philosophy. In certain ways, it pointed to functions previously fulfilled by the deity in scientific discourse, but no longer so explicitly specified. It served as a reminder of the powers and terrors of nature, of the ways it challenged the human desire to know, and perhaps of its ineluctable mysteries.

Discussions of the sublime in English took their point of departure from Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757). Burke established the sublime as counterpart to the beautiful in the vocabulary of aesthetic appreciation. The experience was that of astonishment, Burke claimed, "and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror." "Whatever therefore is terrible, with regard to sight," he went on, "is sublime too, whether this cause of terror, be endued with greatness of dimensions or not."{8} Examples included dangerous animals, the ocean, darkness, or vast spaces. Other instances of the sublime displayed the power of nature and, indirectly, of the divinity: earthquakes and thunder, for example. From Burke onwards, sublimity was distinguished from straightforward beauty in descriptions of natural scenery or weather events. In the 1790s, discussions of the "picturesque" by William Gilpin and Uvedale Price put forward a third aesthetic category to be differentiated from Burke’s two. Some English readers also became aware of the analysis by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Judgment (1790), which significantly altered the terms in which the sublime was understood. Kant’s list of sublime phenomena was similar to Burke’s: "Bold, overhanging, and as it were threatening rocks; clouds piled up in the sky, moving with lightning flashes and thunder peals; volcanoes in all their violence of devastation; the boundless ocean in a state of tumult; the lofty waterfall of a mighty river, and such like…"{9} But the German philosopher inserted an element of reflection into appreciation of the sublime, insisting that astonishment and terror alone did not suffice to produce the effect—only when they were succeeded by a feeling of intellectual mastery of fear by comprehension of the underlying phenomena. What was truly sublime was not the power of nature itself but the power of the human mind to grasp it. To quote Kant: "Sublimity therefore does not reside in anything of nature, but only in the mind, in so far as we can become conscious that we are superior to nature within, and therefore to nature without us."{10}

Although Kant’s work was not widely read in Britain, his maneuver of inserting mental reflection into the aesthetics of the sublime was matched by British commentators. It permitted writers to discriminate between a discerning apprehension of the powers of natural phenomena and a merely irrational—even superstitious—fear of them. This did not, however, resolve the theological ambiguities of the term’s connotations. The orthodox construed the sublimity of nature as a sign of the deity. In his 1802 lecture, Davy concluded that chemistry "must be always more or less connected with the love of the beautiful and the sublime; ... [being] eminently calculated to gratify and keep alive the more powerful passions and ambitions of the soul."{11} Thus, God could be approached through sublime phenomena, which were apprehended by the intellectual function of the mind, rather than being the object of primitive superstition. For religious skeptics, on the other hand, the inherent powers of nature or the vast expanses of the earth’s history pointed to the absence of God. For them, sublimity was a characteristic of the human mind that was able to grasp this profound vacancy and to master the fear it instilled.

Chemistry, in Davy’s view, was a sublime science because it revealed the fundamental unity of natural forces, all of them derived from electricity. Geology exhibited the immensely powerful forces of earthquakes and volcanoes, and was generally seen as opening up the sublime vista of ages past. Meteorology was another science that offered a plentiful fund of sublime phenomena for representation and interpretation. The popular fear of unusual meteoric sights, such as auroras, ball lightning, tornadoes, and peculiar cloud formations, had been denounced as superstition since the early eighteenth century. Enlightened opinion had sought to tame these terrors by reducing the weather to normal fluctuations of temperature and other variables, recorded as a matter of routine. The sublimity of atmospheric phenomena was nonetheless continually evoked in written and visual representations. The drawings and paintings of William Hodges, prepared during Captain James Cook’s second Pacific voyage in 1772-75, derived much of their impact from meticulous rendering of weather conditions. John Reinhold Forster’s account, Observations made during a Voyage round the World (1778), matched Hodges’s images with detailed verbal records of the same meteorological phenomena. In Tahiti, the cloud-shrouded peaks loomed mysteriously over Hodges’s pastoral scenes; off the coast of New Zealand, he portrayed threatening waterspouts in a storm-darkened landscape in the style of Salvator Rosa.{12} Alexander von Humboldt later referred to the emotional impact of these scenes, which "awakened throughout Northern Europe a deep interest mingled with a sort of romantic longing."{13} Hodges, Forster, and other artists of exploration succeeded in rousing feelings of the sublime with their representations of exotic overseas locations. They used the sublimity of weather phenomena as a resource for this purpose, evoking the mysteries of atmospheric events while purporting not to succumb to the irrational superstition that had previously surrounded them.

