Victorian Accumulating: Part One: Inductive Science and Utopia

Michael A. Williams, Ph. D.

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Introduction

In this article I am concentrating on the way in which Victorian writers such as Thomas Macaulay and William Whewell celebrated the scientific and technological Utopia which they thought British scientists had created for the benefit of humanity. I will address the importance to them, as they perceived it, of the work of Francis Bacon (1561-1626), and the way in which, again as they perceived it, Victorian scientists’ adopted Baconian Inductive Scientific methodology and triumphed over all previous scientific work. I will elaborate my arguments with some relevant but necessarily brief remarks on British imperial expansion, the phenomenon of the Commodity, and the relationships between the Beautiful and the Useful. In a second article I hope to comment on the ways in which for other writers such Utopian dreams turned into Dystopian nightmares.

First, I need to focus on the importance of Francis Bacon whose work Thomas Macaulay, among others, acclaimed as a precursor of the Victorians’ need to expand their knowledge base in the cause of bettering the human condition. This Victorian ‘philanthropic’ vision sat in an easy alliance with their grand scale acquisitiveness and the predominance of the profit motive, but it was an unholy alliance resulting in the massive expansion of possessions and commodities which was a leading feature of the life as lived by those Victorians who were able to afford it. The original dream of bettering the human condition may have been inspired by Bacon, but the reality was a progress which benefitted the few at the expense of the many.

I need also to focus on the practice of accumulating masses, not of material possessions, but of material evidence and observations for it was the latter which Bacon promoted in his scientific writings. This activity of gaining, and then classifying, an ever-increasing data base was a crucial part of the development of nineteenth-century science since many Victorian scientists followed the Post-Baconian Natural Philosophers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in pursuing Bacon’s program and seeking to base their phenomenological explanations and scientific theories on the data and observations which they were collecting at a seemingly exponential rate.

1. Blind groping, Serendipity, and Inductive Science

At the start of the nineteenth century the newly industrialising England was developing an optimism which Walter Houghton (1957) attributes to the idea of Progress having been ‘well-established by the eighteenth century’ (28). He also credits Francis Bacon’s scientific program as contributing to the idea of Progress by offering the prospect of ‘advancing knowledge, each new age possessing and profiting from a constantly increasing body of positive truth’ (ibid.). Indeed, writing in the early seventeenth century, Bacon did produce the first fully articulated rationale for collecting evidence in creating hypotheses and verifying positive truths in deductions and explanations: ‘general statements’, he argued, ‘depend on the accumulation of accurate observations and careful experiments’ and ‘come out, not notional, but well-defined, and such as nature may acknowledge to be really well known to her, and which shall cleave to the very marrow of things’ (Bacon edited by Moffett: 1847:119). Further, Houghton takes his interpretation of Bacon’s influence to the point where he reads a very special significance into what happens in Bacon’sNew Atlantis (1627), an early foray into science fiction upon which I would like now to focus since Bacon’s vision uncannily anticipates certain nineteenth century developments.

The way in which the tale begins reflects what had been happening in British maritime history since Henry VII had granted letters patent in 1495 to the Cabot brothers authorising them to navigate to the far corners of the globe and ‘to ‘conquer, occupy and possess’ and acquire for the king ‘the dominion, title and jurisdiction … towns, castles, cities, islands and main-lands so discovered’ (Ferguson: 6). Bacon’s tale begins with a group of English maritime adventurers who are on a voyage which begins in Peru. Their destinations are China and Japan. However, after five months the easterly winds which they have been enjoying give way to westerly winds and they become becalmed. Their supplies are exhausted but they do what the religious refugees do in Andrew Marvell’sBermudas (circa. 1650)do: ‘we did lift up our hearts and voices to God above, who showeth his wonders in the deep, beseeching him of his mercy’ (Jones: 450).. Their prayers are granted. They have stumbled across a terra incognita in the South Sea-a New Atlantis. The imperial significance of this, given the fact that real English mariners were engaged in similar journeys, would have been clear to Bacon’s contemporaries.

That Bacon, well read in classical literature, is adapting Plato’s concept of the ideal Republic might suggest that Bacon himself is sailing close to the wind politically. James I, God’s anointed, had appointed him Attorney General in 1613 and Lord Chancellor in 1618, and he enjoyed a favourable position in a royal court ruled by a king who was already asserting the Stuart claim to the Divine Right of Kings. But Atlantis is not a monarchy, it is a precisely organised hierarchy governed by the Fellowship of Salomon’s House, and these august creatures have all the trappings of monarchy and the position of the chief Father, the Tirsan, is defined in a ‘King’s Charter’. (ibid: 452, 471/3).

A senior official from the Fellowship. The Governor, tells his English guests about the objectives of Salomon’s House: ‘The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible’ (Jones: 480). Houghton argues that this became very important indeed when ‘under the influence of Comte’ it ‘came to be thought of as the historical end of the nineteenth century’. (Houghton: 33).

Victorian writers, politicians, engineers and medical people themselves, without any necessary reference to Comte, projected a complex from contemporary events in which they emphasised the importance of three key elements in Bacon’s thinking, articulated by the Governor, as they understood them: accumulating evidence to facilitate an investigation of the physical world; the development of technology; and the betterment of the human condition. However, they did not operate in the systematic manner envisaged in Bacon’s Utopia.

Their approach in the first half of the nineteenth century was rather ad hoc, very much a business of serendipity, to borrow the term coined by Horace Walpole (1754), which is a rather more complimentary term than that used by William Whewell (1794-1866) who described pre-nineteenth century scientific work as ‘blind gropings’. Certainly, a great deal of Britain’s early industrial achievement may look like the result of applied science and there were apologists, William Whewell prominent among them, who thought that Britain’s Industrial Revolution was a triumph of the inductive scientific methods proposed by Bacon. However careful examination makes it clear that opportunism and improvisation were just as important if not more so than the systematic application of scientific principles. The Dugans (2000), quoting from Simon Schaffer, offer the following observation:

Part of the solution to the Industrial Revolution riddle lies in the British technical expertise in three apparently unrelated areas: cannons, clocks and beer. To take the example of steam locomotives like the Rocket: British cannon-makers had pioneered the kind of precision engineering needed to make pistons to fit exactly inside their cylinders to form an airtight seal. British clock-makers knew how to translate the up and down movement of big levers into a circular motion. And British brewers had worked out how to keep steam pressure constant, so it did not blow up in your face. [Dugan: 2000: 25].

In effect, Robert Stephenson ((1803-1859) produced one of the most important and revolutionary developments in the early British Industrial Revolution through an amalgam of other people’s tried and tested procedures rather than through the application of scientific principles. Whewell, however, and others imbued with pride in national achievements, thought otherwise and tried to argue that Victorian scientists and technologists were answering Bacon’s call for progress through Inductive Science.

2: The Natural Philosophers interpret Bacon’s program

Much of the spade-work, literally as well as metaphorically, in accumulating the scientific data necessary to the development of inductive science was done by the likes of Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) who interpreted the Baconian program as the ‘complete discovery of the face of the earth’ (1767: p. xvii.) Certainly the breath-taking accumulation of data by post-Baconian Natural Philosophers, and the astonishing breadth of their interests was an ambitious attempt to realise the dream which Bacon had articulated inThe Advancement of and Proficience of Learning Divine and Human (1605), Instauratio Magna (1620), The New Atlantis (1627), and Sylva Sylvarum or Natural History (1627). Robert Jameson (1774-1854), for instance, Regius Professor of Natural History and Keeper of the Museum in the University of Edinburgh, left behind him forty thousand specimens of rocks and minerals, ten thousand fossils, eight thousand stuffed birds and many more insects and flowers (Gillispie: (1951): 66). Joseph Priestley himself wrote on theology, history, education, politics, psychology, optics, electricity, botany and pneumatic chemistry (ibid. 23). Thomas Young (1773-1829) who succeeded Humphry Davy as Professor at Rumford's Royal Institution, learned Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Chaldae, and Samaritan, found the principle of hieroglyphic writing through his study of the Rosetta Stone, could grind lenses and turn a lathe, is recognised as a founder of actuarial science, studied physics and physiology, and identified colour-blindness and astigmatism (Gillispie: (1960): 411). Finally, Thomas Foster (1789-1860), regarded as one of the founders of meteorology, studied astronomy, mechanics and aerostatics. When he was only sixteen he compiled a weather journal. He also had extensive interests in anatomy, physiology, and phrenology, in colours, the life of birds, his study of the violin, and of the law, his editions of Lieder der Deutschen (Songs of the Germans ), of Catu1lus and the original letters of Locke, Shaftesbury and Algernon Sydney which he had inherited, his poems, and his metaphysical treatises. When he fell ill in 1810, his attention was directed to the influence of the atmosphere on health and diseases; in 1811 he took up the study of astronomy after the appearance of a comet, and in 1812 published his Researches about Atmospheric Phaenomena. In July 1819 he discovered a comet. Five years later he founded, with Sir Richard Phillips, a Meteorological Society (which lasted only a short while however), returned to his experiments on the influence of the atmosphere on the origins of diseases, especially cholera, and in 1831 made a balloon ascent. Characteristically, he did not omit to publish an autobiography and two volumes of Epistolarum Fosterarium. This is a fragment of his activity. In the catalogue of the Royal Society alone he is represented with thirty-five papers.

