It cannot, I think, be truly asserted, that the intellectual powers know no difference of sex . . . Male genius fetches its treasures from the depths of science, and the accumulated wisdom of ages: the female finds her’s in the lighter regions of fancy and the passing knowledge of the day . . . Dividing subjects of thought into abstruse, serious, and light, I consider only the former and the latter as peculiarly appropriated by wither sex; the center is common to both: it is the keynote uniting two chords, equally useful and necessary to both.
Laetitia Hawkins,
Letters on the Female Mind, Its Powers and Pursuits, 1793
‘Much attention has lately been paid to the education of the female sex,’ spluttered a fictional gentleman in 1795. Counselling the new father of a baby girl, he poured scorn on the idea that women could ever learn to do anything useful. Although he did admit that in ‘poetry’ plays, and romances, in the art of imposing upon the understanding by means of the imagination, they have excelled’, he made it clear that factual matters were beyond their grasp: ‘I have never heard of any female proficients in science – few have pretended to science till within these few years.’ Imagination and fact, literature and science, women and men – for him, these were polar opposites.1
The actual author of these words was Maria Edgeworth. As part of her campaign to improve women’s education, she composed an imaginary yet disturbingly realistic set of letters based on the condescending views of Thomas Day, a friend of her father Richard Edgeworth. When he was only twenty-one, Day had devised his own educational experiment. He wanted to mould a young girl so that she would fit his taste for a bride ‘simple as a mountain girl . . . intrepid as the Spartan wives and Roman heroines’. Selecting two orphans – one blonde, one brunette – Day carefully followed the prescriptions of the Swiss educational philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau for rearing docile young girls, but was dismayed to discover that his pupils had minds of their own. Although he soon apprenticed the more rebellious one to a milliner, he persevered with the other, teaching her to endure fear and pain by firing pistols through her skirts and dropping melted sealing-wax on her bare arms. Unsurprisingly, she too was unenthusiastic about her rescuer, and ended up marrying one of his friends. Strangely, Day later published a best-selling educational book for children.2
Day was horrified when he discovered that Richard Edgeworth was encouraging his own daughter Maria to write about philosophy and politics. However, his advice went unheeded, and Richard and Maria Edgeworth collaborated to write books encouraging children to study and think while they played. Rational entertainment – combining learning with pleasure – was the educational fashion of the period. Girls as well as boys were learning more about science, but educators disagreed on vital issues. Should girls really learn to think for themselves, or should they continue to believe themselves governed by their emotions rather than their minds? Was it possible to reconcile intellectual independence with conventional obedience? Would fostering women’s education lead to unhappy marriages and the breakdown of social stability?
Not only women were interested in reforming female education. Day and Richard Edgeworth both belonged to the Lunar Society, an informal group of fourteen men who met every month on the Monday nearest the full moon, when the country roads would be well illuminated for travelling. This rational explanation of their name did not, of course, prevent them from being known as the Lunaticks, and they exuberantly tried out many ingenious yet impracticable inventions. But they also engaged in serious discussions of scientific and technological ideas that did much to promote early industrialisation. Unfettered by aristocratic conservatism, these self-made men made the Midlands rather than London the location of change for Britain’s future.3
Several of the Lunar men were involved in teaching women. William Withering, a medical botanist, taught female students through correspondence. ‘Natural Philosophy is my only real Entertainment,’ enthused his pupil Catherine Wright as she struggled to find time for squeezing in experiments between her household duties. Despite teaching herself chemistry and inventing a therapeutic water bath, she was embarrassed about her own ignorance. ‘Excuse my follies,’ she begged, ‘very few of our Sex Ever Attain to the Learning of a School Boy . . . I have constantly regretted my too confined Education.’ Withering repeatedly tried to discipline her imagination, dictatorially insisting that she follow his instructions rather than her own inclinations: ‘I am terefied to Death while I risk my Ideas before you,’ she wrote.4
Perhaps the most eminent member of the Lunar Society was Erasmus Darwin, who had sheltered Day’s would-be bride from excessive educational experiments. Darwin bought a large house for his illegitimate daughters to run as a girls’ boarding school – an enlightened act, even though he did promptly publish a pamphlet telling them how to do it. He recommended that women should be taught science, and endorsed Maria Edgeworth’s work (as well as plugging his own books). Nevertheless, his advice carried a strong paternalistic edge. Armed with the latest scientific knowledge, he argued, women would be able to undertake more interesting conversations with men.5
Now eclipsed by his far more famous grandson Charles, at the end of the eighteenth century Erasmus Darwin was renowned throughout England not only for his educational innovations, but also for his medical expertise and radical politics. He had hesitated before publishing what turned out to be his most famous book, The Botanic Garden, two book-length allegorical poems explaining not only modern botany, but also many other innovations in science and technology. For one thing, Darwin favoured frankness, and knew that he would be accused of corrupting young women by using sexual terminology to describe how plants should be classified. Just as significantly, he worried about damaging his medical reputation by appearing in print as a poet. Scientific poetry had sold well throughout the century, but now new disciplinary boundaries were being set up. Men of science were distinguishing themselves from men of letters by adopting dry, sober styles of writing. Should Darwin dare to bring together facts and imagination, science and literature? Or would he be mocked for trying to reconcile incompatibles?