The balancing act was typical of invocations of the meteorological sublime. The Quaker meteorologist Luke Howard recorded an unusual phenomenon witnessed with his family on the cliffs at Folkestone in July 1820. With the sun behind them, facing into a bank of low mist, the group observed their shadows projected onto the misty screen. A halo surrounded the shadow of the group as a whole, and another each person’s head. An individual separating from the group acquired a halo around his own shadow, from his own point of view, but not from the others’. Howard concluded: "The whole phenomenon was highly curious and interesting; and the facility with which each of the party could either appropriate the glory to himself or share it with the company present, suggested to me some reflexions of a moral nature—in which, however, I shall not anticipate the reader." The moral reflections presumably concerned the importance of mutuality and the limitations of an egotistic view of the world. The incident demonstrated how sublime weather phenomena could convey to the enlightened observer a morally uplifting message rather than the degrading nostrums of superstition.{14}

Thunder and lightning were rather more problematic in this respect than clouds and haloes. Their terrors were less easily dispelled, and the attempts to control them were more politically loaded in the context of arguments over the legacy of the Enlightenment. From Franklin’s days, experimental philosophers had identified lightning with the static electricity familiarly generated and transmitted by human hands. As Priestley saw it, a heavenly power had been brought to earth by the electrical philosophers—testimony to the ability of human reason to bring nature under its sway. For Franklin and Priestley, control of lightning was associated with the power of progressive enlightenment to challenge despotic authority.{15} Davy shied away from the political implications, but did not hesitate to lay claim to command of these natural forces; he listed electricity among the means by which man was enabled "to interrogate nature with power, not simply as a scholar, passive and seeking only to understand her operations, but rather as a master, active with his own instruments."{16} The moral dangers of such a stance were reflected in the treatment of atmospheric electricity in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Shelley, who was acquainted with Davy’s reputation and writings, portrayed the hazards of a Promethean attempt to control the forces of nature. In her novel, thunder storms and lightning appear as forces of destiny, partially identified with the monster created by Frankenstein, but also manifesting the relentless powers of nature itself. Frankenstein records how he was seduced into the study of natural philosophy by witnessing an oak tree blasted by lightning. His studies reach their culmination with the infusion of a "spark of being" into the creature he has manufactured. Storms accompany each subsequent appearance of the creature, as it demands restitution for its solitary state and begins to exact its revenge on its creator. At the end, it is Frankenstein who is left "blasted" in the wastes of the Arctic, his scientific ambitions horribly thwarted.{17}

Mary Shelley’s fantasy can be read as a warning of the moral dangers of enlightened intellectual hubris, or even as an allegory of its potential to stir up social unrest.{18} The hazardous power of atmospheric electricity—partially and insecurely controllable by man—stands for the capacity of nature to avenge trespasses upon its domain. This is a message of continuing relevance to modern science and technology, as the enduring popularity of Shelley’s novel attests.{19} In other manifestations, however, the natural sublime is a source of reassurance in the novel: mountainous and pastoral scenery signify the benevolent aspects of nature to which Frankenstein is insensitive. It is because he is largely indifferent to these forms of the natural sublime that he succumbs to the temptation to try to improve on nature’s own processes of reproduction. In tracing his fate, Shelley’s novel explores the ambiguities of the natural sublime, its capacity for encoding both the raw terrors of nature and the powers of the human mind to subdue it. Her emblematic story captures how the natural sublime had come, in certain respects, to stand in for the deity—comforting the humble, warning the proud, and jealously guarding the cosmic mysteries.

One manifestation of the natural sublime that exhibited its ambiguities in an acute form was the great length of the history of the earth being revealed by the science of geology. The newly disclosed abyss of time past was regarded by some as inspiring a greater reverence for the creator, whose design had been realized over an unimaginably long period. For others, the prospect of a lengthy history of the world, unfolding according to natural laws, tended to dispense with the need to invoke the deity. Abraham Werner’s influential teachings at the mining academy at Freiberg in Saxony were generally seen as encouraging the former interpretation. Werner’s "Neptunist" geology outlined the long-term effects of erosion in forming the landscape, assigning the origins of rock strata to successive deposits laid down at the bottom of a primeval ocean. Those who saw Neptunist geology as reconcilable with the Biblical account of the flood believed it opened up the sublime prospect of an extended period of divine creativity in the history of the earth. Fossils and minerals appeared as the keys to this inspiring vision. As the former radical James Parkinson put it, in his monumental Organic Remains of a Former World (1811), "By widening the views of the natural philosopher, … by showing him a glimpse of other creations, more just and more grand sentiments also must be excited of the immensity of animated nature and of the power of the great Creator of all things."{20}

