Discovering, describing, purchasing

The nineteenth-century discovery and excavation of the Maya monuments of Central America is inseparably linked with the name of the US explorer and travel writer John Lloyd Stephens. Unlike many of the pre-disciplinary precursors of modern archaeology, Stephens is still revered by modern practitioners; for instance, distinguished Maya scholar Michael D Coe describes his travel books as ‘marking the very genesis of serious Maya research’, containing ‘almost prophetic insights’ into the lost civilization of Central America (Coe 1994, pp. 84–85). The present essay is, however, less concerned with echoing these well-deserved accolades, and more with analysing the literary, aesthetic and ideological concerns of Stephens’ two Latin American travel narratives, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan (1841) and its sequel, Incidents of Travel in the Yucatan (1843). For although primarily remembered today as a pioneer of modern Mesoamerican archaeology, Stephens achieved celebrity in his lifetime as one of the most commercially successful travel writers of the nineteenth century.

Maya archaeology to this day enjoys a privileged place in the North American academy, and part of Stephens' seminal importance for this scholarly tradition doubtless lies in his establishment of what might be termed an ‘Americanist’ ideology in interpreting Maya high culture.

As science turned its focus towards ‘man’, new disciplines emerged with the aim of utilizing scientific methods to understand and regulate human behaviour. Rather than understanding this scientific inquiry into human behaviour as a unique historical phenomenon with an identifiable moment of origin, we must recognize its continuity with a long tradition through which it found momentum yet against which it would struggle for authority. The search for knowledge about human existence and behaviour clearly did not begin with the emergence of science as a discrete discipline in the eighteenth century; instead, through a complex network of intellectual and social reconfigurations, it was incorporated into an emerging disciplinary structure and found legitimization through its relation to science. During this time of change in how knowledge was produced, valued and circulated, a range of new disciplines contended for authority over self-knowledge. To understand how psychoanalysis would eventually come to function within this network of disciplines and ultimately to undermine the concept of science itself, I want to consider briefly how several of them developed and how they come to contribute to Freud's psychoanalytic project.

As philosophy became focused on metaphysical questions explored primarily through philosophical speculation and reason, physiologists continued to use scientific methods to observe and measure bodily responses as a means of establishing the basic foundations for sensory physiology. Despite their attempts to understand all perceptual phenomena in terms of mechanistic bodily operations, however, physiologists were increasingly confronted with a factor that they seemed unable to explain.

Introduction: Visual Worldmaking

Leading, primarily, a visual existence, man's main orientations are focused on light and perception of light. The optical channels of a human being are superior to the rest of his sensory inputs, as long as quantity and complexity of data are under question. With regard to linguistic design, metaphors of light hold an eminent position in human discourse, connected especially to fields of knowledge, learning, moral quality and aesthetic perfection. As a consequence, they stand out in all ideological terrains of human self-constitution, concerning basic religious concepts, their narrative transformations as well as rationalistic sublimations of these models, during modernity's development towards the age of enlightenment.

This essay deals with the interrelationship between scientific–especially physical–theories and the ideological groundwork of a given culture. Centring on influences emerging from pre-formal concepts of reality, the problem will be raised if any explicit physical theory will succeed in keeping a constitutive distance from such pre-scientific forms of worldmaking. It will need to be asked if modern quantifying approaches to nature fall under the clandestine seizure of intersubjective and intracultural dynamics, importing a basic matrix of anthropomorphic worldmaking into those formal and quantified versions of reality we use to call sciences.

Complying with such a project gives good reasons to keep a secure distance from positions which take the social construction of all forms of reality and worldmaking for granted. It is not the structuring idea of this paper to underline the presumable irrelevance of scientific hopes for objective truths – a tendency one might call ‘epistemic relativism’.

The search for health is a constant in all societies, but the increasing wealth of Victorian society made it a realizable priority for an ever-widening clientele. And given the limitations of conventional medicine, with its reliance on techniques such as bleeding or drastic drug regimes, it was not surprising that a galaxy of alternative therapies offered themselves, which were then denounced as quackery by the profession. Some of the fringe movements were chimeras that flourished briefly and faded as quickly. Others showed more staying power, and among the weightier was hydropathy, a system centred on the use of a series of water treatments which originated in Austria in the 1820s at the Gräfenberg establishment of Vincent Priessnitz. Hydropathy was but one of several unorthodox medical therapies on offer in early Victorian Britain. Where it differed from the other fringe movements – mesmerism, galvanism, botanism and even homeopathy – is that it attracted substantial long-term commercial investment. Whereas homeopathy, the most successful of its competitors on the medical margin, remained almost entirely a clinic and surgery bound enthusiasm, hydropathy established its place on both the therapeutic and the physical landscape. The first hydropathic, or water-cure, establishments in Britain appeared in the early 1840s in and around London, subsequently spreading west and north. In England, it was, however, to become an increasingly provincial interest, surviving in its original curative form by the 1880s only at a few northern outposts such as Stockport.

