In May 1903, Agnes Mary Clerke (1842–1907) was elected an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) alongside Margaret Lindsay Huggins (1848–1915). Only three women had achieved this before: Mary Somerville (1780–1872) and Caroline Herschel (1750–1848) in 1835, and Anne Sheepshanks (1789–1876) in 1862. To celebrate Clerke and Huggins’s rare achievement in 1903, English poet and journalist Sir Edwin Arnold wrote a column for the Daily Telegraph’s ‘A page for women’ about changing attitudes towards women in astronomy. He contrasted the news of Clerke and Huggins’s election with a bygone time, ‘when it would have been thought not only unwomanly, but almost improper, that a well-bred female should know anything about Sir Isaac Newton, or gravitation, or the Milky Way’.Footnote 1 Arnold’s 1903 celebration of the admittance of Clerke and Huggins to the RAS highlights the changing social attitudes towards women in astronomy: the honorary membership of Somerville, Herschel and Sheepshanks to the RAS in 1835 and 1862 did not reflect the same shift away from the ‘unwomanly’ and ‘almost improper’ connotations associated with women working in science that the 1903 elections did. While women were barred from becoming fellows of the RAS until 1916, Clerke’s honorary election nonetheless reflected her decades of astronomical work, including a range of successful publications.
Generally well received in their day, Clerke and her astronomical books also feature in more recent scholarship. Of note is the work of Mary Brück, who published a detailed biography of Clerke’s life, as well as a broader volume highlighting the underdiscussed labour and contributions of women, including Clerke, to early British and Irish astronomy.Footnote 2 Additionally, Bernard Lightman has written extensively on Clerke as a popularizer of science, the importance of her gender in science publishing, and the backlash she faced as a woman writing about astronomy, a male-dominated field.Footnote 3 However, existing scholarship on Agnes Clerke thus far has not addressed her reception in women’s periodicals, nor her own contribution to The Gentlewoman in 1901. These women-focused outlets provide a new lens through which to analyse Clerke’s views on the role of women in astronomy, and the impact of audience on the in-/exclusion of women in her writing on astronomy.
This article takes up that challenge, locating the work of Agnes Clerke within a broader history of women in astronomy and astronomical publishing through an outline of her literary career – also drawing on letters to her publishers, Adam & Charles Black – and raises the question of gendered strategies in Clerke’s astronomical writing. Compared with the more famous A Popular History of Astronomy during the Nineteenth Century, her article titled ‘Women in science’ in The Gentlewoman demonstrates the relevance of publication outlet to Clerke’s writing, particularly in relation to her engagement with gender.
Women writers: finding a place in astronomy
For nineteenth-century women, access to the upper echelons of British astronomy depended largely on men in their lives. Male relatives, especially husbands, were often the reason why women could bypass social and institutional barriers to access resources including libraries and laboratories.Footnote 4 For example, Caroline Herschel’s initial ventures into astronomy resulted from her brother William Herschel’s interest in astronomy.Footnote 5 For Mary Somerville, it was her husband William whose ‘mediation was vital to her access to knowledge and her subsequent career as a scientific author’.Footnote 6 Likewise, it was the Rev. Richard Sheepshanks, brother of Anne Sheepshanks and former RAS secretary, who facilitated her election as an honorary member of the RAS.Footnote 7 For Clerke, it was her father John William Clerke (1814–90) who held a keen interest in the sciences and astronomy, educating Agnes and her sister Ellen Mary Clerke (1840–1906) on these subjects from a young age as part of their homeschooling in Ireland.Footnote 8 Their brother Aubrey St John (1843–1923) excelled in mathematics and science, and graduated from Trinity College Dublin in 1865. He was keen to share what he learnt at university with Agnes. The encouragement and support Clerke received from her brother and father is described by Mary Brück as ‘a case of role-reversal: Agnes’ career at every stage was encouraged by her father and brother who remained in the shadows’.Footnote 9
Amateur astronomical societies provided another point of access for women wishing to further their astronomical interests in late nineteenth-century Britain. These provided opportunities to participate in astronomical research and even observational expeditions. Astronomical organizations aimed at amateurs made astronomy accessible to those who sat outside the bounds of ‘professional’ astronomical research. Eva Kaufholz-Soldat interrogates the clear-cut distinction between ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ astronomy, asking, for example, whether one should ‘count institutional affiliation or paid positions, or both’ when determining whether women in pre-Great War Europe are to be understood as professional or amateur researchers.Footnote 10 In the introduction to A Popular History, Agnes Clerke explains that the astronomy of the late nineteenth century is ‘in a special manner, the science of amateurs’, and that ‘no one “with a true eye and a faithful hand” but can do good work in watching the heavens’.Footnote 11 This good work was significantly more accessible to middle- and upper-class people in Victorian Britain, who could afford to purchase the latest publications and necessary equipment to partake in research, as well as have leisure time to pursue research.Footnote 12