Attempts to render the geological sublime conformable with Christian theology were, however, seriously challenged by the rise of an alternative to the Wernerian system: the "Vulcanist" geology of the Scottish natural philosopher James Hutton. Hutton ascribed a crucial role to the processes of heat and fire in creating rock formations, recognizing discontinuities in the surface strata caused by deeper rocks being thrust upwards by the earth’s internal heat. More importantly, Hutton saw these natural forces as operating continuously through immense periods of time, raising rock formations that would in turn be eroded away in an eternal cyclical process. In a phrase that became notorious, he claimed he perceived "no vestige of a beginning—no prospect of an end." Hutton’s dizzying vista of a history without beginning or end was perceived as a direct challenge to Christian notions of the creation and the apocalypse. His model undermined scripture and suggested an alternative vision of the history of the earth, in which landscapes and continents were formed by natural processes operating over an indefinite expanse of time.{21}

Hutton’s systematic exposition of his ideas, The Theory of the Earth (1795), lengthy and indigestible as it was, sounded alarm bells among the defenders of religious orthodoxy. The Irish chemist and meteorologist Richard Kirwan, in his Geological Essays (1799), charged Hutton with an uncontrolled imagination, "the sublime talent of fascinating Invention," which could all too easily seduce the public.{22} The danger was accentuated by the translation of Hutton’s ideas into a more accessible idiom by his former student John Playfair, in his Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory (1802). Responding to this, the Swiss-born chemist Jean André Deluc, in his Elementary Treatise on Geology (1809), charged Hutton with "sapping the very foundation on which the great edifice of society has always rested … in short, abandoning men to themselves."{23} Deluc advocated a geology that would continue to conform with the basic framework of scripture—a view that, by this time, was increasingly marginalized among specialist geologists. The Edinburgh Review, on the other hand, had welcomed Playfair’s Illustrations for his "eloquent language, … well calculated to fascinate the imagination, by the novelty and sublimity of the conceptions."{24} From the Edinburgh’s point of view, the geological sublime was neither to be feared nor ridiculed, but rather enlisted as an inspiring vision of how human reason could encompass the chasm of historical time. A similar thought appears to have motivated Percy Shelley’s use of Hutton’s ideas to invoke the sublimity of the deep past in his poem "Mont Blanc" in 1816.{25}

Predictably, Davy’s lectures on geology, given to the Royal Institution in 1805, did not align him with Scottish Whigs or English radicals. While he criticized scriptural geology like Deluc’s, he was scornful of the speculative excesses he perceived in both Huttonian and Wernerian systems. Davy invoked the sublime as a kind of veil drawn by the deity across the depths that human knowledge was not permitted to penetrate. He admonished Hutton that man "was not intended to waste his time in guesses concerning what is to take place in infinite duration." Balancing his accounts, Davy also criticized Deluc for his "vain attempts to penetrate into mysteries that have been wisely concealed from us," Werner for his desire "to satisfy the ardent imagination of students," and Kirwan for "the lighter ebullitions of his fancy."{26} The sublimity of the past, Davy suggested, should be respected as an impenetrable mystery. He warned of the dangers of crossing the bounds set for human knowledge and the risks of seducing the public imagination to pursue this goal. Ironically, in other fields of his scientific endeavors, such as electrochemistry, Davy was judged guilty of exactly these faults. It was the perception of his willingness to trespass on the domain of forbidden knowledge—and to use his public fame in support of his efforts—that led Mary Shelley to use him as a model for her character Waldman, the charismatic chemistry professor who inspires Victor Frankenstein.

