Michael D Rectenwald
English Department
Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
mdr2@cs.cmu.edu
Roots of the Divide: ‘Useful Knowledge’ versus Literary Culture
The roots of the “useful knowledge” movement can be traced to the gentlemanly
educational and social reformers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The
“philosophical radicals” developed new educational plans and systems, based largely on
the economic and social conditions emerging with nascent industrialism. This utilitarian
coterie, which included Jeremy Bentham, Francis Place, James Mill, John Stuart Mill,
and Henry Brougham, criticized the established educational institutions in Britain as
antiquated and deficient. These and other advocates helped to launch a new knowledge
industry whose primary emphasis was useful knowledge. Useful knowledge—associated
with an understanding of the material world as opposed to literature, classical languages,
and theology—was a precursor to the category ‘science’ to arise later in the century.
This paper addresses the bifurcation of useful knowledge and literary studies in early
nineteenth-century Britain, arguing that the sciences-humanities divide to develop by the
end of the century may have taken different shapes, depending on the interpretation given
to ‘usefulness.’ A consideration of the useful knowledge movement, I argue, is essential
for understanding the historical relationship between the humanities and fields of
scientific and technical expertise.
In this paper, I will discuss several stages in the developing relationship between
“useful knowledge” and literary culture. First, I discuss the rise of the useful knowledge
Rectenwald, Roots of the Divide
movement in early nineteenth-century Britain by considering the works and activities of
the “philosophical radicals”— Jeremy Bentham, James and John Stuart Mill, Henry
Brougham, and others—who sought to promote their version of a utilitarian education in
Britain. Then, I consider the uses made of the useful knowledge movement by plebian
and radical educationists, noting that the meaning of useful knowledge was different for
different reformers and educationists. I then turn to the impact that the useful knowledge
movement began to have on more conservative educational and publishing institutions,
by looking at the periodical writing of the budding geologist, Charles Lyell. I conclude by
discussing the rise of useful knowledge (and science) relative to the humanities in terms
of the interests represented by each.
This study of useful knowledge as distinguished from literary culture involves a tour
of nineteenth-century periodicals, in particular the Tory and gentlemanly Quarterly
Review, the ‘radical,’ middle-class Westminster Review, the plebeian Mechanic’s
Magazine, and the Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.
By locating tracing the knowledge movement through these periodicals, we can locate the
contributions that these various periodical publics made to the development of useful
knowledge relative to literary culture, as well as noting the effects of such developments
within several social and cultural milieus. The rise of science as a distinct educational
category is not surprisingly a history of struggle for social and cultural hegemony, and
likewise intersects with social class interests.
2
Rectenwald, Roots of the Divide
Useful Knowledge
The roots of the “useful knowledge” movement can be traced to gentlemanly educational
and social reformers of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth century. The
“philosophical radicals” developed new educational plans and systems, based largely on
the changing economic and social conditions emerging with nascent industrialism. This
utilitarian coterie, which included Jeremy Bentham, Francis Place, James Mill, John
Stuart Mill, Henry Brougham, and others, criticized the established educational
institutions in Britain as antiquated and deficient.1 The mobilization of the terms “useful
knowledge” and “useful learning” can be traced at least as far back as the seventeenth
century,2 but it was primarily Jeremy Bentham and his associates who gave it its
nineteenth-century currency.3
In 1794, Bentham had proposed a serial encyclopedia (published in numbers) for the
“diffusion of useful knowledge” that would place readers in the center of the
“Academical Panopticon,” from within which they could readily survey and partake of
any and all knowledge of use to them.4 Although the “Panopticon plan” for education
was circulated amongst the philosophical radicals, it was never published. In 1814-15,
Bentham wrote Chrestomathia (published 1816-17), his only published work on
1
David Lee Robbins, A Radical Alternative to Paternalism: Voluntary Association and the Popular
Enlightenment in England and France, 1800-1840, an unpublished doctoral thesis (1974): 10. According to
Robbins the “philosophical radicals” included David Ricardo, James Mill, Jeremy Bentham, and Henry
Brougham. This work is hereafter referred to as Robbins.
2
Joseph Glanvill, Plus ultra, or, The progress and advancement of knowledge since the days of Aristotle in
an account of some of the most remarkable late improvements of practical, useful learning, to encourage
philosophical endeavours : occasioned by a conference with one of the notional way (1668). As early as
1800, Richard Phillips described his Juvenile Library, or Monthly Preceptor as a “complete course of
useful knowledge, to be continued in every succeeding number” (I (1800): 143). James Mease published a
serial Archives of Useful Knowledge in Philadelphia from 1810-1813. Noah Webster’s Elements of Useful
Knowledge was published in Hartford in 1812. Also in 1812, Joseph Guy used it in his Pocket Cyclopedia.
Other early prominent occurrences included William Bingley's popular encyclopedia, Useful Knowledge
(1816).
3
Robbins, 251.
4
Robbins, 201.
3
Rectenwald, Roots of the Divide
education, a sketch that served as a blueprint for the educational program that came to
bear its name.5 “Chrestomathia,” which Bentham explained was “a word, formed from
two Greek words, signifying conducive to useful learning,” came to stand as the model
for a new secondary day school for the children of the ‘middling and higher ranks’ of
society in London.6 Based on the work of educator Joseph Lancaster, a Quaker whom
James Mill and Francis Place regarded as the originator of the monitorial system, a
“chrestomathic” education, or education in useful knowledge, was distinguished from the
religious and classical education given at the National schools as informed by the
National Society for the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established
Church.7
For Bentham, “useful knowledge” generally signaled a differentiation between
knowledge that might be applied in action and to the “benefit” of society, as opposed to
the knowledge of the pedant, classical scholar, or theologian. The Chrestomathia
consisted basically of two learning tables along with the rationale and appendices for
explaining the plan. In the first Chrestomathic instruction table, Bentham listed the
courses of instruction along with “several STAGES, into which the course is proposed to
be divided: accompanied with a brief view of the ADVANTAGES derivable from such
Instruction: together with an intimation of the REASONS, by which the ORDER OF
PRIORITY, herein observed, was suggested.”8 The curriculum was divided into five
stages of difficulty, each arranged in order of decreasing utility, as well as taking into
consideration the relative degree of “preparedness” of the learner in relation to the
5
Jeremy Bentham, Chrestomathia, in J.R. Dinwiddy, ed., The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham (1983):
hereafter referred to as Chrestomathia.
6
Jeremy Bentham, Chrestomathia, 19.
7
Robbins, 251-94; “Editorial Introduction to Chrestomathia,” xi-xii.
8
Chrestomathia, 18, emphasis in original.
4
Rectenwald, Roots of the Divide
instruction. At each stage, the student first encountered the most useful and ‘naturally
pleasant’ knowledge. Thus, in part two of stage one, for example, “Mechanics at large”
are arranged not according to their logical relationship, but rather in terms of their
practical applicability, the preparedness of the students, and the pleasantness of the
instructions: “1) Mechanics in the limited sense of the word, 2) Hydrostatics, 3)
Hydraulics, 4) Mechanical Pneumatics, 5) Acoustics, and 6) Optics.”9 Hence, a student
who left school early would have received the benefit of the most readily applicable
knowledge.10
Numerous attempts to found the Chrestomathic school were undertaken. Bentham’s
garden at Queen’s Square Place was chosen as the site for a school. A fund was
established, and a committee formed (which included Mill, Place, and Ricardo) to found
and run the school. For various reasons, including infighting and problems over the site,
no Chrestomathic school was ever established. Yet the useful knowledge model on which
it was based informed other projects, including the Hazelwood School (f. 1819) and
Bruce Castle (f. 1827), both of which had been founded by Thomas Wright Hill and sons.