For those who did have the resources to partake in ‘amateur’ astronomy, societies such as the Liverpool Astronomical Society (founded in 1882) and the British Astronomical Association (BAA, founded in 1890) offered a space for both men and women to conduct observations, discuss developments and even organize eclipse expeditions.Footnote 13 Elizabeth Brown (1830–99), for example, joined the Liverpool Astronomical Society in 1883 and frequently published her drawings of the Sun and sunspots in their Proceedings.Footnote 14 She also organized two self-funded eclipse expeditions under the auspices of the society. Brown travelled to Russia in 1887 and to Trinidad in 1889, accompanied on both expeditions by a relative, Martha Louisa Jefferys. Father Stephen Perry also joined them on the trip to Trinidad.Footnote 15 Brown published her eclipse expedition experiences as In Pursuit of a Shadow (1888) and Caught in the Tropics (1890). She subsequently became instrumental in founding the BAA in 1890 as a society specifically designed to include women and others excluded by the RAS. Brown was proposed for RAS fellowship in 1892 but, like prior female nominees, was not elected.Footnote 16
The first paid astronomical position women could hold in Britain was as a ‘lady computer’ at the Royal Observatory Greenwich (ROG) in 1890, a scheme which ‘owed its existence’ to Astronomer Royal Sir William Christie (1845–1922).Footnote 17 The ROG hired its human computers from women’s colleges in Cambridge, Oxford and London. Among the first cohort of five women with paid positions as human computers were Alice Everett (1865–1949) and Annie Scott Dill Maunder (1868–1947, née Russell), both members of the BAA. Hired respectively in 1890 and 1891, they excelled in their roles, making calculations and observations, primarily assisting with meridian and time.Footnote 18 On top of long hours and intense working conditions, the women computers were poorly paid, with the salaries of the first five women computers between four and eight pounds a month, and some women resigned within two years of starting work.Footnote 19 Despite the challenges, these few computing jobs meant that university-educated women could be employed in astronomical work. As Mary Brück describes it, the women computers at Greenwich ‘appear to have been given every encouragement and were allowed to make independent use of the Observatory’s instruments according to their own ideas outside their formal duties’.Footnote 20 This, nonetheless, was not a path to promotion within the observatory or further opportunities. Even Everett and Russell, deemed ‘robust young torch bearers’ for their dedication and enthusiasm to astronomical work, were rejected in 1892 as RAS nominees alongside Elizabeth Brown.Footnote 21
One viable alternative for nineteenth-century women interested in astronomy was to write about it. This neither required the technical training necessary for observatory work nor involved the arduous and underpaid shifts of human computers. Indeed, science writing aligned well with nineteenth-century cultural trends in Britain that emphasized the role of women as teachers. The expectation of middle-class women to be mothers, combined with ‘the general culture of piety and improvement’ of the Victorian period, emphasized women’s roles in educating children.Footnote 22 The task of popularizing science, particularly through children’s books, became an extension of the role of women as domestic caregivers, and consequently ‘educational writings became an area that women could claim for themselves’.Footnote 23 The concomitant increase in the ‘femininization’ of certain sciences – including botany, geology and, to a lesser extent, astronomy – meant that ‘[s]cience activities and science writing became part of the middle-class project to shape appropriate learning for women within a new-style family’.Footnote 24 It became expected that women would educate both themselves and their children in these sciences.
Bounds of social acceptability for Victorian women science writers emphasized their roles as a mother or caregiver. In the early nineteenth century, women writers often achieved this through their use of the familiar format, described by Kristine Larsen as ‘books written largely by women for women and children in the form of letters, conversations, and catechisms’.Footnote 25 Larsen’s inclusion of catechisms, or summaries of religious doctrines often expressed through questions and answers, highlights the important religious aspect of women’s science writings for children. Beyond simply educating children on scientific topics, a virtuous Victorian woman writer must also relate scientific teachings to religion, reinforcing her role as a mother by connecting the natural world with theological instruction.Footnote 26 Instruction in scientific phenomena was thus accessory to the upbringing of a well-rounded, pious child.
One example of an astronomy writer in this vein is Margaret Bryan (1759–1836), whose A Compendious System of Astronomy (1797) showcases the familiar format adopted by many early nineteenth-century women writers. The frontispiece features an engraving of Bryan with her two daughters. In dedicating the book to all her pupils – including her own children – Bryan emphasizes her maternal role. She explains that the portrait is there so they will not forget her and ‘inflict a severe pang on that heart which feels for you almost parental tenderness’.Footnote 27 The text maintains a familiar, conversational tone, using pronouns ‘I’, ‘we’ and ‘us’ throughout. Bryan often references God’s role in the creation of the universe and, for example, in the first chapter, asks, ‘how can I presume to recount the works of the Almighty, or shew the wisdom of his counsels!’Footnote 28 Bryan’s work epitomizes the conjunction of maternal care with religious teaching expected in science books written by women for young people in this period.
