Abstract
This book focuses on aspects of Whig politics in the first half of the nineteenth century. It considers some strands of science as they influenced Whig notions of how the statesman should appear. It is written not from the perspective of the history of science (the attempt to explain the pattern and development of scientific ideas and practices) but from the point of view of political history. In other words, the essay explores certain ways in which some manifestations of scientific engagement expressed the political identity of Whig statesmen. This kind of political history is not the same as the history of policy. Of course Whigs did sometimes bring science to bear on policy issues: an aspect treated elsewhere by the present author in relation to the Talents Ministry (1806–1807).1 The circumstantial account attempted here has rather modest explanatory force when it comes to specific political actions, but it has value in indicating the context of politics. This is because it engages a note of thought and sentiment that was influential in political manners even while parliamentary choices were dominated by the great framing issues of public religion, social change, trade policy and parliamentary reform.
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Notes
J. Bord, ‘Whiggery, science and administration: Grenville and Lord Henry Petty in the Ministry of All the Talents, 1806–7’, Historical Research, 76 (2003), 108–127.
L.G. Mitchell, The Whig World, 1760–1837 (London: Hambledon and London, 2005); Holland House (London: Duckworth, 1980).
Henry Edward, Lord Holland (ed.), Henry Richard Vassall, Lord Holland, Memoirs of the Whig Party During My Time (London: Longman, Green, Brown and Longmans, 1852), I, pp. 45–55;
Lord Stavordale (ed.), Henry Richard Vassall, Lord Holland, Turther Memoirs of the Whig Party with Some Miscellaneous Reminiscences, 1807–1821 (London: John Murray, 1905), pp. 370–375.
H. Brougham, Discourse of the Objects, Advantages and Pleasures of Science (2nd edn, London: Baldwin and Cradock, 1827), p. 6.
R. Yeo, Defining Science: William Whewell, Natural Knowledge and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 28–48, see p. 29.
See J. Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 73–75, for an overview;
E.A. Wasson, Whig Renaissance: Lord Althorp and the Whig Party, 1782–1845 (New York and London: Garland, 1987); ‘The coalitions of 1827 and the crisis of Whig leadership’, Historical Journal, 20 (1977), 587–606.
Parry, Rise and Fall of Liberal Government, p. 167; L.G. Mitchell, Charles James Fox (London: Penguin, 1997), p. 195. Fifty-two self-described ‘Whigs’ were returned in 1847, while Fox identified sixty-nine Foxites in 1802.
See L.G. Mitchell, ‘Foxite politics and the great reform bill’, English Historical Review, 108 (1993), 338–364; Lord Melbourne, 1779–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 3–40, 142–210.
C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (London: Fontana, 1993), pp. 12–13.
N. Gash, Reaction and Reconstruction in English Politics, 1832–1852 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), esp. chs. 5–6, pp. 119–200; Aristocracy and People, Britain 1815–1865 (London: Edward Arnold, revs. edn 1983), pp. 156–186.
P. Mandler, Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform: Whigs and Liberals, 1830–1852 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990).
R. Brent, Liberal Anglican Politics: Whiggery, Religion and Reform 1830–1841 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987).
D. Forbes, The Liberal Anglican Idea of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952).
J.W. Burrow, Whigs and Liberals: Continuity and Change in English Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988).
Signally in J.G.A. Pocock ‘The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform: a history of ideology and discourse’, Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 215–310.
Ibid. and J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (2nd edn, Princeton, NJ and London: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 546–547.
B. Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England 1783–1846 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), pp. 309–371, 439–492, esp. pp. 439–441, in the context of ‘The politics of anatomy and an anatomy of politics, c.1825–1850’, in
S. Collini, R. Whatmore, and B. Young (eds), History, Religion and Culture: British Intellectual History, 1750–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 179–197; Corn, Cash, Commerce: The Economic Policies of the Tory Governments, 1815–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 303–314; and especially The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 147–162.
T.A. Jenkins, Gladstone, Whiggery and the Liberal Party, 1874–1886 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988).
T. Macaulay, ‘War of the succession in Spain’, Edinburgh Review [January, 1833], in A.J. Grieve (ed.) Critical and Historical Essays by Thomas Babington Macaulay (2 vols, London: Dent, 1907), II, p. 111.