The London University, founded in 1828, was arguably established on the Chrestomathic
model.11 The Benthamite useful knowledge campaign also supplied the apologetics for
the well-known educational projects that followed, including the mechanics’ institutes
and the SDUK.12 Furthermore, with Bentham’s Chrestomathia in hand, the philosophical
radicals were among the first champions of specifically ‘scientific’ education in Britain.
9
Ibid.
Washington, 87.
11
Elie Halévy has argued that the London University represented the realization of the Chrestomathic
model. (Elie Halévy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, trans. Mary Morris, London, 1972, pp. 296,
482).
12
Robbins, 251; Washington, 81-2.
10
5
Rectenwald, Roots of the Divide
“Useful knowledge” was a vesicle within which a scientific curriculum circulated
through the capillaries of the social body. The useful knowledge movement was thus an
important precursor to the debates regarding the relative importance of ‘science’ versus
other cultural knowledge, including classical languages, literature, and theology.
Early nineteenth-century educationalists adopted Bentham’s emphasis on useful
knowledge, if not his exact system. In the Preface to A Pocket Cyclopedia, or, Miscellany
of Useful Knowledge (1812), the schoolmaster Joseph Guy similarly distinguished useful
knowledge from “what is termed a liberal or genteel education,” which left students
“ignorant of the nature and quality of numerous objects with which they have been
surrounded.”13 The departments of useful knowledge, or the study of “things” as opposed
to their “names” in the classical languages, consisted of “Man,” “Commerce,” “Civil
Polity,” and the “Arts, Sciences, Literature, Religion, &c.”14 “Useful knowledge”—
associated with an understanding of the material world as opposed to literature, classical
languages, and theology—was a precursor of the category ‘science’ to arise later in the
century.
The Westminster Review (f. 1824) was the primary Benthamite periodical organ,
representing most closely the strict utilitarianism of the philosophical radicals.15 In an
1825 review of the second edition of George Jardine’s Outlines of Philosophical
Education (1818), for example, the Westminster distinguished between “useless”
(classical) education, and what the review advocated as an education for “the business of
society:”
13
Joseph Guy, A Pocket Cyclopedia, or, Miscellany of Useful Knowledge (1812): 9.
Ibid., 7, xix-xx.
15
Roger P. Wallins, in Alvin Sullivan, ed., British Literary Magazines: The Romantic Age, 1789-1836, vol.
2 (1983): 424-33. The Westminster, founded by Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, was funded by Bentham
and his protégé, John Bowring. Early contributors included James Mills, John Stuart Mill, and W. J. Fox.
14
6
Rectenwald, Roots of the Divide
Directly and immediately, we have risen to the station which we occupy, not by
literature, not by the knowledge of extinct languages, but by the sciences of
politics, of law, of public economy, of commerce, of mathematics; by astronomy,
by chemistry, by mechanics, by natural history. It is by these that we are destined
to rise yet higher. These constitute the business of society, and in these ought we
seek for the objects of education.16
The improvements in social and economic practice had been derived from knowledge
enterprises that were poorly, if at all, represented in the established institutions of
learning, least of all at Cambridge and Oxford. Thus, the success of nascent industrialism
and the extension of empire incited reformers to apply pressure to such long-standing
educational institutions. The “business of society” had changed, and the Westminster
wanted “the objects of education” to reflect such changes. The study of material “things”
(the sciences) as opposed to the study of their “names” (the languages) was the clarion
call for educational reform. A later reviewer made even stronger remarks, arguing that
the sciences—including astronomy, mechanics, and chemistry, and not “mere literature,”
had advanced civilization to its present heights. “To be literary,” the reviewer continued,
“is the disease of the age.”17 “Literary” study was the obsession of the English
universities of Cambridge and Oxford, as well as the preparatory educational systems that
resembled them, and included drilling in classical languages, literature, and theology, and
the neglect of natural history and philosophy. The useful knowledge movement thus
challenged an aristocratic system of education with one based on the new middle-class
industrial concerns.
The mobilization of “useful knowledge” as distinct from other cultural knowledge can
be gleaned in Thomas Peacock’s satire on Romantic poesy in his Four Ages of Poetry
Anon., “The Present System of Education,” the Westminster Review 1 (1825): 150, 151.
Anon, Westminster Review 4: 147-76, qtd. in Alvin Sullivan, ed., British Literary Magazines: The
Romantic Age, 1789-1836, vol. 2 (1983): 424.
16
17
7
Rectenwald, Roots of the Divide
(1820).18 Poetry had once represented the sum total of human knowledge—historical,
“scientific” and cultural. Poetry’s golden age corresponded to the period of “barbaric
manners and supernatural interventions… remote from our ordinary perceptions.”19 Its
reign depended on plunder as the primary means of material gain, upon mystified
understandings of nature, and a lack of mastery over nature and its laws. In the age of
improvement, however, the only true knowledge was that which “can claim a share in
any one of the comforts and utilities of life of which we have witnessed so many and so
rapid advances.”20 That is, true knowledge has passed beyond the parameters of poetry
and into the province of the sciences.
“Useful knowledge” was generally seen as either a part or a product of the “positive”
sciences, including the physical sciences, Political Economy, the Benthamite science of
morals, but variations of this theme were of course in evidence. While useful knowledge
was not divided into “pure” and “applied” sciences, gentlemanly and plebeian reformers
often mobilized the term differently. Plebeian commentators appropriated the rhetoric of
“useful knowledge” and adapted it to their own particular ends. In an address to the
Banksian Society of Manchester entitled The Benefits of General Knowledge, (1829),
Rowland Detrosier, factory worker turned scientific lecturer and deist preacher, provided
a definition of useful knowledge that became common for plebeian radicalism in the
period.21 “Whatever tends to ameliorate the condition of man, or to increase his means of
18
Thomas Peacock, The Four Ages of Poetry (1820) in John E. Jordan, ed., A Defence of Poetry, by Percy
Bysshe Shelley. The Four Ages of Poetry, by Thomas Love Peacock (1965).
19
Ibid., 15.
20
Ibid., 18.
21
James Epstein, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual, and Symbol in England, 1790-1850
(1994): 128; hereafter referred to as Epstein.
8
Rectenwald, Roots of the Divide
happiness, is not merely profitable, but useful and necessary.”22 Any knowledge that
enabled such improvements was deemed “useful” and scientific. But narrow
interpretations of “useful knowledge” given by middle-class reformers were resisted and
revised by plebeian reformers who saw in such a restricted utilitarianism the desideratum
to limit the education of the working classes to middle-class industrial objectives—to
make “mere machines” of the workers.23 In An Address Delivered to the Members of the
New Mechanics’ Institution, Manchester (1831), Detrosier lamented the trend of limiting
“useful knowledge” to the “knowledge of mechanical arts” for the objectives of “one
redeeming virtue—industry! matchless industry!”24 Drawing on a social
environmentalism and utilitarianism resembling that of Robert Owen, James Mill, or
William Godwin in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), Detrosier called for
“the extension of knowledge” to include “moral and political knowledge”25 for the
“formation of character, and the development of mind,”26 in order that education reach its
rightful goals, “the melioration of the moral, physical, and intellectual state of the poorest
and most numerous class society,” and ultimately, “the happiness of all.” Instead of
acting from such a broad concept of usefulness, this new industry in knowledge—the
revenues of which he calculated at “nine millions a year”27 —had been reduced to “the
application of mechanics to the purposes of life.”28 In numerous lectures, Detrosier
22
Rowland Detrosier, The Benefits of General Knowledge, More Especially the Sciences of Mineralogy,
Geology Botany and Entymology (1829): 4.
