Victorian Debates Research Articles

The Forms of Discipline: Christina Rossetti's Religious Verse

The Christina Rossetti of literary history is very different from the Christina Rossetti of Victorian Britain. Canonization has reduced her body of work to a tiny fraction of what once was; as Sharon Smulders notes, although Rossetti wrote a thousand poems ... six volumes of devotional prose, two collections of fiction, and [a] juvenile novella, her fame rests largely on 'Goblin Market' and a few short, melancholy lyrics. (1) These few survivors form an unrepresentative sample, overwhelmingly drawn from her earlier works. Meanwhile, despite its success in her own lifetime--over twenty-one thousand copies of her last volume of poetry, Verses, had been printed by 1912 (2)--Rossetti's late devotional poetry has often been ignored by present-day readers. Even when scholars turn their attention to this poetry, is often with an air of disappointment. Critics tend to read this body of work as an unimpressive footnote to her earlier accomplishments: exhausted, weary, and self-denying, revealing a poet who has traded vigor for dogma. Her devotional poetry has been characterized as full of endless, futile repetition and finally and obsessed with a sense of imprisonment within a small and shrinking universe of meaning. (3) Even Isobel Armstrong's sympathetic account of Rossetti in her Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, Politics dismisses her late poetry, flatly claiming that it is in Christina Rossetti's earlier poetry that her most powerful energies are at play. (4) Rossetti's devotional verse, widely read in her lifetime, has been ignored or rejected in ours. In effect, we have created two Rossettis: the widely admired early Rossetti, welcome in classrooms and anthologies, and the late Rossetti, banished to the archive. Some signs show that this trend might be changing. Scholars have paid increasing attention to Rossetti's religious beliefs, linking her work to the larger Victorian debates over Tractarianism. By reminding us of the importance of Rossetti's Christian faith, recent criticism has prepared the ground for reconsidering this later poetry. Much of this scholarship on Rossetti's devotional poetry tends to be biographical and historicist in nature, and makes an indispensable contribution to our understanding of Rossetti. (5) But although this scholarship rightly acknowledges her devotional poetry, does not address the charges critics have made against it. Thematic and biographical criticism, however accomplished, cannot answer a dismissal based on stylistic or formal grounds. Even the scholarship that focuses on Rossetti's religious verse--for instance, Smulders' Christina Rossetti Revisited and Constance Hassett's Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style--emphasizes content over form and style. (6) Thus Smulders' marvelous analysis of Verses describes how the sonnet sequences can be understood as a pilgrimage (p. 168) with close reading taking a back seat to summary. And Hassett's study offers a largely thematic reading of Verses, in contrast to the rich stylistic analysis gives Rossetti's earlier work. Since the religious poetry is largely read biographically or thematically, the idea that Rossetti's devotional poetry is passive, resigned, and exhausted can linger on unchallenged. Consequently, we overlook much of the poetry that made her work so popular with her Victorian readers. But what if we were to read Rossetti's late poetry, not as a footnote to her widely read early work, but as a central part of Rossetti's formal accomplishments? In this reading of the devotional poetry, we see how she embraces both restrained verse forms and a repetitive but resourceful style to create religious verse that moves from despair and resignation to determined activity. This argument thus modifies Amy Billone's claim that Rossetti's sonnets are an overpowering celebration of selfhood; her poetry celebrates not the self as is but religion's power to discipline and remake it. …