By the late nineteenth century, however, the landscape had shifted for women science writers. The arc of increasing scientific professionalization formally excluded women from scientific spaces and communities. Darwin’s widely circulating theories raised new barriers by portraying women as ‘intellectually inferior due to the evolutionary process’.Footnote 29 Beyond that, increased demand for popular scientific books, paired with a decline in the popularity of the ‘familiar format’, meant that forging careers in science writing required women to innovate. A general devotion to the ‘moralizing of scientific discovery’ persisted, but late nineteenth-century women science writers had to develop more sophisticated approaches to ensure profitable publications.Footnote 30 Simultaneously, they had to tread a very fine line to stay within the bounds of socially sanctioned femininity. For women in the late Victorian era, astronomical writing ‘sat precariously on the borderlines of what was considered a respectable occupation’.Footnote 31 Women science writers faced a high-wire act in which they needed to balance scientific credibility with appropriate femininity.
One author of the late Victorian era who successfully achieved this was Agnes Giberne (1845–1939), who wrote both historical fiction and popular-science books. Among her works on astronomy, geology and science, some of the most famous titles include Sun, Moon and Stars: Astronomy for Beginners (1879) and Among the Stars (1884). Following her death in 1939, The Times obituary titled ‘Miss Agnes Giberne: a pioneer of popular science’ highlighted how the success of her science and astronomy books for beginners ‘showed her gift of divining a need where it existed: it demonstrated also her power of reducing the complexities of science to simple terms and of presenting them in a very clear and engaging way’.Footnote 32 Giberne’s success writing science books is more notable for the timing; she was succeeding exactly when it was becoming increasingly difficult for women to do so. Science was both an increasingly professionalized and masculinized domain, and the intimate style of science writing that, for example, Margaret Bryan had succeeded with in the early nineteenth century was fading from fashion. Giberne carved her own niche by writing books ‘occupying a transitional space between the familiar format and the more formal lecture/textbook style that was … increasingly becoming the norm with the masculinization and professionalism of the popularization of science’.Footnote 33 Giberne adopted a writing style that fit the well-worn confines of propriety, combining accessible narrative with a familiar dialogue and a strong fantastical element.Footnote 34 To establish astronomical expertise, she appealed to respected male scientists, for example referencing esteemed astronomers William Herschel and William Huggins in her writing on the nebular hypothesis.Footnote 35 But she continued to choose children as her audience, which helped her remain ‘within the gendered boundaries of scientific narrative discourse’.Footnote 36 By ‘enclosing her astronomical writing within the maternal tradition of education and religious teaching’, she embraced the task of religious instruction through science writing.Footnote 37 This reinforced her ‘[a]cceptability and authority’ within her reinvention of the outdated familiar format, keeping Giberne within the tradition of popular-science books written by women.Footnote 38
In contrast, Giberne’s contemporary Agnes Clerke departed entirely from that tradition. Clerke wrote for adults and – in later publications – even scientists. Beyond simply referencing the work of established male astronomers, she was ‘the female astronomical writer who dared promulgate her own thinking’.Footnote 39 Clerke turned away from the conversational tone and storytelling that characterized so much of nineteenth-century women’s science writing, following instead the singular example of Mary Somerville. Somerville famously translated Pierre-Simon Laplace’s Mécanique céleste (published across five volumes between 1798 and 1825), published in 1831 as Mechanism of the Heavens. Her acclaimed On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1834) is noted as one that ‘arguably launched popular science writing’.Footnote 40 The changing style of Somerville’s work across her writing career reflects changing social and commercial constraints, which, as Erin Johns Speese argues, were shaped by changing cultural attitudes surrounding women’s role in society (and, by extension, science). She ‘had to adapt to the standards (typically male standards) that increasingly emphasized objectivity rather than emotion, and as a result, the trajectory of the sublime in Somerville’s works reflects the real-life conditions and pressures of a woman writer’.Footnote 41 Unlike her previous texts, the manuscript of Somerville’s 1860 publication On Molecular and Microscopic Science had to be read and approved by a ‘man of science’, thus ‘Somerville’s publisher suggested that her writing must be like that of a male scientist – objective and rational.’Footnote 42
Parallels between Somerville’s style and Clerke’s were noted in 1886, when R.J. Mann described Clerke’s Popular History in the Edinburgh Review as ‘traced by the pen of a lady on whom the mantle of Mrs Somerville seems to have descended’.Footnote 43 Likewise, RAS president James W.L. Glaisher said, ‘The work of Miss Agnes Clerke is similar to that of Mrs Somerville, lying in the domain of scientific writing.’ He emphasized A Popular History as ‘not merely an astronomical history, but a work of actual constructive thinking in our science’.Footnote 44 Glaisher highlighted the somewhat exceptional nature of Clerke’s writing, referencing later works such as Problems in Astrophysics (1903) and Modern Cosmogonies (1905), which sought not only to describe the history of the field of astronomy, but also to suggest open questions and avenues for further scientific study. As Clerke wrote in the preface to Problems in Astrophysics, the work ‘represents a sort of reconnaissance, and embodies the information collected by scouts and skirmishers regarding practicable lines of advance and accessible points of attack’.Footnote 45
Clerke herself served as such a scout. At the personal invitation of David Gill (1843–1914), Her Majesty’s Astronomer of the Royal Observatory at the Cape of Good Hope, she had been to visit that observatory and was current on astronomical developments.Footnote 46 Clerke’s Problems in Astrophysics and Modern Cosmogonies represent a lifetime spent building a career which allowed her to pursue her interest in astronomy and science, a challenging task for a woman during the late nineteenth century. Bernard Lightman notes that Clerke’s ‘high standing’ in comparison to other popularizers of astronomy ‘can be attributed to her attempt to interpret the larger meaning of recent astronomical discoveries to the professional astronomers themselves’.Footnote 47 Letters to the publisher early in Clerke’s career provide insight into the publication route for her first and best-known work, A Popular History of Astronomy.
