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The Victorian Scientist: The Growth of a Profession, by Jack Meadows; pp. vi + 202. London: The British Library, 2004, £16.95, $35.00.
John Phillips and the Business of Victorian Science, by Jack Morrell; pp. xx + 437. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2005, £57.50, $109.95.
Here are two books about scientific careers in Victorian Britain, one focusing on a single individual, the other offering a collective portrait. The subtitles indicate a focus on professional aspects of science-in particular, career-making, which is, for Jack Morrell, "the business of Victorian science." Jack Meadows portrays an ideal or idealized type of the scientific career, and the inevitably diverse backgrounds of this or almost any professional group surface mainly in the anecdotes rather than as a basic element of the story. Interestingly, the geologist John Phillips of Morrell's book is not once mentioned by Meadows; Phillips's lack of much schooling would make him unusual but not quite unique within the population of Victorian scientists described by Meadows.
As Meadows points out, the word "scientist" was coined only in the 1830s, and it was not commonly used in Britain as the name of an occupational category before the 1890s. The end of the century is also when the career in science was assuming its contemporary form, with university degrees as the gateway to a profession, and a university post as the exemplary and often preferred location for scientists. During the Victorian period, universities were not so privileged. Although Phillips spent the last decades of his life, from 1853 to 1874, at Oxford, he earlier turned down a professorship at University College, London, where, since there was no real salary, he would have had to survive on student fees. Even at Cambridge, where George Airy become professor of astronomy, the University offered little in the way of material support, beyond the observatory. Meadows passes on the local joke...