As the interior depths of the earth disclosed the abyss of times past, the vacancy of outer space began to reveal an even more lengthy history. A key idea was the "nebular hypothesis," the notion that stars and planets could be formed by natural processes of gravitational attraction operating on primeval clouds of dust and gas. The discovery of dozens of nebulae in the heavens opened up the sublime prospect of the formation of solar systems like our own by the action of natural laws. The hypothesis was put into general circulation in the fourth edition of Pierre Simon de Laplace’s Exposition du système du monde (1813). By the 1830s, it had several prominent Whig defenders in Britain. William Whewell’s Bridgewater Treatise, Astronomy and General Physics (1833), insisted the nebular hypothesis could be reconciled with belief in a divine being who acted over a very long period of time. The hypothesis was viewed as complementary to Huttonian geology by Playfair and the younger geologist Charles Lyell, both of whom distinguished a scientific belief in historical development from illegitimate and unprofitable speculations about the creation. It was in this context that the hypothesis was presented by the Glasgow astronomer John Pringle Nichol, in his Views of the Architecture of the Heavens (1837).{27}

Many Whigs who were comfortable with the idea that divine creativity had extended over a long history of the physical formation of the earth nonetheless refused to contemplate a concurrent process of biological evolution. Since respectable opinion had rounded on Erasmus Darwin’s evolutionary speculations in the 1790s, ideas of the transmutation of species had been exiled to the radical fringe. Discussions of biological evolution threatened to reduce the origins of humanity itself to natural processes, a doctrine associated with the most extreme materialism and atheism of the Enlightenment. Such ideas were nonetheless to be found in the radical working-class press from the 1820s. Subversive journalists such as Richard Carlile and Charles Southwell advocated the materialist philosophy of the Baron d’Holbach and the transmutationist theories of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.{28} By the 1830s, it was becoming harder to draw the line between respectable contemplation of the history of the earth and the disreputable doctrines of biological evolution. Some middle-class geologists acknowledged that a progressive trend in the development of living things was evidenced by the fossil record; others, including Lyell, continued to deny this. Progressive development might be regarded as a further tribute to the powers of the deity, exerted periodically to bring forth new kinds of life, for instance by the comparative anatomist Richard Owen in the 1840s. Owen regarded each stage in the progressive development of the vertebrates as a successive realization of the "archetype," a kind of ideal plan in the divine mind. Other anatomists, however, perceived the same phenomena as evidence for materialist theories of the transmutation of species. Robert Knox, an extramural lecturer in Edinburgh and later in London, and Robert Grant, professor at University College London, found their evolutionary teachings echoed in the radical press while they were ostracized by respectable society.{29}

The appearance of the anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation in 1844 revealed how contemplation of the abyss of the past had descended into fiery discord. Deeply divided opinions about the extent of divine involvement in the history of life on earth could no longer be sheltered under the ambiguities of the sublime. Although the hidden author of Vestiges, the publisher and journalist Robert Chambers, was a friend of Scottish Whigs like Nichol and the phrenologist George Combe, his text attained a scandalous notoriety by explicitly proposing materialist theories of the origin and development of life. The book advanced conjectures on the formation of living beings from nonliving matter and their progressive evolution by natural causes. The nebular hypothesis and the findings of comparative anatomists found their place alongside embryological fantasies and questionable experiments on the spontaneous generation of life. Chambers’s work succeeded with readers who were inspired by a new kind of sublime vision: that of the progressive development of life—including human life—under the auspices of natural laws. Respectable authorities who were unwilling to accept this conclusion, such as the Cambridge geologist Adam Sedgwick, feared the way had been opened to atheism and thoroughgoing materialism. Vestiges was vehemently attacked by Sedgwick and others on these grounds. To the Anglican scientific establishment, it seemed that the veils of sublime mystery had been torn away from the vision of the past. The abyss of time threatened to yawn wide and swallow the existing order of society, founded as it was believed to be on a general faith in stable divine government.{30}

When talk of biological transmutation surfaced in Britain in the 1830s, it drew energy from a dispute about the nature of living beings that had erupted periodically since the 1790s. Although evolution was little discussed in the intervening decades, the question of the properties of life was never entirely off the agenda. The specter of materialism—frequently denounced but never entirely suppressed—hovered over the debate about vital powers throughout the period. Respectable opinion sought to demarcate living from nonliving things, to show that life required an infusion of extraordinary powers into matter and could not originate naturally. On the other side of the question were those who wanted to close the gap between animate and inanimate worlds, to demonstrate that life was a natural outcome of material organization without any addition of superior powers. The dispute between "transcendentalists" and "immanentists" was implicit in discussions of biological properties such as respiration and animal electricity.{31} Investigations of human nervous physiology and mental attributes were especially fraught in this connection, since they seemed to bear upon the question of the existence of an immaterial soul. In each domain, newly revealed experimental phenomena were subject to disputed interpretations, as the problem of the powers of life defied conclusive resolution.