Two Clocks: Aurora Leigh , Poetic Form, and the Politics of Timeliness

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's reception history demonstrates the power and the politics of timeliness. Celebrated in her own age for her poetry's formal innovations and political engagements, by the early twentieth century, Virginia Woolf could easily conclude that fate had not been kind to Mrs. Browning as a writer, as she noted that Barrett Browning's importance become merely historical. (1) Indeed, Barrett Browning's poetry was largely ignored until the 1970s--a time of growing interest in women's writing and feminist theory. As Bina Friewald and, more recently, Simon Avery, demonstrate, rehearsing this reception history tells a much larger historical narrative about what historical circumstances must be in place to engage with women's writing on its own terms as it helps us reflect on our own shifting critical practices. (2) New Criticism ignored Barrett Browning, while feminist criticism--in its many historical iterations--ensured that her writing found its proper place within the literary canon. (3) If formalism was not always kind to Barrett Browning's poetry, Caroline Levine's recent article, Strategic Formalism, suggests that we have at last reached a historical moment in which Barrett Browning can be kind to formalism. Arguing for a new formalist method, Levine reads Cry of the Children to demonstrate how the collision between the poem's literary forms--its irony, inversions, metaphors and rhymes--and its engagement with social forms such as gender and the nation creates the poem's political effects. (4) Building on Levine's work, I that the collision of literary and social forms in Aurora Leigh contributes to contemporary debates about the politics of timeliness. The novel-poem merges genres with different temporal valences such as the seemingly anachronistic epic and the modern novel in order to combine poetry's transcendent aesthetic with the novel's plodding narrative But the novel-poem also reflects on how social forms express themselves temporally as it depicts how women's education delays their development and participates in Victorian debates about the nature of historical I that these discrepant forms and temporalities refuse a monolithic or uniform understanding of historical time and, in the process, resist political arguments grounded in timeliness. As Catherine Gallagher reminds us, most understandings of literary form actually contend against time. (5) While describing how formalism fails to account for length, Gallagher alludes to one of the most powerful complaints lodged against American New Criticism: that it celebrates the timelessness of the literary text at the cost of political and historical readings. (6) However, I argue that Aurora Leigh's discrepant temporalities encourage us to question whether timeliness has its own political problems. As Dipesh Chakrabarty demonstrates, political arguments grounded in claims to timeliness came to non-European peoples in the nineteenth century as somebody's way of saying 'not yet' to somebody else. (7) He suggests that linear, historical time excludes non-European people from history by representing them as remnants of the past rather than contemporaries. Similarly, Julia Kristeva's essay, Women's Time recounts how each successive generation of the women's movement has had to confront its exclusion from linear, historical time as she argues for the creation of a new signifying space that emphasizes individual difference. (8) Like Kristeva, Aurora Leigh demonstrates how linear, historical time often represents women as belated or untimely. In fact, Barrett Browning turns to poetry to create a more inclusive historicism precisely because it combines timeliness with the timeless and even untimely nature of discrete literary forms. In other words, by representing multiple, overlapping timescapes, Aurora Leigh questions the dominance of linear, progressive An attention to Aurora Leigh's varied timescapes has two important implications: first, it highlights how Aurora Leigh's simultaneity--its poetic double vision and apocalyptic imagery that emphasize how poetry embodies historical time even as it transcends it--transforms history's messy, multiple temporalities into a unity that does not obscure difference. …

The Bible and the Cause: Freethinking Feminists vs Christianity, England, 1870–1900

This article examines Victorian debates on scriptural interpretation and women's rights, when feminists and anti-feminists, Christians and secularists battled over whether the Bible assigned women a subordinate sphere. It argues that scriptural debates were of central importance to the nineteenth-century ‘woman question’, while women's rights provided the discursive terrain upon which Christians and secularists competed for power and legitimacy. The article focuses on the contributions made by women activists in the secularist or freethought movement. These ‘freethinking feminists’ have been largely ignored in the historiography, though they formed a longstanding and active current within the Victorian women's movement. They were often marginalised, however, because of their violently anti-Christian views and their insistence that the Bible needed to be rejected in full for women to acquire freedom and equality. They argued not only with conservative Christians but with other activists in the women's movement who sought to demonstrate that women's rights could be reconciled with scriptural teachings. Highlighting this alternative tradition reveals the ‘religious roots’ of Victorian feminism to have been diverse and highly contested, and expands our understanding of the multiple processes by which modern definitions of ‘secularism’ came into being.