W.H.G. Armytage, ‘Charles Watson-Wentworth, Second Marquess of Rockingham, F.R.S. (1730–1782): some aspects of his scientific interests’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 12 (1) (1956), 64–76.
I. Kramnick, Bolingbroke and his Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 139. For Bolingbroke’s rejection of empiricism, see ibid., p. 45. Kramnick’s point is consistent with
Reed Browning, Political and Constitutional Ideas of the Court Whigs (Baton Rouge, LA and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1982);
Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthsman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959);
H.T. Dickinson, Walpole and the Whig Supremacy (London: English Universities Press, 1973) and Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth Century Britain (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977).
Reed Browning indicates the Ciceronian structure of Court Whig ideology, Political and Constitutional Ideas of the Court Whigs, pp. 175–256, particularly of the court conception of the balanced constitution, ibid., pp. 245, 252; J.H. Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole: The King’s Minister (London: The Cresset Press, 1960);
J.B. Owen, The Rise of the Pelhams (London: Methuen and Company, 1957);
R. Browning, The Duke of Newcastle (New Haven CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1975);
S. Ayling, The Elder Pitt, Earl of Chatham (London: Collins, 1976).
L.S. Jacyna, Philosophic Whigs: Medicine, Science and Citizenship in Edinburgh, 1789–1848 (London, New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 31.
Franklin to Cadwallader Evans, 7 September 1769, mentioned in V.W. Crane, ‘The Club of Honest Whigs: The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. Series 23 (1966), 210–233, 211.
D.P. Miller, ‘The “Hardwicke Circle”: the Whig supremacy and its demise in the 18th-century Royal Society’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 52 (1998), 73–91.
Ibid., 81–83; S. Schaffer, ‘The consuming flame: electrical showmen and Tory mystics in the world of goods’, in R. Porter and J. Brewer (eds), Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 489–526.
On the Whig side, see M. Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689–1720 (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1976), and for an example of Newtonian Hanoverianism,
see J.T. Desaguliers, The Newtonian System of the World, the Best Model of Government: An Allegorical Poem (Westminster, 1728),
cited in Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–1783 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 11.
For Toryism, see A. Guerrini, ‘The Tory Newtonians: Gregory, Pitcairne and their circle’, Journal of British Studies, 25 (1986), 288–311.
M.C. Jacob and L. Stewart, Practical Matter: Newton’s Science in the Service of Industry and Empire, 1687–1851 (Cambridge MA, and London; Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 74.
L. Stewart, The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992), pp. 90–92, 109–111, 118, 189–190, 206.
P.N. Miller (ed.), Joseph Priestley: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. xv–xvi.
John Norris, Shelburne and Reform (London: Macmillan and Company, 1963), pp. 82–99. Shelburne is referred to here occasionally as such even after his elevation to the marquessate in 1784, where this is necessary to distinguish him from Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, the third Marquess of Lansdowne (1780–1863), who in turn was known as Lord Henry Petty until his succession in 1809.
Robert Stewart, Henry Brougham, 1778–1868: His Public Career (London: Bodley Head, 1985), p. 8.
Leonard Horner (ed.), Memoirs and Correspondence of Francis Horner MP (2 vols, 2nd edn, London: John Murray, 1853), I, pp. 209–210.
See Wasson, ‘Coalitions of 1827’, and J. Bord, ‘Our friends in the north: patronage, the Lansdowne Whigs, and the problem of the liberal centre, 1827–8’, English Historical Review, 117 No. 470 (2002), 78–93.
Austin Mitchell, The Whigs in Opposition, 1815–1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), mounts a standard survey, principally in Chapters I–III, pp. 1–81.
D. Rapp, ‘The left-wing Whigs: Whitbread, the mountain and reform, 1809–1815’, Journal of British Studies, 21(2) (1982), 35–66.
L.G. Mitchell, C.J. Fox and the Disintegration of the Whig Party (London, Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 238.
J.R. Dinwiddy, Radicalism and Reform in Britain, 1780–1850 (London: Hambledon, 1992), p. 13.
Biancamaria Fontana, Rethinking the Politics of Commercial Society: The Edinburgh Review, 1802–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 6, 72–76, 105–110, 140–146.
Mitchell, Holland House, p. 184. See particularly Lord Holland’s insistence to Lord Greville that political progress could be halted, with catastrophic results: F.M. Bladon (ed.) The Diaries of Robert Fulke Greville, vol. III (London: Bodley Head, 1930), 9 January 1835, pp. 197–198 discussed in ibid.
