Worlds of Wonder: Sensation and the Victorian Scientific Performance
Author(s): Iwan Rhys Morus
Source: Isis, Vol. 101, No. 4 (December 2010), pp. 806-816
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society
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Worlds of Wonder
Sensation and the Victorian Scientific
Performance
By Iwan Rhys Morus*
ABSTRACT
Performances of various kinds were central to the strategies adopted by Victorian natural
philosophers to constitute their authority. Appealing to the senses of their audience
through spectacular effects or ingenious demonstrations of skill was key to the success of
these performances. If we want to understand the politics and practice of Victorian
science—and science more generally—we need to pay particular attention to these sorts
of performances. We need to understand the ingredients that went into them and the
relationships between scientific performers and their publics. In particular, we need to
investigate the self-conscious nature of Victorian scientific performances. Looking at
science as performance provides us with a new set of tools for understanding the politics
of knowledge, the relationship between producers and consumers of scientific knowledge,
and the construction and constitution of scientific authority.
I
N HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY, the physicist Oliver Lodge, recently appointed professor
of physics at Liverpool, described an intriguing experiment that took place at a meeting
of the Physical Society, held at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. The performer
was the Cavendish professor of physics, J. J. Thomson, and he was attempting to
demonstrate the production of discharge in a vacuum tube surrounded by a coil when a
Leyden jar was discharged through the coil. It was an unusually damp day (even,
presumably, by Cambridge standards), and particular precautions were taken to make sure
that all the various parts of the apparatus were properly insulated; further, gas heaters were
arranged around the lecture table in an effort to keep the atmosphere as dry as possible.
Despite all this, Thomson could not get the experiment to work. Lodge, sitting in the
audience, was sure that he knew what the problem was—and when Thomson suspended
the meeting while he attempted to resolve the difficulty he approached Ebenezer Everett,
Thomson’s laboratory assistant, and suggested some simple modifications. The result was
* Department of History and Welsh History, Hugh Owen Building, Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth
SY24 3DY, Wales.
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©2010 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.
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that when the audience was called back, “flashes were obtained without any difficulty, the
electrodeless discharge in the bulb being brighter and more vigorous, to the evident
astonishment of Sir J. J. Thomson—it was probably stronger than he had seen before.”1
What makes this episode particularly revealing for my present purposes is what Lodge,
writing about the event many years later, said he should have done: “I always regretted
that I hadn’t had the prompt energy or, so to speak, impudence to get up and make this
arrangement in front of the audience; for I was at that time very familiar with Leyden jar
discharges, and it would have been an object lesson that would have attracted attention.”
It was almost as if Lodge wished that he had acted like a stage magician performing a
trick, jumping up and amazing the audience with his dexterity. His autobiographical
fantasy certainly reveals a significant degree of self-consciousness on the part of this
particular Victorian experimenter regarding the importance of appropriate performance in
the public presentation of physics. Lodge clearly recognized that careful choreography
mattered a great deal in the presentation of the scientific self. In this instance, he knew that
he possessed tacit knowledge that was not widely shared by the audience (or, for that
matter, the putative performers of the experiment) and that he could have taken advantage
of that hidden fund of hands-on know-how to impress his authority on the assembled
gathering. He clearly recognized that this tacit knowledge was a valuable and important
asset and that there were circumstances in which making his possession of it visible was
a useful strategy. As it was, however, he failed to act, and so “only Mr. Everett and a few
subordinates” knew anything about his intervention.2
Lodge’s acknowledgment of the place of self-conscious performance in the practice of
Victorian physics chimes well with recent trends in its historiography.3 Historians have
tended to regard Victorian physics as being on a one-way trajectory toward disembodiment— on a journey from the theater to the metrological laboratory and from bodily
expression and sensation toward self-discipline. During the course of the nineteenth
century, physicists moved away from reliance on their own bodies as conduits for the
production and validation of knowledge. As physics became objective, it became disembodied. New kinds of instruments and new regimes of laboratory discipline were designed
to do away with the vagaries of the body and its inconveniently corporeal performances.4
We can indeed make sense of nineteenth-century physics and its instrumental orientation
in such terms, as a set of practices designed to eliminate dependence on the bodily senses
as arbiters of truth. At best, though, the body was only displaced, rather than entirely
removed, with the emergence of new regimes of disembodied precision.5 Lodge’s example
reminds us that he, at least, was keenly aware of the significance of his own embodied
knowledge and the importance of its performative expression. Historians are once again
looking at the body in nineteenth-century physics—as a site for colonization and as a vehicle
for making knowledge. In this, our preoccupations are mirrored by a broader trend in Victorian
historical and cultural studies for reappraising the Victorians’ self-fashioning.6
1
Oliver Lodge, Past Years: An Autobiography (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1931), p. 188.