Reading the Mind: From George Eliot's Fiction to James Sully's Psychology

Reading the Mind:From George Eliot's Fiction to James Sully's Psychology Vanessa L. Ryan What is the function and value of fiction? Debates over these questions involve considerations that range from aesthetics to ethics, from the intrinsic values of the genre to its moral effects. Recently, largely under the influence of the cognitive sciences, the question has taken on a new cast: might science give us a new answer to these long-standing issues? Studies such as Lisa Zunshine's Why We Read Fiction (2006), John Carey's What Good Are the Arts? (2005), and Alan Palmer's Fictional Minds (2004) are part of a growing area of interdisciplinary work on the relationship between art and consciousness.1 This body of work asks not just how our theories of consciousness inform our understanding of the process and function of [End Page 615] reading fiction, but also whether fiction itself might provide a key to new theories about the nature of consciousness. The nineteenth-century novel is often considered the high point in the literary representation of mind. Indeed, the terms "psychology" and "novel" are explicitly yoked in the nineteenth-century with the simultaneous emergence of both as discrete forms of intellectual and artistic activity. Not surprisingly, George Eliot has come to be identified with the term "psychological novel": in fact, Nicholas Dames argues that she was the first to couple the words psychology and novel in this way in an 1855 review where she contrasted Charles Kingsley's historical romance Westward Ho! with "those 'psychological' novels."2 While George Eliot initially used the phrase in what Dames calls "mock disdain," by the end of the nineteenth century the term "psychological novel" had gained currency as a straightforward description of a type of Victorian novel: Wilbur Cross, in his summary The Development of the English Novel, for example, describes the form as "stressing an inner sequence of thought and feeling, which is brought into harmony with an ethical formula and accounted for in an analysis of motive." Along with Elizabeth Gaskell and George Meredith, Cross also cites George Eliot as one of his central examples of the "psychological novel."3 It seems natural, then, when a critic asks, "what is the special distinguishing function of the modern art of fiction?" to turn for an answer to George Eliot's novels and their close connections with psychological science. It is perhaps surprising that this still-current question was posed by the nineteenth-century psychologist James Sully (1842–1923) in an 1881 article in the journal Mind on "George Eliot's Art."4 His essay offers us a Victorian contribution to questions about the relationship of literature and psychology that are being addressed today by critics such as Sally Shuttle-worth, Athena Vrettos, Kay Young, Nicholas Dames, or Rick Rylance, especially [End Page 616] with respect to George Eliot. James Sully's essay not only provides valuable insight into how the Victorians themselves understood the role of psychology in the novel, but also helps to place contemporary debates about fiction and consciousness into sharper relief. In the wake of important studies, such as Rylance's Victorian Psychology and British Culture (2000), that have brought renewed attention to nineteenth-century British psychology, recent scholarship has shown the central role of Victorian debates about the mind in shaping the fiction of the period.5 Nineteenth-century mental science provided material and inspiration for works of literature, with imaginative writers eager to exploit and develop the narrative and thematic potential of contemporary psychological discourse and probe the problems it raised. Novelists such as Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, and Henry James turned to some of the most current work in the science of the mind, which they saw as the most sophisticated and credible approach to psychological realism available. These and other novelists rapidly absorbed the central terms of the new science as it considered problems of consciousness, identity, and memory, and brought them to life by dramatizing and questioning them in their fiction. James Sully's interest in George Eliot reflects this fruitful mid- to late-nineteenth-century cross-pollination between philosophers, scientists, and novelists who were interested in the nature of consciousness, psychology...

Our Victorian Education (review)