The past two hundred years have seen naturalistic and often materialistic modes of scientific inquiry (as advocated by, for example, John Tyndall and Richard Dawkins) superseding the teleological and theistic methods used by earlier non-specialists. This hardening of the scientific viewpoint (though not absolute, particularly in physics) is interesting when one considers the concomitant increase in the acceptability to the general public of evolutionary explanations, the increase in the popularization of what was seen as ‘good science’, and the parallel reduction of extra-epistemic factors in evolutionary theorizing. In this essay I briefly examine two episodes within the development of a professional Victorian geology: the rejection of ‘scriptural geology’ by the emerging geological community and the controversy over the 1844 publication of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Both of these episodes nicely illustrate the boundary work that went into delineating the emerging community from those that used, and what would become, sidelined modes of discourse. As a part of this delineation – and over the course of the early part of the century – geology was characterized as a practical, specialized, active, ‘masculine’ endeavour that was amenable to Christianity. Such rhetoric allowed the community to distance themselves from both Biblical literalists and the amateurs who in many ways founded the field, thus moving the adjudication of scientific claims out of the public sphere into the hands of what would eventually become the scientific profession.

In 1859, Prince Albert addressed the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) as its President and attempted to assess the place of science in the modern State. In his description of science, he says:

A little over a year later Albert was dead, but his vision of the material location for the operations of science was beginning to be accomplished.

In early May 1868, the correspondence pages of the Pall Mall Gazette (PMG) were the scene of a heated debate between two of the most well known figures of the day, Professor John Tyndall and Mr Daniel Dunglas Home. Each man was the recognized leader of his field, but their fields were apparently diametrically opposed. Tyndall was head of the Royal Institution and the natural heir to the late Michael Faraday as experimental philosopher and materialist scientist; Home was celebrated across Europe and America as a gifted spiritualist medium, whose physical phenomena were unsurpassed. Their topic was a séance proposed in 1861, at which Faraday was to have examined spiritualist phenomena produced by Home, but which had not ultimately taken place. The two men began a stiffly polite dialogue within the correspondence columns, but rapidly degenerated into personal attacks and self-vindicating reasoning. By the time they called a truce in late May, the debate had clearly demonstrated the strength of the barriers constructed between established scientific practice and areas of investigation still regarded as beyond the scientific pale.

In his pamphlet Observations on the Education of the People, Henry Brougham links scientific education with a stable working populace. For Brougham, science was a unity, and reflection upon it would reveal an ordered world, functioning correctly. ‘The more widely science is diffused’, he writes, ‘the better will the Author of all things be known’. Yet, this view of science, predicated as it was upon a unified Nature, was actively critiqued in the early nineteenth century. Cheap, mass-market periodicals such as the Mechanic's Magazine emerged from a combination of technological innovation, philosophical radicalism and entrepreneurial opportunism, to provide a textual space for an alternative scientific culture. These titles foregrounded dialogue, preventing the ‘thematic finalization’ necessary to disseminate unified Nature as a final signified. Their textual community, lying outside of ‘high’ scientific discourse and yet at times engaging with it, allowed members to negotiate and appropriate, in a dialogic exchange, the contested signs of the industrial age.

This chapter seeks to recover this rival scientific discourse and, by exploring its foundation in the textual community that supported it, identify its codes, constructions and participants. The chapter is organized into three sections: the first considers the foundation of the Mechanic's Magazine and the strategies employed by the editors to carve out a readership from within the reading audience of the new ‘mass’ journals such as the Mirror of Literature.

Setting aside any question of ‘faith and doubt’, superficially associated with the history of the mid-nineteenth century, there was as much a tendency as ever during that period for people to look heavenwards with their questions. The author of an 1856 article in Chambers's Journal noted that:

If anything characterizes nineteenth-century attitudes towards science, it is its increasing popularization by just such a plethora of books and discussions, to say nothing of the enthusiasm of writers and publishers such as Robert Chambers himself. The scale of space attracted a readership negotiating its way between traditional biblical motifs, and models that corresponded with emerging astronomical data, and it is unsurprising to find that in his own popularizing volume, Chambers expressed one in terms of the other.

