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Scientific heritage
Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci,. Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 187-195, 1997 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. Printed in Great Britain 0039-3681/97 $17.00+00.00
Pergamon
ESSAYREVIEW
Scientific Heritage Patricia Fara * Roy
Porter,
London:
A Social
History
(London:
xvi +431 pp., ISBN 0 241 12944 3 Hardback From
the mid-1980s
Britain’s
country
Hamish
Hamilton,
1994),
E20.00.
house
culture
has flourished
under
a
Tory government fostering private enterprise and cushioning the upper classes. Margaret Thatcher magisterially pronounced that ‘We are no more than life tenants of our heritage and we have a duty to pass it on in as good a condition as that in which we received it’.’ With this book about London’s past, Roy Porter joins a long list of eminent
historians
of varied political
persuasions
who
have engaged with the Thatcherite agenda. Allocating her more index references than Queen Victoria or Elizabeth I, he casts her as a witch brewing up an idiosyncratic potion of policies unlikely to restore the flagging health of an ailing London Porter an
(p. 364).
frequently
ageing
patient
turns
to such medical
afflicted
with
symptoms of decay. But metaphors reveals little of his former incarnations although
it
is
tempting
to
draw
imagery,
hardening
arteries,
diagnosing displaying
apart, Porter the urban as geological and medical parallels
with
commentators
London
as
alarming historian historian, of
the
eighteenth century about whom he has previously written so eloquently. In particular, Porter engagingly describes how, as a young man, Edward Gibbon “caught the West End bug” and contentedly settled down to a life of study, installing himself in luxurious accommodation close to the metropolitan book shops (pp. 115-l 16). If David Cannadine had not already appropriated Gibbon’s famous title for charting the demise of the British aristocracy, Porter could well have called his own book The Decline and Fall
*Darwin College, Cambridge, CB3 9EU U.K. ‘Stephen Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and Mational Idmtity in England and the United Srates (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), pp. 101-107, quotation p. 106. 0039-3681(96)00001-5 187
Studies in History and Philosophy
188
qf London.2 He views the British
Empire
expansion,
attributes
and-like
shortcomings whose
Gibbon-he
of its central
abolition
of the
as the key to London’s
adminstrators. Greater
the capital’s Prime
London
in
successful
decline to successive
amongst
Council
of Science
these is Thatcher,
1986 he blames
instigating the city’s precipitous fall after four flourishing centuries cally initiated by the opening of the Royal Exchange in 1570. Porter ironically
apparently reiterating
has little sympathy Thatcher’s narrow
for
symboli-
with purely architectural accounts, definition of legacies from earlier
generations: “If buildings take precedence over people we get heritage, not history” (p. 9). Instead, he has set out to construct a heroic narrative of London itself by exploring how the city’s physical fabric interacts with its inhabitants and its economy. Thatcher cemented her vision of heritage with the mortar of England’s aristocracy. In contrast, prompted by his own origins in southern suburbia, Porter has followed the prescriptions of Samuel Johnson and Ford Madox Ford, that writing the capital’s biography entails resuscitating the experiences of ordinary people far removed from the palaces of Westminster. Sweeping flamboyantly from Queen Boudicca to Baroness Thatcher, Porter has produced an enthusiastic and absorbing metropolitan narrative by interweaving details of quotidian life with the more commonly commemorated events of London’s past. Rather than focusing on the politicians and financiers based in Westminster and the City who constructed London as the hub of the British Empire, he vividly portrays the sewer hunters, street traders and commuters
who populated
suburbs. Porter
accommodates
coherent
narrative
at a somewhat physical
an extraordinary
of continuous
breathless
ments, his account
the less salubrious
pace. Interlacing
is consistently
and economic
evolution,
growth
quarters range
of material
although
within
occasionally
chronological
geared towards preceding
of the metropolis
its current
a single
delivering
and thematic
his central
and its
it
arrange-
theme of the city’s
decline.
He constantly
reiterates images of a living London, a creature which swells, shrinks and suffers. Well before the natural pruning effected by the fire and the plague, political commentators were worried that this bloated city was parasitically poisoning the kingdom. In the eighteenth century, Tobias Smollett similarly described the capital as an overgrown monster, a dropsical head whose extremities would drop off from lack of nourishment. Reviving such repeated diagnoses of hypertrophy is just one way in which Porter imposes a strong historical pattern onto a city he describes as “a muddle that worked” (p. 389). Although Porter refuses to prescribe a cure for this metropolitan patient, he formulates his diagnosis of governmental failures by retrieving the opinions of ‘Roy Porter, Ed~urd Gibbon: Muking History: (London: Weidenfeld Cannadine, The Drclinr and Fall of the British Aristocrucy (New University Press, 1990).