Ibid.
3 Bernard Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences (Chicago: Univ.
Chicago Press, 2007).
4 M. Norton Wise, ed., The Values of Precision (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1995); and Lorraine
Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone, 2007).
5 For similar remarks on skill see Harry Collins, Changing Order (London: Sage, 1985).
6 For historians’ work on the body in nineteenth-century physics see Elizabeth Green Musselman, Nervous
Conditions (New York: State Univ. New York Press, 2006); Graeme Gooday, Domesticating Electricity
(London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008); Chris Otter, The Victorian Eye (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2008); and
2
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As we survey Victorian scientific sites and experiences, thinking about physics as
performance can provide us with a useful tool for moving back and forth between the
production and the consumption of scientific knowledge. Most historians would now agree
that making sense of Victorian science means understanding audiences as much as
understanding practitioners. Looking at performances provides a way of bridging the gap
between consumers and producers. In particular, we need to understand these kinds of
scientific performances as entirely self-conscious choreographies that were frankly typical
of a culture that placed a great deal of freight on appearance and artifice as measures of
moral probity. In significant ways, such performances were telling instances of the
strategies through which Victorians articulated gender.7 Disciplined scientific performances were instantiations of masculinity. As Lodge’s revealing anecdote reminds us,
scientific performers usually knew exactly what they were doing and how important it was
to do the job well. Trying to understand the experience of performance also gives us a tool
for making sense of the Victorian sense of scientific wonder. The language of sensation
is a constant throughout nineteenth-century descriptions of scientific phenomena. By and
large, the vocabulary used is one that engages with the senses quite directly. Deconstructing scientific performances gives us a way of getting behind this kind of language and
understanding what it signified and what rested on that network of significations. Looking
at performance therefore provides us with a way into the politics of knowledge, its gender
relations, and its public spaces.
PERFORMANCE, POLITICS, PLACE
Almost two decades ago, Jan Golinski presented an exemplary account of how Humphry
Davy fashioned a role for himself, his institution, and his instruments as purveyors of
spectacular scientific performances for fashionable Regency London audiences. Davy’s
invention of himself as a new kind of scientific performer was strategic. It marked his own
rejection of the kind of sensationalist natural philosophical culture of experimentation
within which he had spent his scientific apprenticeship with Thomas Beddoes at the
Pneumatic Institution, and it took place at a historical juncture during which others were
also offering powerful new models of public scientific authority.8 Davy would turn out to
be one of the forerunners of a new generation of natural philosophers who wished to
reinvent themselves as quite distinct from their politically engaged and heterodox progenitors. This certainly meant exploring new genres of scientific performances, but it
meant reinventing their audiences as well. Institutions such as the Royal Institution, which
was established in 1799 and provided Davy with a base for his scientific activities for the
rest of his career, did not so much cater to a fashionable audience with a taste for
flamboyant scientific performances as construct it. Performing in a particular way meant
embodying a particular model of scientific authority. In the same way, being an aficionado
Jutta Schickore, The Microscope and the Eye: A History of Reflections (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2007).
For the broader trend see Patrick Joyce, Democratic Subjects (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994); and
Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the City (London: Verso, 2003).
7 John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven,
Conn./London: Yale Univ. Press, 2007).
8 Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992); Simon Schaffer,
“Scientific Discovery and the End of Natural Philosophy,” Social Studies of Science, 1986, 16:387– 420; and
Iwan Rhys Morus, “Radicals, Romantics, and Electrical Showmen: Placing Galvanism at the End of the English
Enlightenment,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 2009, 63:263–276.
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of particular kinds of performances that took place in distinctive and exclusive settings
also meant identifying with and participating in that particular model of authority.