Young’s work on the Rosetta stone is of particular interest. In 1801, the British brought this 2,000 years old Egyptian artefact to Britain after a successful campaign against Napoleon. The circumstances under which the British acquired the Stone is a notable example of two imperial powers competing not simply for land and trade routes, but also for scientific knowledge. Bligh’s expedition on ‘The Bounty’ which the British had purported to be a scientific voyage was in fact part of their naval strategy against the French, and Napoleon’s expedition against Egypt was primarily an act of imperial conquest, but the 126 French scientists whom the expedition took with them were there not for military purposes. The French had two other aims in mind. The first was commercial. They were surveying for a possible route between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea as a way of bypassing the Cape of Good Hope where French merchant shipping was vulnerable to British attacks. (A French engineer did eventually realise the dream and supervised the construction of the Suez Canal.) However, there was a secondary aim. When the French capitulated, the British Admiralty insisted that all scientific papers and Egyptian artefacts be surrendered to the British. The French, however, rung a concession out of their enemies – only papers and artefacts which a man could carry were to be surrendered. Everything else had to be relinquished. The Rosetta stone was too heavy for one man to carry and the British took charge of it, taking it back for display in the British Museum. It would not be the first ancient artefact which they expropriated as a result of military conquest and imperial expansion - and financial exploitation (e.g. the ‘Elgin’ marbles). In fact, imperial expansion had a drastic effect on the import of specimens and artefacts from around the world and went a long way to answering Priestley’s call for the ‘complete discovery of the face of the earth’. The imperial adventuring, as well as supposedly ‘scientific’ expeditions (such as Captain Bligh’s ill-fated trip to Tahiti partly in search of the breadfruit tree) provided the organisers of the Great Exhibition of 1851 with a veritable cornucopia.

Captain Bligh’s trip on the Bounty is famous for the mutiny by its crew. A later naval voyage is as famous as Bligh’s is notorious. Charles Darwin (1809-1882), perhaps the most important of the Victorian ‘Merchants of Light’ (a term given to very important functionaries in Bacon’s Salomon’s House), set off on his famous voyage in the Beagle in 1831.

During the voyage he collected specimens to send home so that others might catalogue them. Unlike the earlier and very meticulous John Ray (1627-1705) cataloguing was not Darwin’s forte. We can derive some idea of the volume of collecting that he and his fellow naturalists were engaged in by considering the difficulties which he himself encountered when he discovered that the cataloguers whom he wished to employ were suffering from overload.

Although not adequate to, or too busy for, the task of cataloguing the riches he had collected, Darwin did celebrate the rich profusion of the natural world, reflecting inThe Origin of Species’ (1859)on ‘the vast diversity of the plants and animals’ (71) and concluding that the fecundity and the variety of the natural world are unstoppable because ‘each species tends by its geometrical ratio of reproduction to increase inordinately in number’, and ‘each large group tends to become still larger, and at the same time more divergent in character’ (444).

3: The Baconians celebrate Modern Inductive Science

The expansion in knowledge which Bacon promoted as an essential scientific objective was, to repeat the point, given a significant boost by what he himself called ‘the enlarging of the bounds of human empire’ (Jones: 480), transformed by his countrymen from informed control over the physical world into the extension of their control over other peoples. The expansion of the second British Empire and the seemingly exponential development in British manufacturing and international trading attendant on the British industrial revolution were a matter of pride for many Victorians. Their pride might well be viewed as the arrogance of men and women who thought that they had an almost divine mission to fulfil. Certainly for many Victorians, Britain was not the first among equals but the imperial state non-pareil. It is significant that some of the most energetic commentators on Victorian England’s growing imperial achievements were admirers of Francis Bacon, who was himself at work when the first British Empire was in its infancy, the initial work of colonising the Irish was well under way and British mariners had begun their predatory and lucrative incursions into the Americas.

Macaulay’s essay on Bacon (1837) is an early example of what I have described in the last paragraph. It is a celebration of Bacon as a revolutionary figure who ‘while still at college, planned that great intellectual revolution with which his name is inseparably connected’.

In describing this revolution Macaulay emphasises that the aim of Bacon’s revolution is to produce the ‘fruit’ of scientific activity, which Macaulay elaborates in the Victorian rhetorical ideals of ‘the multiplying of human enjoyments and the mitigating of human sufferings’: in short, ‘the relief of man's estate’.

For Macaulay, the key words in Baconian philosophy are Utility and Progress. To achieve these, however, he did not think, as some Victorians did, that it was necessary to break from the recent feudal period into a world of modernity which a powerful but ultimately ineffective minority vigorously opposed. He adopted Bacon’s longer historical perspective and applauded his call to overthrow something which preceded feudalism - ‘the ancient philosophy’. The inadequacies of its proponents are clear to both men. It had ‘disdained to be useful’, ‘was content to be stationary’ and ‘dealt largely in theories of moral perfection, which were so sublime that they never could be more than theories’. Above all, they ‘could not condescend to the humble office of ministering to the comfort of human beings’.

Macaulay is unremitting in his scorn for the Ancients. In his account, they would have no truck with putting a roof over their heads or teaching the uses of metals, and as far as they were concerned, to ‘impute to such (men) any share in the invention or improvement of a plough, a ship, or a mill’ was ‘an insult’. But, to turn from this ancient ‘rant’ to the lessons to be learned from Bacon is ‘delightful’. In a telling little parallel, Macaulay sets the ornamental against the useful and argues that if you judge Platonic thought by its ‘flowers and leaves’, you will think it the ‘noblest of trees’, but if you follow Bacon’s example and judge a tree by its fruits, you will have a less favourable opinion of Plato. Macaulay, like the chemist, Faraday, would seem to have made his mind up that the Useful is more valuable than the Beautiful. An apple, it would seem, is there to be eaten, not gazed on as a thing of beauty or regarded as a suitable subject for a still life painting.

Macaulay’s presentation of the ancients is truly iconoclastic. Having conceded that their philosophy might ‘sharpen and invigorate’ the minds of their devotees, he then points out that one might say the same about ‘the orthodox Lilliputians and the heretical Blefuscudians about the big ends and the little ends of eggs’. His final comment is quite dismissive and authentically Baconian: ‘such disputes could add nothing to the stock of knowledge….no accumulation of truth, no heritage of truth acquired by the labour of one generation and bequeathed to another, to be again transmitted with large additions to a third’. For all the (metaphorical) ploughing, harrowing, reaping and threshing, at the end of the day the bins contained nothing more than ‘smut and stubble’. It is also worth noting Macaulay’s diction which is dominated by the notion of accumulating: ‘stock of knowledge’, ‘accumulation of truth’, and ‘large additions to a third’.

However, there is a slight distortion in Macaulay’s presentation of Bacon’s attitude to the Ancients. In The Advancement of Learning, apart from quoting Scripture to support his arguments, Bacon also quotes from or refers favourably to Archimedes, Cicero, Democritus, Epominandas, Euclid, Hippocrates, Horace, Livy, Philo Judaeus, Plato Pliny, Sallust, Seneca, Tacitus, the cabalistic Hermes Trismegistus, Varro, Virgil and Xenophon. As one might expect from a man of the Renaissance, Bacon has an impressive familiarity with classical texts. But why therefore is Macaulay negative in his presentation of what Bacon has to say about the Ancients and why does he quote Bacon’s objections so approvingly? In fact, his attitude to Greek and Roman classical authors as expressed in the essay is astonishingly at odds with what we know of Macaulay’s life-long devotion to their work. This, after all, is the writer whose Lays of Ancient Rome (1842) and its famous image of Publius Horatius, Spurius Lartius, and Titus Herminus defending the Sublician bridge against the invading Etruscans and sacrificing their own lives to save the Roman Republic was immensely popular with his contemporary audiences.

For Macaulay’s Bacon, however, the Ancients are the people who have held back human progress and it suits Macaulay’s purpose to put aside Ancient Heroes, because he and his idol Bacon are incensed by the way in which the Ancient Philosophers did not so much neglect natural science as fail to cultivate it for bettering the human condition.