and Nicolson, 1988). David Haven and London: Yale
ScientiJic Heritage
189
bit players as well as major actors. Through liberal quotations, Porter reconstitutes contemporary daily life as experienced by individuals crowded together in the world’s largest city. Many of these contributions are inevitably versions penned by elite diarists and novelists, particularly those urging social reform, such as Charles Dickens. Since he quotes the same passage twice (p. 186 and 283), Porter presumably feels a special affinity with Henry Mayhew, who related that he went up into a balloon “to take, as it were, an angel’s view of that huge town”. His own feet firmly on the ground, it is through Mayhew that Porter acquires his longest testimony about labouring reality, one which is literally history from below-the marvellously lively and colloquial three-page account of a Birmingham man who supported himself by scrounging for lost coins in sewer mud. He boasted how “they tells me the foul air ‘ill cause instantious death, but I niver met with anythink about it”, and described with relish the fate of his friend “a rig’lar shore-worker”: “the rats eat every bit of him, and left nothing but his bones” (pp. 285-287). Resuscitating the voices of the urban poor can sometimes seem an exercise in voyeurism, but Porter uses such first-hand accounts for reinforcing his accusations that Thatcherite policies of indifference have disintegrated the city’s thriving stability. However, one consequence of his democratic approach is that-on the surface, at least-science is curiously absent. Historians of science have increasingly pointed to the formative role of geographical location in scientific practices. Rather than providing a backdrop, London has become a crucial participant in many analyses, such as Larry Stewart’s account of a public science rising from the coffee-house projectors negotiating between the Royal Society and Exchange Alley.3 Conversely, within histories focusing on London itself, famous scientists and institutions are often celebrated as vital contributors to its splendour. For example, in London- World City 1800-1840, the splendid catalogue of a huge 1990 exhibition at Essen-in which, as Porter wryly points out, London was itself treated as a historical museum piece whose apogee was reached over 150 years ago-one of the thirteen thematic articles is devoted to describing the city as an imperial scientific capital. Although engineers and instrument makers feature as prominently as more conventional heroes, the authors characterise London as central to the making of science.” But Porter truly follows the current dictum of regarding science as just one type of cultural practice. He brackets the Royal Society with playhouses and gentlemen’s clubs, and portrays precision instruments as just one spin-off from shipping. More unexpectedly, Isaac Newton makes a single fleeting appearance as the occupant of a house in Leicester Square, “the haunt of artists, writers, ‘Larry Stewart, The Rise qf‘ Public Science: Rheloric, Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). “lwan Morus, Simon Schaffer and Jim Secord, ‘Scientific London’, in Celina Fox (ed.), London-World City 1800-1840 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 129-142.
190
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
bohemians, category instead
rakes and revolutionaries” Sir Isaac slotted
about
who introduced like gravity,
into.
entrepreneurs
(p. 102): I remain
In a salutary
reversal
like Joseph Bramah,
those inventions
which matter
but devices which rapidly
intrigued
about which
of priorities,
the Yorkshire in life-not
became indispensable,
we learn
cabinet
abstract
maker
concepts
such as precision
locks, water closets and beer pumps. (Even so, in a Victorian composite portrait of men then deemed to have been famous in science 50 years earlier, Bramah was the only one with his back to the viewer, because no likeness survived from which to copy.5 ) Because of its grandiose scope, this volume may have limited value as a direct source of information for detailed contextualised studies of science, but it does provide an interesting basis for thinking about how we, as historians of science, should
preserve
and present
Britain’s
scientific
heritage-or
inheritance,
the
word judiciously adopted by British school curriculum advisers attempting to stem governmental enthusiasm for heritage history based on famous dates and national heroes. Particularly over the past decade, numerous critics have vociferously attacked the commercialisation cornmodifiers for contributing to postmodern
of heritage, castigating historical alienation of the present from the
past. Diverse commentators are scathing about a heritage industry which, centred around possessions of the wealthy, implicitly reinforces a system of values rooted in property and an outdated social heirarchy. They oppose the condensation of historical change into discrete tourist sites romanticising a way of life separated
from
modern
reality:
spectators
may
gaze in consuming
wonder, but gain little sense of the processes of transformation linking their own lives to those of the factory workers or milk maids immortalised in front of them. Whatever their political leanings, these sceptics run the risk of being dismissively characterised as left-wing intellectuals, although such an ideological demarcation is too facile. Raphael Samuel, for instance, has constructed the debate along different dimensions. He accuses “heritage baiters” of drawing elitist
distinctions
betwen
education.
He positively
democratic
historical
heritage welcomes
culture,
and
history,
between
entertainment
what he views as an expanding
one which embraces
plebeian
material
and
and more artefacts
as
well as the arcane textual sources relied on by professional academics, whom he accuses of promoting their own imaginative interpretations as deceptively authentic renditions of a vanished past.h Porter’s insistence that urban history involves the interaction between people and their built environment parallels the present emphasis by historians of science on integrating scientists’ lives and theories with their equipment and ‘Richard Walker, Regency Portraits (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1985), pp. 605-608. ‘Raphael Samuel, Theutres oJ’ Memory. Volume 1: Pust and Present in Contemporar.y (London and New York: Verso. 1994). especially pp. 259-273.
Vol.