Reviewed by: Our Victorian Education Vicki Macknight (bio) Our Victorian Education by Dinah Birch; pp. 192. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. $81.99 cloth, $37.99 paper. It is hard to disagree with Dinah Birch's central thesis that Victorian debates about education can help us think again about the structures and governance of contemporary British education. It was the Victorians, Birch argues, "who first conceived of education as a formal process that would be crucial [End Page 165] to the life of the nation and all its citizens, with prescribed courses of study, and outcomes measurable by examination" (2). In writing about education, Birch is interested less in the details of policy or pedagogy and more in the overarching ideal of what education could do for individuals and society. For the Victorians, Birch writes, education was to transform individuals into beings of intellect and imagination, and British society into a modern meritocracy. During the era, elementary school was made free and compulsory for all children, and the numbers of secondary schools expanded dramatically. Universities, colleges, and night schools extended the age one could continue in education. These were signs, according to Birch, of a social revolution led by education and accompanied by broad debates over just what education should do. What place should moral or religious teaching have? How should women be involved? How might the education system balance the needs of the nation's children with those of each individual? How should factual learning be balanced with the human urge for creativity and imagination? Instead of focusing on any one age group or type of education, Birch looks at these debates through a literary lens. Birch is a scholar of Victorian literature, able to navigate through the work of a long list of Victorian poets and writers. From all, she finds support for her contention that British education needs to be structured but flexible, and all children included in its humanizing efforts. "The need for national structures remains apparent," she says, "but it is also increasingly clear that its processes must co-exist with a flexibility that can make room for the individual pupil" (145). Birch freely acknowledges that in advocating these things she is not making a novel claim. And just as well. Who would disagree that we should educate children in a personal and individualistic way rather than in huge inflexible systems? That we should foster independent thought, encouraging children to grapple with the darker sides of human life, rather than educating them for thoughtless work? And who would suggest that pride in personal achievement and awareness of what one does not understand would be better than the pressures of competitive examinations in which for some to score highly others must score poorly? The difficulty is how to achieve these things. In all, Birch is animated by an admiration of the poets and writers she studies. This is well placed, of course, and she does not shy away from dealing with issues on which their thought radically differs from our own. She also writes clearly of the intersections between gender, class, and religion and their varying and sometimes contradictory impacts on debates around education. These points are explored through the first three chapters, particularly chapter 2, "Religious Learning." Here she explores the views espoused by Victorian writers on the value of religion in schools, the problematic dominance of religious values in politics and social life, and the moral questions that emerge when religious authority diminishes. Perhaps the most engaging part of this book, for me anyway, was the chapter [End Page 166] focusing on women. Here we find ample evidence for the contradictory impulses that governed the thoughts of female writers (some of whom also worked as teachers) as women gained a larger role and stake in public education. Over the century, as education for males and females became established in larger institutions, women faced questions that lie at the heart of gender difference. Should female students attend schools set up in the masculine mode? they asked. For many the answer, perhaps surprisingly, was no. There is something special, many argued, about the emotional and imaginative capacities that are fostered in the more private spheres of domestic and...

George Eliot and the Authority of Preaching

Preaching was for many centuries the domain of men, and the exclusion of women was justified on the grounds of their different nature and lack of authority. Victorian philosophical debates about the nature of women found literary counterparts in Victorian fiction. Eliot's novel Adam Bede presents a female preacher whose authority is demonstrably independent of her biological sex, despite the attitudes of her audiences. Her sermon's echoes of Mark's Gospel show how the literary contexts of both biblical and Victorian fiction may suggest that the authority of preaching in the material world comes from encounter with Christ and is entirely independent of gender.

Hardy, Shaftesbury, and Aesthetic Education

This essay traces the influence of Victorian debates about aesthetic education in Thomas Hardy's 1890 short story "Barbara of the House of Grebe." Hardy's story, loosely based on an anecdote about the grandson of the eighteenth-century aesthetic theorist Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, concerns the uses of art for the education of character. Against the claims for moral transformation made by Victorian educational reformers such as Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin, Hardy suggests that art can easily become a tool for subordinating students rather than a means of fashioning free and autonomous individuals.

National Dreams: The Remaking of Fairy Tales in Nineteenth-Century England (review)