That certainly is part of what Bacon agues, but he also attacks the mediaeval schoolmen for reinforcing the barrier to progress and his fierce onslaught is worth quoting at length:

The generalities of the schoolmen are for a while good and proportionable; but then when you descend into their distinctions and decisions, instead of a fruitful womb for the use and benefit of man’s life, they end in monstrous altercations and barking questions.  So as it is not possible but this quality of knowledge must fall under popular contempt, the people being apt to contemn truths upon occasion of controversies and altercations, and to think they are all out of their way which never meet; and when they see such digladiation (i.e. using words trivially) about subtleties, and matters of no use or moment, they easily fall upon that judgment of Dionysius of Syracusa, Verba ista sunt senum otiosorum (Those are the words of idle old men). Notwithstanding, certain it is that if those schoolmen to their great thirst of truth and unwearied travail of wit had joined variety and universality of reading and contemplation, they had proved excellent lights, to the great advancement of all learning and knowledge; but as they are, they are great undertakers indeed, and fierce with dark keeping.  But as in the inquiry of the divine truth, their pride inclined to leave the oracle of God’s word, and to vanish in the mixture of their own inventions; so in the inquisition of nature, they ever left the oracle of God’s works, and adored the deceiving and deformed images which the unequal mirror of their own minds, or a few received authors or principles, did represent unto them.  And thus much for the second disease of learning (Jones: 205).

The Ancients therefore suffered from a special kind of blindness to real human achievement from which modern scientific inquiry will liberate us. So while we know that the gunpowder and printing were invented during the Middle Ages, we do not know who invented them or exactly when. Macaulay goes further than Bacon and argues that even though we know the approximate date of those inventions, the people living at the time would not in any event have appreciated the importance of the two inventions. The reason is quite clear: the Ancients and their ‘enthusiastic votaries’, the mediaeval schoolmen, were blind to the value of the Useful: ‘George of Trebisond and Marsilio Ficino would not easily have been brought to believe that the inventor of the printing-press had done more for mankind than themselves, or than those ancient writers of whom they were the enthusiastic votaries ’.

4: William Whewell’s valuable contributions

The Reverend William Whewell (1794-1866) was another early Victorian enthusiast for Bacon’s work. His distinguished career, the breadth of his interests and the significance of his contributions make him another Baconian worth listening to. He attended Trinity College, Cambridge as an undergraduate, eventually being elected as Master. The range of his scientific, philosophical, academic and literary interests rivals those of Priestley, Jameson, Young, and Foster. Apart from winning a Royal Medal for work on the ocean tides, translating Goethe, and publishing sermons, he wrote poetry (but not what one might call ‘distinguished’). He was also adept at coining neologisms, among them ‘anode’, ‘cathode’, ‘linguistics’, and, most appositely, considering that the geologist Sir Charles Lyell was his contemporary, ‘uniformitarianism’. He also invented the Whewell equation. Before Whewell, mathematicians had conventionally used an equation to a curve, which expressed a relationship between coordinates, these being constant for every point in the curve. Whewell’s equation, however, allowed a mathematician to determine the shape of a curve without reference to a system of co-ordinates.

Apart from works on such matters as mechanics, physics, geology, and economics, he also produced one of The Bridgewater Treatisesentitled ‘Astronomy and General Physics considered with reference to Natural Theology. His formidable oeuvre also included, in 1837 A History of the Inductive Sciencesand, in 1840, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciencesin which he explored the Baconian project to connect ideas and data in a scientific system which would explain how things work.

In 1858 Whewell went so far as to up-date one of Bacon’s major works. In his version of the Novum Organumhis praise for Bacon is fulsome:

It is to our immortal countryman, Bacon, that we owe the broad announcement of this grand and fertile principle ; and the development of the idea, that the whole of natural philosophy consists entirely of a series of inductive generalizations, commencing with the most circumstantially stated particulars, and carried up to universal laws, or axioms, which comprehend in their statements every subordinate degree of generality; and of a corresponding series of inverted reasoning from generals to particulars, by which these axioms are traced back into their remotest consequences, and all particular propositions deduced from them ; as well those by whose immediate considerations we rose to their discovery, as those of which we had no previous knowledge.

Whewell recognises that despite Bacon’s breadth of vision, his ‘particular precepts’ are now useless. The reason for this is that he did not have at his disposal what Whewell and his contemporaries have – ‘a large actual progress of solid truth to look back upon’. Armed with this, the moderns have ‘the prospect of better success.’ In fact, Whewell is careful and generous to emphasise the difference between himself and Bacon by recognising the restrictions under which the latter laboured.

His attitudes to the Ancients differs further from Macaulay’s since he goes so far as to claim that it might be possible to learn some valuable lessons from what has gone before: ‘to extract from the past progress of science the elements of an effectual and substantial method of Scientific Discovery’. Not every ‘Baconian’, then, was as iconoclastic as Thomas Babington. Whewell is basing his claim on a wide-ranging study of both ancient and modern texts, including the works of Plato, Aristotle, Roger Bacon, Francis Bacon, Newton and Herschel. He regards knowledge of their work as essential to the task which he has set himself of adapting Baconian principles to contemporary scientific work. He is aiming at nothing less than the construction of a ‘Newer Organ’, a task which he judges to be not at all presumptuous based as it is on the knowledge of Physical Science which the ‘present generation’ commands. In fact, he has an unalloyed confidence in the knowledge which has been acquired by the present generation and is very much part of what constituted the optimism of early Victorian culture.

Whewell incorporates into the programme which he is proposing Bacon’s radical revision, not rejection, of Aristotle. According to Whewell, ‘The name Organum was applied to the works of Aristotle which treated of Logic, that is, of the method of establishing and proving knowledge, and of renting error, by means of Syllogisms’. Bacon designed his ‘Novum Organum’to replace what he considered to be a method which did not promote ‘the augmentation of real and useful knowledge’ (again a key term emphasising expansion and accumulation). However, Whewell, consistently with what he has already stated, recognises that ‘Plato and Aristotle in the ancient world, Richard de Saint Victor and Roger Bacon in the middle ages, Galileo and Gilbert, Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, in modem times, were led to offer precepts and maxims, as fitted to guide us to a real and fundamental knowledge of nature’. Previous scientific thinkers, contrary to Macaulay’s claim, have not been completely blinded by the Ancients to the value of applied science because the best writers on the philosophy of science have emphasised something authentically Baconian: ‘instances of the application of scientific truths, which are subservient to the uses of practical life; to the support, the safety, the pleasure of man’.

Indeed, Whewell notes that Bacon himself mentioned such discoveries and inventions as the invention of gunpowder, glass, and printing, the introduction of silk, and the ‘discovery’ of America. He mentions this as a prelude to asking some most important questions about these inventions and discoveries which were in practice being ignored by those of his contemporaries who more interested in market success than he was: ‘Yet which of these can be said to have been the results of a theoretical enlargement of human knowledge?’ That question implies a further – ‘How much of the progress which human beings have made to date has been the product of applied science?’ He concedes that Columbus’ ‘discovery’ of America was partly due to his conviction that earth was round, but there he draws a line between the pre-Victorian and the Victorian. He asserts that, while previous discoveries may have been spectacular, and fulfilled what was to become a Victorian ideal-an increase in man’s ‘power of adding to his comforts and communicating with his fellow-men’-they have not resulted in any significant increase in our ‘theoretical knowledge’. Former scientists have not in fact achieved what his contemporaries have and furthered the development of Inductive Science.

For it is contemporary scientific practitioners who have exploited the benefits of applied science Whewell is clearly very satisfied with their achievements offers a most fulsome tribute to contemporary applied science which in ‘the history of most of the useful arts in our time offers abundant proofs & illustrations’ of the benefits which can now be enjoyed. He is proud of such valuable devices as the barometer for use as a weather-glass, the air-pump, the diving-bell, the balloon, the invention of steam engines, steam boats, screw-propellers, locomotive engines, railroads and bridges and structures of all kinds, improved lightning-conductors for buildings and ships. Clearly, as one might expect from a Baconian, no argument can be advanced without a multiplicity of supporting examples. Victorian habits of accumulating were shaping the culture in ways which some would be proud of and others learn to perceive as an alarming and sometime confusing new phenomenon.