In the end, he wrote a preface justifying his decision. ‘The general design of the following sheets,’ he wrote, ‘is to inlist Imagination under the banner of Science.’ His anxiety was unnecessary. The Botanic Garden was an instantaneous success amongst literary authors as well as his scientific colleagues at the Lunar Society – ‘the most delicious poem upon earth,’ raved the gothic enthusiast Horace Walpole. Packed with mythological references, ornate verses and whimsical descriptions, The Botanic Garden is not a work that appeals to modern tastes, but at the time it was enormously popular. Poetry was well-recognised as a didactic medium, and hefty technical footnotes discussed the very latest scientific theories and technological inventions. Darwin’s Botanic Garden became an important educational text.6 This scientific epic influenced the major Romantic poets, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Darwin’s self-exoneration – to inlist Imagination under the banner of Science – became a slogan that appealed to many writers. Women were traditionally credited with possessing imagination, but now some of them wanted to learn and write about science. In her calls for educational reform, Maria Edgeworth cited Darwin’s rallying-call (although she did produce her own version, mis-remembering that ‘Science has of late “been enlisted under the banners of imagination”’.) Many women, she went on, are interested in botany, but now they are turning to chemistry, formerly a male preserve. Even so, Edgeworth did not suggest that women should be involved in the excitement of research. Instead, she promoted chemistry as a safe, methodical activity, making it sound like a glorified form of cooking. ‘Chemistry’ she commented in her double-edged recommendation, ‘ is a science well suited to the talents and situation of women . . . it demands no bodily strength; it can be pursued in retirement; it applies immediately to useful and domestic purposes . . . there is no danger of inflaming the imagination, because the mind is intent upon realities, the knowledge that is acquired is exact, and the pleasure of the pursuit is a sufficient reward for the labour.’7
Darwin’s most famous female fan was Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, now often acclaimed as the world’s greatest work of science fiction. Darwin appears in the very first sentence of Frankenstein’s preface, which starts: ‘The event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr Darwin . . . as not of impossible occurrence.’8 Shelley had been particularly impressed by Darwin’s account of vorticellœ, microscopic creatures which, after being dried for several months, seemed to be miraculously restored to life when soaked in water. Like Edgeworth, she got the details slightly wrong – vermicelli, she called them – but she did follow Darwin’s injunction to integrate science and imagination. Excluded from real-life chemical laboratories because that would, as Edgeworth put it, court ‘the danger of inflaming the imagination,’ Shelley produced her trenchant critique of scientific research.
In the early seventeenth century, Francis Bacon had prescribed a new approach to learning, one based on experiments and investigation rather than on books and tradition. Bacon became an ideological figurehead whose shadow stretched forward over the centuries. He was renowned for envisaging a utopian research community where men would examine, control and exploit nature – a nature that remained feminine. ‘For knowledge itself is power,’ he had preached, and Mary Shelley’s contemporaries still quoted his words as they put his ideals into practice.
Shelley lived halfway between Bacon and us, at a time when modern science was becoming established and women were starting to campaign for equality. Neither Bacon nor Shelley practised science themselves, yet through their writing both of them had an enormous impact on how we think about scientific research and women’s roles within it. Another man-woman pair, they make appropriate book-ends for this collection of scientific partnerships which started with Francis Bacon and Lady Philosophy, and ends with Mary Shelley and Victor Frankenstein.