Masculine methods: travel narratives and scientific authority in early Victorian Britain

Abstract

Feminist formulations have rightly impacted the history of science. In this thesis, I show how in the context of 19th Century Britain, men of science appealed to contemporary norms of masculinity to claim masculine virtues and epistemic authority. British men of science used colonial modes of knowledge production and in doing so asserted their epistemic authority over and in relief of the knowledge of women and Indigenous people. Individual men of science used travel narratives to exhibit virtues associated with heroic voyagers. In their travel narratives, men of science like Charles Darwin exaggerated danger and omitted accounts of assistance to present a particularly British masculinity that exalted independence and stoicism. Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle was a wildly popular, public-facing travel narrative. Thomas Huxley, who adopted the moniker ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’, also wrote a travel narrative that was published under very different conditions. Darwin’s travel narrative was published at the beginning of his career as an important work of self-fashioning. In contrast, Huxley’s Diary of the Voyage of H.M.S. Rattlesnake was published post-humously from an unpublished diary. In contrasting Charles Darwin’s public-facing travel narrative and Thomas Huxley’s more private travel diary we can see how a man of means could afford to avoid the riskiest parts of doing colonial science while asserting their total independence and stoicism. Specifically, perilous masculine experiences became a prerequisite for producing knowledge and telling an exaggerated story of peril became a reliable means of accruing epistemic authority in the scientific community. The production and distribution of the scientific travel narrative, for both scientific and popular consumption, was a direct response to concerns about the decline of British science that Charles Babbage pointed out in 1830, which highlighted the beleaguered state of British science, particularly when compared to the success of French theoretical science.