In the 1790s, the question of vital powers arose in connection with pneumatic medicine. Priestley, author of the materialistic Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit (1777), had also bequeathed to science his discoveries of several new gases, soon investigated for their potential medical utility. In the mid 1790s, pneumatic medicine was taken up by the physician Thomas Beddoes, who had been ejected from the Oxford chemistry chair for his radical associations and sympathies. Beddoes recruited the young Davy to assist with dispensing gaseous therapy at his Pneumatic Institution, established in Bristol in 1797. The most notorious episode there, in 1799, concerned the breathing of nitrous oxide. After Davy experienced hallucinations and a feeling of blissful intoxication from respiring the gas, friends and supporters of Beddoes flocked to Bristol to try it out. The poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey were among those who enjoyed the ecstatic feeling of freedom and mental excitement that the gas induced. Davy’s recorded response to his own experience suggested that the gas offered a means of transcending normal bodily conditions; it seemed to transport him to a world of ideas independent of matter: "My emotions were enthusiastic and sublime … with the most intense belief and prophetic manner, I exclaimed to Dr. Kinglake, ‘Nothing exists but thoughts!—the universe is composed of impressions, ideas, pleasures and pains’."{32}

To most observers, however, the nitrous oxide experiments suggested a different conclusion, namely the dependence of mental states on the body’s physical condition. Taken at face value, the incident showed that the mind could be altered by chemical means, lending support to the materialists’ position that it was a function of the physical organization of matter. Davy himself had written an "Essay to Prove the Thinking Powers Depend on the Organization of the Body" in a private notebook in the 1790s. In slightly guarded comments at the end of the decade, he and Beddoes welcomed the prospect, held out by nitrous oxide, of a chemical solution to the problems of health and happiness. For conservative commentators who lined up to criticize the Bristol "enthusiasts," the materialist motivation of the project was obvious and its claims for the effectiveness of the gas had to be resisted. The Anti-Jacobin Review ridiculed the "Pneumatic Revellers" in a poem published in 1800, which set the tone for a number of other satirical attacks. The satirists asserted that the notion that nitrous oxide could be the material agent of general enlightenment was nothing but fantasy. The supposed effects of the gas were dismissed as collective delusion. Tellingly, little further research was done on nitrous oxide for decades and its anesthetic effects—later so widely exploited—were not recognized until the 1840s.{33}

Many of the same doctors who explored the potential of pneumatic medicine were also interested in therapeutic applications of electricity, which offered a candidate for the principle of life itself. In the 1790s, Luigi Galvani’s discovery—that movement could be produced in a dissected frog by apparently transmitting electrical impulses—generated enormous interest in the role of electricity in animal life.{34} The attention of the public was drawn to the vital function of electricity by the spectacular experiments of Galvani’s nephew, Giovanni Aldini, in London in 1803. On one widely reported occasion, the body of a recently hanged criminal was brought to a private anatomy theatre, where a group of surgeons watched as wires from an electrical battery were applied to the corpse. Aldini reported that the body’s muscles twitched and an eye opened, so "as almost to give the appearance of re-animation." After another attempt at revival, Aldini noted, "vitality might, perhaps, have been restored, if many circumstances had not rendered it impossible."{35} It was expedient to be cautious because the implications of what had been attempted were staggering: control of electricity might place in human hands the power to bring the dead back to life. Mary Shelley later acknowledged the importance of such incidents in inspiring her conception of Frankenstein.