23
The Mechanics Magazine 1 (1823): 196.
24
Rowland Detrosier, An Address Delivered to the Members of the New Mechanics’ Institution,
Manchester (1831): 7.
25
Ibid., 15.
26
Ibid., 9.
27
Ibid., 8.
28
Ibid., 6.
9
Rectenwald, Roots of the Divide
challenged the useful knowledge industry conceived in more limited terms.29 Thus, for
Detrosier and others, the question was not whether the knowledge movement should
include more than “useful knowledge,” but rather, what was meant by “useful.”
In calling for the expansion of useful knowledge, Detrosier may be seen as reclaiming
for plebeian education something of the original objectives as advocated by Bentham,
and as derived from the movement for the Chrestomathic education for the middle and
upper classes. Useful knowledge had been the ‘scientific’ knowledge of self, society and
environment for the advancement of the moral and rational society. “As it was used by
the Radicals, ‘Useful Learning’ meant not only the diffusion of usable knowledge, but
also the ability of the individuals to whom it was dispensed to make creative and
independent use of that knowledge.”30 The extent and the uses to be made of useful
knowledge were both very much at issue in the educational programs directed at the
working classes.
Early Useful Knowledge Periodicals: The Making of the Useful Knowledge Reader
This section examines the construction of the useful knowledge reader by considering the
new useful knowledge periodicals that began publication in the 1820s.31 In particular, I
focus on the Mechanic’s Magazine (f. 1823) and the Penny Magazine of the Society for
the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (f. 1832). Perhaps due to their reputed “matter-of-
Other addresses delivered by Detrosier to Mechanics’ Institutes include An address delivered at the New
Mechanics Institution, Pool Street, Manchester, on ... Dec. 30, 1829; On the necessity of an extension of
moral and political instruction among the working classes: an address, delivered to the members of the
New Mechanics Institution, Manchester, on Friday evening, March 25, 1831; An address on the
advantages of the intended Mechanics' Hall of Science (1832); and others.
30
Robbins, 265-6.
31
Here I am following Jon Klancher’s seminal discussion of the role of periodicals in the construction of
reading audiences -- The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790-1832 (1987) -- and adding the
dimension of knowledge as a marker by which readers were figured and constructed.
29
10
Rectenwald, Roots of the Divide
fact” contents, these “knowledge texts” have been for the most part neglected by literary
and cultural historians.32 Other scholars have mined the contents and history of the
publications,33 but little attention has yet been paid to the rhetorical, ideological and
political conditions under which the useful knowledge periodicals sought to engage their
readers, or in fact, how they aimed to construct their readerships in the first place. Nor
have historians considered the differential responses of the editors and publishers to these
conditions. A study of such rhetorical interventions should do much to illuminate the
character of the knowledge industry, as well as the importance of that industry to the
history of science culture and the relationship of science and literary studies.
The Mechanic’s Magazine: “Ours and for Us”34
Alan Rauch, Useful Knowledge: The Victorians, Morality, and the March of Intellect (2001): 21. Rauch’s
study is in fact a recent exception. Rauch notes that such knowledge texts have been largely neglected: “For
reasons that are not entirely clear, the rapid growth of periodicals, encyclopedias, and societies promoting
knowledge is a phenomenon in English popular culture that has largely been ignored by students of
literature and history” (22). However, after surveying the knowledge industry in the first chapter, Rauch
goes on to study the industry’s impact on novels in the remaining chapters, in effect reinforcing the neglect
he bemoans by privileging the study of literary to such knowledge texts. Instead, I treat the knowledge texts
as objects of study in their own right, and provide a more detailed reading of such texts in the first two
chapters of this study.
33
Within the history of science, Susan Sheets-Pyenson has done remarkable work to recover the
importance and summarize the contents and histories of useful knowledge periodicals. But given that
immensity of her task, she was not able to offer anything like a close reading of their rhetoric. Working in
the history of education, David Lee Robbins offered an excellent intellectual history of the “Popular
Enlightenment” that includes a thorough tracing of lineages and intellectual partnerships across classes and
continents, without which this essay would be missing important information and connections. However,
given that his thesis was “primarily an essay in intellectual history” (ii, 22), he similarly was unable to pay
much attention to the conditions of production. William Brock has done remarkable work on periodical
publishing, particularly studying the commercial science journals of the nineteenth century (“Development
of Commercial Science Journals” (1980)) and with J. Meadows, the prominent publishers of scientific
material, Taylor & Francis, (Lamp of Learning (1984)). Taylor & Francis published the Philosophical
Magazine (f. 1798). The editorial partner of Richard Taylor, Alexander Tilloch, was also a contributor, for
a time, to the useful knowledge periodicals directed at mechanics and artisans, with the short-lived The
Mechanic’s Oracle (f. 1824). Brock’s attention to the publishers, printers, editors, contents and history of
scientific periodicals is indispensable to any worthy subsequent study.
34
The Mechanic’s Magazine, Museum, Register, Journal & Gazette; “ Our and For Us” was the first
banner on the frontispiece of the bound Volume 1 of the Mechanic’s Magazine, as derived from the
prospectus in the first number. The secondary slogan was “Knowledge is Power,” which the editors
ascribed to Bacon (Mechanic’s Magazine 1, title page, 18, 99); this publication is hereafter referred to as
MM.
32
11
Rectenwald, Roots of the Divide
The Mechanic’s Magazine was the first of its kind in Great Britain. The first number
appeared on Saturday, August 30, 1823. “The object proposed by this publication at its
outset, was one of entire novelty” when the magazine first undertook it—to diffuse
scientific knowledge specifically to the artisans and mechanics of Great Britain.35
Archibald Constable, the publisher of the Edinburgh Review and from 1826 of
Constable’s Miscellany, the first library of useful knowledge (conceived in conjunction
with John Murray),36 noticed the new class of such periodicals in 1824, lending further
credence to the claim of novelty by the Mechanic’s Magazine: “The present desire of
knowledge among mechanics and manufacturers in every part of the island … had
occasioned the publication of numerous works of a class hitherto unknown in this
country.”37
Edited at the outset by the Scots patent agent, John Robertson and the ex-
naval officer and pro-labor economist, Thomas Hodgskin,38 the Mechanic’s Magazine
aimed primarily to reach artisans and mechanics who might buy it for the same price as
the Mirror (2d.-3d.) and read it on their leisure time “in all towns within 150 miles of the
metropolis.”39 Its circulation has been estimated as from 15,000 to 16,000 readers in
35
MM 1, (1823): Preface, iii. Its priority was reasserted in the preface to the third volume, after others had
entered the field. “The ‘Mechanic’s Magazine,’ it was, which first proposed to teach science to mechanics,
and invited mechanics to lend their aid to men of science” (MM 3, ii). Brock, Robbins, and Sheets-Pyenson,
amongst others, have all asserted that it was the first of its kind.
36
James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation (2000): 46; Samuel Smiles, A Publisher and His Friends: Memoir
and Correspondence of the Late John Murray II (1891): 295-6. See chapter three of this dissertation.
37
Archibald Constable, qtd. in Low Scientific Culture, 63.
