Paul White

Ministers of Culture: Arnold, Huxley and Liberal Anglican Reform of Learning

In his introduction to C. P.Snows famous essays, Stefan Collini provides an historical account of the two-cultures debate, suggesting that the notorious exchange between Snow and F.R. Leavis was prefigured in the l880s in a series of addresses by Thomas Huxley (1825-95) and Matthew Arnold (1822-88).1 A leading science popularizer and promoter of scientific education and technology, Huxley seems a good stand-in for Snow; while Arnolds pleas for the moral role ofliterature, and his sharp criticism of the vulgar and narrowly utilitarian classes who fail to appreciate it, make him a Victorian counterpart to Leavis. In the public statements that are taken to epitomize the Victorian debate, Huxleys 1880 lecture at Masons College, Birmingham, and Arnolds 1882 Rede lecture, one can read a polarized and acrimonious account of science and literature. Huxley holds forth against classical scholars who, in their capacity of Levites in charge of the ark of culture, have excommunicated science from centres of Iearning.? Arnold upbraids science, which, for all its usefulness and interest, remains superficial, incapable of engaging the emotions or of inspiring moral action. Issuing from concerns about the narrowness of education, and about a more general moral and intellectual disintegration that only a reformed education can heal, the Huxley-Arnold debate appears to presage the fragmentation oflearning by the rise of disciplines, and the triumph of specialization. Collini is only one in a series of commentators extending back to Lionel Trilling who have placed Huxley and Arnold at the forefront of a movement that culminates in the separation of the sciences from the humanities. Huxley has been portrayed as the epitome ofthe new professional scientist, whose independent status was secured through hard-fought campaigns against the entrenched Anglicanism and classical curricula that dominated English institutions of learning for much of the nineteenth century, Arnold has been viewed correspondingly as a great defender of Oxbridge traditionalism, and as the architect of literary criticism as a scholarly discipline. Each appears to reside in, and to champion, different worlds: Huxley the bustling metropolis and rising middle-classes, salaried expertise, and self-made men; Arnold the elitism of public schools and wealthy colleges, the snobbery offashionable literati, the jaded critic of progress nostalgic for an age whose heroes were poets. This story of the two cultures fits well with prevailing accounts of nineteenthcentury science developed decades ago in the work of Roy MacLeod, Adrian Desmond, Frank Turner, Thomas Heyck and others, and largely unchallenged despite major shifts in the field. According to such accounts, the Victorian period is the great age of professionalization, in which the sciences, aligned with the rising commercial

Darwin, Concepción, and the Geological Sublime

Darwins narrative of the earthquake at Concepcion, set within the frameworks of Lyellian uniformitarianism, romantic aesthetics, and the emergence of geology as a popular science, is suggestive of the role of the sublime in geological enquiry and theory in the early nineteenth century. Darwins Beagle diary and later notebooks and publications show that the aesthetic of the sublime was both a form of representing geology to a popular audience, and a crucial structure for the observation and recording of the event from the beginning. The awesome spectacle of the earthquake proved in turn the magnitude of the forces at stake in earth history, and helped to make geology an epic conjoining the history of civilization with the history of the earth.

Darwin Wept: Science and the Sentimental Subject

Could a man of science be sentimental in an age of objectivity, when emotions were largely purged from the field of Victorian science, and feelings themselves defined as animal instincts and reflex mechanisms? This essay addresses the question through Darwins work on the expression of emotions, and the relationship between his work and his own emotional experience, with particular attention to grief and tears. An old woman in a railway carriage is suddenly overcome with a painful recollection, perhaps that of a long lost child – her mouth becomes ever so slightly contracted, her countenance falls, her eyes suffuse with tears … . An opthalmic surgeon perseveres with his treatise on the physiology of weeping while mourning the loss of his daughter … . With difficulty, a mother prolongs her infant sons screaming in order to record the shape of his mouth for a family friend and famous naturalist … . Her observations later appear in a work on emotional expression (Darwins), together with photographs of sobb...

Science at home: the space between Henrietta Heathorn and Thomas Huxley.

Lidentite des hommes dans la science provenait de modeles de vie de famille et de valeurs feminines. Les hommes recherchaient plutot une place a caractere culturel, en revendiquant une certaine morale a laquelle les femmes contribuaient

From Commentary to Translation

Translators have always made use of commentaries and still do today, whether silently absorbing exegetical information into the translated text or presenting it in translator’s notes and prefaces. It is well known that vernacular translators in the Middle Ages and early modern period habitually translated material from the Latin commentaries, incorporating it into their translated texts and furnishing them with translated glosses. The variety and complexity of the interactions of translation and commentary, from the ‘commentated translation’ to the ‘transmuted commentary’, have been extensively studied in the medieval context.1