The issue of vital processes was of central concern to Coleridge during the decade of the 1790s, and his reflections were symptomatic of the difficulties raised by the legacy of materialism. Even while associating with Beddoes’s Bristol circle and endorsing its philanthropic aims, he withheld support from what he took to be its underlying materialism. At the end of 1796, he wrote to the radical poet John Thelwall, taking him up on his argument that the principle of life was a kind of subtle matter like air or electricity. He also commented on the ideas of Dr. John Ferriar, who had been writing about the "vital principle" in the Memoirs of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. Ferriar’s view constituted an alternative to the materialism of which Priestley and Erasmus Darwin were identified as spokesmen.{36} But, as Coleridge came to understand, talk of the vital principle and identification of it with electricity or subtle matter, did not suffice to keep materialism at bay. While vitalism seemed like an alternative to materialism, since it acknowledged an exogenous principle in addition to the organizing capabilities of matter itself, questions remained as to whether the vital principle was itself a kind of matter and whether it operated within the realm of natural law. The London surgeon John Abernethy concluded that firmer lines of demarcation had to be drawn. Lecturing to the Royal College of Surgeons in 1814, he distinguished three entities: the material body, the vital principle (a "subtle, mobile, invisible substance, superadded to the evident structure of … matter"), and the immaterial soul.{37} Abernethy’s position was scornfully dismissed as "bombast" by the Edinburgh Review and fiercely criticized by his former student William Lawrence in 1816. Lawrence denounced the idea of a separate principle of life as a philosophical mystification, akin to ancient notions of an "anima." He insisted that life could be understood as a phenomenon of organized matter, and enlisted the support of the great French physiologist Xavier Bichat for this assertion. Abernethy responded by charging his opponent with materialism and atheism for his attribution of vital powers to matter itself. In turn, Lawrence denied that medical findings had any implications for theological issues: "An immaterial and spiritual being," he remarked, "could not have been discovered among the blood and filth of the dissecting room."{38}

This widely publicized debate gave fuel for both sides of the dispute about vital powers. Lawrence’s dismissal of an exogenous principle of life was adopted by other reforming physicians, such as John Elliotson, a professor at the University of London from 1831; it also encouraged evolutionists like Elliotson’s colleague Grant. Bichat had proposed that human mental processes were elaborations of simple organic properties like sensibility. The suggestion was that the human mind could be viewed as an evolutionary outcome of animal development. Such a conception appealed to writers in the radical underground press. Richard Carlile wrote that, "instead of viewing ourselves as the particular objects of the care of a great Deity, … we should consider ourselves but as atoms of organized matter."{39} On the other hand, it was precisely to oppose this kind of radical materialism that Coleridge and other conservative writers swung to Abernethy’s side. In lectures given in 1818-19, the poet declared that Bichat’s definition of life —"the sum of all the functions by which death is resisted"—was "the vilest form … of modern materialism."{40} Organization had to be seen as the consequence of life, not its cause. Life was the result of a vital principle that transcended normal material causation. Only on this basis, Coleridge held, could morality be sustained. If human beings were reduced to organized matter, there would be no foundation for elevating them above base natural instincts, no grounds for human aspirations to transcend the animal level.

The cultivation of a sense of the sublimity of nature provided an aesthetic basis for communicating scientific discoveries to a broad public audience. Among the issues raised by the popularization of science, the abyss of time and the enigma of life posed particularly acute problems for traditional religious doctrine. The emergence of a new kind of public scientific culture provided the conditions for bringing these questions to light and also made them especially fraught and urgent. Members of the social elite were well aware that the recruitment of a large public audience had made radical ideas much more dangerous. Enlargement of the public for scientific knowledge injected a fear of social instability into the discussion of problematic issues in the sciences.

Central to the new relationship between the sciences and their public audience was a new image of the man of science: the scientific hero. In various ways, the public persona of the male natural philosopher was reconstructed in this period. Certain individuals achieved conspicuous celebrity by virtue of their standing with public audiences. The scientific hero shared some features of the poetic or artistic "genius," as this figure was coming to be understood. In science, as in literature and the arts, the genius was distinguished by a mysterious quality exceeding normal human capabilities. As Simon Schaffer has written, "Genius began to be understood not as a peculiar capacity possessed by a creative artist, but as the power which possessed him."{41} Signs of possession by this power included an ability to sense intuitively the sublime forces of nature. The public personae of many men of science came to be identified with their emotional responses to natural phenomena. In addition to genius, the scientific hero possessed a capacity for strenuous exertion and bodily suffering. Among the features that might distinguish him were dauntless self-experimentation or grueling travel. The scientific hero was a passionate as much as a calculating being, attuned to the powers of nature on an emotional as well as an intellectual level, though no less masculine for all his depth of feeling. He suffered considerably in the quest for knowledge and was morally enhanced thereby.

