Victorian Scientific Naturalism examines the secular creeds of the generation of intellectuals who, in the wake of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, wrested cultural authority from the old Anglican establishment while installing themselves as a new professional scientific elite. Beginning in the crisis of authority in the 1850s that followed the aristocratic mismanagement of the Crimean war and the trauma of the Indian mutiny, this campaign, led by biologists, physicists and mathematicians such as Thomas Huxley, Joseph Hooker, John Tyndall and William Kingdon Clifford, helped reform and mod ... More

Victorian Scientific Naturalism examines the secular creeds of the generation of intellectuals who, in the wake of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, wrested cultural authority from the old Anglican establishment while installing themselves as a new professional scientific elite. Beginning in the crisis of authority in the 1850s that followed the aristocratic mismanagement of the Crimean war and the trauma of the Indian mutiny, this campaign, led by biologists, physicists and mathematicians such as Thomas Huxley, Joseph Hooker, John Tyndall and William Kingdon Clifford, helped reform and modernize Victorian Britain. The tendency of much recent scholarship, however, has been to sideline the scientific naturalists in favor of recovering previously neglected groups of historical actors, many of whom contested their claims to cultural and scientific authority. This volume, which brings together new essays by leading historians of science and literary critics, returns to these canonical figures, in the light of the new scholarly agendas, to re-evaluate their place in the broader landscape of nineteenth-century Britain. It offers a series of new perspectives on Victorian scientific naturalism, as well as its subsequent incarnations in the early twentieth century, that together provide an innovative understanding of the movement centering on the issues of community, identity, and continuity.