Giovanni Aldini’s galvanic performances using the corpse of George Forster—which
took place, coincidentally, in London at just about the time when Davy was accomplishing
his own institutional, political, and epistemological shift—nicely embody the genre of
scientific performance against which Davy was setting himself. Aldini’s performances
were certainly flamboyant and spectacular, as he put his subject’s body through a regime
of electrically induced gestures and gesticulations. They were performances designed to
salvage the battered reputation of Aldini’s uncle, Luigi Galvani, by demonstrating the fact
of animal electricity, as well as to establish Aldini’s own reputation as a natural philosopher. They were amenable to both radical and reactionary readings by contemporary
commentators. As some of those commentators noted, they had more than a little in
common with the kind of pneumatic experiments that Davy himself, under Beddoes’s
tutelage, had been enthusiastically promoting only a few years previously.9 Davy now
thought that Aldini’s experiments were “rather disgusting than instructive.” While Aldini
and Beddoes putatively regarded themselves as participating in a culture of experimental
performance in which bodies (their own and those of their subjects) played a central role,
the new performative culture that Davy wished to promote both for himself and for his
audience at the Royal Institution was one that focused on spectacular instruments instead.
This did not make them less performances; it simply meant that they embodied a different
set of epistemological and political values.10
Davy’s pupil, Michael Faraday, had clearly learned a great deal about the values of
performance from his master’s example. Faraday’s performances were famously both
carefully cultivated and self-disciplined. John Tyndall (of whom rather more later)
described his predecessor’s performances at the Royal Institution in terms that read like
a recipe for Victorian manliness: “Underneath his sweetness and light was the heat of a
volcano. He was a man of excitable and fiery nature; but through high self-discipline he
had converted the fire into a central glow and motive power of life, instead of permitting
it to waste itself in useless passion.” Directed passion was the key to successful scientific
performance. As Tyndall reminded his readers, “Faraday was not slow to anger, but he
completely ruled his own spirit, and thus, though he took no cities, he captivated all
hearts.” There was doubtless an element of self-description here too. Tyndall was just as
aware as his master that performance mattered and that control was its key. We can see
the same kind of recognition of self-conscious choreography in the Duke of Somerset’s
prediction that the “story of Faraday is sure to make a great noise. There is something
romantic and quite affecting in such a conjunction of Poverty and Passion for Science, and
with his brilliant success he comes out as the Hero of Chemistry.” Most of his contemporary biographers remarked on his meticulous preparation.11
9 On the purposes of Aldini’s performances see Charlotte Sleigh, “Life, Death, and Galvanism,” Studies in the
History and Philosophy of Science, 1998, 29:219 –248. For a commentator’s view of matters see John Corry, A
Satirical View of London at the Commencement of the Nineteenth Century: Comprising Free Strictures on the
Manners and Amusements of the Inhabitants of the English Metropolis; Observations on Literature and the Fine
Arts; and Amusing Anecdotes of Public Characters, 6th ed. (London: J. Ferguson, 1815), p. iv. The first edition
was published in 1801.
10 [Humphry Davy], “An Account of the Late Improvements in Galvanism . . . by John Aldini,” Edinburgh
Review, 1803, 3:194 –198, on p. 196. See also Mike Jay, The Atmosphere of Heaven: The Unnatural Experiments
of Dr. Beddoes and His Sons of Genius (New Haven, Conn./London: Yale Univ. Press, 2009).
11 John Tyndall, Faraday as a Discoverer (London, 1868), p. 45; and Duke of Somerset to Charles Babbage,
16 Dec. 1835, quoted in Morris Berman, Social Change and Scientific Organization (London: Heinemann,
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Specific scientific performances and the spaces where they took place quite explicitly
carried epistemological and political baggage during the first decades of the nineteenth
century. John Herschel’s dictum that true natural philosophy could be recognized through
the way it was “divested, as far as possible, of artificial difficulties, and stripped of all such
technicalities as tend to place it in the light of a craft and a mystery, inaccessible without
a kind of apprenticeship,” while mere craftsmanship, on the other hand, had a tendency to
“bury itself in technicalities, and to place pride in particular short cuts and mysteries
known only to adepts; to surprise and astonish by results, but conceal processes,” can be
read as a commentary on different styles of performance and their implications. His
remarks offered a dissection of the ethical value of different kinds of putatively scientific
demeanor. What to show and what to hide while performing was a matter not just of
choreography but of moral and epistemological authority as well. Others found the discipline
built into Herschel’s and Faraday’s models of performance just as problematic.12 It tended to
make actual participation in scientific practice the preserve of an exclusive few rather than
welcoming the enthusiastic masses, they argued. Different accounts of proper performance and the public demeanor of the man of science carried with them competing
politics of knowledge. These competing politics found institutional expression in different
scientific spaces.