38
Practical Observations, 3; Patricia Hollis, The Pauper Press: A Study in Working-Class Radicalism of
the 1830's (1970): 101; William H. Brock, “British Science Periodicals and Culture: 1820-1850,” in
Victorian Periodicals Review, 21, 2 (1988): 47-55, at 48; Elie Halevy, Thomas Hodgskin edited in
Translation with an Introduction by A.J. Taylor (1956): 84, originally published in French, in 1903;
hereafter referred to as Halevy. According to William Brock in “British Science Periodicals,” Hodgskin
and Robertson had a falling out after only three weeks of co-editing the magazine (48). Hodgskin went on
to found the Chemist and probably to edit the rival London Mechanics’ Register in 1824. For Karl Marx’s
debt to Hodgskin, see Halevy, esp. the Translator’s Introduction, 9-27, esp. at 22-7, and the Conclusion,
167-81. A discussion of Hodgskin’s economic and knowledge politics follows, below.
39
MM 1, 16.
12
Rectenwald, Roots of the Divide
1824.40 As a part of the new movement in cheap literature, its reach was sizeable relative
to other more established periodicals whose circulation it exceeded.
Robertson had been a partner of Thomas Byerley, the editor of the Mirror, a cut and
paste compendium of material previously published in more expensive journals for
middle-class readers. Robertson copied the Mirror’s format for the Mechanic’s
Magazine, while making “a supremely significant modification: he decided to make the
subject matter of the MM primarily technical and scientific.”41
Meanwhile, Thomas Hodgskin, soon to be Robertson’s co-editor, had established
connections to the Westminster radicals (Bentham, James Mill, Godwin, Francis Place, et
al.), by virtue of an epistolary friendship with Francis Place.42 Place asked James Mill to
help the young and struggling Hodgksin, and Mill obtained for him a position as a
reporter on the Morning Chronicle, which brought Hodgskin to London in 1823.43 In
London, Hodgskin and Robertson met, and established the Mechanic’s Magazine in the
same year.44 Thus, the Mechanic’s Magazine owed its existence, to some extent, to the
influence of the Westminster “philosophical radicals.”
The Mechanic’s Magazine positioned itself in the context of expectations for
‘popular’ science as a potentially radical discourse. Given the contradictory demands of
the discursive field into which the magazine entered—including the plebeian demand for
educational independence, middle class industrial objectives, and the upper-class fears
40
T.F. Dibdin, The Library Companion (1824): xv; Altick, English Common Reader, 393.
Robbins, 203-4. The relative individual importance of Robertson and Hodgskin to the magazine remains
somewhat unclear, although W. H. Brock maintains that they split as joint editors after only a few weeks,
leaving Robertson as the sole editor of MM. See the next two sections, below.
42
Halevy, 34-82, and passim. According to G.D.H. Cole in his Introduction of Labour Defended, “it was
probably the Essay on Naval Discipline that gained for Hodgskin his friendship with Francis Place, and an
introduction to the circle surrounding Jeremy Bentham” (9).
43
Halevy, 82.
44
Ibid., 84.
41
13
Rectenwald, Roots of the Divide
over plebeian education—the Mechanic’s Magazine negotiated this difficult rhetorical
terrain to develop a tenuous amalgam. The editors adopted the strategy of positing useful
knowledge as disinterested and value-neutral, thus facilitating cooperation between the
otherwise suspicious social orders, “where opposed groups readily perceived the moral
and political presuppositions of their opponents in their most favourite cosmologies.”45
While repeatedly denying political motivation and condemning party politics as “party
and factious purposes,”46 the editors nevertheless advocated knowledge as a political tool
in the hands of the artisans and mechanics for whom it was intended. Knowledge was the
rallying cry for a new movement for the working classes that partially escaped the
charges associated with other forms of organization, such as the “combination” (or
unionizing) of workingmen for higher wages or shorter hours. “Amongst other things, we
have taught them to combine, though not for the small purposes which have often (we say
not always) marked the combinations of Mechanics, but for that more general and noble
purpose—the acquisition of knowledge, and the action and reaction of the intellect.”47
The term “combine” was provocative, suggesting that knowledge was figured as a new
political tool for the union of workers, with the ultimate objective of improving their
position in the social order. Thus the editors made it clear that their sympathies lied with
the workers’ interests, and they suggested that education was the most important,
“general” means by which they could pursue such interests.
Barry Barnes and Steven Shapin, “Science, Nature and Control: Interpreting Mechanics’ Institutes,” in
Social Studies of Science 7 (1977): 31-74.
46
MM 1, 32.
47
MM 3 (1825): iv, emphasis in original).
45
14
Rectenwald, Roots of the Divide
The magazine vigorously asserted the importance of working-class “independence,”
especially with regards to education.48 The most striking assertion came in its “Proposals
for a London Mechanic’s Institute” published on October 11, 1823, in which Hodgskin
and Robertson launched their public appeal for a Mechanics’ Institution in London, like
those at Glasgow, Edinburgh and Liverpool. Trumpeting such institutions, they argued
that the education of the mechanics and artisans had to be “in their own hands,” and not
in those of the masters of industry and trade, or the government:
The education of a free people, like their property, will always be directed most
beneficially for them when it is in their own hands. When government interferes,
it directs its efforts more to make people obedient and docile, than wise and
happy. It desires to control the thoughts, and fashion even the minds of its
subjects; and to give into its hands the power of educating the people, is the
widest possible extension of that most pernicious practice which has so long
desolated society, of allowing one or a few men to direct the actions and control
the conduct of millions. Men had better be without education—properly so-called,
for nature of herself teaches us many valuable truths—than be educated by their
rulers; for then education is but the mere breaking of the steer to the yoke; the
mere discipline of a hunting dog, which, by dint of severity, is made to forgo the
strongest impulse of his nature, and instead of devouring his prey, to hasten with
it to the feet of his master.49
The magazine was a forerunner in expressing the value of an independent working-class
education.50 Brougham would echo this proclamation closely in his Practical
Observations. Some gentlemanly aid was accepted as a necessary evil at the outset of
adult education, but “gratuitous” lectures were anathema to a truly working-class
educational independence. Independence was figured in terms of ‘manliness,’ a virtue
that could not easily be denied, and extended to the management of the mechanics’
48
Ibid., 99-102, Cobbett, qtd. in MM 1, 190; MM 2, 422-3, 437.
Ibid., 99-102, at 100.
50
In his “Introduction” to Thomas Hodgskin’s Labour Defended Against the Claims of Capital (1825),
Cole credits Hodgskin for being “the pioneer of the idea of ‘Independent Working-Class Education,’
though he was soon to have successors in that field” (10).
49
15
Rectenwald, Roots of the Divide
institutions themselves. According to the editors, the Glasgow Mechanic’s Institution,
founded on July 26, 1823, provided the first example of a mechanics’ institution
“established by mechanics themselves.”51 The Edinburgh School of Arts had also been
founded in April, 1821, and the Liverpool Mechanics and Apprentices’ Library in July,
1823.52 The Mechanic’s Magazine called for their emulation by a similar institution for
London.
The initial Proposal had been made in October, 1823. Preliminary meetings were
held over the next two months. The London Mechanics’ Institute was founded on
December 2, 1823. Although they had been provisional secretaries of the Mechanics’
Institute, neither Hodgskin nor Robertson won election to any permanent office on
December 15, 1823.53 In the following month, Birkbeck, having been elected President,
delivered the opening address to several hundred members of the institute.54
A bitter and heated struggle soon broke out over the control of the institute, and the
conflict was reflected in the pages of the Mechanic’s Magazine. After launching the
Institute from their pages and securing the support of both gentleman subscribers and
working-class members, Hodgskin and Robertson soon found the control of their
brainchild passing into the hands of such benefactors as Birkbeck and Place, and
regretted giving up their ideal of ‘popular’ control. “No doubt they realized that, with
every important figure who lent his support to the institution, their own influence would
MM 1, 101, emphasis in original.; Hudson argues, however, that “to the Glasgow and Liverpool
Institutions may be awarded the honour of being established by the working-classes; but to the latter alone
belongs the credit of having existed solely by their support” (42). The Edinburgh School of Arts had been
founded in April, 1821, and the Liverpool Mechanics and Apprentices’ Library in July, 1823 (39, 45).