The author of the above Chambers's article, however, correctly identified a trend among popularizers during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Science writers and their readers shifted their attention beyond the Earth beneath their feet and into space, our satellite, the neighbouring planets, and what might be found there.

Because science was becoming a professional enterprise in the nineteenth century, an inquiry into the ‘centrality’ or ‘marginality’ of scientific ideas at mid-century entails two separate questions. First, why did a given idea influence other researchers or fail to influence them? Where professional networks made themselves effective gatekeepers of credibility, this becomes in the first instance a question about the functioning of those networks. But there was also a popular audience for scientific ideas, and another way to assess the perceived ‘centrality’ of a scientific discourse would be to ask how well it was known to this broader community, and why they regarded it as fundamental or incidental to the scientific enterprise. By the later nineteenth century, this is less a question about the validation of competing claims than about the apportionment of finite public awareness. The universe of authenticated science was growing large; in the general-interest monthlies and nascent magazines of ‘popular science’, new ideas competed for attention with hagiographic surveys of past achievement. Many claims regarded as credible by researchers were nevertheless ignored by the reading public. For a new idea to be celebrated as a groundbreaking discovery, it needed to possess not only credibility but visible social implications. Indeed, popularizers often promoted scientific ideas by converting statements about nature into statements about human society.

The present chapter considers sidelined sites of science in the late-Victorian period, precisely the moment during which many historians have characterized the sciences as having transformed into specialized professions based in academic and government-sponsored research facilities, like the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. The growth and character of these facilities have received much historical attention; yet, surprisingly, their forerunners have not. If we agree that a significant institutional shift took place during this period, we might ask what were those forerunner institutions and what became of them?

Several histories of Anglo-American scientific institutions have contributed to a ‘canon’ of nineteenth-century science as a progress story of a shift from ‘amateur’ to ‘professional’ science in which the former involved individual, leisurely endeavours and the latter professional teams, working in ‘Big Science’ at new research institutions. Contemporary late-Victorian discourse championed state-supported research while bemoaning the inadequacy of private initiative. More recent laboratory studies, in turn, have tended to celebrate specialized, extra-domestic sites – museum, laboratory, observatory – while sidelining ‘private’ domestic spaces. The image has emerged of ‘domestic’ science as quaint and idiosyncratic, although various scholars are succeeding in dismantling this skewed representation.

One of the best documented cases of a nineteenth-century amateur tradition, located at the private estate of John William Strutt, third Baron Rayleigh, Terling Place, in Essex, has helped create this idiosyncratic imagery.

‘The year 1866 was marked by a strange incident, an unexplained and inexplicable phenomenon … which disturbed the maritime population and exciting the public mind in the interior of continents.’ Thus, began Jules Verne's classic science fiction adventure Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Published in 1870, the novel began with reports of an unknown monster sinking a number of ships. Verne's description of the sightings, the rumours and the debates surrounding the creature's existence accurately reflected the sea serpent periodical literature of the time.

Although sea serpents are most often associated with myth and legend, in the nineteenth century they achieved a margin of scientific legitimacy that they never had before or since, capturing the imagination of a public trying to make sense of the vast new developments in science. The discovery of fossils, particularly dinosaurs, provided tangible evidence for the existence of creatures which had been regarded as belonging to the realm of the fantastic. As paleontologists discovered plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs, a dramatic increase in sightings of sea serpents also occurred.

British science in the early twenty-first century seems largely institutionalized; sophisticated laboratories, commercial companies and governmental organizations control the production and distribution of scientific knowledge to such an extent that it is difficult to imagine that science was not always part of the British hegemony. Indeed, there is a popular, if ahistorical, perception that science has always been practised from within such a power structure. Despite the continued opposition of, among others, animal rights activists and certain scientific ethics lobbying groups, professional science appears insulated against, and unconcerned by, any voices raised in protest. Yet, the rise of the scientific institution in the late nineteenth century reveals that the central and dominant position of professional science did not go uncontested and that public resistance was not as marginalized as it appears today. State-supported (if not funded) scientific laboratories, the most important symbol of professional science in the last quarter of the century, found to their cost that the ideology of institutional science was anathema to some sections of the Victorian public and to try to sideline their contribution to scientific debates would result in voluble opposition.

The founding of the British Institute of Preventive Medicine in 1889 is one of those important moments in the history of the scientific laboratory that reveals how professional scientific culture was once a site of vigorous and violent conflict over authority.