William Robert Grove: Victorian Gentleman of Science by Iwan Rhys Morus

Author:Iwan Rhys Morus
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786830067
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

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SWANSEA SCIENCE

When the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) arrived in Swansea at the beginning of August 1848 for its annual meeting it was seventeen years since its inaugural meeting in York in the summer of 1831. In those intervening years the association’s gatherings had become an important part of the life of British science.1 From fairly humble origins the British Association had boomed to become a huge affair. For a week in summer, natural philosophers and their entourages descended on a provincial town and turned the place into the temporary capital of British science. Locals and visitors flocked in their hundreds to scientific lectures delivering the latest developments in the various sciences, as well as to a packed itinerary of soirées and excursions. Local worthies had their opportunity to rub shoulders with the scientific lions. Meetings were extensively reported upon in the local and the national press. Hosting a gathering of the BAAS had become a mark of civic prestige and ambition. The association moved from town to town (though never to London) on an annual basis. Those towns competed for the honour of playing host to the assembled gentlemen of science. Inviting the scientific jamboree to Swansea was a deliberate signal of the town elite’s ambitions and Grove, it seems, was the instigator.

The BAAS’s first gathering in York was the result of hard work and perseverance by William Vernon Harcourt. Harcourt was a local clergyman with impeccable credentials. His father had been archbishop of York and his mother the daughter of the marquis of Stafford. After completing his studies at Oxford in 1811 he had entered the church and by 1824 he was a canon of York minster as well as the rector of a couple of Yorkshire parishes. In that year he was also elected a fellow of the Royal Society. There was more to Vernon Harcourt than the kind of scientific dilettante despised by the scientific reformers, nevertheless. In 1822 he had been one of the leading local lights behind the establishment of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society, and he was one of its first presidents. The Yorkshire society was typical of the kind of scientific organisations that were proliferating across the British Isles during the first half of the century.2 In some ways, what Vernon Harcourt had in mind when he issued his invitation for natural philosophers to gather at York in 1831 was a means of bringing together these different societies. It certainly exceeded expectations. Several hundred people attended the meeting to experience the mixture of scientific lectures and entertainments that were to become a feature of the association’s meetings.

The following year’s meeting took place in Oxford. By now, it had become clear to the leaders of metropolitan science too that this was an organisation that could be moulded to serve their own interests. Charles Babbage had attended the York meeting and saw in the new association the possibility of providing a rival for the Royal Society. Babbage was already a fan of this kind of gathering.

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