SPACES, RESOURCES, AND THE LANGUAGE OF DISPLAY
Attending to scientific performances therefore means paying careful attention as well to
the spaces in which such performances took place and the networks in which those spaces
were situated. London throughout the nineteenth century offers a very useful cultural
geography in this respect. The metropolis sustained a broad and heterogeneous range of
scientific sites. The kinds of performances varied widely from site to site. Audiences at the
Royal Institution, for example, would certainly not have witnessed science in the same
way as visitors to the Adelaide Gallery or the Royal Polytechnic Institution. Artifacts and
experiments might be understood differently when they appeared at the Royal Society or
one of the specialist scientific societies than when they were on display in an exhibition
hall.13 In all these different spaces, though, I want to suggest that performances were
self-conscious, knowingly tailored to the space and to the audiences that might be
encountered there. Audiences, presumably, also knew that what they got in terms of
scientific performance depended on where they went. Spectators of scientific display must
be considered as active and engaged participants in scientific performances rather than
disinterested passersby. They had, after all, chosen to enter spaces where particular genres
of science, carrying different epistemological and cultural messages, were put on show.
(See Figure 1.)
1978), p. 174. Regarding Victorian manliness see Tosh, Man’s Place (cit. n. 7); and John Tosh, Manliness and
Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Longmans, 2004).
12 John F. W. Herschel, Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (London, 1830), pp. 70,
71–72. See also William Sturgeon, “On the Relation by Measure of Common and Voltaic Electricity,” Annals
of Electricity, 1836 –1837, 1:52– 65; Iwan Rhys Morus, “Different Experimental Lives: Michael Faraday and
William Sturgeon,” History of Science, 1992, 30:1–28; and William J. Ashworth, “The Calculating Eye: Baily,
Herschel, Babbage, and the Business of Astronomy,” British Journal for the History of Science, 1994,
27:409 – 441.
13 Iwan Rhys Morus, James Secord, and Simon Schaffer, “Scientific London,” in London: World City,
1800 –1840, ed. Celina Fox (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 129 –142; and David Livingstone,
Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2003).
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811
Figure 1. Visitors promenade through the Great Hall of the Royal Polytechnic Institution. From
“The Great Hall of the Polytechnic Institution,” Illustrated Polytechnic Review, 1843, 1:209 –210, on
p. 210.
Scientific spaces and the performances that took place there did not exist in isolation.
They were parts of cultural networks. Performers and audiences alike were well aware that
the market for entertainment and edification was a competitive one. Interested consumers
could go to lectures in a variety of venues, elite and popular. They could visit exhibitions
of many sorts where different kinds of scientific artifacts and performances might be
enjoyed. There were even penny peep shows on street corners that catered to those with
scientific tastes.14 Thinking spatially about these different kinds of scientific experiences
might provide us with another way of thinking about “popular” science—in fact, thinking
in these terms may allow us to get away completely from the vocabulary of the “popular”
scientific performance. Instead of categorizing the range of different practices, individuals,
or institutions we encounter as historians of the period as emblematic of “popular”
science—as opposed to elite, professional, or amateur science (and dismissing or applauding them accordingly)—we might more usefully look at them in terms of their position in
14 Regarding the peep shows see Peter Quennell, ed., Mayhew’s London (London: Spring, 1949), pp.
460 – 465. On the market for entertainment and edification more generally see Lightman, Victorian Popularizers
of Science (cit. n. 3); and Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman, eds., Science in the Marketplace: NineteenthCentury Sites and Experiences (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2007).