Reviewed by: National Dreams: The Remaking of Fairy Tales in Nineteenth-Century England Jennifer L. Holberg (bio) Jennifer Schacker . National Dreams: The Remaking of Fairy Tales in Nineteenth-Century England. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2003. As the landscape of nineteenth-century England grew ever more industrialized, so in many ways did its creative landscape, particularly in the sense that the imaginative power that was thought to have accompanied England's rural past had long disappeared. Thus, Charlotte Brontë writing at midcentury could have Jane Eyre observe: "The men in green all forsook England a hundred years ago," said I, speaking as seriously as he had done. "And not even in Hay Lane, or the fields about it, could you find a trace of them. I don't think either summer or harvest, or winter moon, will ever shine on their revels more." (104) The "men in green" may indeed have deserted England and its literature, and yet, as Jennifer Schacker very ably illustrates, English readers remained firmly under the cultural sway of foreign popular tale collections, as rendered by English translators and compilers. These tale collections, like the successful Grimms'Märchen to which all of Schacker's [End Page 270] examples respond in some way, were not only popular with a wide reading audience, but they also provided "a space in which to encounter and then reflect upon national identities and differences" (2). These narrative collections, she argues, bear examination for two reasons: first, because "most often, popular tales were cast as sources of insight to the national character of their respective places of origin, drawing on the rhetoric and ideology of Romantic nationalism, social evolutionism, and comparative philology. These 'national dreams' . . . were regarded as offering insight to foreign minds, hearts, and history" (11). But secondly, and more importantly for Schacker, though these tales were offered as a way for nineteenth-century readers to gain understanding of foreign cultures, they also help deepen our own understanding of nineteenth-century Englishness itself. Schacker's scholarship is rigorous and wide-ranging, and she is clearly conversant and comfortable with a number of academic fields, including folklore, Victorian studies, publishing history, and children's literature. Her study focuses on four popular foreign tale collections that she takes as representative: Edgar Taylor's German Popular Stories (1823), T. Croften Croker's Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1825), Edward Lane's Arabian Nights (1839–41), and George Webbe Dasent's Popular Tales from the Norse (1857). Devoting a chapter to each work, she presents a carefully nuanced picture of the context and aims of each book as well as the background and goals of its author. And Schacker is as admirably attentive to both textual and publishing details as she is to cultural history. Thus, for example, she provides equally fascinating accounts of Taylor's stylistic work as the first English presenter of the Grimms as she does of Lane's ideological commitment to placing the Arabian Nights in a specifically Egyptian national context. At the same time, her study is theoretically sophisticated; one especially notable instance comes in her treatment of Croker. In her subtle analysis of Croker's Irish tales, she examines not only the methodology for which he has traditionally been remembered, but also how he seems to utilize, but ultimately subvert, a colonialist stance. In each case, Schacker has chosen provocative works, ones that allow her to deliver on her primary aim of describing the "national dreams" of nineteenth-century England. Indeed, her summary of the underlying issues addressed by these texts demonstrates how these popular tales firmly inform many of the most vexed of Victorian debates: Whether seen primarily as a window to preindustrial society, and thus to England's past, as in German Popular Stories; to the worldview of England's neighbors, and thus to current Irish-English relations, as in [End Page 271] Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland; to the manners, customs, and imaginations of Egyptians, and thus to the contrast of East and West, as in the Arabian Nights; or to national particularities within an Indo-European heritage of language and literature, as in Popular Tales from...

Authentic performance in theatrical women's fiction of the 1870s

This article both uncovers a forgotten genre of women's writing and intervenes into recent critical debates about the status of the actress in Victorian literature and culture. In the 1870s and early 1880s a number of women's novels were published that presented acting as a noble and ennobling profession. Such texts didactically engaged with traditional portrayals of theatrical life as dissolute and depraved and described it instead as a profession requiring all a woman's powers of endurance and self-sacrifice. The novels appear, therefore, to incorporate rather than challenge conservative mythologies of womanhood; the article argues, however, that the challenge to those mythologies comes precisely from the texts’ refusal to accept that public life taints a woman. The novels compound their attack on ideals of domestic, compliant femininity through sympathetically evoked scenes of self-directed acting: authentic female performance emerges as the self-governed expression of the insurgent impulse to act. Such texts therefore represent an intriguingly nuanced contribution to Victorian debates about the “essential” nature and appropriate sphere of women.

Scientific Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century

Book Review| January 01 2003 Scientific Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern InquiryBenedict, Barbara M.Cluster on Science in the Nineteenth CenturyVictorian Relativity: Radical Thought and Scientific DiscoveryHerbert, ChristopherThe Culture of English Geology, 1815-1851: A Science Revealed through Its CollectingKnell, Simon J.Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise. Osiris, n.s., vol. 15 (2000)MacLeod, RoyUseful Knowledge: The Victorians, Morality, and the March of Intellect DurhamRauch, AlanVictorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation”Secord, James A.Sparks of Life: Darwinism and the Victorian Debates over Spontaneous GenerationStrick, James E. KATHY ALEXIS PSOMIADES KATHY ALEXIS PSOMIADES Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Nineteenth Century Studies (2003) 17 (1): 137–145. https://doi.org/10.2307/45196927 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation KATHY ALEXIS PSOMIADES; Scientific Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century. Nineteenth Century Studies 1 January 2003; 17 (1): 137–145. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/45196927 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressNineteenth Century Studies Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2003 Nineteenth Century Studies Association2003Nineteenth Century Studies Association Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Review: Sparks of Life: Darwinism and the Victorian Debates over Spontaneous Creation, by James E. Strick and The Spark of Life: Darwin and the Primeval Soup, by Christopher Wills and Jeffrey Bada

