In my eternally-in-progress book project about scientists in characters in Victorian literature, I often refer to real men of science as reference for the way science was really developing in the era. There are probably three I refer back to more than any others: Charles Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley, and John Tyndall. Darwin and Huxley are perhaps obvious touchstones; the most significant Victorian scientist of them all and then the man who professionalized science. Each has an excellent biography, which I read back when I was preparing for my Ph.D. examinations: Janet Browne's two volumes Voyaging (1995) and The Power of Place (2002) for Darwin and Adrian Desmond's From Devil's Disciple to Evolution's High Priest (1994) for Huxley. There are some good scholarly studies of Tyndall—particularly the book that turned me on to him to begin with, Ursula DeYoung's A Vision of Modern Science (2011)—there has never been a systematic biography of Tyndall.
The Ascent of John Tyndall: Victorian Scientist, Mountaineer, and Public Intellectual |
 |
|
Published: 2018 Half-read: June–October 2024 |
But in their own era, Tydnall was the equal of the other men. He was a prominent physicist, figuring out why the sky was blue; he also did a lot of work on heat and glaciers. He used to get in scraps with John Ruskin about whether glaciers moved. Ruskin trusted the results of his own eyes (he'd never seen a glacier move, and neither did anyone he talked to), while Tyndall made a model glacier out of ice cream. Tyndall gave a notorious speech called the Belfast Address, where he advocated for scientific materialism, and like Huxley he was one of proponents of the professionalization of science. His star has faded in a way the others' haven't, perhaps because he's not associated with a single big paradigm shift like evolution. And I guess because of this, there's hasn't been a biography of him. But he certainly deserves one, and as someone who I'm guessing has thought about Tyndall more than almost anyone else alive, I am squarely in the target audience for one.
So I was excited when last year I discovered that back in 2018, Cambridge University Press had finally published one. I finally picked it up this June, intending to read it along with a few other scholarly books I'd been meaning to around to before finalizing my book manuscript.
Four months later, the summer long over, I finally gave up on it. I normally don't count unfinished books for my statistics or review them on my blog, but I read 369 pages of it, which 1) is longer than many books I give myself credit for because I read all of them, and 2) seems like more than enough to make a fair impression of, given the book is 576 pages long including front- and backmatter.
A good biography doesn't just give you a chronological telling of a person's life, it gives you a sense of them as a person, as a personality; both Browne's Darwin and Desmon's Huxley are good examples of this, particularly the latter, a book I refer back to a lot in my own writing. Unfortunately, the only sense of Tyndall one gets here is of as a dull plod. Is this because he was a dull plod? There is perhaps necessarily something of the dull plod to all scientists, and Tyndall himself wrote as a young man in the 1850s that after three years of scientific study, "I lack the warm aspirations which I once felt, and I believe this is a necessary consequence of my pursuits: / Love is exiled from the heart / When knowledge enters in" (qtd. in Jackson 69). But I don't feel like the man who delivered the Belfast Address could have been a dull plod... right?
So, I suspect it's down to the writing of Roland Jackson that's the dull plod, not John Tyndall. We move from fact to fact to fact, all of which are extensively documented. Kudos to Jackson, and I mean it; he very clearly did the work to assemble everything Tyndall did. But one drowns in details here with little sense of the actual man who did all of these things. What were his passions, his conflicts, his drives? One doesn't really know... and this is the thing I really wanted out of the book, particularly a sense of how his radicalism in some senses—the Belfast Address, his promotion of scientific education—conflicted with his conservatism in others. Notoriously, Tyndall backed Governor Eyre's horrific actions in putting down the Morant Bay Rebellion. As Sarah Winter says,
Tyndall advocated that clear racial distinctions should be applied to reach an appropriate understanding of which categories of British subjects were entitled to due process protections: “We do not hold an Englishman and a Jamaica negro to be convertible terms, nor do we think that the cause of human liberty will be promoted by any attempt to make them so.” Tyndall implies not only that the races are separate species, but also that Eyre’s violent suppression of the Morant Bay uprising was legitimate on that basis, as long as such impositions of martial law are restricted to Jamaica, and, by implication, other imperial territories with white minority populations. [...] In Huxley’s terms, Tyndall reveals his deepest political commitment to a social order based in human inequality, defined according to racial differences.
In Sarah's take, anyway, it seems to me there ought to be a lot packed in this incident that would give us insight into Tyndall. It strikes me, for example, that the scientific impulse to classify, to sort has led Tyndall to make some morally reprehensible choices... and indeed, Stephen Jay Gould has shown how the scientific project often reinforced white supremacy even at the cost of the careful observation that is supposedly the cornerstone of the scientific method! On top of this, Tyndall spent a lot of time in America, where it seems to be he no doubt must have made a lot of observations about people of color (which I'm guessing he didn't often encounter in Britain).
But even though there's a whole chapter called "Eyre Affair and Death of Faraday," all the insight Jackson gives us into this moment is that Jackson wasn't as liberal as Huxley (who supported the investigation into Governor Eyre, and also supported the North during the American Civil War, while Tyndall sympathized with the South). That's it? Other big moments like the Belfast Address seem similarly buried in a slew of facts about who Tyndall ate dinner with and what hikes he went on in the Alps. There's just too much detail here, and no sense of narrative.
As I said above, I'm basically the target audience for a Tyndall biography... but by September I had pretty much stalled out completely on this book, somewhere in the middle of chapter 13. It's got its nuggets of insights, and I think there are a few bits I will end up making use of in my book. But I also don't think it's worth my time trying to get through to the end. The magisterial biography of John Tyndall, alas, remains to be written.
No comments:
Post a Comment