Abstract
Would Mary Somerville have achieved more, and gone on to make major scientific discoveries, had she been able to go to university, hold down a job, and become the Professorial Director of some research institute? Richard Anthony Proctor, her Royal Astronomical Society obituarist in 1872, lamented that the social proprieties of her day had made it impossible for Mary to really achieve her potential as a planetary dynamicist, while Dr. Mary Brück, in her excellent and perceptive biographical article, styled her a ‘mathematician and astronomer of underused talents.
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Proctor, ‘Mary Somerville’, obituary [n. 1], 196, argues against the lack of official funding, especially for salary provision and adequate posts, for British scientists. Even so, he admitted that a successful scientific writer could make between £2,000 and £5,000 a year from writing, while a new edition of a successful work could earn for its author as much as the entire annual salary of a university professor: ‘(say from £500 to £1,000)’, p. 8. While I am not aware of any precise figures for Mary Somerville’s earnings from her books—especially from her consistently in print On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences and Physical Geography—one might take Proctor’s figure from the 1870s as a rough guide to potential earnings for 20 or 30 years earlier.
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Reference
Richard, A. P., (1873). Mary Somerville, Obituary Notice. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 33, 190–197.
Mary, B., (1996). Mary Somerville, mathematician and astronomer of underused talents. Journal of the British Astronomical Association, 106, 4, 201–206.
Elizabeth, B., (1899). F.R. Met. Soc.’, obituary. Journal of the British Astronomical Association, 9, 5, 214–15.
Chapman, A., (1998) The Victorian Amateur Astronomer. Independent Astronomical Research in Britain, 1820–1920 (pp. 280–293). Chichester, New York: Praxis-Wiley.
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Chapman, A. (2015). Conclusion: A Career in Retrospect. In: Mary Somerville and the World of Science. SpringerBriefs in History of Science and Technology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09399-4_6
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