The twelve chapters of this eclectic and catholic collection of disciplinary perspectives, bookended by an introduction and conclusions by Bernard Lightman and Bennet Zon, offer a diverse yet integrated set of examinations of the origin and formation of disciplines. The book is much more than the sum of its excellent parts, as linkages are made both between chapters and within the introduction and conclusions. The concepts of disciplines and disciplinarity, their variants and interrelationships and the boundaries they construct, are explored through communities of theory and practice, of class, gender and even country. While the focus is on Victorian culture, and hence particularly on Britain, several chapters relate to wider European contexts.
The book seeks to answer a set of questions ‘which have never previously been asked together: how did the Victorians define a discipline? What factors impinged upon that definition? How did they respond to disciplinary understanding?’ (n.p.). It is neatly divided into six sections of two chapters each.
On professional validation, Bernard Lightman addresses ‘The evolution of the scientific disciplines’ and Theresa Buckland ‘Disciplining terpsichore: moves towards the study of dance in Victorian Britain’. Lightman explores the tension between creating new disciplines and the desire to unify scientific knowledge, exemplified by the move away from religious concepts as unifying agents to those of secular, professional principles. Buckland takes the emergence of dance as a discipline, tracing its origin to France and overlaid with issues of class and the social and professional status of dance instructors.
On university education, with a focus on art history and history, are Barbara Larson's ‘Positivism and early chairs of art history in Europe: 1860–1880’ and H.S. Jones's ‘The Manchester School of History: Victorian origins of a “modernist” discipline’. Larson's chapter, like Buckland's, traces a European history. She explores the development of art history within academia, arguing that its credibility as it emerged late in the century was built on a positivist outlook and alignment with the methods of medicine and the natural sciences. Jones examines Thomas Tout's Manchester School of History in the context of the emerging role of a civic university and the importance of research.
On society journals, we have David Lowther's ‘Un-gentlemanly science: rhetoric and rivalry in the codification of British zoology, 1830–1840’, and Efram Sera-Shriar's ‘The scandalous affair of the Anthropological Review: Hyde Clarke, James Hunt, and British anthropology in the 1860s’. Lowther takes the antics of the short-lived Magazine of Natural History to illustrate the cut-throat nature of journal publishing and the manner in which it created or broke scientific reputations and impacted on zoological frameworks. Sera-Shriar takes a new look at the schism in British anthropology in the 1860s, and the manner in which the exposure of James Hunt, president of the Anthropological Society of London, through letters in the Athenaeum, led to his downfall and to disciplinary reorganization.
On literary genres are Rachel Davies's ‘“A subject which is peculiarly adapted to all cyclists”: popular understandings of classical archaeology in the nineteenth-century press’ and Roisín Laing's ‘Victorian autobiography, child study, and the origins of child study’. The first builds an analysis around responses to the discovery of Troy, and how popular culture in the form of newspaper reports, periodicals and public lectures informs and affects the discipline of archaeology. Here again, there is a recognition of a gendered dimension to the development. For Lang, the focus is child psychology, developing from the Victorian idea of childhood and autobiographical accounts of children's perceptions of self. Drawing on the influence of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, Lang argues that childhood and race can be seen as co-constructed ideologies based in ideas of progressive evolution.
On disciplinary boundaries are Simon Goldhill's ‘Disentangling antiquity: classics and theology in the nineteenth century’ and Jason Richards's ‘From truth to proof to computer problem: of mathematical discipline and epistemological change’. Goldhill explores classics and theology as contestants for the territory of antiquity, and argues that their interpenetration remains today. Richards brings out the changing definition of the nature of mathematics. Taking Augustus de Morgan as a focus, he reveals the significance of a move from considering mathematical statements as true to mathematical statements as proofs within a particular framework that shaped and constrained the discipline.
In the final section on interdisciplinarity, we have Renata Miller's ‘Middlemarch and the limits of interdisciplinarity’ and Bennet Zon's ‘All arts constantly aspire to the condition of musicology: Victorian musicology as interdiscipline’. Miller focuses on George Eliot's novel Middlemarch, set in the years 1829–31, interpreting it as an exploration of the development and separation of scientific disciplines, arising out of tension between art and science, medicine and biological research, and science and religion. Zon takes musicology rather than literature as the focus. He examines interdisciplinarity, through the lens of Walter Pater's statement that ‘All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’.
The editors’ ‘Conclusion: metapatterns, metadisciplines’ rejects the search for metapatterns as the culmination of disciplinary knowledge, which might be expressed as ‘theories of everything’, for the ‘tangled bank’ of disciplines and disciplinary change. The disciplines are characterized by shapes, forms and relations that change. That change may be driven by different forces, such as professionalization and popularization, the formation of societies and of universities, and by the tensions and interactions between developing individual disciplines. It is that contingency, which yet leads to evolution, that comes foremost out of these essays.