52
Hudson, 39, 45, 42.
53
Halevy, 88.
54
Hudson, 49.
51
16
Rectenwald, Roots of the Divide
further diminish.”55 Indeed, such was the case. The managers chose a “gentlemanly
place”56 for their headquarters, which served to alienate the working class members and
discourage their visits. The managers proceeded to conduct a “clandestine”57 meeting for
the selection of a permanent residence. The latter was secured on the basis of an interestcharging debt to George Birkbeck. Not made during an official General Meeting, this
business deal had been conducted “illegally.” As the Mechanic’s Magazine saw it, this
was precisely the sort of indebtedness to the upper classes that would undermine any
independent education for the working classes.
The Penny Magazine: “The Finder”58
After the early useful knowledge periodicals had established their readerships, later
useful knowledge periodicals were able to build on and extend the reach of useful
knowledge dissemination. They were aided by the addition of the steam press,
stereotyped printing and the widened readerships in useful knowledge that had begun in
the early 1820s. The early 1830s marked the take-off period for the first mass reading
market in Britain, with the emergence of the new mass periodicals,59 the most important
and successful of which were the Penny Magazine, Saturday Magazine, and Chambers’s
Edinburgh Journal.60
55
Ibid., 87.
MM 2, 309.
57
MM 2, 307.
58
From the first article of the first number entitled, “Reading for All”: “[I]n this point of view our little
Miscellany may prepare the way for the reception of more elaborate and precise knowledge, and be as the
small optic-glass called “the finder,” which is placed by the side of a large telescope, to enable the observer
to discover the star which is afterwards to be carefully examined by the more perfect instrument” (1). My
suggestion here is that The Penny was also a “finder” of mass reading audiences.
59
Scott Bennett, “Revolutions in Thought,” 226.
60
Ibid., 245.
56
17
Rectenwald, Roots of the Divide
Owing perhaps to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge’s (SDUK’s)
“noisy role in the nineteenth century march of the mind,” the Penny had more immediate
and widespread success than its rivals in the field of popular literature.61 It has been often
noted that the Penny Magazine was the first genuinely mass periodical in Great Britain.
But less noticed and perhaps more important is the fact that the first mass periodical was
a useful knowledge periodical. Charles Knight, its publisher and editor,62 took special
notice of this important phenomenon in the beginning of the Preface to the first bound
volume:
It was considered by Edmund Burke, about forty years ago, that there were eighty
thousand readers in this country. In the present year it has been shown, by the
sale of the “Penny Magazine,” that there are two hundred thousand purchasers of
one periodical work. It may be fairly calculated that the number of readers of that
single work amounts to a million.
If this incontestable evidence of the spread of the ability to read be most
satisfactory, it is still more satisfactory to consider the species of reading which
has had such an extensive and increasing popularity.63
The species of reading that Knight referred to was useful and edifying reading. Such
reading was opposed to romance, vicious rumor-mongering, and partisan politics. In
contradistinction to these classes of reading, the Penny was to appeal to the same readers
with calm reason. As we shall see, the Penny defined useful knowledge widely. Like its
precursors, the Penny included the useful arts, basic science, and Political Economy
Washington, iii. Washington’s is the only book-length study devoted to The Penny Magazine, although
he claims to trace the lineage of such popular literature as The Penny from the Renaissance, and focuses
three and a half chapters of six on its intellectual and cultural forebears, devoting only the remaining to its
history and contents. Washington’s dissertation director was none other than Richard Altick.
62
As Washington notes, Knight was the editor and publisher of The Penny Magazine, but a Penny
Publications Committee of the SDUK superintended it. The Committee consisted of Matthew Hill (who
conceived of the publication), Thomas Falconer, David Jardine, Henry B. Ker, George Long, John
Wrottesley, B.H. Malkin, W. H. Ord, John Ward (the nephew of Thomas Arnold), William Allen, J.
Whitshaw, and G.B. Greenough. “At least three members of this sub-committee were responsible for the
examination and approval of each number of the publication before it went to press” (152-155, 155).
63
“Preface,” PM 1 (1832): iii, emphasis added.
61
18
Rectenwald, Roots of the Divide
under the rubric of “useful knowledge.” But it also included “moral” and “religious”
knowledge. Knight contrasted the useful knowledge vended in the Penny with reading
calculated to excite the passions, “inflame a vicious appetite,” “minister to prejudices and
superstitions,” or “appeal to the lovers of the marvelous.” In the Penny, there was none of
the “tattle or abuse for the gratification of a diseased personality—and, above all, no
party politics.”64 Knight was particularly concerned with the passions of political
journalism fed by radical and other partisan periodicals. In his autobiography, he claimed
that periodical purveyors had contributed to and exploited political fervor to the detriment
of the social order.65 Under his editorship and the superintendence of the Society for the
Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK), the Penny would construct a discursive space
removed from political ideology. But the Penny, I argue, was no less an advocacy
magazine than those it sought to counteract. Fundamental to the construction of the
Penny’s mass audience was the positing of an idealized reader abstracted from sociopolitical context, left with only an “innocent” desire for knowledge.66 The putative
apolitical character of the Penny was also instrumental in helping to extend the belief in
“value-neutrality” that would prove invaluable as a credo of science as the century
progressed. However, to accept such “value-neutrality” at face value would be to take the
educationists and reformers at their word.67 Value-neutrality was an ideology that served
64
Ibid.
Charles Knight, Passages of a Working Life During Half a Century, with a Prelude of Early
Reminiscences (1864, 1865): vol. 1, 235.
66
PM 1 (1832): 1.
67
In “The Editorial Character and Readership of The Penny Magazine,” Bennett relies on mostly
quantitative analysis of the content, paying almost no attention to the context in which such content was
purveyed and assuming that the mere quantity of various types of articles can be used to determine the
magazine’s editorial character. While appropriately re-examining the dominant scholarly thinking on The
Penny Magazine—that it was simply an organ for disseminating middle-class, Whig values amongst the
“petit bourgeoisie and perhaps upwardly mobile members of the labor aristocracy” (135-6)—he ends by
suggesting that the periodical was ideologically neutral: “The magazine met the need of its readers to know
65
19
Rectenwald, Roots of the Divide
to advance, while masking, various socio-political interests, harbored within the notion of
“useful knowledge.”
In the case of the Penny, these interests involved the values of the philosophical
radicals, such as James Mill, Henry Brougham, and Francis Place, in conjunction with the
religious advocates who were also prominent members of the main Committee of the
SDUK.68 Based largely on Brougham’s Practical Observations, the aim of the SDUK
had been “strictly limited to what its title imports, namely, the imparting useful
information to all classes of the community, particularly to such as are unable to avail
themselves of the experienced teachers, or may prefer learning by themselves.”69 The
SDUK was to provide for the first prong of Brougham’s plan for the education of the
people, the production of cheap publications, which was to be combined with the second
prong, the establishment of libraries and reading societies. The latter would be effected
mostly by local efforts.70 The Penny Magazine was launched to extend the reach of the
first prong, the aim of which had been considered by the Committee to be unmet by the
Society’s erstwhile efforts: the Quarterly Journal of Education (f. 1831), the Library of
in a simple, pragmatic way about the world that was emerging about them. The Penny Magazine did this,
did it well, and did it almost always with no appeal to an ideological position. It was the competitive value
of The Penny Magazine, not its power to define or champion a given position, that led to the ten million
individual decisions made in 1832 to buy the magazine” (137-8). Bennett fails to acknowledge that the very
definitions of terms like “pragmatic” and “competitive value” are under ideological formation during the
very period in question. The Penny itself had a large role in this work.