Whewell clearly needs to accumulate examples to support his expansion of the catalogue of what he clearly admires as notable achievements exemplifying the creative cooperation of theory and practice, There may have been something accidental in the discovery of the telescope but both Roger Bacon and Descartes had already taught the principles involved in its operations; Newton had invented a reliable thermometer by paying attention to natural laws; Watt’s improvements in the workings of the steam engine offer an example of how superior applied science is to ‘the blind gropings of mere practical habit’; the improvements in lightning conductors are the work of Sir William Snow Harris, who has based his experiments on his careful studies in electrical theory and has used theory and calculation at every step; Cavendish and Lire have taught how to measure the quantity of oxygen in the air; Lussac and Graham have devised methods for measuring the bleaching power of a substance; while Davy has constructed his safety-lamp according to his researches into the behaviour of flames and has used his discoveries about galvanic batteries to protect ships’ bottoms. Theory is married to practice and the results benefit humanity.

However, you cannot divorce the results and applications of applied science from commercial considerations. Whewell celebrates the achievements in the land sciences because as a result of skilled surveying by geologists, potential investors in mining projects have been saved from ruin by not investing in schemes for digging coal where none is to be found.

But, one wonders, given that Victorian culture was deeply penetrated and shaped by obsessions with gross material accumulation, how deeply was it penetrated and shaped by what men like Whewell wrote and lectured about? Were the businessmen, the investors and the consumers aware of the propositions which Whewell was advancing? Were they concerned about them at all? The answer is probably not. They were probably far more interested in the results of the work of men like Sir Roderick Murchison whom Whewell praises for accurately calculating the existence of gold in abundance in Australia years before the actual digging began. Perhaps, for investors and speculators, material gain was simply far more important than a Cambridge academic singing the praises of Inductive Science.

In providing what he obviously thinks is a convincing case for the triumph applied science, Whewell, as I noted above, feels obliged to provide a plethora of examples. In this, he is following Bacon’s principle that ‘General statements depend on the accumulation of accurate observations and careful experiments’ (Moffett: ed.1847:119). Thus, on the basis of the evidence which he has accumulated, Whewell is able to offer a triumphal ‘general statement’ on the present Condition of the National Sciences: i.e. ‘clear and theoretical insight’ has replaced ‘blind trial’.

5. Faraday celebrates the Beauty of the Useful

In 1848, the chemist, Michael Faraday (1791-1867), produced an ideal example of the inductive science which Whewell was celebrating. His The Chemical History of a Candle was a series of lectures which he delivered at the Royal Institution before ‘a juvenile audience’. One can contrast the technical explanations which Faraday offers his audience with the way in which The Governor from Salomon’s House does not, or perhaps cannot, offer his guests any detailed insight into how their science works. For instance, he asks his guests to accept that they ‘make a number of kinds of serpents, worms, flies, fishes….to be perfect creatures….and have sexes, and do propagate’. While he denies that there is any element of serendipity, he is not prepared to reveal the workings of this eugenics program: ‘Neither do we do this by chance, but we know beforehand of what matter and commixture what kind of those creatures will arise’ (483). He has, fortunately for him, already taken out an insurance against his guests asking any awkward questions by claiming a privileged position. He quotes the prayer which ‘one of the wise men of the wise men’ of the society of Salomon’s House has offered to the Judaeo-Christian God whom they worship: ‘Lord God of heaven and earth, thou hath vouchsafed of thy grace to those of our order to know the works of thy creation and the secrets of them, and to discern….between divine miracles, works of nature, works of art, and impostures and illusions of all sorts’. (459) By a strange irony, the idea that the workings of the universe are arcanal and that their mystery is granted to a privileged few is a very odd basis for launching scientific investigation but consistent with a hierarchical view of social structure. Atlantis is hierarchical; so was Jacobean England; so is Bacon’s approach. The inductive science of the few applied for the benefit of the many – a description which suit equally well for the declared aims of Victorian scientists such as the pioneer chemist, Faraday. Faraday, however, does not claim divinely sanctioned minority access to truth. His approach is altogether more down to earth.

The published edition of Faraday’s Lectures of 1849 was prefaced by the editor, William Crookes, with comments couched in the contemporary idiom of triumphal progress that Macaulay and Whewell would have appreciated. He begins with the huge interval in time between the use of the pine-torch and the invention of the paraffin candle, and, pursuing the idea of progress, asserts that ‘The means adopted by man to illuminate his home at night, stamp at once his position in the scale of Civilisation’, repeating what seems to be at times a Victorian obsession with their relative standing not simply in white Anglo-Saxon but in global civilisation. According to Crooke, the time lapse between the separate inventions of the two forms of lighting may be counted in millennia but in the nineteenth century it has taken only a life-time for the theories behind the invention of the second to be determined during which ‘Atom by atom, link by link, has the reasoning chain been forged’. The Governor from Salomon’s House makes a similar assertion when he points out to the English mariners that ‘three thousand years ago….the navigation of the world….was greater than at this day’. However, he assures them that he is perfectly well aware ‘how much it is increased with you within these six-score years’ (Jones; 462). The Governor pays tribute to the speed of progress in fifteenth century navigation and Crooke pays tribute to nineteenth century inventiveness. But Crooke is also commenting implicitly on the necessary limitations on the offerings from the Governor from Salomon’s. The invention of the paraffin lamp is a triumph for modern science over previous science because now, as opposed to then, ‘the great phenomena are known’ and ‘the child who masters these Lectures knows more of fire than Aristotle did’.

Crooke ends his preface on a distinctly Baconian note: ‘Among the readers of this book some few may devote themselves to increasing the stores of knowledge: the Lamp of Science must burn’ (my emphasis).

Faraday offers his audience a fairly comprehensive account of his chosen subject, an account which is obviously based on a very confident grasp of technical matters. His professionalism is apparent as he lectures on the sources, structure, mobility and brightness of a candle flame; the air necessary for combustion and the production of water; the nature of water and the functions in the combustion process of hydrogen and oxygen; the production of carbonic acid; the functions in the process of carbon or charcoal and the similarities between respiration and the burning of a candle.

Interestingly, his opening remark refers to a surprising obligation: ‘But we must speak of candles as they are in commerce’. This is a scientific world quite different from that envisaged by Bacon. The people of Atlantis do not deal in commodities: they ‘maintain a trade, not for gold, silver, or jewels, nor for silks, nor for spices, nor for any other commodity of matter, but only for God’s first creature, which was Light; to have light (I say) of the growth of all parts of the world’ (Jones: 469). Faraday’s, however, is a science with a firm purchase on the world of industry and trade. Hence he now describes and illustrates the industrial process which candle-makers use to produce their raw material. His description is detailed and precise:

The fat or tallow is first boiled with quick-lime, and made into a soap… the soap is decomposed by sulphuric acid, which takes away the lime, and leaves the fat re-arranged as stearic acid….a quantity of glycerine is produced at the same time. Glycerine-absolutely a sugar, or a substance similar to sugar-comes out of the tallow in this chemical change. The oil is then pressed out of it; and you see here this series of pressed cakes, shewing how beautifully the impurities are carried out by the oily part as the pressure goes on increasing, and at last you have left that substance which is melted, and cast into candles as here represented’.

He shows his audience a sample of different candles, made variously of: stearin (three glycerids, monostearin, distearin, tristearin, formed by the combination of stearic acid and glycerine and the chief constituent of tallow or suet); the purified oil of the spermaceti whale; yellow bees-wax and refined bees-wax; and paraffin obtained from the bogs of Ireland. He then presents a final example which has a very interesting provenance and the way in which Faraday refers to it introduces more than a glimpse of Victorian gun-boat diplomacy: ‘I have here also a substance brought from Japan, since we have forced an entrance into that out-of-the-way place’. (my emphasis).

He then demonstrates how to transform the raw materials into the finished article: ‘And how are these candles made? I have told you about dips, and I will shew you how moulds are made….Here is a frame, with a number of moulds fastened in it. The first thing to be….done is to put a wick through them….the tallow is then melted, and the moulds are filled….when the moulds are cool, the excess of tallow is poured off at one corner, and then cleaned off altogether….the ends of the wick are cut away’.

No doubt mindful that candle is not only the result of a chemical process but also a commodity, Faraday turns from the subject of ‘mere manufacture’ to the subject of ‘luxury in candles’, and this lecturer in Chemistry now engages his audience in the vexed question of the relationship between the Beautiful and the Useful. He states his objections to ‘beautifully coloured’ and ‘beautifully shaped’ candles quite forcibly: ‘All, however, that is fine and beautiful is not useful. These fluted candles, pretty as they are, are bad candles….when we come to these refinements, we are obliged to sacrifice a little in utility’.

