Jonathan Jeffrey Wright

Catholics, Science and Civic Culture in Victorian Belfast

The connections between science and civic culture in the Victorian period have been extensively, and intensively, investigated over the past several decades. Limited attention, however, has been paid to Irish urban contexts. Roman Catholic attitudes towards science in the nineteenth century have also been neglected beyond a rather restricted set of thinkers and topics. This paper is offered as a contribution to addressing these lacunae, and examines in detail the complexities involved in Catholic engagement with science in Victorian Belfast. The political and civic geographies of Catholic involvement in scientific discussions in a divided town are uncovered through an examination of five episodes in the unfolding history of Belfasts intellectual culture. The paper stresses the importance of attending to the particularities of local politics and scientific debate for understanding the complex realities of Catholic appropriations of science in a period and urban context profoundly shaped by competing political and religious factions. It also reflects more generally on how the Belfast story supplements and challenges scholarship on the historical relations between Catholicism and science.

Rocks, skulls and materialism: geology and phrenology in late-Georgian Belfast

Recent years have seen the development of a more nuanced understanding of the emergence of scientific naturalism in the nineteenth century. It has become apparent that scientific naturalism did not emerge sui generis in the years following the publication of Charles Darwins On the origin of species (1859), but was present, if only in incipient form, much earlier in the century. Building on recent scholarship, this article adopts a geographically focused approach and explores debates about geology and phrenology—two of the diverse forms of knowledge that contributed to scientific naturalism—in late-Georgian Belfast. Having provided the venue for John Tyndalls infamous 1874 address as president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Belfast occupies a central place in the story of nineteenth-century scientific naturalism. However, in uncovering the intricate and surprising ways in which scientific knowledge gained, or was denied, epistemic and civic credibility in Belfast, this discussion will demonstrate that naturalism, materialism and the relationship between science and religion were matters of public debate in the town long before Tyndalls intervention.

Robert Hyndman’s Toe: Romanticism, Schoolboy Politics and the Affective Revolution in Late Georgian Belfast

On 2 April 1821 an eighteen-year-old Belfast youth named Robert James Tennent received a letter from a young woman with whom he was conducting a flirtation. Little is known about the letter’s author, one Hannah McGee, but much can be said about Tennent. Born on 30 April 1803, he was a scion of one of Belfast’s most prominent Presbyterian families: his father, Robert Tennent, was a well-known philanthropist and reformer, while his uncle, William Tennent, was numbered among Belfast’s wealthiest merchants and had, in the 1790s, played a prominent role in the United Irish movement.1 Following an early education in Belfast, Robert James Tennent had, in 1820, enrolled in Trinity College, Dublin, where he studied law: he was thus a young man with prospects, and, as McGee herself quipped, a ‘fine, dashing fellow’. Given all of this, it might be supposed that McGee’s family and friends were favourably disposed towards her connection with him. But such was not the case: ‘Let me turn where I like,’ she complained in her letter, ‘I hear of nothing but of such and such a one saying what a pity it is I should have fixed my eye on that harum scarum youth as they are pleased to style you.’2