68
The SDUK was careful to avoid the topics of religion, however. Thomas Arnold was rejected as a
Committee member due to his interest in promoting Christianity through the Society. See Washington, esp.
134.
69
See the prospectus for “The Society of the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge,” which followed the first
treatise of the Society in first bound volume of the Library of Useful Knowledge (1829). This section will
not retrace in detail the institutional history of the SDUK. To date, the most comprehensive institutional
studies of the SDUK are Monica C. Grobel, The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge 1826-1846
(unpublished Ph.D. dissertation), and Harold Smith, The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge
1826-1846: A Social and Bibliographical Evaluation (1974).
70
Practical Observations; Robbins, 215. The third prong was the establishment of Mechanics’ and other
educational institutions.
20
Rectenwald, Roots of the Divide
Useful Knowledge, the Library for the Young, the Working-Man’s Companion, the
Farmer Series, and especially the Library of Entertaining Knowledge.71
Throughout the first volume, the Penny posited useful knowledge as a
transcendent, universal value that could tie together a vast public with reading that
superseded partisanship and social strife. In the first number of The Penny Magazine,
published on Saturday, March 31, 1832, the magazine included no less than three articles
on knowledge and its imagined readers. In the first article, “Reading for All,” the fear of
the spread of cheap literature was considered analogous to an earlier fear of the stagecoach. The stage-coach, it had been argued, should be banned—otherwise, “‘will any
man keep a horse for himself and another for his man, all the year, for to ride one or two
journies,’” when the stage-coach can take him on many more journeys for “‘four
shillings.’”72 Although it might be initially lamented like the stage-coach had been, the
Penny would do for “all classes”—in terms of knowledge—what the stage-coach had
done for the middle classes in terms of “communication.” It would effectively end the
upper class “monopoly of literature” by catering to readers without the time, means, or
reading habits for extensive study. The other publications of the SDUK had been directed
to “diligent readers—to those who are anxiously desirous to obtain knowledge in a
condensed, and in most cases, systematic form.” But the Penny was to be a “useful and
entertaining Weekly Magazine, that may be taken up and laid down without requiring any
considerable effort.”73 That is, the Penny would serve as light reading, providing an easy
introduction to useful knowledge for the unlearned reader or the reader without either the
time or energy for difficult study. The Penny figured its reader not as a serious student
71
Washington, esp. 152.
PM, 1, 1.
73
Ibid., emphasis in original.
72
21
Rectenwald, Roots of the Divide
but rather as an occasional and superficial forager for information. While the Penny
would improve readers, far from promising them any expertise, like the finder on the
telescope, it would merely indicate to the more arduous observer where more knowledge
might lie:
Whatever tends to enlarge the range of observation, to add to the store of facts, to
awaken the reason, and to lead the imagination into agreeable and innocent trains
of thought, may assist in the establishment of a sincere and ardent desire for
information; and in this point of view our little Miscellany may prepare the way
for the reception of more elaborate and precise knowledge, and be as the small
optic-glass called “the finder,” which is placed by the side of a large telescope, to
enable the observer to discover the star which is afterwards to be carefully
examined by the more perfect instrument.74
“The finder” would only help readers find the objects of study. But the Penny can also be
seen as a finder of readers, creating a mass market for knowledge and fashioning subjects
to properly receive it, by cultivating the proper disposition for its reception. The Penny
would then direct a segment of its readers to other publications, especially its own
Library of Useful Knowledge.
As another article in the same number suggested, however, very few readers could
hope to become distinguished discoverers of knowledge in their own right. As the latest
entrant into the new knowledge industry, the Penny was quick to establish its position on
the diffusion of knowledge among the people. In “Excellence Not Limited by Station,”
the Penny warned of the dangers attendant upon such “self-deception” as the “habit of
considering our stations in life so ill-suited to our powers.” The artisan or mechanic
should not expect his attainments to remove him from his current station, nor should they
make him dissatisfied with it. Middle and upper class readers need not worry about such
consequences either:
74
PM 1,1.
22
Rectenwald, Roots of the Divide
As society is constituted, there cannot be many employments which demand very
brilliant talents, or great delicacy of taste, for their proper discharge. The great
bulk of society is composed of plain, plodding men, who move “right onwards” to
the sober duties of their calling… England, happily for us, is full of bright
examples of the great men raised from the meanest situations; and the education
which England is now beginning to bestow upon her children will multiply these
examples. But a partial and incomplete diffusion of knowledge will also multiply
the victims of that evil principle which postpones the discharge of present and
immediate duties, for the anticipations of some destiny above the labours of a
handicraftsman, or the calculations of a shopkeeper.75
Unlike the early volumes of the Mechanic’s Magazine, the Penny intended to draw a
distinction between claims for knowledge as a means of self-improvement for its own
sake, which it promoted throughout, and knowledge as a sure means to improve one’s lot
and by extension, the lot of the working classes in general. From the outset, the new
magazine sought to reassure the wary and warn the overly ambitious that the acquisition
of knowledge, properly understood, should not turn the social order upside-down, as
some had feared and others had hoped.76 The partial and incomplete diffusion of
knowledge was indeed dangerous if such diffusion was considered as a guarantee to
change the social status of the average worker. While some knowledge seekers would
attain greatness, those who became derelict in their duties as a result of a few attainments
were not among them:
Of the highly-gifted men whose abandonment of their humble calling has been the
apparent beginning of a distinguished career, we do not recollect an instance of
75
PM 1, 5.
Washington argues that The Penny Magazine was, following James Mill’s essay “Education,” primarily
directed at the middle classes. See Washington, esp. 124. If this was the case, then the rhetoric in such
articles as this must be interpreted both in terms of the palliating effects they must have had on its middleclass readers, as well as in consideration of its more plebeian readers. For an example of such plebeian
readers, I point to George Holyoake, who in his autobiography, Sixty Years of an Agitator’s Life (1892),
acknowledged reading The Penny and giving it away as a payment for room and board to his artisan-class
lodgers. See page 70. The Penny furthermore claimed that the publication was meant for “the poor, or the
labouring body in England—that class of society to whose wants and improvement our humble labours are
mainly directed” (PM 1, 170).
76
23
Rectenwald, Roots of the Divide
one who did not pursue that humble calling with credit and success until the
occasion presented itself for exhibiting those superior powers which nature
occasionally bestows. Benjamin Franklin was as valuable to his master as a
printer’s apprentice, as he was to his country as a statesman and a negotiator, or to
the world as a philosopher. Had he not been so, indeed, it may be doubted
whether he ever would have taken his rank among the first statesmen and
philosophers of his time. One of the great secrets of advancing in life is to be
ready to take advantage of those opportunities which, if a man really possesses
superior abilities, are sure to present themselves some time or other.
Thus, the hope for the “distinguished career” is held out as a possibility, but the
abandonment of one’s “humble calling” is the one sure way to miss the “opportunities”
that may present themselves to the truly superior adherent. According to this formulation,
the only way of knowing whether or not one might rise above one’s current station was to
remain at work, to improve oneself, and to wait and watch patiently for opportunities to
advance. Thus, a model for the diffusion of knowledge was proposed—one that claimed
to shore up the status quo, while at the same time, expanding the market for knowledge.