This is not his final word on the issue as he mixes theory and practice in the kind of Inductive Science so celebrated by Whewell

….as to the light of the candle. We will light one or two, and set them at work in the performance of their proper functions….there is a much more wonderful thing about the burning of a candle than this. You have here a solid substance with no vessel to contain it; and how is it that this solid substance can get up to the place where the flame is? How is it that this solid gets there, it not being a fluid? Or, when it is made a fluid, then how is it that it keeps together? This is a wonderful thing about a candle.

Faraday is asking questions which he answers in a piece of inductive science which includes someone else’s serendipity:

Here is a clever invention of some costermonger or street stander in the market-place for the shading of their candles on Saturday nights, when they are selling their greens, or potatoes, or fish. I have very often admired it. They put a lamp-glass round the candle, supported on a kind of gallery, which clasps it, and it can be slipped up and down as required. By the use of this lamp-glass, employed in the same way, you have a steady flame, which you can look at, and carefully examine, as I hope you will do, at home.

After observing the success of the street trader’s home-made solution to a problem, Faraday moves into theorising about what he has observed:

A beautiful cup is formed… As the air comes to the candle it moves upwards by the force of the current which the heat of the candle produces… and so cools all the sides of the wax, as to keep the edge much cooler than the part within; the part within melts by the flame that runs down the wick as far as it can go before it is extinguished, but the part on the outside does not melt. If I made a current in one direction, my cup would be lop-sided, and the fluid would consequently run over,-for the same force of gravity which holds worlds together holds this fluid in a horizontal position, and if the cup be not horizontal, of course the fluid will run away in guttering.

The explanation which Faraday has offered his audience reinforces for him what he has already claimed about the relationship between the Beautiful and the Useful: ‘You see now why you would have had such a bad result if you were to burn these beautiful candles…which are irregular, intermittent in their shape, and cannot therefore have that nicely-formed edge to the cup which is the great beauty in a candle’.

He argues that you can align beauty and utility: ‘the perfection of a process--that is, its utility--is the better point of beauty about it. It is not the best looking thing, but the best acting thing, which is the most advantageous to us’. To equate a thing’s beauty with its practical benefits to human life is not a surprising piece of aesthetic theorising from a chemist who makes it quite clear in his lectures that it is the processes and materials with which he deals which he finds astonishingly beautiful. Two statements are particularly revealing.

In the first he celebrates the candle’s impact on the objects around it.

You have the glittering beauty of gold and silver, and the still higher lustre of jewels, like the ruby and diamond; but none of these rival the brilliancy and beauty of flame. What diamond can shine like flame? It owes its lustre at night-time to the very flame shining upon it. The flame shines in darkness, but the light which the diamond has is as nothing until the flame shine upon it, when it is brilliant again. The candle alone shines by itself, and for itself, or for those who have arranged the materials’.

In the second he finds beauty in the working of the candle: ‘I cannot imagine a more beautiful example than the condition of adjustment under which a candle makes one part subserve to the other to the very end of its action. A combustible thing like that, burning away gradually, never being intruded upon by the flame, is a very beautiful sight’.

He evens uses capillary attraction to assert the beauty he discerns and to assert his modernity. He asks how the flame gets hold of the fuel and answers his own question – capillary attraction which, he declares, is a ‘beautiful point’. He imagines someone objecting to his enthusiasm: ‘Capillary attraction!’ you say, ‘the attraction of hairs’. He replies to the imagined objection: ‘Well, never mind the name: it was given in old times, before we had a good understanding of what the real power was’. He has not actually answered the imagined objection which is to his finding capillary attraction beautiful, and not to his use of the term. Further, his pinning the responsibility for the name on the Ancients is a most intriguing piece of aesthetic theorising which suggests that you cannot recognise and appreciate beauty until you discover the true nature of the power behind it . Substantially he is arguing the same case as Burke and Bell, and after Burke and Bell, Ruskin, all of whom seek to ground the perception of beauty in what is objectively verifiable, whether a matter of observed consistency of physical reactions (Burke), physiological explanations (Bell), or divinely ordained human reactions to the multiplicity of eternal natural truths (Ruskin). Geology and Evolutionary Theories may have been particularly divisive for many Victorians, but the divisions seem to pale in the context of so much celebration of beauty in the richness and the workings of the natural world whether represented by scientists like Darwin and Faraday, or painters like Turner and their advocates like Ruskin.

Mindful of his audience, Faraday asks them a question about a popular game and explains what the players observe during the game as if he were giving a lecture on an aspect of physics

‘Am I right in supposing that anybody here has played at snapdragon? I do not know a more beautiful illustration of the philosophy of flame, as to a certain part of its history, than the game of snapdragon. First, here is the dish; and let me say, that when you play snapdragon properly, you ought to have the dish well-warmed; you ought also to have warm plums and warm brandy, which, however, I have not got. When you have put the spirit into the dish, you have the cup and the fuel; and are not the raisins acting like the wicks? I now throw the plums into the dish, and light the spirit, and you see those beautiful tongues of flame that I refer to. You have the air creeping in over the edge of the dish forming these tongues. Why? Because, through the force of the current and the irregularity of the action of the flame, it cannot flow in one uniform stream. The air flows in so irregularly that you have what would otherwise be a single image, broken up into a variety of forms, and each of these little tongues has an independent existence of its own’.

Mindful also of the major rationale for his giving a series of scientific lectures, he promises his audience that, having spent so much time in ‘illustrations’, such as playing snapdragon, he will in future ‘hold you more strictly to the philosophy of the thing’, i.e. he will spend more time expatiating on the theoretical issues. He invites them to be involved in a common pursuit: ‘We come here to be philosophers; and I hope you will always remember that whenever a result happens, especially if it be new, you should say, "What is the cause? Why does it occur?" and you will in the course of time find out the reason’. The explanation is clear and purposive, and like all good teachers, Faraday has gauged his arguments and his illustrative material to suit the needs of his ‘juvenile’ audience.

6: Celebrating the Imperial Dimension of British Science

In his essay on Sir James McKintosh (1835), Macaulay’s progressive tone when he considers Britain’s growing dominance on the international scene is as triumphal as Whewell’s celebrations of the successes of British inductive science.

Macaulay celebrates the triumphal progress of the British towards, as he and many of his contemporaries saw it, global supremacy as a civilisation and an imperial power sustained inevitably by the Royal Navy, and he celebrates the export of civilised benefits to the rest of the world:

During the course of seven centuries the wretched and degraded race have become the greatest and most highly civilised people that ever the world saw, have spread their dominion over every quarter of the globe, have scattered the seeds of mighty empires and republics over vast continents of which no dim intimation had ever reached Ptolemy or Strabo, have created a maritime power which would annihilate in a quarter of an hour the navies of Tyre, Athens, Carthage, Venice, and Genoa together, have carried the science of healing, the means of locomotion and correspondence, every mechanical art, every manufacture, everything that promotes the convenience of life, to a perfection which our ancestors would have thought magical (my emphases).

Incidentally, the Governor produces an astonishing myth when he tells his visitors that the Deluge had stimulated nations around the globe to build huge fleets. In one fairly risible example (463) he claims that ‘China also and the great Atlantis (which you call America), which have now but junks and canoes, abounded then in tall ships’!

Macaulay’s view is extreme but was perhaps surpassed by another admirer of Bacon, Charles Kingsley who shared with Whewell a conviction of the importance of Bacon in the history of Inductive Science. In his lecture on the study of Natural History delivered at Reading in 1846 he celebrated England as the nation to be rightly credited with the conquest and control of the natural world:

Bear in mind both these last great proverbs; and combine them in your mind. Remember that while England is, and ever will be, behindhand in metaphysical and scholastic science, she is the nation which above all others has conquered nature by obeying her; that as it pleased God that the author of that proverb, the father of inductive science, Bacon Lord Verulam, should have been an Englishman , so it has pleased Him that we, Lord Bacon’s countrymen, should improve that precious heirloom of science, inventing, producing, exporting, importing, till it seems as if the whole human race, and every land from the equator to the pole must henceforth bear the indelible impress and sign manual of English science. [my emphases]

And bear in mind, as I said just now, that this study of natural history is the grammar of that very physical science which has enabled England thus to replenish the earth and subdue it. Do you not see, then, that by following these studies you are walking in the very path to which England owes her wealth; that you are training in yourselves that habit of mind which God has approved as the one which He has ordained for Englishmen, and are doing what in you lies toward carrying out, in after life, the glorious work which God seems to have laid on the English race, to replenish the earth and subdue it?(my emphases).

7: Advertising: a radical and necessary change in practice

But the new industrial world, being, after all, an essentially commercial enterprise, had already developed more effective ways of promoting itself than lectures and articles by scholarly writers no matter what prestige the writers might have enjoyed.