Review: <i>Sparks of Life: Darwinism and the Victorian Debates over Spontaneous Creation</i>, by James E. Strick and <i>The Spark of Life: Darwin and the Primeval Soup</i>, by Christopher Wills and Jeffrey Bada

Review: Sparks of Life: Darwinism and the Victorian Debates over Spontaneous Generation

Review: Sparks of Life: Darwinism and the Victorian Debates over Spontaneous Generation

J.E. Strick: Sparks of life. Darwinism and the Victorian debates over spontaneous generation

J.E. Strick: Sparks of life. Darwinism and the Victorian debates over spontaneous generation

James E Strick, Sparks of life: Darwinism and the Victorian debates over spontaneous generation, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2000, pp. xi, 283, £30.95 (hardback 0-674-00292-X).

James E Strick, Sparks of life: Darwinism and the Victorian debates over spontaneous generation, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2000, pp. xi, 283, £30.95 (hardback 0-674-00292-X). - Volume 46 Issue 1

Sparks of Life: Darwinism and the Victorian Debates over Spontaneous Generation (review)

Sparks of Life: Darwinism and the Victorian Debates over Spontaneous Generation (review)

Sparks of Life: Darwinism and the Victorian Debates over Spontaneous Generation

Sparks of Life: Darwinism and the Victorian Debates over Spontaneous Generation

Sparks of life: Darwinism and the Victorian debates over spontaneous generation

Introduction Early History Needham versus Spallanzani Worms, Molecules, and Evolution Note on Terminology Why Another Study of the Spontaneous Generation Debates? 1 Spontaneous Generation and Early Victorian Science The Standard Story of the British Debates Bastian and Burdon Sanderson Criticisms of Bastian by Lankester and Roberts The Germ Theory of Disease The Role of Heat-Resistant Spores Major Victorian Scientists through the 1860s 2 MolecularTheories and the Conversion of Owen and Bennett Brownian Movement and Owen's Role in Developing Ideas on Spontaneous Generation John Hughes Bennett and Histological Molecules Owen's Change and the Darwinians Bennett's Conversion to Spontaneous Generation Further Response to Owen's Conversion 3 Bastian as Rising Star Bastian's Background Bastian Enters the Spontaneous Generation Debate Wallace and Darwin Discuss Bastian Further Support for Bastian 4 Initial Confrontation with the X Club: 1870-1873 Huxley's Tightrope Act Huxley's Attitude toward Young Men of Talent Huxley Turns against Bastian Brownian Movement and Other Rhetorical Devices The Younger Darwinians Bastian, Huxley, and the Royal Society E. Ray Lankester and Bastian 5 Colloids, PleomorphicTheories, and Cell Theories: A State of Flux Thomas Graham and Colloids Conservation of Energy and Correlation of Forces Cell Theory and the Demise of Brownian Movement Revisited Life Cycles in Infusorial Monads Pleomorphist Theories of Bacteria 6 Germ Theories and the British Medical Community The Cattle Plague of 1865-66 and Germ Theories Tyndall, the Germ Theory, and the Medical Community Support in the Medical Community for Bastian The Pathological Society Debate of April 1875 The Physiological Society 7 Purity and Contamination: Tyndall's Campaign as the Final Blow Tyndall's A Priori Commitments Embarking on the Quest and Recruiting Support The Exact Sciences versus the Biomedical Sciences The X Club and the Royal Society Spores: Tough Allies to Kill Convincing Pasteur: Urine Proves a Weak Ally Conclusions Epilogue, 1880 through 1915 Glossary Timeline Cast of Characters Notes Sources Index

Life from Smut

Sparks of Life Darwinism and the Victorian Debates over Spontaneous Generation. James E. Strick. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000. 298 pp. $45, £30.95. ISBN 0-674-00292-X. Centering his account on Henry Bastian (the last great supporter of the idea that organisms can suddenly arise from nonliving materials), Strick examines the disputes among early Darwinians that helped prepare the foundations of microbiology and speed the acceptance of the germ theory of disease.