“Useful knowledge,” as I have suggested, was a contested category, with different
meanings imputed to it by various interlocutors. The Penny expanded the strict utilitarian
sense of the phrase, placing itself “in direct opposition to those who believed that
education was only useful in proportion to the amount of money it brought the learner.”77
In this, the magazine appeared to agree with the artisan lecturer Rowland Detrosier, for
example, for whom happiness and not productivity was the primary object of plebeian
education, rather than with the early Mechanic’s Magazine, which promoted knowledge
as a source of political and economic power. But the Penny’s idea of happiness and
Detrosier’s idea of happiness were quite different. For the Penny happiness was not, as
for Detrosier, the product of a holistic change in social conditions as the result of
77
Washington, 180.
24
Rectenwald, Roots of the Divide
collective moral and political knowledge, but rather the result of prudence on the part of
individuals faced with existing conditions. Further, if “knowledge is power,” for the
Penny it was only in the most individualistic sense—as a means for the “prudent” to
choose wisely. As I argue elsewhere, this appropriation of useful knowledge would force
those who sought social change from the useful knowledge movement to seek other
venues for the dissemination of knowledge amongst plebeian readers. These
propagandists would find smaller readerships amongst the “aristocrats” of working-class
education. In the meanwhile, the issues at stake revolved around questions of
knowledge—what knowledge was to be disseminated, who controlled its dissemination,
who authorized and gained authority by it? What was the role of readers—were they
active participants, or passive recipients? As we shall see in the following section, from
the late 1820s, the new knowledge movement attracted the attention of gentlemanly
publishers, who also attempted to appropriate it for their own ends.
The Quarterly Review and Charles Lyell: A Scientific Turn
Charles Lyell’s career as author did not begin with his notorious Principles of Geology,
but in the Quarterly Review, where he published articles on science and education
beginning in 1825.78 In Lyell’s first article for the periodical, the Quarterly continued in
its usual response to the educational reform questions of the day, and its ideological
opponent, Henry Brougham, at the Edinburgh.79 Brougham and the Edinburgh had
campaigned heavily for a new, London University, ruthlessly attacking the exclusive,
[Charles Lyell], “London University,” Quarterly Review 33 (1825-6): 257-75; [Charles Lyell],
“Scientific Institutions,” Quarterly Review 34 (1826): 153-79; [Charles Lyell], “State of the Universities,
Quarterly Review 36 (1827): 216-268.
79
[Charles Lyell], “The London University,” Quarterly Review 33 (1825-6): 257-75, at 259.
78
25
Rectenwald, Roots of the Divide
classical education at Oxford and Cambridge.80 In response, the Quarterly had
commissioned Lyell to defend the English universities, and by implication his own
Oxford education, which he did, calling only for gradual modifications in light of the
campaign for London. But in the process, he began his research for what would become a
criticism of the university and educational system in England. In terms of class, Lyell’s
educational politics were relatively conservative and remained so; true education
remained the sole property of the wealthy. But in light of his own circumstances as a
fledgling graduate trying to eek out a living as a lawyer, he began to consider university
reform, and also, the newly emergent scientific and literary institutions cropping up
across the country.
His first reformist contribution was an article published in the Quarterly Review,
entitled “Scientific Institutions.” Here, Lyell heralded a scientific revolution.81 In this
early notice of a scientific revolution in Europe, Lyell connected the growth,
specialization, and professionalism of natural knowledge to the status of empire.82
[Henry Brougham], “New University in London,” The Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal 42 (1825):
346-67, esp. at 354-5; idem., “The London University,” The Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal 43
(1825-6): 315-41.
81
While historians of science have generally seen the 19th development of science as a second scientific
revolution, the first occurring in the 17th century, recent commentators suggest that it was in fact the first
scientific revolution. See Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine, eds., “Introduction: The age of
reflexion,” in Romanticism and the Sciences (1990): 1-9; and David Knight, Humphry Davy: Science &
Power (1992): xii.
82
William Whewell later made the same connection: William Whewell, Astronomy and General Physics
Considered With Reference to Natural Theology, Third Bridgewater Treatise (1833). Whewell connected
commerce and colonialism to the growth of knowledge. The stimulus to trade and colonialism was the
variety of vegetables and animals that God had placed in the various regions of the earth. In fact, God had
placed them as such in order to encourage such trade and colonialism: “The intercourse of nations in the
way of discovery, colonization, commerce; the study of the natural history, manners, institutions of foreign
countries; lead to most numerous and important results. Without dwelling upon this subject, it will probably
be allowed that such intercourse has a great influence upon the comforts, the prosperity, the arts, the
literature, the power, of the nations which thus communicate. Now the variety of the productions of
different lands supplies both the stimulus to this intercourse, and the instruments by which it produces its
effects. The desire to possess the objects or the knowledge which foreign countries alone can supply, urges
the trader, the traveler, the discoverer to compass land and sea; and the advantages of civilization consists
80
26
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England’s colonial possessions, being “more diversified in climate and local character
than those of any other,” should, Lyell argued, greatly advantage her for acquiring
collections of “proportional extent and magnificence,” especially as “England is not only
the most affluent of modern nations, but the grand centre of commercial activity and
communication between the most distant portions of the globe.” Yet relative to imperial
status, England’s natural collections, especially at the British Museum and library, were
“wholly unworthy of the present age.” Given the greatness of her empire, “we may ask
why her museums do not display a proportional extent and magnificence.” The answer
was “not difficult.” The fault lay with the “opinion of the enlightened and educated
classes [who exercised] a predominant sway” over the “whole resources of the state.”
They had not developed a “general taste for promoting physical science,”83 and for this
reason, the scientific collections (and science itself) in England lagged behind that of
inferior nations. Lyell chided the elites for their neglect of science, and called upon them
to reassess their commitments.
Lyell expressed “great satisfaction” that the National Gallery of Pictures “is not to find
a place…at the British Museum.” The collections of the fine arts and the sciences should
be housed in separate museums and libraries, so that they are not forced to compete for
space and patrons, or suffer the misappropriation of funds. Given the closer connection of
the arts to the human passions, patrons tend to overemphasize the arts. But the natural
sciences required their own province and protection, if their full development was to be
adequately encouraged.84
almost entirely in the cultivation, the use, the improvement of that which has been received from other
countries” (62-3).
83
Ibid., 155, emphasis added.
84
Ibid., 155-6.
27
Rectenwald, Roots of the Divide
The article was ostensibly a review of the transactions of the new scientific societies
in Cambridge, Cornwall, Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol and Yorkshire. But Lyell used
the occasion to deliver his own assessment of the state of science in 1826 England, and to
offer his views for the reform of its knowledge enterprises. After the founding of the
Royal Society in 1663, nearly a century lapsed before “a national museum of Natural
History [the British Museum] was founded in our metropolis” in 1759.85 “From the
institution of the Royal Society in 1663, to the year 1788…no subdivision of scientific
labour was attempted in our metropolis,” until the founding of the Linnaean Society,
which undertook the “prosecution of the studies of zoology and botany in all their
details.”86 But soon after the founding of the Royal Institution in 1799, Lyell reported,
numerous societies devoted to one or another division of natural philosophy had sprung
into existence. The first decades of the century were marked by a veritable explosion in
scientific activity and its specialized, metropolitan institutions: the College of Surgeons in
1800, the Horticultural Society in 1804, the London Institute for the Advancement of
Literature and the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in 1805, the Geological Society in
1807, and the Astronomical Society in 1821.87 Despite such a burgeoning of scientific
institutions in England, the educated elite remained seemingly indifferent to the sciences,
and instead continued to focus on literature and the fine arts. Lyell paraded this list to
underscore the lack of appropriate interest and support from the educated elite. Lyell
provided no figures to support his claim that the fine arts and literature yielded greater
patronage than did the sciences, but he made clear his sense of the situation. Yet, given
such a revolution in science and the benefits derived from it, who could afford to remain
85
Ibid., 155.