As the industrialists prospered and cottage industries gave way to manufactories in which mass production created a seemingly exponential supply of commodities, advertisers were constrained to develop new strategies, moving their operations into spaces which were not available to the general public, such as sessions in which they planned and agreed with the retailers the advertising copy which they would then make available publicly. With this stage complete, the retailers moved into enclosed spaces such as shopping malls and large stores into which they welcomed their would-be customers, and which replaced the public thoroughfare described by Carlyle (146). But then openly advertising and selling your commodities in the streets had long been considered as something rather dirty, hence the connotations of the term sales ‘pitch’. When Ruskin opened a teashop in Paddington Street he refused to put up a sign announcing that he was open for business (Richards, 40).

The producers, who were often the advertisers, created and supplied a seemingly never ending multiplicity of commodities to ever-expanding markets. Ironically, in view of Ruskin’s aesthetic claim that the greater the number of the truths offered in a painting, the greater the painting, just so the greater the supply of commodities on offer, the healthier the market. And, whereas it had been a remarkable variety of natural specimens and observations which the scientists had collected and it was a remarkable natural fecundity and richness which both Darwin and Ruskin in their different areas celebrated, so it was an equally impressive man-made cornucopia which the organisers of the Great Exhibition celebrated in 1851.

8: Commodities supersede fossils: 1851

The Great Exhibition of 1851 was a key moment in the developments which I have described so far. The organisers of and participants in the Exhibition displayed a profuse array of functional items such as ingenious inventions and commodities readily available to those who could afford them, as well as the purely decorative items which were, in some cases, beyond financial value. The significance of this, I suggest, is that the zoological, botanical and geological specimens and fossils had served the cause of expanding human understanding of the world around us, but the commodities served the cause of ever-expanding markets and profits, and, for many, the tangible productions applied science now ranked far ahead of pure science.

The key elements in Bacon’s thinking as identified by Macaulay - Utility and Progress - were triumphant as essential constituents of the new capitalist order, and the way in which the generality benefit (or are supposed to benefit) from the ideas and the inventions of a few is a common feature of Bacon’s ideal republic and the Victorian social and economic order. But the rulers of New Atlantis have no truck with merchandise. The Governor tells his visitors that his people do not trade in ‘gold, silver, or jewels, nor for silks, nor for spices, nor any other commodity of matter" (Jones: 469). Bacon is not calling into play the full range of the meanings of the word ‘commodity’ available to him. At the time when he was writing, the word could indeed mean a thing produced for use or sale, and the profits which could accrue to the owner. Hence, the nascent plantations of the West Indies could be valued in 1630 for the way in which they ‘yeeld an exceeding commodity to this king’, and in 1621, Burton used the word to mean self-interest when he wrote that ‘Commodity is the steer of all their actions’ (see entries in OED). These are the meanings which Bacon is using here and yet it had another meaning altogether more in line with the objectives of the mission of the Fathers of New Atlantis. For the word was also used in Bacon’s day to refer to something of use or advantage to mankind. Hence in 1615 the god Vulcan was credited with being ‘the first that found out the commoditie of fire’, and, to go from the sublime to the domestic, hops used in brewing were described in 1594 as ‘a commoditie of greate and continuall use’. However, it was the first set of meanings which came to predominate and, as I argued above, the British interpreted and developed the key Baconian ideals of Utility and Progress as something supposedly bettering the human lot in a manner he did not envisage.

9: Arranging the Exhibition

Of course, the organisers of the Exhibition of 1851 had to decide on the way in which they would catalogue and organise the displays of the profuse achievements and collections which they were celebrating. Ironically, the way in which they organised the internal space of the Crystal Palace was fully in line with Ruskin’s description of spatial truth in Modern Painters I: ‘the state of vision in which all the details of an object are seen, and yet seen in such confusion and disorder that we cannot in the least tell what they are, or what they mean…. It is not mist between us and the object…., it is no cold and vacant mass, it is full and rich and abundant, and yet you cannot see a single form so as to know what it is. (Chapter 5: Of Truth of Space). Richards (1991) has argued that in the Crystal Palace, ‘it was impossible to draw the line between the many and various things out on display; in such a space things seemed to lose their distinctness’ (31).

There had been a disagreement as to how the Exhibition should be arranged. Prince Albert had initially settled on four main categories: ‘1. Raw Materials. 2. Machinery and Mechanical Inventions. 3. Manufactures. 4. Sculpture and Plastic Art generally’. In this, the Prince was following the example of the Natural Philosophers who labelled, categorised and compartmentalised their materials but the Exhibition’s Commissioners were, as was to be expected, commercially-minded, and they catered for consumers by arranging finished articles departmentally . They were not as systematic as the Philosophers in their organisation of their materials and by juxtaposing ‘articles of a similar kind from every part of the world’, achieved greater approval from the public than those exhibitors who worked according to Prince Albert’s strict categorisation(London Illustrated News: June 14th 1851. 501).

9a: The Decorative Contents of the Great Exhibition

In 1851, the world's largest known diamond was the Kohi-Noor. This has a spectacular history. Having been mounted on the Peacock Throne, the Mughal throne of India, it was later taken to the Badshahi Mosque in Lahore, stolen and taken to Persia, and brought back to the Punjab where the British took possession of it when they conquered the Punjab in 1849. Queen Victoria received it in 1851. At this point, the stone was an astonishing 186 carats. Along with over 2000 other diamonds, the Koh-I-Noor was mounted on the British Crown, proved to be the most popular exhibit on the India ‘stall’ and took its place in a spectacular display of jewelry, which included The Daria-I-Noor, an extremely rare pale pink diamond, and the 8th-century Tara Brooch, discovered in 1850. According to Charlotte Gere, Victoria was shown the famous blue 'Hope' diamond by Mr Hope himself, and after the closing of the Exhibition the Directors of the East India Company presented the Queen with 'a specimen of each of the principal articles exhibited by the Company'. Victoria’s Journal records the gift, of 'truly magnificent jewels’ among which were two hundred and twenty four very large pearls, a girdle of nineteen emeralds set round with diamonds, and fringed with pearls, and a collection of rubies one of which she believed to be the largest in the world. A truly satisfied monarch recorded: ‘I am very happy that the British Crown will possess these jewels, for I shall certainly make them Crown jewels' (see Gere). This gift, it must be emphasised, was a (feudal) token of her subjects’ homage to her as the royal head of an ever-expanding empire, and not a (capitalist) commodity. Nor either was the Celtic Revival jewellery exhibited by the Dublin jeweller George Waterhouse. But the decorative sat easily with the equally spectacular display of commodities, which were essentially the products of an economy driven by technological inventiveness.

9b: The Functional and Bacon’s vision: from Atlantis to Crystal Palace

According to the Official Catalogue, the Exhibition celebrated not only the strictly decorative. In this, the organisers behaved in line with Bacon’s sci-fi vision of the New Atlantis, and, like Bacon, side-lined scientific theory. In The New Atlantis (1627), when Bacon’s mariners arrive at a ‘terra incognita’, their host, the Governor, as I noted above, declares the raison d’être of the House of Salomon: ‘the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible’.

Not everything which the Governor lists, however, turns out to be equally important. As he develops his account, he leaves behind seeking the ‘knowledge of causes’ and the ‘secret motions of things’ and concentrates instead upon the extension of human control. Small wonder that Macaulay found so much to adulate in Bacon’s work. Pure science comes a poor second to the Governor’s Exhibition of the benefits of what one assumes is authentically applied science. If the applied science of Atlantis has in fact a basis in theoretical scientific work, however, this is something the reader has to take on trust.

Atlantis has a Lower Region consisting of caves which the people use for ‘all coagulations, indurations, refrigerations, and conservations of bodies’. They also use ‘natural mines’ for the production of ‘artificial metals’ whose benefits include curing some diseases and the prolongation of the lives of the cave-dwellers. They have high towers for insulation, refrigeration and conservation as well as astronomical observation. They do not, however, study the workings of the universe as Newton was to, but are concerned with the more practical matter of early warnings of rain, snow or hail. Practical meteorology rather than astrophysics. (But then astrophysics was not developed until nearly three and a half centuries after Bacon died.)

Atlantis, being a fictional Utopia, features a natural abundance. The people have ‘great lakes, both salt, and fresh; whereof (they) have use for the fish and fowl’. However, they seem to have no interest in the chemical composition of water. They are concerned with the practical value of their water systems. They have pools which strain fresh water out of salt and others which turn fresh water into salt. They combine nature and human inventiveness in harnessing ‘violent streams and cataracts’ and ‘engines’ which, by intensifying the winds, facilitate mechanical propulsion. However, the Governor offers his guests no details of how the engines ‘facilitate mechanical propulsion’.