1,
Culture
Scientljic
Heritage
191
their laboratories. Focusing on experimental practices means that material culture is no longer divorced from histories of scientific practitioners and their ideas. This shift in analytic perspective also entails transforming some of the social divisions which still prevail between communities of scientific historians. While university scholars have traditionally relied primarily on texts, museum researchers have tended to concentrate on the provenance and design of instruments. Like our libraries, one function of Britain’s museums should be to act as resource centres conserving our national material legacy of science for academics to explore. One might expect that, under a Tory regime, museum managers would be particularly committed to preserving material objects from the past for future generations. But a trip round London’s Science Museum confirms that the links between heritage and political attitudes are not at all clear cut. The Science Museum has been an avowedly Thatcherite organisation for at least the past decade, yet the current managers have decided to place priority on modern innovations, rather than on conserving and displaying the historical artefacts for which they act as the nation’s caretakers. They have deliberately adopted a forceful didactic role based on celebrating current achievement: their declared goal, as articulated by one of the assistant directors, is to “bring before the British public the scientific and technological issues of the day through the distinctive, and the distinctly powerful, medium of museum exhibitions”.7 This focus on modeling and propagating current scientific knowledge tends to partition it off from the earlier practices which led to its construction. But to borrow Porter’s portrayal of London, science resembles a living organism, which, like a coral reef, is “always becoming a product .. because, first of all, it is a process” (p. 8). The Museum has diverted its funds away from running costs to capital expenditure, away from curatorial and library staff towards new buildings. As an increasing number of old instruments are consigned to storage in Blythe Road, the Museum’s management boasts that a quarter of the institution’s floor space will be devoted to interactive displays. Historical artefacts are being supplanted by expensive electronic constructions which, in the name of the Public Understanding of Science, are perpetuating a centuries-old propagandist exercise of promoting, rather than appraising, scientific activities.8 By endorsing scientific enterprise, the Science Museum is obeying Thatcher’s injunctions that public bodies should boost national prestige and obtain private commercial sponsorship, but it has apparently ignored her recommendation to entrench the country’s heritage within its material inheritance. from ‘John Durant, ‘Rising to the Challenge’, Museums Journal 9315 (1993), 2627, quotation p. 27. ‘Roger Cooter and Steven Pumfrey, ‘Separate Spheres and Public Places: Reflections on the History of Science Popularization and Science in Popular Culture’, History of Science 32 (1994), 237261. especially pp. 238-239.
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
192
The
Science
heritage
centres,
fee-paying people
Museum seeking
visitors.
did trail
education.
is intentionally to emulate
Indeed, down
their financial
in August
Exhibition
These applicants
competing
Road,
but
privately
run
success by attracting
1995, long queues
were appropriately
exhibition steeped in nostalgia. reconstructing Britain’s glorious
against
they
of strangely
were
clothed
seeking
more attired
jobs,
not
for staffing a scientific
This was not, however, to be a bid for past, but a recreation (not even the original
versions) of the costumes, props and sets of Star Trek. Other galleries demonstrate that scientific instruments have become, like works of art, costly collectors’ items which can be put into service as inherited advertisements of national prowess. Few historians of science have publicly articulated any unease about the policy directions of the Science Museum. This silence perhaps reflects the discipline’s implicit endorsement of the country-house approach, only recently challenged by a growing interest in retrieving less elite practices. Porter refreshingly tells us more about the popular panoramas of Leicester Square than the museums
of South Kensington.
Just as Dickens
and Mayhew
recounted scientific activities taking place on London’s pavements rather than inside its hallowed emporia, so Porter’s narrative valuably suggests how the past might be displayed from a viewpoint other than that of aristocrats of science. Historians
of science have focused far less on the issues surrounding
exhibits of scientific heritage,
than on the difficulties
accounts. Students and lecturers alike constantly comprehensive yet reliable histories of science, himself histories,
addressed.
Pointing
he blames
to the pitfalls
over-specialisation
and the proliferation
of micro-studies
cultural
specifically,
forces.
More
involved
complain about an issue which
associated
with rejecting
for the absence isolated
he argues
that
from
material
in creating
of synoptic the interplay
while exposing
written
the lack of Porter has Whiggish accounts of larger the hidden
ideologies encoded within science successfully deprivileges its practices, this demystification itself renders mysterious the processes through which science has proved such a dramatically powerful enterprise.9 Since conceiving this book on London, a project gestated
over many
years,
Porter has benefited from some of his own prescriptions (his ubiquitous medical imagery is disturbingly infectious) and painted a “big picture” history. While he has self-deprecatingly characterised his earlier work on geology as “tunnel history”, this metropolitan narrative attributes the city’s rise and fall to a rich blend of economic, social, geographical, political and other cultural factors. The generous bibliographic essay references within each chapter reflect the ‘Roy Porter, ‘The History of Science and the History of Society’, in Robert Olby rf al. (eds), Companion to the History of Modern Science (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 3246, especially pp. 4344. See also J. R. R. Christie, ‘Aurora, Nemesis and Clio’, British Journalfor the History of Science 26 (1993).391405.
Scien@c Heritage
193
multi-faceted scope of this work-sub-headings include administrative developments, middle-class life, shock-horror literature, London’s villages, transport improvements and sex. Few authors can rival Porter’s skill at wrapping so many detailed studies into an enticing package, and he is adept at unobtrusively introducing insights reflecting his close familiarity with the history of science literature. For instance, in a single paragraph, he moves from a physical description of the brass Greenwich Meridian to a succinct condensation of recent work on the imperialising functions of standardisation: through surprising his readers into laughter at the Great Western Railway’s announcement that “London Time is kept at all stations on the Railway”, he deftly shows how Britain’s capital became the metronome not just for the provinces-Bath and Bristol were eleven minutes ahead of London-but also for the Empire and the rest of the world (p. 185). On the other hand, Porter’s second stated concern-the rising prestige of science-is not one broached in this book, and the value of scientific achievements remains an unquestioned assumption. In a volume with such panoramic ambitions, there must inevitably be a tension between comprehensiveness and detail, and London’s scientific activities are compressed into slightly tedious patches which are essentially chronological lists composed in polished prose (urbane would perhaps be a more appropriate adjective). Still more disappointingly, Porter’s account relies on facts and entertaining anecdote rather than on analytic interpretation. Given his propensity for medical metaphors, he might have enriched his story by making symbolism more structurally central. As one comparison, in Flesh and Stone, Richard Sennett explores urban development through bodily experiences. Spanning even more centuries than Porter, Sennett travels in time and space from Perikles’ Athens to modern Greenwich Village, visiting selected cities to examine how people’s changing beliefs about the body relate to their behaviour and their built environment. His narrative is chronological, but fashioned by anatomical themes. His account of the eighteenth century, for instance, uses the period’s own favoured metaphor of circulation-derived from William Harvey’s medical demonstrations-for unifying town planning, free market economics and the movement of rioting crowds through pre-Revolutionary Paris. lo In his opening cliche, Porter encapsulates the appeal of his book for himself and his readers: “Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner ...” (p. xiii). Many purchasers must, like me, have been attracted by the notion of learning more about the city in which they grew up, and so gaining a deeper personal appreciation of how this urban environment molded their lives. Presumably some of them shared my empathetic shudder of recognition at seeing the dreary southern railway suburbs of my childhood so aptly epitomised as a “fungus-like “‘Richard Sennett, Flesh und Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilizution Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994), especially pp. 255-281.