Ibid., 159.
87
Ibid., 162-3.
86
28
Rectenwald, Roots of the Divide
indifferent? What institutions could remain unchanged? Why was science still lacking in
patronage as compared to the fine arts and literature? The educated elite and the elite
institutions remained complacent at their own peril. Lyell wanted to provoke them to
reform.
But Lyell was careful to compensate for such risky remarks, by noting the “rise and
progress of similar institutions in the provinces,” which for him were perhaps more
important than the metropolitan. Such a complimentary reference to the provinces served
in part as flattery of the rural readers, and a swipe at the Edinburgh, with its recent
campaigning for a London University based largely on supposed metropolitan
superiority.88 The new provincial societies included those in Manchester (f. 1781),
Cornwall (f. 1814), Liverpool (f. 1814), Cambridge (f. 1819), Bristol, (f. 1820),
Yorkshire (f. 1822), as well as “many other institutions in our provinces, such as those of
Newcastle, Bath, Leeds, and Exeter.”89 Thousands thereby gained exposure to the natural
sciences; but more importantly for Lyell, “a new class of lecturers” had been born whose
employments in the branches of natural knowledge had allowed them “to enlarge and
perfect their own knowledge.” Lyell saw the possibilities for a “certain class of the
community, to direct their minds and devote their lives professionally to these studies.”
The provincial societies offered new theatres for “native talent,” and perhaps did more for
knowledge production than their metropolitan counterparts.90 Eventually, the rank of such
societies would secure their place as objects of ambition even for men from the nobler
classes.
[Henry Brougham], “New University in London,” The Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal 42 (1825):
346-67, esp. at 354-5.
89
Ibid., 163-71.
90
Ibid., 172, emphasis mine.
88
29
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By 1826, therefore, Lyell had already begun to delineate a model for the division of
natural knowledge from cultural (and religious) enterprises, arguing that such a division
was a prerequisite for the development of natural knowledge. Further, he outlined a
system of professionals located throughout the land, lecturing to an enlarging public, and
contributing original research to their fields of knowledge. This professional lecturer and
researcher in natural sciences would be differentiated from the older model for natural
philosopher. No longer an amateur, he would pursue scientific matters exclusively. Such
a situation in science would benefit men like Lyell, who, although aristocratic,
nevertheless struggled to earn an independent living. One would pursue natural science in
an institutional setting in which both the production and exchange of knowledge would
be accelerated. Additionally, the new breed of naturalist could effectively eschew
religious affiliation, and eventually even the necessary conciliation between natural and
revealed truth, as represented in the usual framework of natural philosophy, Natural
Theology. Lyell’s criticism and recommendations are prescient in terms of the history of
“science and culture” and “science and religion”—and the eventual division of these
spheres by the last quarter of the century.
Lyell’s correspondence shows that he was amused at having gotten a reformist article
published in the Tory Review. “I must not sport radical,” he joked in a letter to his friend,
Gideon Mandell, “as I am become a Quarterly Reviewer. You will see my article just out
on ‘Scientific Institutions,’ by which some of my friends here think I have carried the
strong works of the enemy by storm.”91 Lyell was being playful and triumphant, as he
had already ‘sported radical,’ within the Quarterly Review itself, into which he had
carried “the strong works of the enemy,” referring undoubtedly to the kinds of
91
Letter to G. Mantell, June 22, 1826, L&L, I (1881): 164-5.
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educational and institutional reforms being proposed at the Edinburgh Review by the
utilitarian and Whig, Henry Brougham. Lyell’s gentlemanly status, 92 coupled with his
skilled rhetorical maneuverings, had permitted him to smuggle a reformist article into a
bastion of periodical conservatism. Likewise, it might have looked as if the Quarterly had
finally conceded to, or in fact was proposing, some relatively ‘radical’ change.
He immediately set to work on his next project, an article about the Royal inquiry of
Scottish universities. The article “State of the Universities” represented another important
first for the Quarterly, amplifying Lyell’s earlier revision of scientific educational
institutions, and extending it to the ancient university structure. Ostensibly, the article
was a review of the publications relating to a Royal Commission established to
investigate the Scottish universities. Lyell used the occasion to undertake an historical
and geographical survey of university education, and to evaluate English and Irish
universities in particular. Not only did the Scottish universities resemble each other on
basic assumptions, they also resembled the French, German, and Italian. Further, it was in
the very points of agreement that they all differed from the English and the Irish. As
such, the English system exhibited peculiarities not seen in any of the others:
There are three striking peculiarities in the system of education in England and
Ireland without parallel in any of the other nations of modern Europe: First, the
length of preliminary education, and the limited extent of the subjects it embraces:
Secondly, the virtual exclusion of a regular course of study in the faculties of
theology, law and medicine: Thirdly, the very incomplete subdivision of sciences
among those on whom the whole burden of teaching is cast.93
These three points of difference were the objects of Lyell’s criticism. Lyell objected to
the length of preliminary education, its limitations, and finally, the lack of the
92
93
James A. Secord, Introduction, Principles of Geology (1997): xiii.
[Charles Lyell], “State of the Universities,” the Quarterly Review 36 (1827): 216-68, at 218.
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specialization in the departments of natural knowledge. Finding the English and Irish
universities deficient in comparison with other systems and indeed, in terms of their own
history, he argued for the introduction of professional studies, and in particular, the
increase in scientific studies, as well as their inclusion in the examinations. The upshot
was the recommendation for new professors in the various departments of knowledge,
especially in natural knowledge, thus enlarging the new natural knowledge class that
Lyell envisioned.
As might be expected, what Lyell lamented most about the English system was the
absence of studies in the natural sciences. While the taste for natural sciences is weak in
most students, others have “an irresistible, and as it were, instinctive propensity to
cultivate such studies, and if no elementary knowledge be communicated in a scientific
form, they will, nevertheless, follow the bent of their inclination; and what might, under a
proper direction, have led to the improvement and exercise of the mental faculties, must
often degenerate into a frivolous amusement.”94 Such “frivolous amusement” referred to
the amateur status of the naturalist in England and implied the need for a dedicated class
of science practitioners who might be remunerated for their pursuits.
Lyell’s Quarterly articles of 1826-7, taken together, outlined a model for the reform
and modernization of knowledge enterprises within English educational and scientific
institutions. First, Lyell called for the division of the spheres -- of the sciences from other
cultural enterprises, i.e., the fine arts and literature. The division of natural and cultural
knowledge enterprises had to do partly with the requirement that institutions keep pace
with the growth of knowledge, but the separation of the spheres was also necessary in
order to steer patronage to the sciences. Secondly, he called for a new professionalism in
94
Ibid.
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the sciences – a new class of lecturers, stationed both within the new provincial
institutions and at “Oxbridge.” Third, he called for increased specialization in the
branches of natural knowledge. Specialization was required by the growth of knowledge,
but it also yielded more professional positions within the emerging and older institutions.
Given the Quarterly’s former conservative resistance to almost all education reform, the
model represented a significantly altered view of education for the publication and its
readers.
33