Familiar Science in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Abstract

Our opinion is, that cannot be too familiarly dealt with... Punch (1841)'INTRODUCTIONThe word appears in the titles to scores of introductory scientific works from late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century Britain. From letters on chemistry to A compend of geology, geography, A history of birds and conversations on interesting topics, many different disciplines were presented to new audiences in supposedly ways, exploiting everyday situations, objects, and language for explanatory ends. Indeed, by 1841 Punch was proposing a Very Familiar introduction to astronomy, a comic conflation of the banal and sublime which claimed that cannot be too familiarly dealt with. This paper takes seriously the ubiquity of avowedly writings and experiences in the mid-nineteenth century, to propose a new category for historians of science, that of familiar science. Through close readings of selected sources it introduces contemporary engagements with and representations of objects and familial life, and suggests one alternative way of examining a period for which the concept of the popular has become a disputed and unsatisfactory historical tool for understanding scientific practices.A monstrous and precocious child holds an everyday object, and addresses his rather myopic grandmamma (Fig. 1 ). Behind him a table overflows with experimental apparatus; she is pushed into a darkening comer. She holds a copy of Who Killed Cock Robin?; his toy basket contains Milton and Shakespeare, Newton and Boyle; his Algebra and Bacon lie on the floor. You see Gran 'Ma, the boyish brat explains, you Suck this Egg, or, more properly speaking, before you extract the matter contained within this shell by suction, you must make an incision at the apex & a Corresponding aperture at the base. Aye Dear! replies his beleaguered ancestor, How very clever! - they only used to make a hole at each end in my time. She ends with an exclamation: Well I declare they are making improvements in every thing!! George Cruikshank's 1828 caricature, The Age of Intellect, plays on the conflations and tensions I will analyse in the following article: of the everyday and of the childish with the scientific and technical; of the known and the unknown. It captures a desire to educate the rising generation of soon-to-be Victorian Britain in new language and sensory practices, and highlights the relationship between the childish tales of old and natural science, philosophy, mathematics and literature. And, of course, its humour relies on punning reference to the criticism that this type of what I shall call familiar science was indeed teaching your grandmother to suck eggs.2Recent academic work has made it increasingly clear that the simple designation of popularisation does not do justice to the rich variety of activities, sites and experiences in the heterogeneous culture of the nineteenth-century sciences; both to the importance of these practices and publications to defining and articulating what was, and also to its range of active participants and types of participation, not only its passive recipients.3 Once a useful rhetorical counterpoint to the overwhelming academic emphasis on the history of a few expert discoverers, the analytic category of the popular is also, now, a disputed historical tool for understanding scientific practices, yet few constructive new ways of mapping the landscape have been proposed.4 Rather than being predicated on a simple popular-professional dyad, and championing privileged places such as laboratories and observatories, the new history of the nineteenth-century sciences is focused on practical processes and all kinds of objects, on societal relationships and literary representation.5 Hence, historians of require new vocabularies to differentiate types and levels of participation and expertise in introductory engagement with the sciences, as well as strategies of presentation and kinds of audiences. …