Abstract
Ignorance, language and the problems of simplification all contributed in making the scientist appear remote (even foreign) and divorced from everyday life. In popular fiction this would lead almost inevitably to the stereotype with which we are now so familiar. Almost to a man (and they were all men) scientists were portrayed as, at best, unemotional and detached, and, at worst, inhuman and insane. Mindless of everyday affairs, fictional scientists were eccentric, unpunctual, slovenly, scruffy. They were cantankerous and short-tempered. Their precision was the precision of the pedant. They actively connived the deaths of others, failed to see the dangerous implications of their work, or were indifferent to the suffering that their research might cause. Lusting after fame or fortune, their dedication often became warped into an obsession leading them from one act of inhumanity to another.
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Notes
Rudolphde Cordova, ‘The microbe of death’, Pearson’s Magazine, 1897, vol. 2, pp. 464–74; W.L. Alden, ‘The purple death’, Cassell’s Magazine, 1895, p. 115.
John G.E. Leech, ‘The microbe of love’, Pearson’s Magazine, 1902, vol. 2, p. 374.
John N. Raphael, ‘Up above: the story of the sky folk’, Pearson’s Magazine, 1912, vol. 2, pp. 710–60.
ibid. For the identification of women with vivisected animals, see Coral Lansbury, ‘Gynaecology, pornography and the anti-vivisection movement’, Victorian Studies, 28 (1985) pp. 413–37.
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Herbert C. Fyfe, ‘The first traverse of Africa’, Pearson’s Magazine, 1900, vol. 2, pp. 418–24.
Sir Ernest Shackleton, ‘The making of an explorer’, Pearson’s Magazine, 1914, vol. 2, pp. 138–42.
Ejnar Mikkelsen, ‘Lost in the Arctic’, Pearson’s Magazine, 1912, vol. 2, pp. 506–20.
David A. Hollinger, ‘Inquiry and uplift: late-nineteenth-century American academics and the moral efficacy of scientific practice’, in Thomas L. Haskell (ed.), The Authority of Experts: Studies in history (Bloomington, 1984), p. 142.
Julius L.F. Vogel, ‘Photographing electricity’, Pearson’s Magazine, 1899, vol. 2, p. 643.
Herbert N. Casson, ‘At last we can fly’, Pearson’s Magazine, 1907, vol. 2, p. 98;
Alder Anderson, ‘Analysing motion’, Pearson’s Magazine, 1902, vol. 1, pp. 502–9.
See I. Bernard Cohen, ‘The fear and distrust of science in historical perspective: some first thoughts’, in Andrei S. Markovits and Karl W. Deutsch (eds), Fear of Science — Trust in Science: Conditions for change in the climate of opinion (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), pp. 29–58.
Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘A study in scarlet’ (1887), reprinted in The Complete Sherlock Holmes Long Stories (London, 1929), pp. 12–13.
Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The sign of four’ (1880), reprinted in The Complete Sherlock Holmes Long Stories (London, 1929), p. 136.
Brian Wynne, ‘Physics and psychics: science, symbolic action and social control in late Victorian England’, in Barry Barnes and Steven Shapin (eds), Natural Order: Historical studies of scientific culture (London, 1979), p. 174.
Colin Russell, Science and Social Change, 1700–1900 (London, 1983), p. 257.
Frank M. Turner, ‘Public science in Britain, 1880–1919’, Isis, 71 (1980), pp. 589–608.
See G.R. Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency: A study in British politics and political thought, 1899–1914 (Berkeley, 1971);
Bernard Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform: English social-imperial thought, 1895–1914 (London, 1960); and
Robert Scally, The Origins of the Lloyd George Coalition: The politics of social-imperialism, 1900–1918 (Princeton, 1975).
Étienne de La Boétie, The Politics of Obedience: The discourse of voluntary servitude, translated by Harry Kurz (Montreal, 1975).
See Patrick Joyce, Work, Society and Politics: The culture of the factory in later Victorian England (London, 1982).
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© 1996 Peter Broks
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Broks, P. (1996). Images. In: Media Science before the Great War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25043-1_4
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