They also have ‘Chambers of Health’ which feature body preparations with remarkable properties which can restore your skin from arefaction (dryness) and secure the ‘sinewes, vital parts, and the very juice and substance of the body’. It is easy in reading to forget that this is an august Governor of Salomon’s House and not some cheap-skate Victorian quack!

The Governor now turns to horticulture, and we move from sci-fi to the early world of botanical experiment. In this activity his people have no truck with the beautiful appearance of their orchards and gardens but are more concerned with the effects produced by grafting and injections, interfering with growth rhythms and growing times, altering sizes, shapes, colours and tastes, experimenting with different kinds of soil and growing without seeds! Inevitably, perhaps, they also produce ‘divers kinds of drinks’.

A special arrangement is used for some plants: ‘And many of them we so order, as they become of medicinal use’. Actually, the English mariners encounter Atlantis’ herbal remedies before they even set foot on shore. While still aboard, they are greeted by a dignitary who is carrying a fruit which looks like an orange and is used for a protection against infection. Some mariners are sick and they are housed in the Strangers’ House and given sleeping tablets. Shortly after Bacon’s image of herbal remedies in Atlantis (454), John Rae was cultivating his Cambridge medicinal herbal garden. Bacon also draws on a contemporary development when the Governor expounds on the horticulture of New Atlantis and describes experiments in growing plants without seeds, inventing new species, and converting one plant or tree into another. This is treading in a fiction on the same dangerous religious minefields as Rae and others did in actual history when their botanical pioneering work dared to call into question hallowed Biblical teaching on the Fixity of Species. They proved to be almost as controversial in their day as Darwin was in his.

As the Governor continues his exposition, the New Atlantis more and more resembles the Great Exhibition. There are the results of applied science: ‘divers mechanical arts…and stuffs made by them; as papers, linen, silks, tissues; dainty works of feathers of wonderful lustre; excellent dies…many of them are grown into use throughout the kingdom’. There are ‘furnaces of great diversities, and that keep great diversity of heats’ and ‘Instruments also which generate heat only by motion’.

Not only is Atlantis very advanced in its machinery, it is also highly inventive as regards sight and sounds. Its people have invented ‘perspective-houses’, where they demonstrate ‘all manner of lights and radiations’ and can ‘represent also all multiplications of light, which (they) carry to great distance…as in the heavens and remote places’. They also have developed their multiplications of light to such an extent that they can ‘represent things near as afar off; and things afar off as near’ and have produced ‘glasses’ allowing them ‘to see small and minute bodies perfectly and distinctly.

Their innovations in sound technology certainly feature the purely aesthetic. They have ‘sound-houses’ in which they are able to generate a range of sounds: ‘’dainty and sweet’, ‘great and deep’, ‘extenuate and sharp’, ‘tremblings and warblings’. In fact, the Governor claims that they ‘represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices and notes of beasts and birds’. They have also developed means for sound transmission, ‘means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances’. However, mindful of one of their main objectives, they have also made advances in assisting with partial deafness by developing ‘helps which set to the ear do further the hearing greatly’. However, the Governor tells his guests/readers what they have achieved but not how .

Bacon now expands on the achievements of his ideal New World, as the Governor continues his litany of successes which, like the Great Exhibition, feature the functional and the decorative. The functional includes

engine-houses, where are prepared engines and instruments for all sorts of motions ….swifter motions than any you have, either out of your muskets or any engine that you have: and to make them and multiply them more easily, and with small force, by wheels and other means: and to make them stronger and more violent than yours are; exceeding your greatest cannons and basilisks….ordnance and instruments of war, and engines of all kinds…. new mixtures and compositions of gun-powder, wild-fires burning in water, and unquenchable…. we have some degrees of flying in the air…ships and boats for going under water, and brooking of seas; also swimming-girdles and supporters….divers curious clocks, and other like motions of return: and some perpetual motions….a mathematical house, where are represented all instruments, as well of geometry as astronomy, exquisitely made.

It is not only the useful which is being catered for. Like the Great Exhibition, New Atlantis also has luxury goods departments: ‘perfume-houses…. wherewith we…. multiply smells…. imitate smells, making all smells to breathe outs of other mixtures than those that give them’. It also has a confectionery department specialising in ‘all sweet-meats, dry and moist; and divers pleasant wines, milks, broths, and sallets; in far greater variety than you have’.

The similarity to the Great Exhibition goes further: ‘We have also precious stones of all kinds, many of them of great beauty, and to you unknown; crystals likewise; and glasses of divers kinds; and amongst them some of metals vitrificated, and other materials besides those of which you make glass. Also a number of fossils, and imperfect minerals, which you have not. Likewise loadstones of prodigious virtue; and other rare stones, both natural and artificial’.

Like the French Seigneurs and the Chinese Emperors who exploited the potential of clockwork to create automata, fun toys for those seeking idle sources of amusement, the people of Atlantis have automata which ‘imitate also motions of living creatures, by images, of men, beasts, birds, fishes, and serpents’ and produce ‘a great number of other various motions, strange for equality, fineness, and subtilty’. Bacon can little have realised that the British harnessing of clockwork for more practicable things would contribute more than significantly to the British Industrial Revolution, and that using clockwork for toys would handicap the French and the Chinese in their technological development. (Duggan: chap. 4).

Atlantis needs, of course, a governmental structure, and a hierarchy of the Fellows of Salomon’s House, each with their areas of responsibility runs Bacon’s Utopia: The ‘Merchants of Light’ (an anticipation of scientists like Charles Darwin) travel to other countries and bring back to Atlantis ‘the books, and abstracts, and patterns of experiments of all other parts’; three ‘Depredators’ collect the experiments which are detailed in the books; three ‘Mystery-Men’ collect ‘the experiments of all mechanical arts; ….of liberal sciences; ….of practices which are not brought into arts’; three ‘Pioneers or Miners’ try out new experiments ‘such as themselves think good’. Their work is scrutinized by the Compilers who catalogue and categorize their experiments ‘to give the better light for the drawing of observations and axioms out of them’. The work now passes to the ‘Dowry-men or Benefactors’. These examine the others’ experiments and decide not only what is useful and practicable but also what will serve for ‘plain demonstration of causes, means of natural divinations, and the easy and clear discovery of the virtues and parts of bodies’.

There remain three groups in the hierarchy. First, there are the ‘Lamps’ who consider everything achieved to date and ‘direct new experiments, of a higher light, more penetrating into nature than the former’. Secondly, there are the ‘Inoculators’ who carry out the experiments. Finally, there are three ‘Interpreters of Nature’ who ‘raise the former discoveries by experiments into greater observations, axioms, and aphorisms’. Again, Bacon describes what happens, but how the ‘Interpreters of Nature’ actually do create ‘greater observations, axioms, and aphorisms’ remains a trade secret, even, one suspects, from Bacon who is, after all, engaged in creating a fiction and not writing a treatise in theoretical and applied science, or, indeed, lecturing on the chemistry of the candle.

The Fellows’ choice of eminent figures whose achievements they have chosen to honour reveal where their priorities are. They have two long galleries. One contains ‘patterns and samples of all manner of the more rare and excellent inventions’. In the other they place statues of those who variously invented: ships; ordnance and gunpowder; music; letters; printing; astronomy; works in metal; glass; silk of the worm; wine; corn and bread; sugars.

In a similar manner, the organisers of the Exhibition celebrated inventiveness. Alfred Charles Hobbs, in competitive mode, demonstrated the inadequacy of several respected locks of the day with his own inventions; Frederick Bakewell demonstrated a precursor to today's fax machine; and Mathew Brady was awarded a medal for his daguerreotypes. Visitor would also have seen the world’s first voting machine, a prototype Sam Colt Navy, the Tempest prognosticator (a barometer using leeches), and the first public toilets. These were situated in the Retiring Rooms of the Crystal Palace and the public paid a penny for the use of what must have been a most desirable facility!

9c: The International Dimension

Just as Atlantis’ Merchants of Light cast a wide net and bring back ideas from around the globe, so the organisers of the Exhibition celebrated the achievements of Britain’s ‘Merchants’ and the openness of a small set of islands off the European mainland to the rest of the world. They put on display such artefacts as gold ornaments and silver enamelled handicrafts fabricated by the Sunar caste from Sind, British India; C.C. Hornung of Copenhagen, Denmark, showed his single-cast iron frame for a piano, the first made in Europe; the ‘Trophy’ telescope was manufactured by Ross of London, and the equatorial mounting, designed by a German team, was made by Ransome & May of Ipswich. The Catalogue notes carefully that the telescope had a main lens of 11 inches (280mm) aperture and 16 feet (4.9m) focal length. In fact, engineering advances occupied a prominent place in the Exhibition. J. S. Marratt, for instance, exhibited a five-feet achromatic telescope and a transit theodolite used in surveying, tunnelling, and astronomical work.