Agnes Clerke: strategies of publication
After moving to Florence in the 1860s to continue her studies, Agnes befriended Janet Ross, the cousin of Edinburgh Review editor Henry Reeve. It was Reeve who published Clerke’s first article in the Edinburgh Review in 1877, thus launching Clerke’s literary career.Footnote 48 She wrote more articles for the Edinburgh Review and also contributed to the Encyclopaedia Britannica throughout the 1870s.Footnote 49 The Encyclopaedia Britannica publishers Adam & Charles Black (A&C Black) published Clerke’s Popular History of Astronomy in 1885, playing a central role in her biggest success as a science writer. Clerke’s correspondence with A&C Black sheds some light on the approach she adopted to convince them of publishing an astronomy book written by a woman.
Clerke first wrote to A&C Black on 25 September 1882 with a proposal for a full-length book, to be titled A Popular History of Astronomy during the Nineteenth Century.Footnote 50 From the start, she emphasizes that her work will be accessible ‘to the general reader’, explaining her ‘aim to make the larger drift of astronomical research and discovery intelligible to the general reader, and at the same time to enter sufficiently into detail to give the volume some permanent value’.Footnote 51 Clerke further positions herself as a chronicler of the men who shaped astronomy. She explains to the prospective publisher that ‘biographical sketches of the chief investigators – Sir William and Sir John Herschel, Bessel Struve, Father Seelie, LeVerrier etc. would impart vitality and arouse attention’.Footnote 52 Writing again on 29 September 1882, Clerke acknowledges the publisher’s market-related concerns and highlights that the volume will be written ‘so as to make it such as to meet the tastes and requirements of as large as possible a section of the public’.Footnote 53 She pledges to ‘avoid technical details, and endeavour to render the volume attractive as well as useful’.Footnote 54 Clerke thus positions the book as one with popular appeal that will sell widely. She also signals to the publishers that she will fulfil expectations by avoiding any seemingly difficult, perhaps even unwomanly, science. The pitch prevailed. Three years after the initial proposal, Clerke sent A&C Black a manuscript of A Popular History and it was published in 1885.
The preface to the printed text articulates for the reader many of the same arguments Clerke used to persuade the publisher. She reassures the reader that the sources informing her writing are, as far as possible, the ‘original authorities’, and that she has tried to ‘give to each individual discoverer, strictly and impartially, his due’.Footnote 55 On 17 June 1885, Clerke proposed to A&C Black ‘to dedicate the work to the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres, who, from the kindness he has shown in promoting my studies, will, I have no doubt, be interested in its success’.Footnote 56 Alongside Lord James Crawford (1847–1913), the preface also acknowledges Ralph Copeland (1837–1905), the chief astronomer at his Dunecht Observatory and the third Astronomer Royal for Scotland, as well as Edward S. Holden (1846–1914), director of the Washburn Observatory, Wisconsin, ‘for many valuable communications’.Footnote 57 While appreciating real assistance with the book, these acknowledgements also link Clerke to men who carried credentials that she, as a woman, simply could not. Support from an astronomer earl, a distinguished professor and a doctor all lent legitimacy to Clerke’s work in the eyes of publishers, critics and the public. This was common practice among women authors writing history books in late Victorian Britain who similarly ‘borrowed authority from renowned male historians to sanction their scholarly competence’.Footnote 58
Clerke further emphasizes the accessibility of the material, describing the development of a ‘new astronomy’ since the mid-eighteenth century, which ‘is more easily intelligible’ and ‘less remote from ordinary experience’ than the astronomy ‘evolved by the aid of the calculus from materials collected by the use of the transit-instrument and chronograph’.Footnote 59 This ‘new astronomy’ turned away from reliance on ‘[a]bstruse mathematical theories’ and ‘unintelligible formulae’, and instead grew from the development of telescope technologies and the spectroscope, which allow Clerke to ‘describe in simple language the most essential parts of recent astronomical discoveries’ in A Popular History.Footnote 60 In a similar vein, Stenhouse notes, ‘In order to broaden the readership of her work, the most substantial change [Mary] Somerville made to her writing in the preparation of Connexion was to remove all algebraic formulae.’Footnote 61
Lightman notes that Clerke also ‘adopted the conventional format of the male scientist – the descriptive, impersonal, and objective scientific report’.Footnote 62 Clerke deviated from the convention of woman scientific popularizers like Agnes Giberne by not using storytelling or fictious elements in her scientific writing. Clerke nonetheless did adhere to the practice of interweaving religion throughout her work. In the preface to the first edition of A Popular History, for example, Clerke describes astronomy as having ‘irresistibly spoken to man of the glory of God’.Footnote 63 Others have further argued that Clerke ‘tried to prevent scientists hostile to Christianity from using scientific theories to undermine the power of religion’ in her texts.Footnote 64 This made her vulnerable to vicious reviews from scientists such as Richard A. Gregory (1864–1952), who disregarded her exactly because of her attempts to connect new astronomical discoveries with Christian views.Footnote 65
Notwithstanding, A Popular History received favourable reviews from well-respected astronomers, including Edward Walter Maunder (1851–1928) of the Royal Observatory Greenwich.Footnote 66 Clerke’s Popular History has been described as an ‘instant success’ with quick sales demanding reprints just two months after initial publication.Footnote 67 The 1885 edition was so successful that a further three editions of A Popular History were published in 1887, 1893 and 1902.