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different kinds of networks.15 Where were particular kinds of institutions physically
located? What else went on at these sorts of locations? What kinds of audiences gathered
there? Asking these kinds of questions might help us understand how contemporary
performers and audiences alike negotiated the cultural map of science in London (and
elsewhere)— how audiences knew where to go to get what they wanted and how lecturers
(for example) knew what kind of performance to put on.16
Scientific performances did not always take place in spaces that had been designed with
such activities in mind. A phantasmagoria or magic lantern performance in a theater or at
a fairground might count as scientific for some, at least, of its spectators. Magic lantern
shows in domestic settings should remind us that even middle-class drawing rooms could
provide space for scientific performances. How scientific performances were made sense
of and assimilated by their audiences was often an outcome of what else was going on
around them—in the same building or around the corner. Victorian commentators recognized exhibitions as the characteristic spaces of their age. In 1892, the Telegraphic
Journal and Electrical Review welcomed an electrical exhibition to the Crystal Palace by
musing that
it would be interesting if we could know how the future historian will deal with an institution
which is peculiar to the nineteenth century. Commencing with the second half of the century,
we have had International, General and Special Exhibitions of all kinds. Bazaars and marts are
old enough, but an exhibition, though allied to both, is neither one nor the other, and no
preceding institution will be found to exactly compare with it. The historian will probably come
to the conclusion that the institution existed in the latter half of the nineteenth century, because
it was one suited to the requirements of the period.
Scientific performances at exhibitions acquired their significance in the context of the
range of other displays on offer, whether these were demonstrations of machinery, arrays
of consumer goods, or tableaux vivants of exotic people and places.17
Wherever scientific performances did take place, they required the mobilization of a
range of human and material resources. When, for example, the Royal Polytechnic
Institution installed W. H. Armstrong’s Hydro-electric Machine in 1843, the gallery had
to be closed for several days to accommodate the process. The machine itself was a
substantial piece of equipment, with a boiler seven and a half feet long and three and a half
feet in diameter, made from iron plate five-eighths of an inch in thickness. It was the size
of a steam locomotive engine. Significant resources and skills were required to manufacture and erect this kind of apparatus. Even apparently more trivial material components of
a scientific performance embodied labor in the same way. A great deal of skill went into
putting together a magic lantern demonstration as part of a public lecture, for example. As
one experienced practitioner noted toward the end of the century:
It is a well known fact that the same lantern outfit in the hands of exhibitors possessed of
different qualifications may give good or bad results according to the good or indifferent
15 Roger Cooter and Stephen Pumfrey, “Separate Spheres and Public Places: Reflections on the History of
Science Popularization and Science in Popular Culture,” Hist. Sci., 1994, 32:237–262; James A. Secord,
“Science in Transit,” Isis, 2004, 95:654 – 672; and Iwan Rhys Morus, “Replacing Victoria’s Scientific Culture,”
Nineteen [e-journal], 2006, 1.
16 Nineteenth-century London street maps and guidebooks provide hitherto largely neglected resources for
understanding the places of metropolitan science in context.
17 “Exhibitions,” Telegraphic Journal and Electrical Review, 1892, 30:120. See also Richard Altick, The
Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1978).
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Figure 2. The Gassiot cascade, demonstrated in Pepper’s Boy’s Playbook of Science (1866).
From John Henry Pepper, The Boy’s Playbook of Science, rev. and ed. by T. C. Hepworth
(London: George Routledge and Sons, 1881), p. 269.
management it receives at the hands of the operator. Although it may at first appear a simple
enough matter to “run” a lantern, yet to get everything in readiness with dispatch, and to keep
everything going smoothly throughout a lantern exhibition, requires a certain knowledge and
deftness attainable only by practice and experience.18
As well as thinking carefully about the spaces and resources of scientific performance,
we need to pay particular attention to its language and its effects—to the ways performances were described and the impact they were said to have. Very often, Victorian
scientific performances were described in an aesthetically loaded language of wonder.
Henry Noad, for example, described the Gassiot cascade as “one of the most beautiful that
can be made with the Induction Coil.”19 The Gassiot cascade was certainly a visually
stunning spectacle; more important, it was clearly and explicitly designed and viewed as
such. The experiment’s aesthetic qualities were not peripheral to its performance. Far from
it: they were what its performance was all about. (See Figure 2.) Similar language is
evident in many other accounts of the discharge experiments of which the Gassiot cascade
18 “The Magic Lantern: Its Construction, Illumination, Optics, and Uses,” Optical Magic Lantern Journal,
1889, 1:66 – 67, on p. 66. On the installation of the Hydro-electric Machine see Iwan Rhys Morus, “More the
Aspect of Magic Than Anything Natural: The Philosophy of Demonstration in Victorian Popular Science,” in
Science in the Marketplace, ed. Fyfe and Lightman (cit. n. 14), pp. 336 –370.