In the 1760s, Priestley had explained how natural philosophy ought to improve the moral standing of those who studied it. "A philosopher," he remarked, "ought to be something greater, and better than another man." Contemplation of God’s works "should give a sublimity to his virtue … [and] expand his benevolence," so that natural philosophers could become "great and exalted beings."{42} To this conception of the elevating power of nature, the Romantic era added an increased appreciation of its sublime forces and their impact on the receptive individual. As Schaffer notes, however, philosophers’ cultivation of their receptivity to natural powers seemed morally troubling to many commentators. In Germany, Kant and Goethe led resistance to the notion that insight into nature could follow from indulgence of the imagination or the emotions. In England, Edmund Burke set the terms in which pneumatic medicine and galvanism were satirized as varieties of "enthusiasm," rather than acknowledged (as their devotees claimed) as sources of natural inspiration.{43}

Notwithstanding the satirical attacks on his work at Beddoes’s Pneumatic Institution, Davy went on to show that space did exist in British public life for a man to fashion himself as a scientific genius. While he ceased to display mind-altering gases, he developed a passionate style of self-presentation to his audiences, apparently giving way to transports of rhetorical intensity as he dilated on the beauties of the divine design or the sublimity of natural forces. In the words of one perceptive observer of his lectures, Davy "presented most strongly to the popular observation the attributes of genius."{44} These attributes included a heightened sensitivity to natural scenery, a generous dedication to the public good, and heroic powers of bodily endurance. Davy’s last writings, Salmonia (1828) and Consolations in Travel (1830), exhibited his scenic sensibilities and his awe of the infinities of time and space. His invention of the miners’ safety lamp was taken to show his selfless benevolence toward humanity at large. Reckless trials of the effects of gases on his own physiology were followed by no less painful submission to the effects of electrical currents and sparks applied to parts of his body. He sustained permanent injury to his right hand from a laboratory explosion. During an episode of serious illness in 1807, the chemist’s female admirers thronged around his residence anxious for news. The sufferings of Davy’s body in the pursuit of knowledge had become central to his public persona as a hero of science.{45}

Each aspect of Davy’s heroic image was shared by other experimenters of his time. In the obituary éloges presented to the Paris Institut to mark the passing of distinguished savants, their sensitivity to the powers of nature was particularly noted. Individuals were repeatedly shown to have been inspired in the quest for knowledge by experiencing the sublime emotions elicited by natural scenery.{46} The sublime forces of nature were also invoked in celebrations of technological genius, for example in the poems of Erasmus Darwin, where the ability to tame those forces was lauded in panegyrics of leading industrialists like James Watt and Matthew Boulton.{47} A powerful desire to benefit humanity in general was ascribed to Watt in biographies and eulogies following his death in 1819; it became central to the creation of his image as a heroic genius of industrial innovation.{48} Similarly, the promoter of vaccination, Edward Jenner, was celebrated as a scientific hero for his benevolence and humane genius in numerous portraits on canvas, in print, on medals, and in sculpture.{49} Finally, Davy’s self-sacrificing galvanic experiments were matched or exceeded in their painfulness by those of the German experimenters, Johann Wilhelm Ritter and Alexander von Humboldt, who repeatedly subjected their own bodies to electrical currents.{50}

Although Davy developed the heroic potential of travel to only a limited degree, grueling travel was central to the lifelong self-fashioning of other scientific heroes, especially Humboldt. Humboldt’s reputation was gained in the course of his journey in the Amazon basin, the Andes, and the pampas in the years 1799 to 1804, recorded in the massive Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du nouveau continent (1805-34), which eventually reached thirty volumes. His long-labored account comprised tables and innovative diagrammatic representations of the vast quantity of data he had assembled from astronomical, magnetic, meteorological, and geological instruments. In stunning maps and images, Humboldt presented his findings on the distribution of plant and animal life, climatic zones, geological formations, and geographical features. He combined this with a verbal narrative in which his physiological and emotional reactions were highlighted, in order to match the instrumental record against the sufferings of his own body, and to convey to readers the aesthetic dimension of the natural environment.{51} The style owed something to the example of Georg Forster (son of J. R. Forster), with whom Humboldt had traveled in the Low Countries, France, and England in 1790. It was also deployed in his popular Ansichten der Natur (1808), where Humboldt explained: "Descriptions of nature affect us more or less powerfully, in proportion as they harmonize with the condition of our own feelings. For the physical world is reflected with truth and animation on the inner susceptible world of the mind."{52} The Humboldtian style of exploration became enormously influential through the popularity of its written descriptions, for example in the portion of his monumental work translated as the Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent (1814-29).{53} Charles Darwin packed a copy of this book during his own travels in South America. Other scientific explorers, including Lyell and Joseph Hooker, were also inspired by the heroic endurance and emotional sensitivity exhibited by the German traveler.{54}