Following the second edition, Clerke received an offer for a paid position at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich in 1889. However, low pay combined with concerns about the dangerous walk across Greenwich Park at night led her to turn down the offer.Footnote 68 Perhaps Clerke also knew that women’s observatory work did not offer the same freedom and independence as being an author. Like A Popular History, Clerke’s subsequent major works, The System of the Stars (1890) and Problems in Astrophysics (1903), also enjoyed brisk sales. Science writing alone thus provided Clerke with a viable income in the scientific world even at a time when the likelihood of this was diminishing.
Reviews in popular-press outlets indicate ways in which Clerke’s writing aligned with expectations for women writing science. For example, a letter published in the Belfast Newsletter in April 1891 singled out Clerke as a leader among women in astronomy:
It is a subject which peculiarly commends itself to our fair sisters; and, judging by the good work which has been done in the past, and which is now being done, by ladies in the direction of popularising astronomy – I might, as a solitary instance, refer to that truly beautiful and sublime literary production of Miss Agnes M. Clerke, only recently published, entitled The System of the Stars – there can be very little doubt that ere long ladies will appear in the foremost rank of the ‘noble army of astronomers.’Footnote 69
While complimentary, this letter clearly locates women as not yet leaders in astronomy.
Similarly, the Times Literary Supplement notably classifies Clerke’s writing as different from the astronomy of men in a glowing 1903 review of Clerke’s new book Problems in Astrophysics. The review particularly praised her collation for sustaining science: ‘Those who undertake the labour of summarizing and condensing the rapidly accumulating mass of literature right up to yesterday, as Miss Clerke has done in the present volume, are nobly aiding science.’Footnote 70 The article concludes with confidence, ‘we feel that Miss Clerke has earned, and will surely receive, the admiration and gratitude of astronomers for this new proof of her devotion to their science’.Footnote 71 The presentation of Clerke as a supporter, separate from the grateful astronomers and ‘their’ science, suggests that she successfully delivered on the initial proposal to A&C Black to ‘avoid technical details’ and to tell the story of the men of astronomy. In this, she stays within the borders of what was acceptable for a woman writing about science without stepping into the territory of ‘their’ science.
Clerke’s books largely omit discussion of the contributions of women to astronomy. Mary Brück notes that although Clerke ‘was a friend and encourager of other women in astronomy’, A Popular History ‘is practically devoid of female names’.Footnote 72 After the first (1885) edition of A Popular History, the subsequent three editions (1887, 1893, 1902) included corrections as well as the addition of scientific developments since the last edition. The 1893 edition includes for the first time the work of Scottish astronomer Williamina (Mina) Paton Stevens Fleming (1857–1911). Clerke notes Fleming’s role as director of a group of women computers and their work on the Draper catalogue, a star catalogue that would be published between 1918 and 1924.Footnote 73 She also highlights Fleming’s Harvard Observatory work with plates of the star system Beta Lyrae (Sheliak) spectrum groups.Footnote 74 However, Fleming was appointed to work in the Harvard observatory in 1879, and was promoted to her role organizing the Draper catalogue in 1886, and it is interesting to note that Clerke omits her from the 1885 and 1887 editions.Footnote 75 Similarly, it is the 1893 edition that first mentions Margaret Huggins, a personal friend of Clerke’s, for her work in spectroscopy carried out alongside her husband, William Huggins, since their marriage in 1875.Footnote 76 Caroline Herschel – who discovered several comets, revised Flamsteed’s star catalogue, catalogued over 2,500 nebulae and was awarded the Royal Astronomical Society gold medal in 1828 – is only briefly mentioned in A Popular History, described in a footnote as ‘her brother’s devoted assistant’, and for observing the comet which was then ‘discovered’ twenty-three years later by Pons (Jean-Louis Pons, 1761–1831) of Marseille.Footnote 77
While both Clerke’s editions of A Popular History and her other mainstream publications largely ignore the involvement of women in astronomy, her writings in publications targeting a female audience present a different picture. In the women’s periodical The Gentlewoman, Clerke explicitly discusses not only the important roles played by women in astronomy, but also the institutional and societal barriers impeding their involvement in the field. Together, this suggests that Clerke’s exclusion of women in mainstream publications is intentional and perhaps reflects a self-conscious publication strategy.