(London
and
194
Studies in History und Philosophy of Science
growth”
(a chapter
title appropriated
undated,
like many of the quotations).
Camden
who leaf through
George Cruikshank’s by an expanding description appropriate
of its “dung for Porter’s
Building
News,
Any more centrally
that this country
but
of
astonishment
at
town was being taken over
on the other hand, they might judge Charles Dickens’ hills, and dust-heaps, and ditches” to be increasingly degenerating metropolis (pp. 218-219). Searching for
such titillating historical snippets to enrich their own origins enticed browsers searching for self-identification in another William focusing
irritatingly
located residents
London may gasp in anachronistic
1829 protest
London;
from
may well have urban history,
Cronon’s splendid book on Chicago. His study demonstrates that on the development of a single city need not preclude interpretive
innovation. Organised around commodity flows, he combines economic and environmental history to relate his metropolis’s growth to the Great West beyond it. Although dealing with the particular history of a specific city, he has-unlike Porter-intentionally provided an analytical framework applicable to other
urban
centres
by considering
The City as a quasi-mythical
entity
counterposed against The Country.” Porter decided to construct a more conventional narrative, but one which delivers a strong political punch. Scholarly critics accuse Porter of having abandoned
his academic
sophistication
to capture
a more general
audience,
a
sour grapes sort of scepticism frequently levelled at successful authors. Yet as historians of science, we should be concerned about the proliferation of learned monographs in our field compared with the absence of introductory and accessible narratives-other than biographical studies--designed
surveys for non-
specialists. Best-seller lists and television schedules testify to the enormous popular interest in scientific topics, a potential market virtually unexplored by science
historians.
Let alone
the financial
rewards
for individuals,
this
marginalised discipline would surely profit as a whole by increasing its public profile. Some approaches, such as interlacing factual evidence with fictional imaginative
elaboration,
surely learn by considering Unlike
most historians
inevitably
arouse
the retailing of science,
professional
hackles,
but we could
success of books like Porters.
Porter
has explicitly
written
himself
into
his own text. Similarly to Cronon and Sennett, he has framed his urban narrative with autobiographical details, implicitly inviting his readers to participate in a shared voyage of self-discovery by jointly travelling through their city’s history. Such authorial involvement may seem particularly suited to these types of book, but many historians now heed E. H. Carr’s oft-quoted injunction that understanding works of history entails first understanding the authors who wrote them.‘2 Whether writing for an academic or a popular “William Cronon, Nuture’s Metropolis: Chicugo timi the Grecrt Wrst (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Co., 1991). ‘*Discussed in Cannadine, up. c,ir., note 2, pp. 3 8.
ScientiJic Heritage
195
audience, they regularly include personalised introductions and conclusions which fortify the impact of their arguments by providing an additional layer of self-reflexive contextualisation. Historical accounts are, like literary texts, constructed narratives, yet paradoxically, historians of science tend to cling to the same strategies of detachedness used by the scientists whose rhetorical tactics they are exposing. By writing in the third person, and absenting ourselves from the stories we are telling, we emulate the style adopted by the scientific practitioners whose professed objectivity we are casting in doubt. Curiously undermining our own project, we imply through this borrowed narrative grammar that we are-as scientists traditionally prefer to portray themselves-omniscient external observers distanced from our subjects. Rather than regarding self-references as unprofessionally narcissistic, we should perhaps consider whether our analyses might be strengthened by situating textually the production of our own knowledge as well as that of the scientists we are studying.13 Overtly declaring their personal commitment, historians further engage their readers’ involvement by making their analyses relevant to topical debates. Porter chose to produce a political statement about metropolitan decay under Tory neglect, but there are countless controversial issues in modern science which would benefit from a greater historical appreciation: the environment is one obvious example. In Britain, as access to further education becomes increasingly subjected to financial constraints, creating works which appeal to wider audiences seems almost morally demanded, as well as forming a pragmatically sound strategy for advertising the value of the history of science. Rewriting the past is a delightful endeavour, but archival research can be a self-indulgent exercise. Historians of science are admirably placed to reinforce perceptions of the discipline’s importance by generating accounts of the past able to function as commentaries on current affairs. As Cronon expresses it, ‘no history book is finally worth writing unless it manages somehow to connect itself to the present world in which past and future meet and reshape one another.14 On that criterion, Porter’s London is eminently successful.
13Sharon Traweek, ‘Border Crossings: Narrative Strategies in Science Studies and among Physicists in Tsukuba Science City, Japan’, in Andrew Pickering (ed.), Science as Practice and Culture (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 429465. 140p. cit., note 11, p. xxiii.