The CCNY Affair

,%views THE CCNY AFFAIR LOUIS GREENSPAN Religious Studies / McMaster U. Hamilton, ON, Canada L8s 4K1 GREENSPN@MCMASTER.CA Thorn Weidlich. Appointment Denied: the Inquisition of Bertrand Russell. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2000. Pp. 233 + 8 (illus.). US$25.00. W hen the Board of Higher Education of the City of New York voted, in· February 1940, to offer Bertrand Russell a position as professor of philosophy at the City College of New York, they had no forewarning that their decision would touch off a cultural war as ferocious and divisive as any that we have experienced in recent decades. But unlike contemporary cultural wars, the CCNY dispute lasted only a few short months. It fizzled out because Russell's supporters were unwilling to commit themselves to an extended battle in the courts, and, Russell, needing an income, quietly accepted another position. The concerns that the cultural war raised were rapidly overshadowed by the military war that was taking place in Europe for, as the CCNY affair was ending, the Battle of Britain began. The controversy was never resurrected because it didn't seem to raise any issues of permanent importance. The charges that had been brought against Russell-that he was sceptical concerning the philosophical validity of any absolute moral claims, that he believed that young men and women should be able to live together outside the framework of marriage, that adultery should not be taken so seriously as to be the most solemnly recognized basis for divorce, and, in his wilder moments, that homosexuality should not be a criminal offence-. would hardly shake the moral foundations of any existing liberal democracy. In today's world of single mothers, sexual partnerships, Gay Pride and President Clinton's exegesis of what constitutes sexual relations, the storm over Russell's proposals seems as quaint as the Victorian debates over whether trains that were travelling over twelve miles an hour were breaking boundaries established by God. The CCNY affair is mainly remembered as a comedy. Its most celebrated document is attorney Joseph Goldstein's oft-repeated, colourful charge sheet which denounced Russell as "lecherous, libidinous, lustful , aphrodisiac, irreverent" and on and on-a document that Russell repeated with glee, boasting that his only predecessors were Apuleius and Othello. russell: the Journal of Bemand Russell Smdies The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. n.s. 2.0 (summer 2.000): 71-92. ISSN 0036-0163l 72 Reviews Thorn Weidlich's Appointment Denied restores the episode to its proper place in Russell's life, in the history of academic freedom and, indeed, in the intellectual history of our times. He argues that the affair was not trivial and certainly not comic, and that it opened issues that remain unresolved. On 26 February 1940, New York's Board of Higher Education approved the appointment of Bertrand Russell almost without discussion. It was one item in a full agenda of a liberal body that was meant to have an arm's length relationship to the government that had brought it into existence. Russell's appointment was so routine and without controversy that he was prepared to give up a position that he already held at UCLA (to the delight of the President of that institution). On I March, Bishop Manning, spiritual leader of the city's Episcopalian community, sent a letter to the press in which he announced his outrage at the decision, and included direct quotations from Russell's writings that he felt certain would arouse any New Yorker concerned about the moral rectitude of the city. His letter created an immediate sensation. It called into existence a coalition consisting of the Hearst press and the various Catholic associations of the city. The latter were mobilized into a high state of militancy . Even police and associations of war veterans were addressed, with warnings that Russell's moral endorsement of adultery would produce an epidemic of jealous, murderous male violence. As the pressure mounted, Board members were thrown into confusion and dismay. Many demanded that the appointment be reconsidered. On 18 March the Board met, again behind closed doors. But this time the corridors were invaded by over 200 observers. In a scene reminiscent of the...

Language, brain function, and human origins in the Victorian debates on evolution

Language, brain function, and human origins in the Victorian debates on evolution