A complex story: astronomy in the Victorian women’s periodical
The Victorian era saw the rise of women’s periodicals, in which discussions ranged from fashion trends to the role and contributions of women in contemporary society. Articles in these periodicals were generally written by women and for women, and thus the Victorian era consequently facilitated paid work for women as writers.Footnote 78 Existing societal and editorial constraints meant that these periodicals also ‘influenced how femininity was represented and determined to what extent women could participate in the construction of these identities’.Footnote 79 So whilst women’s periodicals gave women an outlet to read and write about issues pertaining to them, these publications simultaneously generated, upheld and reinforced existing gender norms and ideas. The most popular periodical of the Victorian era was the Girl’s Own Paper (1800–1956), a publication aimed at both working- and middle-class girls, with a peak circulation of 250,000.Footnote 80
The depiction of women in astronomy – by Clerke and others – in the Girl’s Own Paper offers a marked contrast to the presentation of women in Clerke’s general-audience writing. For example, in the June 1893 ‘Correspondents’ section, the Girl’s Own Paper mentions two ‘living astronomers of a high order of our sex’, Agnes Clerke and Mina Fleming:
Here, in England, we have Miss Agnes Clerke, whose scientific works on the subject are very much esteemed; and in addition to this Irish lady, we have a Scotch lady, Mrs. Mina Fleming (of Dundee), who, for the last ten years, has been engaged at astronomical work at Harvard Observatory, having the charge and training of about a dozen women-assistants. She has discovered twenty-one ‘variable stars,’ amongst her other works and attainments.Footnote 81
This article continues to celebrate the contributions of women to both astronomical writing and scientific development.
The Girl’s Own Paper further features articles from the British author Sophia F.A. Caulfield (1824–1911), who often wrote on the work of women in astronomy. Caulfield’s first such article appeared in January 1894, in the second part of ‘The progress of women’.Footnote 82 Caulfield wrote about the achievements of Clerke, whom she knew personally, and Fleming. Caulfield celebrates Fleming’s impressive feat of discovering twenty-one new stars, which she notes is ‘a larger number than as yet discovered by any man’, and goes as far as to say, ‘it is not too much to say that some of the most remarkable astronomical discoveries made in the past few years have been made by this gifted woman’.Footnote 83 Caulfield also discusses Fleming’s women computers, who ‘aid her in solving difficult problems, and with undisputed success at that observatory, examining photographs, and making computations and reductions of astronomical work’.Footnote 84 A periodical for women offers Caulfield a space to discuss the progress of women in science and astronomy, emphasizing that woman can contribute as fully as men when given the opportunity. In January 1895, Caulfield wrote further on this topic in the Girl’s Own Paper in an article entitled ‘Women and girls as inventors, and discoverers’. In it, she highlights achievements realized by women, again including Fleming and Clerke, in the context of the significant obstacles they faced.Footnote 85
The Women’s Penny Paper is another example of a women’s periodical which highlighted the involvement of women in astronomy, with a description of the Royal Institution awarding the Acton prize to Clerke as ‘another proof of all that can be achieved by a talented woman unaided by adventitious circumstances’.Footnote 86 This reference to Clerke’s lack of ‘adventitious circumstances’ quietly acknowledges the patriarchal structures that impeded Clerke’s entrance to the world of astronomical and scientific research and writing. Victorian women’s periodicals provided an outlet intended for a female audience, so it is perhaps not surprising that the women’s periodicals highlight Clerke’s gender. In another example, the April 1892 issue of Hearth and Home describes ‘[t]he best and clearest popular account of the “Nova” in Auriga’, which has been published ‘in the Contemporary Review for the present month’, and it is dramatically revealed at the end of the sentence that this marvel ‘is from the hand of a lady – Agnes M. Clerke’.Footnote 87 There is almost a drum roll anticipating the novel revelation that a women was responsible for the ‘best and clearest account’.
Although these examples illustrate a celebratory tone often found in writings on women in astronomy in women’s periodicals, the representation of women in astronomy in these articles was complex and multifaceted. On one hand, these publications sometimes capitalize on their innate focus on women and their female-dominated audience to spotlight the work of women in a variety of fields, including astronomy. At the same time, Victorian women’s periodicals played an important role in constructing and upholding particular notions of femininity and reinforcing some gender norms. For example, an 1880 article in the Girl’s Own Paper described Mary Somerville as ‘a woman whose life showed that high mental abilities and deep devotion to science need not unfit any woman for the ordinary duties of a wife and mother’.Footnote 88 This example encapsulates the nature of gender representation in these periodicals: although the article underlines Somerville’s contributions to astronomy and science, it is situated in relation to the fulfilment of the familial duties expected of her as a woman.