Pergamon
ESSAYREVIEW
Scientific Heritage Patricia Fara * Roy
Porter,
London:
A Social
History
(London:
xvi +431 pp., ISBN 0 241 12944 3 Hardback From
the mid-1980s
Britain’s
country
Hamish
Hamilton,
1994),
E20.00.
house
culture
has flourished
under
a
Tory government fostering private enterprise and cushioning the upper classes. Margaret Thatcher magisterially pronounced that ‘We are no more than life tenants of our heritage and we have a duty to pass it on in as good a condition as that in which we received it’.’ With this book about London’s past, Roy Porter joins a long list of eminent
historians
of varied political
persuasions
who
have engaged with the Thatcherite agenda. Allocating her more index references than Queen Victoria or Elizabeth I, he casts her as a witch brewing up an idiosyncratic potion of policies unlikely to restore the flagging health of an ailing London Porter an
(p. 364).
frequently
ageing
patient
turns
to such medical
afflicted
with
symptoms of decay. But metaphors reveals little of his former incarnations although
it
is
tempting
to
draw
imagery,
hardening
arteries,
diagnosing displaying
apart, Porter the urban as geological and medical parallels
with
commentators
London
as
alarming historian historian, of
the
eighteenth century about whom he has previously written so eloquently. In particular, Porter engagingly describes how, as a young man, Edward Gibbon “caught the West End bug” and contentedly settled down to a life of study, installing himself in luxurious accommodation close to the metropolitan book shops (pp. 115-l 16). If David Cannadine had not already appropriated Gibbon’s famous title for charting the demise of the British aristocracy, Porter could well have called his own book The Decline and Fall
*Darwin College, Cambridge, CB3 9EU U.K. ‘Stephen Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and Mational Idmtity in England and the United Srates (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), pp. 101-107, quotation p. 106. 0039-3681(96)00001-5 187
Studies in History and Philosophy
188
qf London.2 He views the British
Empire
expansion,
attributes
and-like
shortcomings whose
Gibbon-he
of its central
abolition
of the
as the key to London’s
adminstrators. Greater
the capital’s Prime
London
in
successful
decline to successive
amongst
Council
of Science
these is Thatcher,
1986 he blames
instigating the city’s precipitous fall after four flourishing centuries cally initiated by the opening of the Royal Exchange in 1570. Porter ironically
apparently reiterating
has little sympathy Thatcher’s narrow
for
symboli-
with purely architectural accounts, definition of legacies from earlier
generations: “If buildings take precedence over people we get heritage, not history” (p. 9). Instead, he has set out to construct a heroic narrative of London itself by exploring how the city’s physical fabric interacts with its inhabitants and its economy. Thatcher cemented her vision of heritage with the mortar of England’s aristocracy. In contrast, prompted by his own origins in southern suburbia, Porter has followed the prescriptions of Samuel Johnson and Ford Madox Ford, that writing the capital’s biography entails resuscitating the experiences of ordinary people far removed from the palaces of Westminster. Sweeping flamboyantly from Queen Boudicca to Baroness Thatcher, Porter has produced an enthusiastic and absorbing metropolitan narrative by interweaving details of quotidian life with the more commonly commemorated events of London’s past. Rather than focusing on the politicians and financiers based in Westminster and the City who constructed London as the hub of the British Empire, he vividly portrays the sewer hunters, street traders and commuters
who populated
suburbs. Porter
accommodates
coherent
narrative
at a somewhat physical
an extraordinary
of continuous
breathless
ments, his account
the less salubrious
pace. Interlacing
is consistently
and economic
evolution,
growth
quarters range
of material
although
within
occasionally
chronological
geared towards preceding
of the metropolis
its current
a single
delivering
and thematic
his central
and its
it
arrange-
theme of the city’s
decline.
He constantly
reiterates images of a living London, a creature which swells, shrinks and suffers. Well before the natural pruning effected by the fire and the plague, political commentators were worried that this bloated city was parasitically poisoning the kingdom. In the eighteenth century, Tobias Smollett similarly described the capital as an overgrown monster, a dropsical head whose extremities would drop off from lack of nourishment. Reviving such repeated diagnoses of hypertrophy is just one way in which Porter imposes a strong historical pattern onto a city he describes as “a muddle that worked” (p. 389). Although Porter refuses to prescribe a cure for this metropolitan patient, he formulates his diagnosis of governmental failures by retrieving the opinions of ‘Roy Porter, Ed~urd Gibbon: Muking History: (London: Weidenfeld Cannadine, The Drclinr and Fall of the British Aristocrucy (New University Press, 1990).
