The Organisation of Knowledge in Victorian Britain

COLLECTIONS of essays which have their origin in conference papers can be at risk of resembling the Victorian curate's egg—good in parts; or, to use a less pejorative metaphor, more like trays of building blocks than structures. Some of the essays in this collection began life in a conference, ‘Locating the Victorians’ at the Science Museum in 2001; more were added at a Centre for Research into the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences workshop in Cambridge in 2002. Sadly, two airings have done nothing to diminish the resemblance to a tray of Lego. The proclaimed theme is the organisation of ‘academic, official and legitimate knowledge’ (p. 9) and the volume is one of a series published to mark the centenary of the foundation of the British Academy. In practice this translates first into ten essays on an assortment of academic and would-be academic disciplines, the sciences and mathematics, the social sciences, history, classics and English, and their place in, and struggles with, the expanding formal structures and curricula of higher education during the nineteenth century. Most of the stories are familiar ones: the increasing specialisation of the sciences, the power of the mathematical model in the developing hierarchy, the complex relationships of economics and nascent sociology to political and social policy-making, the ways in which the capture of history by the academy turned it inside out, from inclusive to exclusive, and the struggles of English with the same dilemma. Despite the title, the focus is firmly on England. Perhaps what went on in Scotland, Wales and Ireland was insufficiently official and legitimate; although the extent to which such labels are themselves problematic is never addressed

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