9d: Celebrating a marriage between Ancient and Modern

The displays of new technology celebrated contemporary achievement but the Exhibition also featured artefacts from the past, including the ecclesiastical. Two items are of special relevance. They are the ‘Royal folio Bible’, which featured carved wood boards covered with a very fine Turkish produced ‘Moroccan’ leather, and metal mountings which were ‘ornamental’ rather than functional; and the Royal folio Common Prayer Book with its quintessentially English oak boards. Like the Bible, it too had ornamental metal hinges. It also had a clasp, but the catalogue writers were careful to point out that these were the product of electrotype, and according to Whewell, writing in his History of the Inductive Sciences, from the Earliest to the Present Times (1837)the Electrotype Process was ‘one of the great powers which manufacturing art employs’. (III. 537).

The advertisers’ descriptions of an Imperial quarto Bible, a Royal quarto altar service, and sundry small Common Prayers and Church Services offered similar benefits from using the new process. In addition to this, the Catalogue’s compilers celebrate the way in which the Electrotype process has preserved some very ancient artefacts. For instance, on Stall 11, some specimens of the Babylonian inscriptions in the British Museum were the ‘first perfect fount of this complicated type ever cast in moveable and combining pieces’. Modern technology then, preserving antiquity.

9e: Commodity Language

The Catalogue’s compilers ensured that the producers had a very prestigious advertising facility. The ‘Designers and Printers, Swainson and Dennys, of 97, New Bond Street, used Stall 21 to advertise: ‘Chintzes for dining-rooms, libraries, &c. Chintz, imitation of drapery, for wall-hangings, curtains, &c; of tree, flowers, drab leaves, &c; of groups of flowers and ribbons; of the acacia; of groups of flowers in rustic panel; and of birds and flowers, for drawing-room curtains, &c. Chintzes suitable for bed-furniture, &c., 26 inches wide’.

Not content with describing the commodity, the producer/advertisers describe how their new technology works. Bacon’s Governor describes what ‘engines’ do but not how. Perhaps they come under the ‘Official Secrets Act’ which he pleads early on. However, Swainson and Dennys have a different audience to impress and a different set of conventions to work by. They are engaged in a sales pitch and they need to convince potential customers that there is indeed a well thought out process at work: ‘Line printing is performed in the following manner: fabric is drawn by power over one or more upper cylinders, the lower part of which revolves containing the color. By an ingenious agent, a blade of steel, or other metal, removes the superfluous color, leaving only the ions on the cylinder charged there with’.

This is a superb example of how commodity speech exploits the impersonal construction. The producers and their promoters describe their own world of processes and implements as if it had a mind of its own and this disguises the human agency responsible for the production. Ruskin was opposed to the mass industrial processes which he saw as destroying and erasing all traces of individual creativity, and the commodity speech which producers and advertisers created implicitly supports his argument in that its usage, with the marked reliance on the impersonal construction, denies the responsibility of human beings for the artefacts which human beings Faraday have created. This ‘creative’ use of language had wide implications encompassing actual artefacts such as Pears’ soaps and their magical cleansing effects, and fictional artefacts such as the portrait to which Dorian Gray assigns responsibility for his own actions and therefore his own guilt.

On Stall19 of the Exhibition, Ball, Dumnicliffe, & Co., Nottingham, while seemingly honest about the design of their products, in fact use commodity language in their promotional materials. In their textile fabrics, natural flowers are represented under conventional forms, so that, as it would seem, there is no departure from the original and an avoidance of the pictorial. They assign the origins of their avoidance of raised ornamentation to non-human agencies. So it is that it is Eastern Chintzes which featured ‘but fantastic imitations of flowers’. So too the ‘pure taste’ of ‘classical Greece’ kept female dress free from any ornamentation save ‘that of a flat character’ or ‘flat’ borders of vine, ivy-leaf or homey-suckle’.

The Company also support their design program with reference to an eclectic selection continuing the internationalist emphasis: Persian and Turkish carpets, the Scottish Tartan, Classical Roman dress, and Moorish decoration which lack nothing in luxurious quality but are examples of a flat as opposed to a raised or embossed and pictorial ornamental style. However, not everyone shared their preference for flat ornamentation.

9f: Images of Enduring Power

No one could doubt the arrival of a new and devastating commercial power. But the Exhibition also celebrated an ancient and venerable power to whose symbolic signification raised ornamentation was a key factor. One outstandingly popular exhibit was a State chair of ruby colored silk, embroidered with gold, silver and jewels. But on the back were the royal arms with a wreath of flowers ‘in which the rose leaves are raised and detached from the surface’. The use of relief work in such a presentation is, of course, a special visual language designed to enhance the significance of what the designer is depicting.

9g: Glamorizing the domestic

The producers, motivated by the need to sell their commodities, even glamorized the homely, the mundane, and the downright demotic as part of the spectacle: a knife and fork with ‘ivory handles 58 inches long’; blades ‘etched with different views’; a razor with ‘a cocoa-wood handle’, the blade engraved with a view of Arundel castle; fruit-knives and forks ornamented in plated metal.

A Sheffield manufacturer displayed an assortment of shoes for butchers, cooks, and weavers, as well as an assortment of knives for bakers, painters, glaziers and farriers. Their display cohered only through the physical nature of the objects, not their miscellaneous users. But a manufacturer from ‘Wolver-Hampton’ offered a collection of commodities for one specialist activity - cuisine: jelly moulds; steak and fish dishes; soup tureens; kettles and stands; coffee machines; tea-pots; cheese toasters; egg poachers; wine strainers; spice boxes, &c. - ‘What, wilt the line stretch out to th’ crack of doom?’

10: Officially Utopia

The Utopian vision of the world which the organizers of the Exhibition offered the public was certainly triumphant and

span class="book"THE WORLD’S FAIR OR, THE CHILDREN’S PRIZE GIFT BOOK OF THE GREAT EXHIBITION OF 1851presented a very sanitised view of the Exhibition as reflecting what we can see today as far from Utopian: ‘The Great Exhibition is intended to receive and exhibit the most beautiful and most ingenious things from every country in the world, in order that everybody may become better known to each other than they have been, and be joined together in love and trade, like one great family; so that we may have no more wicked, terrible battles, such as there used to be long ago, when nobody cared who else was miserable, so that they themselves were comfortable’.

There were, however, Victorian writers, notably Dickens and Wilde, who saw their world differently and produced dystopian visions of Victorian accumulations of objects and their power to control and destroy human lives.

Select bibliography: Primary sources

Bacon, Francis. Essays, Advancement of Learning, New Atlantis and Other Pieces: ed. R. F. Jones: New York: Odyssey Press, Inc: 1937.

Bacon, Francis. Distributio Operis (1620) in Selections from the Works of Lord Bacon: e. Thomas W. Moffett:Dublin University Press: 1847.

Carlyle, Thomas. Past and PresentLondon: Oxford University Press:1960.

Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species.London: Harmondsworth: 1968.

Darwin, Charles. Naturalists’s Voyage Round The World. London: John Murray: 1890.

The London Illustrated News. Macaulay: ‘Sir James Mckintosh’: Critical Essays: volume 3. 279: London: 1835.

Ray, John:Historia Plantarum Historia Plantarum (1686-1704)

Ruskin, John. Modern Painters I; Seven Lamps of Architecture: Cook and Weddeburn: Volume 8: Library Edition: London: George Allen: 1903 – 12.

Whewell, William. History of the Inductive Sciences, from the Earliest to the Present Times (1837))

THE WORLD’S FAIR: OR, CHILDREN’S PRIZE GIFT BOOK OF THE GREAT EXHIBITIONGutenberg: Release Date: November 19, 2004 [eBook #14092]

Select bibliography: Secondary sources

Gere, Charlotte. The Exhibition YearsThe Victorian Web.

Gillispie, Charles. The Edge of ObjectivityPrinceton: The Princeton University Press:1960.

Gillispie, Charles:Genesis and GeologyCambridge: Harvard University Press:1969.

Landow, George P: The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin: Princeton New Jersey: Princeton University Press: 1971.

Houghton, Walter E: The Victorian Frame of Mind 1830-1870: New Haven and London: Yale University Press: 1963.

Richards, Thomas: The Commodity Culture of Victorian England. Stanford: Stanford University Press: Verso edition 1991.

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Last modified 5 October 2017