and Nicolson, 1988). David Haven and London: Yale
ScientiJic Heritage
189
bit players as well as major actors. Through liberal quotations, Porter reconstitutes contemporary daily life as experienced by individuals crowded together in the world’s largest city. Many of these contributions are inevitably versions penned by elite diarists and novelists, particularly those urging social reform, such as Charles Dickens. Since he quotes the same passage twice (p. 186 and 283), Porter presumably feels a special affinity with Henry Mayhew, who related that he went up into a balloon “to take, as it were, an angel’s view of that huge town”. His own feet firmly on the ground, it is through Mayhew that Porter acquires his longest testimony about labouring reality, one which is literally history from below-the marvellously lively and colloquial three-page account of a Birmingham man who supported himself by scrounging for lost coins in sewer mud. He boasted how “they tells me the foul air ‘ill cause instantious death, but I niver met with anythink about it”, and described with relish the fate of his friend “a rig’lar shore-worker”: “the rats eat every bit of him, and left nothing but his bones” (pp. 285-287). Resuscitating the voices of the urban poor can sometimes seem an exercise in voyeurism, but Porter uses such first-hand accounts for reinforcing his accusations that Thatcherite policies of indifference have disintegrated the city’s thriving stability. However, one consequence of his democratic approach is that-on the surface, at least-science is curiously absent. Historians of science have increasingly pointed to the formative role of geographical location in scientific practices. Rather than providing a backdrop, London has become a crucial participant in many analyses, such as Larry Stewart’s account of a public science rising from the coffee-house projectors negotiating between the Royal Society and Exchange Alley.3 Conversely, within histories focusing on London itself, famous scientists and institutions are often celebrated as vital contributors to its splendour. For example, in London- World City 1800-1840, the splendid catalogue of a huge 1990 exhibition at Essen-in which, as Porter wryly points out, London was itself treated as a historical museum piece whose apogee was reached over 150 years ago-one of the thirteen thematic articles is devoted to describing the city as an imperial scientific capital. Although engineers and instrument makers feature as prominently as more conventional heroes, the authors characterise London as central to the making of science.” But Porter truly follows the current dictum of regarding science as just one type of cultural practice. He brackets the Royal Society with playhouses and gentlemen’s clubs, and portrays precision instruments as just one spin-off from shipping. More unexpectedly, Isaac Newton makes a single fleeting appearance as the occupant of a house in Leicester Square, “the haunt of artists, writers, ‘Larry Stewart, The Rise qf‘ Public Science: Rheloric, Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). “lwan Morus, Simon Schaffer and Jim Secord, ‘Scientific London’, in Celina Fox (ed.), London-World City 1800-1840 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 129-142.
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Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
bohemians, category instead
rakes and revolutionaries” Sir Isaac slotted
about
who introduced like gravity,
into.
entrepreneurs
(p. 102): I remain
In a salutary
reversal
like Joseph Bramah,
those inventions
which matter
but devices which rapidly
intrigued
about which
of priorities,
the Yorkshire in life-not
became indispensable,
we learn
cabinet
abstract
maker
concepts
such as precision
locks, water closets and beer pumps. (Even so, in a Victorian composite portrait of men then deemed to have been famous in science 50 years earlier, Bramah was the only one with his back to the viewer, because no likeness survived from which to copy.5 ) Because of its grandiose scope, this volume may have limited value as a direct source of information for detailed contextualised studies of science, but it does provide an interesting basis for thinking about how we, as historians of science, should
preserve
and present
Britain’s
scientific
heritage-or
inheritance,
the
word judiciously adopted by British school curriculum advisers attempting to stem governmental enthusiasm for heritage history based on famous dates and national heroes. Particularly over the past decade, numerous critics have vociferously attacked the commercialisation cornmodifiers for contributing to postmodern
of heritage, castigating historical alienation of the present from the
past. Diverse commentators are scathing about a heritage industry which, centred around possessions of the wealthy, implicitly reinforces a system of values rooted in property and an outdated social heirarchy. They oppose the condensation of historical change into discrete tourist sites romanticising a way of life separated
from
modern
reality:
spectators
may
gaze in consuming
wonder, but gain little sense of the processes of transformation linking their own lives to those of the factory workers or milk maids immortalised in front of them. Whatever their political leanings, these sceptics run the risk of being dismissively characterised as left-wing intellectuals, although such an ideological demarcation is too facile. Raphael Samuel, for instance, has constructed the debate along different dimensions. He accuses “heritage baiters” of drawing elitist
distinctions
betwen
education.
He positively
democratic
historical
heritage welcomes
culture,
and
history,
between
entertainment
what he views as an expanding
one which embraces
plebeian
material
and
and more artefacts
as
well as the arcane textual sources relied on by professional academics, whom he accuses of promoting their own imaginative interpretations as deceptively authentic renditions of a vanished past.h Porter’s insistence that urban history involves the interaction between people and their built environment parallels the present emphasis by historians of science on integrating scientists’ lives and theories with their equipment and ‘Richard Walker, Regency Portraits (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1985), pp. 605-608. ‘Raphael Samuel, Theutres oJ’ Memory. Volume 1: Pust and Present in Contemporar.y (London and New York: Verso. 1994). especially pp. 259-273.
Vol.