Agnes Clerke openly discusses the challenges women face in science in the 5 January 1901 edition of the Victorian periodical The Gentlewoman. This publication described itself as the ‘Illustrated weekly journal for gentlewomen’, running from 12 July 1890 until 1926, when it merged with the magazine Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial.Footnote 89 The Gentlewoman was founded and edited by Joseph Snell Wood (1853–1920), who also founded the Society of Women Journalists in 1894, which is still active to this day as the Society of Women Writers and Journalists. The Gentlewoman was, from the outset, a magazine which did not shy from discussing a range of complex issues, as one contemporary scholar summarizes: The Gentlewoman ‘worked, from its very first issues, to foster dialogues between the genders as well as among classes, professions, and geographical regions on complex, deeply contentious subjects of the day concerning women – issues like marriage, divorce and separation, sexual double standards, education, and how young women should be raised’.Footnote 90 With this context in mind, it is not surprising, perhaps, that The Gentlewoman published Clerke’s 1901 article titled ‘Women in science’, which discusses the necessity for more women to be involved in science to normalize the ordinary woman scientist. In the article, Clerke points out that ‘[a]lthough no higher summits in science have been reached by women during the nineteenth century than in earlier times, their average performance has amazingly improved’.Footnote 91 This increase in involvements she sees as a benefit, as ‘until lately, there was no “average performance” on their part to be recorded’.Footnote 92 For Clerke, the observable increase in women in astronomy encourages more women to become involved. She acknowledges that ‘[i]ndividuals of powerful genius emerged now and again from domestic or cloistered obscurity, and did what it was given to them to do amid acclamations’.Footnote 93 Still, Clerke points out that ‘their course was too peculiar to excite emulation. It lay at a hopeless distance from ordinary female experience’.Footnote 94 This exceptionalism left a void of accessible female role models for nineteenth-century women in astronomy, which meant that the women ‘of powerful genius’ in science ‘had no disciples of their own sex’.Footnote 95 Hence ‘[t]he auditors of their discourses, the readers of their treatises, were men’.Footnote 96
Clerke seems to articulate a contemporary inflection point, after which ‘[t]he future, however, depends much more upon the capacity of many than upon the inspiration of a few’.Footnote 97 She identifies that ‘a distinctive note of the recent age is the display of a widely diffused feminine capacity for high and sustained mental toil.’Footnote 98 She goes on to suggest that the recent activity of women in astronomy demonstrates capability for scientific research, and specifically mentions the scientific successes of Caroline Herschel, Mary Somerville, Margaret Huggins, Elizabeth Brown, Annie Scott Dill Maunder (née Russell), and Alice Everett. The contrast between Clerke’s celebration of these women in The Gentlewoman and their shadowy status in A Popular History demonstrates an adaptation to the intended audiences of these publications.
In A Popular History, Clerke mentions Caroline Herschel twice only briefly, first described as ‘her brother’s devoted assistant’, specifying that this devotion appeared ‘first in his musical undertakings, and afterwards, down to the end of his life, in his astronomical labours’.Footnote 99 In this telling, Herschel’s personal astronomical attainments are dwarfed by her life of self-sacrifice. Clerke later mentions Herschel’s astronomical work as a footnote to French astronomer Jean-Louis Pons’s discovery of a comet in 1818, facilitated in part by a comet observed ‘by Caroline Herschel in 1795’.Footnote 100 These short asides do not present the fullness of Caroline Herschel’s achievements, which include a historic election to the RAS and the discovery of three nebulae and eight comets.Footnote 101
By contrast, both the Herschel sibling dynamic and Caroline’s scientific achievements are told differently in Clerke’s article for The Gentlewoman. She details the labours of Caroline Herschel: ‘Night after night, and all night long, she sat, rigid with cold, or worn with fatigue, yet invariably alert, by her brother’s telescope.’ She clearly articulates for a female readership that ‘[h]er devotion made his achievements possible’.Footnote 102 Clerke further describes Herschel’s abandonment of her own career in music to assist her brother’s astronomical work, saying, ‘she was led skyward by her heart rather than by her head, and along a path of self-sacrifice. Her personal ambition as a vocalist had to give way to the demands of duty and affection’.Footnote 103 Far from diminishing Caroline Herschel’s scientific work in The Gentlewoman, Clerke rates Caroline equally ‘as indomitable’ as her brother, and notes ‘her possession of faculties of no common order’.Footnote 104 In a publication explicitly for women, Clerke clearly celebrates and credits Caroline Herschel for being ‘much more than a mere “hand” in a scientific factory’.Footnote 105
Mary Somerville similarly receives significant attention in Clerke’s article in The Gentlewoman, although she is entirely absent in A Popular History. In the women’s periodical, Clerke outlines both Somerville’s achievements and her lasting impact on the scientific world, hailing her as ‘one prolonged contradiction of Beauchene’s sour apothem, “La science rend les hommes rarement aimables, les femmes jamais”’ – which translates as ‘science rarely makes men loveable, women never’.Footnote 106 Clerke informs the reader that Somerville’s translation of Laplace’s notoriously difficult Mécanique céleste ‘drew from its author the remark that she was the only woman who correctly apprehended the abstruse trains of reasoning therein embodied’.Footnote 107 Beyond that, Somerville’s translation alike ‘excited the applause of the learned’ and ‘the awe-struck admiration of the ignorant’.Footnote 108 Clerke commends Somerville’s other works, specifically highlighting her ‘masterly treatise’ On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1834).Footnote 109
Beyond exploring the scientific work of Herschel and Somerville in The Gentlewoman, Clerke goes on to discuss the contributions to astronomy of Margaret Huggins, Elizabeth Brown, Annie Scott Dill Maunder (née Russell), and Alice Everett. She chronicles their contributions ranging from astronomical observers, to eclipse expeditioners, to human computers. Clerke writes that the most remarkable development of ‘female scientific ability’ more generally is ‘the variety in its mode of display’ and cites many other examples of women in entomology, geology, ethnology, bacteriology and biology.Footnote 110 Like Sophia Caulfield in the Girl’s Own Paper, Agnes Clerke expresses in The Gentlewoman her confidence in women’s abilities as she champions their contributions to astronomy and science more widely. A publication outlet intended for a female audience allowed both Clerke and Caulfield to present more detailed and candid views about women engaged in scientific pursuits.