Mandler, Aristocratic Government. The political taxonomies of Brent and Mandler are compared by Boyd Hilton, ‘Whiggery religion and social reform: the case of Lord Morpeth’, Historical Journal, 37 (1994), 829–859, esp. 829–839.
J.C.D. Clark, ‘A general theory of party, opposition and government, 1688–1832’, Historical Journal, 23 (1980), 307–308.
Edinburgh Review or Critical Journal [London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1802–1929], XXXIX (1812), 2, 35, discussed in John Clive, Scotch Reviewers: The Edinburgh Review, 1802–1815 (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), p. 119; Mitchell, Whigs in Opposition, p. 24.
See, for example, Smith to Lady Grey, 7 February 1835, in N.C. Smith, Selected Letters of Sydney Smith (London, Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 232; Lord Russell to Lord Melbourne, 9 September 1839, mentioned in Gash, Reaction and Reconstruction, p. 157.
Horner to Jeffrey, 15 September 1806, in K. Bourne and W.B. Taylor (eds) The Horner Papers: Selections from the Letters and Miscellaneous Writings of Francis Horner, MP, 1795–1817 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994), p. 427.
Scarlett to Lord Milton, 20/21 April 1827; see E.A. Smith, Whig Principles and Party Politics: Earl Fitzwilliam and the Whig Party, 1748–1833 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1975), p. 385.
H. Brougham, Dialogues on Instinct with Analytic View of the Researches on Fossil Osteology (London: C. Knight and Company 1844), p. 13.
Studies of Brougham include A. Aspinall, Lord Brougham and the Whig Party (Manchester: University of Manchester, 1927);
C.W. New, The Life of Henry Brougham to 1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961); Stewart, Henry Brougham;
and T.H. Ford, Chancellor Brougham and His World: A Biography (Chichester: Barry Rose Law, 2001).
Most recently in an excellent article, J.F.M. Clark, ‘History from the ground up: bugs, political economy and God in Kirby and Spence’s Introduction to Entomology, 1825–1856’, Isis, 97 (2006), 28–55, esp. 45–47.
See R.J. Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behaviour (London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 139. For an interesting variant that takes Brougham’s classicism seriously,
see C.D. Pearce, ‘Lord Brougham’s neo-paganism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 55 (1994), 651–670.
See, for example, John G. McEvoy, ‘Positivism, Whiggism, and the chemical revolution: a study in the Historiography of Chemistry, History of Science, 35 (1997), 3, 26–27.
Sir Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1931).
This text, and its treatment in M. Teich and R. Young (eds), Changing Perspectives in the History of Science: Essays in Honour of Joseph Needham (London: Heinemann Educational, 1973), pp. 127–147, is the basis of the extended definition of Whiggism in Chris Wilde’s influential entry on ‘Whig history’,
in W.F. Bynum, E.J. Browne, and R. Porter (eds), Dictionary of the History of Science (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1981), pp. 445–446;
praised by M.J.S. Hodge, ‘The history of the earth, life and man: Whewell and Palaetiological science’, in M. Fisch and S. Schaffer (eds), William Whewell, A Composite Portrait (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), p. 255 and n. 1. The received definition is repeated by Peter J. Bowler in his review, ‘The Whig interpretation of Geology, Biology and Philosophy, 3 (1988), 100. For attempts to rehabilitate ‘Whig’ narratives
see A. Rupert Hall, ‘On Whiggism’, History of Science, 21 (1983), 45–59;
Ernst Mayr, ‘When is Historiography Whiggish?’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 51 (1990), 301–309.
R. Yeo, Defining Science, pp. 168–169; J.W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent. Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
M. Norton Wise with Crosbie Smith, ‘Work and waste: political economy and natural philosophy in nineteenth century Britain (I)’, History of Science, 27 (1989), 263–301, 267. Parts II and III of this study are in the same journal, 391–449 and 28 (1990), 221–261.
S.F. Cannon, Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period (Folkestone, Dawson, 1978), pp. 29–71; Hilton, Age of Atonement, p. 30;
J.A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 410.
P. Corsi, ‘The heritage of Dugald Stewart: Oxford philosophy and the method of political economy’, Nuncius, 2 (1987), 89–144, see 122–123.