19 Henry M. Noad, The Inductorium, or Induction Coil (London, 1868), p. 66.
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was such a prominent example. As historians, we are by now quite familiar with the
importance of spectacle in the history of public experimentation. I am less sure that we
have found good ways of representing and talking about the sense of awe and wonder that
these kinds of spectacles were quite explicitly designed to evoke.20 Experimental performances like these were intended to appeal to the senses, and their ubiquity throughout the
nineteenth century should alert us to the continuing relevance of a pervasive scientific
culture of sensation that argues against prevailing views regarding the progressive disembodiment of physics during the course of the Victorian era.
Nor were performances designed to engage the senses confined to the lowbrow end of
the scientific marketplace. John Tyndall’s experiments on sensitive flames at the Royal
Institution provide a nice example in this respect. They are particularly interesting because
they were designed as experimental performances that made aural phenomena strikingly
visible to audiences. They remind us, therefore, that Victorian audiences and scientific
performers still regarded seeing as the paradigm of knowing. The experiments and their
performance certainly partook of the experimental culture of wonder, as experimenters
competed for the most “beautiful” effects. Tyndall’s own account of the production and
mechanism of sensitive flames—as well as that offered by W. F. Barrett, then Tyndall’s
laboratory assistant at the Royal Institution—shows how the need to produce striking and
impressive performances fed directly into laboratory labor. There was no unidirectional
trajectory from laboratory to theater but, rather, a complex interplay. Performances were
often both the ends of laboratory practice and the instigators of further directed labor.
Public experimental performances were as labor intensive as laboratory work, while what
went on in the laboratory could be as exhaustively choreographed as performances on
stage. Tyndall’s communications to the Philosophical Magazine on the phenomena of
sensitive flames often read as much like instructions to prospective performers as accounts
of laboratory work.21
Public performing was embedded in the experimental culture of Victorian physics. This
was clearly not to everybody’s taste. But even if some, like James Clerk Maxwell, found
the culture of performing for the senses hard to accept, they had little choice but to find
ways of accommodating themselves to it. On the one hand, according to Maxwell, there
were “experiments of illustration,” which aimed “to present some phenomenon to the
senses of the student.” On the other hand were those “experiments of research, . . . those
in which measurement of some kind is involved,” which were “the proper work of a
physical laboratory.”22 Maxwell knew that even in the Cavendish Laboratory he could not
escape entirely from the experimental culture of sensation, and the observation that he
once based an examination question for the Tripos on the physics of the phenakistoscope
may suggest that he found it seductive enough to want to enroll it within mathematical
physics rather than do away with it entirely. In expressing his reservations, Maxwell may
have been thinking of Tyndall at the Royal Institution. He might also have had in mind
John Henry Pepper, professor at the Royal Polytechnic Institution, whose performances
with the “monster coil” and with the eponymous Pepper’s ghost made his name almost
synonymous with mid-Victorian spectacular science.
20
21
22
Iwan Rhys Morus, “Seeing and Believing Science,” Isis, 2006, 97:101–110.
John Tyndall, “On Sounding and Sensitive Flames,” Philosophical Magazine, 1867, 33:92–99.
Quoted in Lewis Campbell and William Garnett, The Life of James Clerk Maxwell (London, 1882), p. 270.
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POLITICS, PERFORMANCE, AND THE PUBLIC
If we can understand the nuances of scientific performances in different settings, then we
will, I suspect, have succeeded also in developing a far more sensitive understanding of
the informal politics of Victorian science. The political epistemology embodied in Pepper’s performances was not the same as that holding sway at the Cavendish Laboratory,
for example— or indeed at the Royal Institution. Performances and their spaces embodied
a politics of knowledge because they carried with them competing and often contradictory
accounts of authority and its constitution, as well as competing notions of what constitutes
science or knowledge more generally. While authority was the outcome of successful
performance, what counted as success was also a product of contingency. Good performers knew what their audiences wanted, certainly; but they helped define their audiences’
expectations as well. Close attention to the ways in which scientific performances mapped
onto a broader culture of public performance and the constitution of authority might
therefore be a good way of trying to work out the relative power of competing epistemological positions. After all, the audiences for scientific performances did not confine
themselves to that genre. They got their sense of the authentically authoritative, presumably, from a far broader spectrum of showmanship—and not just scientific showmanship.