To a modern reader, Clerke’s article in The Gentlewoman nonetheless expressed something of a tension between the celebration of women’s achievements and maintenance of Victorian gender norms. Somerville, for example, is simultaneously described as ‘a mathematician of the “inevitable” type’ and also as a ‘simple Roxburghshire lassie’.Footnote 111 About Alice Everett’s work as a human computer at the Potsdam Observatory, Clerke emphasizes the ‘marked aptitude’ of women for tedious laboratory work measuring stars on photographic plates, citing women’s constitutional ‘patience, rapidity of perception, delicacy of sight and touch’.Footnote 112 Twenty-first-century scholarship shows that women computers at institutions like the Harvard Astronomical Observatory were ‘tolerated as “scientific housekeepers” – custodians of records, cleaners of equipment, boosters of morale for the important men in their presence’.Footnote 113 Even in paid scientific roles, women doing scientific work were viewed through a lens of domesticity. Clerke similarly echoes the idea that women are by nature good teachers, possessing ‘an instinct for teaching. They can divine by sympathy and disentangle by deft thought, perplexities which they do not share’.Footnote 114 Likewise for Clerke, scientific popularization, ‘in particular, falls within the scope of our sex’.Footnote 115 She concludes The Gentlewoman article enumerating the contributions of women to the popularization of science, taking on the role of the teacher as an extension of their expected roles as mothers and wives.
Still, Clerke generates in The Gentlewoman a strong critical discussion of the limits women encountered in astronomy and science more broadly because of their gender. Not only is this kind of analysis entirely absent in A Popular History, but even the facts of women’s achievements in astronomy are sparse in this broad-audience book. Writing for a publication aimed at a female audience provided a venue to discuss in greater depth both the successes of women in astronomy and science more broadly, as well as challenges to greater engagement.
Concluding remarks
After Agnes Clerke died in 1907 of pneumonia at the age of sixty-four, the journal Popular Astronomy reported that she had ‘remained young and hopeful in spirit, and actively occupied with scientific work up to the very end’.Footnote 116 Her obituary in the Daily Telegraph revisited the success of her work, recalling A Popular History as notable ‘since it was not only a complete compilation of the facts of astronomical observation and research, but was written by the brilliant pen of someone who evidently was able to weigh the merits and discuss the possibilities of those same facts’.Footnote 117 This not only acknowledges Clerke’s skill with chronology and synopsis, but also affirms a substantive contribution to astronomical development through syntheses and hypotheses on future astronomical research. A tone of surprised admiration shines through at the end: ‘that someone’, says the obituary, ‘was a lady, until then unknown’.Footnote 118 The obituary pinpoints the fine balance Clerke achieved in her writing, describing her style as ‘lucid and concise, but not by any means bold or technical, even though her subject was mainly of technicalities’.Footnote 119 Clerke navigated structural barriers to scientific publishing and achieved an enduring reputation from the quality of her writing.
A consideration of Clerke’s representation of women raises further questions of her potentially conscious and strategic self-censorship to fit the existing demands of publishers, audiences and reviewers. It was a difficult task to publish science books as a woman in the late nineteenth century. The case of Agnes Clerke illustrates how forging a path to publication success required women to produce writing carefully attuned in terms of technicality, interest, instructional value and social acceptability. The contrast between Clerke’s Popular History and her article for The Gentlewoman evidences different blends for different audiences. In the latter, Clerke writes about ideas of femininity and gender in relation to science, celebrates women who have contributed to science and astronomy, and criticizes the barriers set in front of women by men. A Popular History rather avoids discussion of obstacles to women in scientific research and only in later editions mentions a few select contributions of women to science. This suggests that the audience for women’s periodicals and the publication constraints allowed greater freedom to discuss the challenges and achievements of women. The comparison of Agnes Clerke’s mainstream writing with her writing in a women’s periodical invites a broader discussion concerning the role that Victorian women’s periodicals played in housing and shaping discussions around the (changing) role of women in science.
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to the Royal Astronomical Society for a summer studentship that funded the initial research on this project. The authors would also like to thank the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Cambridge, for support and hospitality during the Modern History of Mathematics programme, where work on this paper was undertaken. This work was supported by EPSRC grant EP/Z000580/1.
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