1,
Culture
Scientljic
Heritage
191
their laboratories. Focusing on experimental practices means that material culture is no longer divorced from histories of scientific practitioners and their ideas. This shift in analytic perspective also entails transforming some of the social divisions which still prevail between communities of scientific historians. While university scholars have traditionally relied primarily on texts, museum researchers have tended to concentrate on the provenance and design of instruments. Like our libraries, one function of Britain’s museums should be to act as resource centres conserving our national material legacy of science for academics to explore. One might expect that, under a Tory regime, museum managers would be particularly committed to preserving material objects from the past for future generations. But a trip round London’s Science Museum confirms that the links between heritage and political attitudes are not at all clear cut. The Science Museum has been an avowedly Thatcherite organisation for at least the past decade, yet the current managers have decided to place priority on modern innovations, rather than on conserving and displaying the historical artefacts for which they act as the nation’s caretakers. They have deliberately adopted a forceful didactic role based on celebrating current achievement: their declared goal, as articulated by one of the assistant directors, is to “bring before the British public the scientific and technological issues of the day through the distinctive, and the distinctly powerful, medium of museum exhibitions”.7 This focus on modeling and propagating current scientific knowledge tends to partition it off from the earlier practices which led to its construction. But to borrow Porter’s portrayal of London, science resembles a living organism, which, like a coral reef, is “always becoming a product .. because, first of all, it is a process” (p. 8). The Museum has diverted its funds away from running costs to capital expenditure, away from curatorial and library staff towards new buildings. As an increasing number of old instruments are consigned to storage in Blythe Road, the Museum’s management boasts that a quarter of the institution’s floor space will be devoted to interactive displays. Historical artefacts are being supplanted by expensive electronic constructions which, in the name of the Public Understanding of Science, are perpetuating a centuries-old propagandist exercise of promoting, rather than appraising, scientific activities.8 By endorsing scientific enterprise, the Science Museum is obeying Thatcher’s injunctions that public bodies should boost national prestige and obtain private commercial sponsorship, but it has apparently ignored her recommendation to entrench the country’s heritage within its material inheritance. from ‘John Durant, ‘Rising to the Challenge’, Museums Journal 9315 (1993), 2627, quotation p. 27. ‘Roger Cooter and Steven Pumfrey, ‘Separate Spheres and Public Places: Reflections on the History of Science Popularization and Science in Popular Culture’, History of Science 32 (1994), 237261. especially pp. 238-239.
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
192
The
Science
heritage
centres,
fee-paying people
Museum seeking
visitors.
did trail
education.
is intentionally to emulate
Indeed, down
their financial
in August
Exhibition
These applicants
competing
Road,
but
privately
run
success by attracting
1995, long queues
were appropriately
exhibition steeped in nostalgia. reconstructing Britain’s glorious
against
they
of strangely
were
clothed
seeking
more attired
jobs,
not
for staffing a scientific
This was not, however, to be a bid for past, but a recreation (not even the original
versions) of the costumes, props and sets of Star Trek. Other galleries demonstrate that scientific instruments have become, like works of art, costly collectors’ items which can be put into service as inherited advertisements of national prowess. Few historians of science have publicly articulated any unease about the policy directions of the Science Museum. This silence perhaps reflects the discipline’s implicit endorsement of the country-house approach, only recently challenged by a growing interest in retrieving less elite practices. Porter refreshingly tells us more about the popular panoramas of Leicester Square than the museums
of South Kensington.
Just as Dickens
and Mayhew
recounted scientific activities taking place on London’s pavements rather than inside its hallowed emporia, so Porter’s narrative valuably suggests how the past might be displayed from a viewpoint other than that of aristocrats of science. Historians
of science have focused far less on the issues surrounding
exhibits of scientific heritage,
than on the difficulties
accounts. Students and lecturers alike constantly comprehensive yet reliable histories of science, himself histories,
addressed.
Pointing
he blames
to the pitfalls
over-specialisation
and the proliferation
of micro-studies
cultural
specifically,
forces.
More
involved
complain about an issue which
associated
with rejecting
for the absence isolated
he argues
that
from
material
in creating
of synoptic the interplay
while exposing
written
the lack of Porter has Whiggish accounts of larger the hidden
ideologies encoded within science successfully deprivileges its practices, this demystification itself renders mysterious the processes through which science has proved such a dramatically powerful enterprise.9 Since conceiving this book on London, a project gestated
over many
years,
Porter has benefited from some of his own prescriptions (his ubiquitous medical imagery is disturbingly infectious) and painted a “big picture” history. While he has self-deprecatingly characterised his earlier work on geology as “tunnel history”, this metropolitan narrative attributes the city’s rise and fall to a rich blend of economic, social, geographical, political and other cultural factors. The generous bibliographic essay references within each chapter reflect the ‘Roy Porter, ‘The History of Science and the History of Society’, in Robert Olby rf al. (eds), Companion to the History of Modern Science (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 3246, especially pp. 4344. See also J. R. R. Christie, ‘Aurora, Nemesis and Clio’, British Journalfor the History of Science 26 (1993).391405.
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multi-faceted scope of this work-sub-headings include administrative developments, middle-class life, shock-horror literature, London’s villages, transport improvements and sex. Few authors can rival Porter’s skill at wrapping so many detailed studies into an enticing package, and he is adept at unobtrusively introducing insights reflecting his close familiarity with the history of science literature. For instance, in a single paragraph, he moves from a physical description of the brass Greenwich Meridian to a succinct condensation of recent work on the imperialising functions of standardisation: through surprising his readers into laughter at the Great Western Railway’s announcement that “London Time is kept at all stations on the Railway”, he deftly shows how Britain’s capital became the metronome not just for the provinces-Bath and Bristol were eleven minutes ahead of London-but also for the Empire and the rest of the world (p. 185). On the other hand, Porter’s second stated concern-the rising prestige of science-is not one broached in this book, and the value of scientific achievements remains an unquestioned assumption. In a volume with such panoramic ambitions, there must inevitably be a tension between comprehensiveness and detail, and London’s scientific activities are compressed into slightly tedious patches which are essentially chronological lists composed in polished prose (urbane would perhaps be a more appropriate adjective). Still more disappointingly, Porter’s account relies on facts and entertaining anecdote rather than on analytic interpretation. Given his propensity for medical metaphors, he might have enriched his story by making symbolism more structurally central. As one comparison, in Flesh and Stone, Richard Sennett explores urban development through bodily experiences. Spanning even more centuries than Porter, Sennett travels in time and space from Perikles’ Athens to modern Greenwich Village, visiting selected cities to examine how people’s changing beliefs about the body relate to their behaviour and their built environment. His narrative is chronological, but fashioned by anatomical themes. His account of the eighteenth century, for instance, uses the period’s own favoured metaphor of circulation-derived from William Harvey’s medical demonstrations-for unifying town planning, free market economics and the movement of rioting crowds through pre-Revolutionary Paris. lo In his opening cliche, Porter encapsulates the appeal of his book for himself and his readers: “Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner ...” (p. xiii). Many purchasers must, like me, have been attracted by the notion of learning more about the city in which they grew up, and so gaining a deeper personal appreciation of how this urban environment molded their lives. Presumably some of them shared my empathetic shudder of recognition at seeing the dreary southern railway suburbs of my childhood so aptly epitomised as a “fungus-like “‘Richard Sennett, Flesh und Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilizution Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994), especially pp. 255-281.