Humboldt provided his contemporaries with an influential model of the scientific hero, but not the only one. Contemporary ideas of genius also shaped the public images of the industrialist Watt, the experimental philosopher Michael Faraday, and even the long-deceased Isaac Newton, none of whom traveled very much.{55} Thomas Carlyle, whose On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841) did more than any other work to popularize Romantic notions of genius in Britain, was scornful of the idea that true genius existed in the contemporary sciences. In his essay "Signs of the Times" (1829), he pointed to the social and institutional machinery by which learning was advanced and communicated: "No Newton, by silent meditation, now discovers the system of the world from the falling of an apple; but some quite other than Newton stands in his Museum, his Scientific Institution, and behind whole batteries of retorts, digesters and galvanic piles imperatively ‘interrogates Nature’,—who, however, shows no haste to answer."{56} Carlyle’s remarks drew attention to the ways in which the influence ascribed to individual genius overlooked the trends toward concentration of resources in the leading institutions and routine training in research skills. In view of this, it may be that the emphasis on individual genius was at least as much a reaction to contemporary social changes as a reflection of them. The market for public science made heroes of a few individuals, like Davy, and placed substantial resources at their disposal. At the same time, the culture of celebrity allowed these individuals to present themselves as rising above the level of the masses, being possessed of special imaginative insights into nature and its powers. A similar point has been made about the images of poets and men of letters, whose individual creativity and imaginative power was hailed the more as they became more subject to the demands of a commercial market for writers’ work. Against the background of the expanding literary marketplace, writers came to view themselves as "artists," uniquely endowed individuals who were independent of material interests.{57}

The commercial market for public education and scientific writing was fundamental to the circumstances in which ideas circulated in British society in the early nineteenth century. An understanding of the prevailing social and political circumstances is essential to a grasp of this culture as a whole, in which scientific ideas took their place. Enough has been said here to show that the notion that science was comprehensively opposed by literary intellectuals is quite inaccurate. Coleridge was deeply inspired by Davy’s chemical investigations. Percy and Mary Shelley reacted rather differently to specific trends in scientific thought in the 1810s, Percy enthusiastically exploring the radical implications of geology and vitalism, while Mary composed her brilliant allegory on the dangers of scientific hubris. Wordsworth maintained a significant interest in sciences such as geology during his poetic career.{58} These and other thinkers responded to specific scientific issues as part of their overall intellectual life. The conception that science was a single entity to be judged as a whole—for or against—simply did not exist for them. "Science," in fact, still meant something like "organized knowledge," rather than being identified as a specific set of beliefs and practices concerning the natural world. Many intellectuals struggled to retain a sense of learning as a whole throughout this period. Whewell’s terminological innovation—"scientist"—was resisted by many, who disapproved of the narrowing of outlook that it seemed to suggest. It was precisely because the sciences were not isolated from other cultural domains that the problems raised by materialism, for example, were so disturbing.

To isolate science from other areas of learning would be to view this period too much in the light of subsequent arguments about the "two cultures." Rather, I have argued here that a deeply polarized political climate was pervasive in its effects on intellectual discussion, and that it led people to very discriminating judgments on specific scientific ideas. Science could neither be ignored nor dismissed; its content called for sustained intellectual engagement and assessment. In a setting where scientific specialists maintained a lively relationship with public audiences, and in which science was commonly treated in general literary publications, a high level of awareness of these questions was taken for granted. The themes of providence and divine design of the natural world provided the vocabulary for legitimating scientific discoveries in relation to established religion. The reconciliation could be accomplished by a variety of routes, but it came under severe strain when sensitive issues arose such as the length of geological history, the possibility of biological evolution, or the material basis of life. In these areas, everyone was aware of the potential for radical appropriation of certain ideas and development of their materialistic or atheistic implications. Individuals responded to the possibility in ways that reflected their own political and social outlooks. Science, in other words, was no monolith but a highly contested domain, which intersected in multiple ways with creative literary work in a complex politicized field. Readers today need to recapture a sense of the intricacy and fluidity of this situation.

Acknowledgements.

I am grateful to Tim Fullford and James Chandler for their careful readings of this chapter. I am, of course, responsible for any errors that may remain. I would also like to thank the organizers and participants of the conference on "Romanticism and Empirical Method," at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, 2-3 March 2001. My attendance at the conference helped me substantially in writing this chapter.