Abstract
In 1830 a remarkable work issued from the pen of Charles Babbage Esq., FRS, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge (and thus distant successor to Sir Isaac Newton), computing pioneer, and seeker after an infallible method for predicting the winners of horse races. The book in question concerns neither the refinements of his latest ‘calculating engine’ nor the intricacies of punting. It was an expression of acute despair entitled Reflections on the Decline of Science in England. He concluded ‘the pursuit of science does not, in England, constitute a distinct profession, as it does in many other countries’, and so, ‘when a situation, requiring for the proper fulfilment of its duties considerable scientific attainments, is vacant, it becomes necessary to select from among amateurs’.1 How far Babbage was justified in his overall analysis of a ‘neglected and declining’ science in England, and in his particular diatribes against the Royal Society, has been much debated of late and is perhaps no longer very important, since his evidence was selective and ignored almost entirely provincial science.
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Notes and References
C. Babbage, Reflections on the Decline of Science in England (1830; 1969 Gregg reprint), pp. 10–11.
J. Carrière, Berzelius und Liebig, ihre Briefe von 1831–1845 (Munich and Leipzig, 1893) p. 134.
G. Kitteringham, ‘Science in Provincial Society: The case of Liverpool in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Ann. Sci., 39 (1982), 329–348.
E. Kitson Clark, The History of 100 Years of Life of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society (Leeds: Jowett and Sowry, 1924).
W. A. Beanland, The History of the Royal Institution of South Wales, Swansea, for the First Few Years Known as the Swansea Philosophical and Literary Society, 1835–1935 (Swansea: Royal Institution, 1935), p. 14.
J. W. Hudson, The History of Adult Education (1851), p. 167.
See D. E. Allen, The Naturalist in Britain (Pelican, 1978).
Lynn Barber, The Heyday of Natural History, 1820–1870 (Jonathan Cape, 1980) p. 23.
T. R. Goddard, History of the Natural History Society of Northumberland, Durham and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1829–1929, (Newcastle: Reid, 1929) pp. 1, 188–195.
W. B. Stephens, Adult Education and Society in an Industrial Town: Warrington 1800–1900 (Exeter, University of Exeter, 1980) p. 40.
C.f. M. Berman, ‘ “Hegemony” and the Amateur Tradition in British Science’, J. Soc. Hist. 1 (1975) 30–50 (37).
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© 1983 Colin A. Russell
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Russell, C.A. (1983). Strongholds of Amateur Science in England. In: Science and Social Change in Britain and Europe 1700–1900. Themes in Comparative History. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17271-9_10
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