In some respects I think that my generation of Englishmen (I was born in the British Midlands in 1940) is a lot closer to the Victorians than was my parents’. They were just too close to the nineteenth century. Some indeed were actually born in it. Just as clothes get dated quickly—I could not believe the illustrations in books published in the 1920s—so also do eras. The debunking efforts of Lytton Strachey struck deeply. But just as my children do not find anything disturbingly weird about the styles of the flappers—although you should hear them on the styles worn by Grace Kelly in the 1950s—so I and my cohort found something attractive about the Victorians. For all of their faults, there was something rather magnificent about them.

Certainly a large number of us spend a large amount of our lives thinking and writing about them. If I had a dollar for every word I have penned on Charles Darwin, I would be a very rich man. But as always our attention is lopsided. We spend huge amounts writing on one person to the virtual neglect of others. Of course, if you are talking about the queen versus the local postman, this is perhaps understandable. But often our judgments would greatly surprise the people of the nineteenth century. George Eliot, for example, was certainly well known back then, but there were many more novelists at least as well known to the Victorians about whom we write nary a word.

I have always felt that William Whewell (pronounced to rhyme with jewel and with a silent first w) was one such neglected person. In his day, he was certainly well known. At Cambridge, he was the professor first of mineralogy and then of moral philosophy, a combination one suspects rarely matched. After that, he became the master of Trinity College, a man of great influence in the university and much involved in tertiary education in the midcentury. This involvement was not always easy, one suspects, since for a while he acted as tutor to the then Prince of Wales (later Edward VII). Whewell was also much involved in science administration, being one of those who worked hard to see that the British Association for the Advancement of Science functioned successfully. He was president of the Geological Society of London. He wrote textbooks introducing new methods of mathematics to British students. And above all he wrote two massive multivolume works on the history and philosophy of science: The History of the Inductive Sciences (three volumes in 1837), followed by The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (two volumes in 1840). These were not produced simply as academic exercises but intended to lay out the nature of science—the nature of good science—just at the time when the British were becoming painfully aware that the countries of the continent (Germany particularly) were racing ahead in science and its education and realizing that their own country needed to take major steps to catch up.

These days Whewell, if he is known at all, is known through his connection with others. For instance, students of Alfred Tennyson know that Whewell had considerably more success in the 1830s with the poet than in the 1850s with the prince as a student, for the teacher filled the pupil with a lifelong love of and interest in science. Actually, though, it was somewhat mixed success, and here perhaps is a major reason for the neglect of Whewell. In the 1840s, the scientific scandal was the evolutionary tract the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (written anonymously by the Scottish publisher Robert Chambers). Although it was deeply flawed, it was forward looking and Tennyson picked it up and made it a major theme of his In Memoriam. Whewell thought it bad scientifically and worse theologically. He did not even bother to write a response but gathered pieces from his earlier writings and published them under the title Indications of the Creator. That showed where he stood. The first edition of the Indications did not even mention Vestiges by name.

The biggest connection of all, and it is here that Whewell today is usually remembered, is with John Stuart Mill, with whom Whewell had titanic clashes through the middle years of the century. They differed on just about everything and were not slow to print to air their differences. This is the topic of Laura Snyder's superb book, Reforming Philosophy: A Victorian Debate on Science and Society. She introduces us to both Whewell and Mill and leads us through their disagreements about the nature of science, the nature of morality, the foundations of political economy, and much more. This is the definitive work and must be on the shelves of any library with pretensions to completeness about the age.

Since this is my field, let me say a little about the Whewell-Mill differences over the philosophy of science. (I am using Snyder's very careful analysis as background.) Basically, Mill was an empiricist and Whewell a rationalist (in respects a Kantian, for unlike many of his countrymen he read German with ease). Mill wanted to see the physical evidence and work from there. Whewell was much more into hypotheses and the consequences to be drawn from them. (Obviously he was using “induction” in a rather odd way that suited his purposes.) For this reason, Whewell was always a bit sniffy about Mill's supposed methods. Apart from the fact that they had been cribbed from John F. W. Herschel's Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (London, 1830), Whewell pointed out (reasonably) that the methods might help in deciding between rival hypotheses, but they were little use in finding the actual hypotheses in the first place. It was this, the logic of discovery—what the American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce was to call “abduction”—that Whewell stressed and was missed by Mill, to the impoverishment of the philosophy of science.

More generally, although in respects there is no question that Mill was the more subtle thinker, Whewell had a much better sense of the fabric of science—its real nature—than did Mill. (Actually, Mill admitted that he was stuck on writing his Logic until he read Whewell's History and got lots of nice examples.) As Snyder points out, this leads to somewhat of a paradox about the most famous theory of their age, namely, the theory of evolution through natural selection published in Charles Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859. Darwin, who knew Whewell well when he was a young man (both when an undergraduate at Cambridge and then on the return from the Beagle voyage when he was discovering his theory), followed Whewell's prescriptions carefully. In particular, central to Whewell's picture of science was the so-called Consilience of Inductions. Here we have one central hypothesis and many consequences in different fields—just what we have in the Origin. (Darwin did this self-consciously and praised himself for having done it.)

Mill unfortunately entirely misunderstood or ignored what Darwin was about. Somewhat condescendingly, he agreed that Darwin had made the idea of evolution a live topic but denied that Darwin had proven anything—denied even that Darwin had tried to prove anything. (As Darwin might have said: “News to me.”) Not that in some respects Whewell was much better. He was so theologically opposed to evolution that (following a pattern) he wrote a new introduction to an old book, where he slammed the theory of the Origin without mentioning it by name.

I guess what it all comes down to is that history has judged Mill on the winning side, looking toward the twentieth century, and has judged Whewell on the losing side, looking back to the eighteenth century. There is truth in this, but it should not blind you to the fact that their actual arguments are to be judged differently and for their own sakes. Laura Snyder offers a wonderful guide to this important task of teasing out what really happened. As always, the University of Chicago Press has produced a well-made book that is a joy to hold and to read.