S. Schaffer, ‘The nebular hypothesis and the science of progress’, in J.R. Moore (ed.), History, Humanity and Evolution: Essays for John C. Greene (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 131–164.
A. Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine and Reform in Radical London (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 18.
Ibid., p. 93. Charles Bell helped Brougham to produce the middle volumes (1836) of an annotated edition of William Paley’s Natural Theology [1802] between 1835 and 1839. The first, fourth and fifth volumes contained Brougham’s own ‘Discourse of natural theology’, ‘Dialogues on instinct’ and ‘Analytic view of the researches on fossil Osteology’. See Charles Bell and Henry Brougham (eds), Paley’s Natural Theology with Illustrative Notes (5 vols, London: Charles Knight, 1836).
W. Thomas, The Philosophic Radicals: Nine Studies in Theory and Practice, 1817–1841 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 53–56.
Roy M. Macleod, ‘Whigs and savants: reflections on the reform movement in the Royal Society, 1830–48’, in Ian Inkster and Jack Morrell (eds), Metropolis and Province: Science in British Culture, 1780–1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1983), pp. 59, 68, 86 [n.57].
L.S. Jacyna, ‘Immanence or transcendence: theories of life and organisation in Britain, 1790–1835’, Isis, 74(3) (1983), 329.
Outstanding works and collections on the period include Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution; Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Secord, Victorian Sensation; Moore (ed.), History, Humanity and Evolution.
See, for example, Anne Hardy, ‘Lyon Playfair and the idea of progress: science and medicine in Victorian parliamentary politics’, in Dorothy Porter and Roy Porter (eds), Doctors, Politics and Society: Historical Essays (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), pp. 81–106.
S. Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth Century England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), see especially the methodological first chapter, pp. 3–41.
The mainly high church followers of John Hutchinson (1674–1737), who promoted an anti-Newtonian physico-theology based on biblical hermeneutics. See J.F.M. Clark, ‘History from the ground up: bugs, political economy and God in Kirby and Spence’s Introduction to Entomology, 1825–1856’, Isis, 97 (2006), 28–55, 47–48.
J.B. Morrell, ‘Professors Robison and playfair, and the “Theophobia Gallica”: natural philosophy, religion and politics in Edinburgh’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 26(1) (1971), 43–63.
P.M. Jones, ‘Living the enlightenment and the French Revolution: James Watt, Matthew Boulton, and their sons’, Historical Journal, 42 (1999), 157–182;
E. Robinson, ‘An English Jacobin: James Watt, junior, 1769–1848’, Cambridge Historical Journal, 11 (1955), 349–355.
L. Goldman, ‘The origins of British social science: political economy, natural science and statistics’, Historical Journal, 26 (1983), 587–616, esp. 610, 613.
M. Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 308–317.
See N. Chambers (ed.), The Letters of Sir Joseph Banks, A Selection, 1768–1820 (London: Imperial College Press, 2000), pp. 122–125, 155–156, 163, 185.
Brougham to Banks, 10 December 1800, in H. Brougham, The Life and Times of Henry Lord Brougham Written by Himself (3 vols, Edinburgh and London: W. Blackwood and Sons, 1871), I, pp. 227–228.
Fox to Banks, 7 May 1802, discussed in J. Gascoigne, Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 21.
R. Drayton, Imperial Science and Scientific Empire: Kew Gardens and the Uses of Nature, 1772–1903 (Ann Arbor, ML, 1993) [facsimile of PhD Thesis, Yale University, 1993], pp. 107–108.
See C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Maiden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 110;
D.P. Miller, ‘Joseph Banks, empire and “centers of calculation” in late Hanoverian London’, and J. Gascoigne, ‘The ordering of nature and the ordering of empire: a commentary’, in D.P. Miller and P.H. Reill (eds), Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany and Representations of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 21–37, 107–116;
J. Gascoigne, Science in the Service of Empire: Joseph Banks, the British State and the Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
C.A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London and New York: Longman, 1989), pp. 116–121.
Expanded in R. Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘improvement’ of the World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000).
Comprehensively surveyed by Thackray and Morrell, in Gentlemen of Science: Early Years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981).
A. Hume, The Learned Societies and Printing Clubs of the United Kingdom: Being An Account of Their Respective Origin, History, Objects and Constitution (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1847), preface: see pp. 3–50, 67–203.
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Bord, J. (2009). Manners, Science and Politics. In: Science and Whig Manners. Studies in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230595231_1
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