(London
and
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Studies in History und Philosophy of Science
growth”
(a chapter
title appropriated
undated,
like many of the quotations).
Camden
who leaf through
George Cruikshank’s by an expanding description appropriate
of its “dung for Porter’s
Building
News,
Any more centrally
that this country
but
of
astonishment
at
town was being taken over
on the other hand, they might judge Charles Dickens’ hills, and dust-heaps, and ditches” to be increasingly degenerating metropolis (pp. 218-219). Searching for
such titillating historical snippets to enrich their own origins enticed browsers searching for self-identification in another William focusing
irritatingly
located residents
London may gasp in anachronistic
1829 protest
London;
from
may well have urban history,
Cronon’s splendid book on Chicago. His study demonstrates that on the development of a single city need not preclude interpretive
innovation. Organised around commodity flows, he combines economic and environmental history to relate his metropolis’s growth to the Great West beyond it. Although dealing with the particular history of a specific city, he has-unlike Porter-intentionally provided an analytical framework applicable to other
urban
centres
by considering
The City as a quasi-mythical
entity
counterposed against The Country.” Porter decided to construct a more conventional narrative, but one which delivers a strong political punch. Scholarly critics accuse Porter of having abandoned
his academic
sophistication
to capture
a more general
audience,
a
sour grapes sort of scepticism frequently levelled at successful authors. Yet as historians of science, we should be concerned about the proliferation of learned monographs in our field compared with the absence of introductory and accessible narratives-other than biographical studies--designed
surveys for non-
specialists. Best-seller lists and television schedules testify to the enormous popular interest in scientific topics, a potential market virtually unexplored by science
historians.
Let alone
the financial
rewards
for individuals,
this
marginalised discipline would surely profit as a whole by increasing its public profile. Some approaches, such as interlacing factual evidence with fictional imaginative
elaboration,
surely learn by considering Unlike
most historians
inevitably
arouse
the retailing of science,
professional
hackles,
but we could
success of books like Porters.
Porter
has explicitly
written
himself
into
his own text. Similarly to Cronon and Sennett, he has framed his urban narrative with autobiographical details, implicitly inviting his readers to participate in a shared voyage of self-discovery by jointly travelling through their city’s history. Such authorial involvement may seem particularly suited to these types of book, but many historians now heed E. H. Carr’s oft-quoted injunction that understanding works of history entails first understanding the authors who wrote them.‘2 Whether writing for an academic or a popular “William Cronon, Nuture’s Metropolis: Chicugo timi the Grecrt Wrst (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Co., 1991). ‘*Discussed in Cannadine, up. c,ir., note 2, pp. 3 8.
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audience, they regularly include personalised introductions and conclusions which fortify the impact of their arguments by providing an additional layer of self-reflexive contextualisation. Historical accounts are, like literary texts, constructed narratives, yet paradoxically, historians of science tend to cling to the same strategies of detachedness used by the scientists whose rhetorical tactics they are exposing. By writing in the third person, and absenting ourselves from the stories we are telling, we emulate the style adopted by the scientific practitioners whose professed objectivity we are casting in doubt. Curiously undermining our own project, we imply through this borrowed narrative grammar that we are-as scientists traditionally prefer to portray themselves-omniscient external observers distanced from our subjects. Rather than regarding self-references as unprofessionally narcissistic, we should perhaps consider whether our analyses might be strengthened by situating textually the production of our own knowledge as well as that of the scientists we are studying.13 Overtly declaring their personal commitment, historians further engage their readers’ involvement by making their analyses relevant to topical debates. Porter chose to produce a political statement about metropolitan decay under Tory neglect, but there are countless controversial issues in modern science which would benefit from a greater historical appreciation: the environment is one obvious example. In Britain, as access to further education becomes increasingly subjected to financial constraints, creating works which appeal to wider audiences seems almost morally demanded, as well as forming a pragmatically sound strategy for advertising the value of the history of science. Rewriting the past is a delightful endeavour, but archival research can be a self-indulgent exercise. Historians of science are admirably placed to reinforce perceptions of the discipline’s importance by generating accounts of the past able to function as commentaries on current affairs. As Cronon expresses it, ‘no history book is finally worth writing unless it manages somehow to connect itself to the present world in which past and future meet and reshape one another.14 On that criterion, Porter’s London is eminently successful.
13Sharon Traweek, ‘Border Crossings: Narrative Strategies in Science Studies and among Physicists in Tsukuba Science City, Japan’, in Andrew Pickering (ed.), Science as Practice and Culture (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 429465. 140p. cit., note 11, p. xxiii.