This is where a comparative account of the evocation of wonder in different settings—the
techniques and technologies of getting at the senses—might prove extremely instructive.
Successful scientific performances required careful rehearsal and attentive selfdiscipline. As Michael Faraday, for example, honed his skills at the Royal Institution
during the 1820s he was clearly aware that performance in that setting was an art to be
mastered through diligent and punctilious attention to detail. His elocution lessons are well
known. He instructed friends from the City Philosophical Society (itself a vehicle for
earnest self-improvement) to attend his lecture performances and drill him appropriately.23
The attributes of a successful performer in a setting such as the Royal Institution, at any
rate, were inescapably gendered. Authoritative performances, as Faraday appears to have
understood, depended on, and embodied, displays of restrained and disciplined passion.
Tyndall’s recognition of the significance of Faraday’s crucial attribute of restraint, noted
earlier, suggests that he understood it too. This was the face of the idealized Victorian
public gentleman—restrained rather than repressed in his mastery of emotion. Command
over his own body was constitutive of the public man and was, consequently, a key
strategy in demonstrating mastery over nature through appropriate experimental performances. If this was the face of successful scientific performance, then it was one that
Victorian audiences would have identified without hesitation as unambiguously male. We
should remember, however, that the kinds of public scientific performances we are
discussing here were instrumental in constructing, rather than simply reflecting, Victorian
notions of public masculinity.
If Victorian audiences’ perceptions of the elements of public life were constituted, at
least in part, by their attendance at scientific performances as one among a range of
activities, then that was also where they got their sense of their own participation in
making the public. Historians of the spectacle have tended to draw rather too sharp a
distinction between spectacles and their detached, disinterested spectators. The flâneur is
simply a cynical observer of the game, never a participant. This is really not a very good
representation of Victorian audiences for scientific performances (nor, one suspects, for
23
Iwan Rhys Morus, Michael Faraday and the Electrical Century (London: Icon, 2005), pp. 53–54.
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other kinds of performances as well). To be successful, Victorian scientific spectacles and
performances had to engage with and recruit their spectators. To understand scientific
performances, we need to understand the very local specificity of audiences rather than
reducing them all to a common type. If they were really all the same, then they are neither
interesting nor particularly helpful as explanatory tools. Audiences constituted themselves
as the public through their active participation in performances. They went there avidly to
see and be seen as part of the same publicly declarative act of belonging. In a matter of
speaking, the audiences at scientific performances were on stage too.
One of the things we particularly need to remember about Victorian scientific performances, then, is the shared self-consciousness of the participants—audiences and performers alike. They knew that they were involved in an act— or that, at least, is the moral
that I want to draw from Oliver Lodge’s wishful anecdote with which I opened this
discussion. This is hardly surprising, for a culture that paid so much attention to mannered
behavior and the moral freight such behavior carried.24 Performative themes such as
discipline and embodiment help us break down distinctions between the production and
the consumption of scientific knowledge and its artifacts. They remind us that bodies
never disappear from physics—and certainly never disappeared for the Victorians. If we
want to understand the heterogeneity of performances through which Victorian natural
philosophers and their audiences made sense of nature, we need to pay attention in
particular to bodies and spaces—to the choreography of public experiments and the
particularities of the places where they were performed. We also need to take their
language seriously. The grammar and vocabulary of sensation pervaded Victorian physics.
If we want to understand what performing science meant for the Victorians, we need to
think harder about this lexicon of corporeal wonder, how it operated, and what it signified.
This matters, of course, not just for the Victorians, however powerful and instructive an
example of the importance of performance they represent. Others have demonstrated that
understanding performances is the key to unlocking the construction and consolidation of
public knowledge across a far broader spectrum.
24
Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 2005).