I have attempted to write the following account of myself, as if I were a dead man in another world looking back at my own life. … I have not great quickness of apprehension or wit which is so remarkable in some clever men. … My power to follow a long and purely abstract train of thought is very limited; I should, moreover, never have succeeded with metaphysics or mathematics. My memory is extensive, yet hazy. … With such moderate abilities as I possess, it is truly surprising that thus I should have influenced to a considerable extent the beliefs of scientific men on some important points.
* * *
I recognized what I had to do, though I shrank from both the task and the exposure which it would entail. I must, I said, give the true key to my whole life; I must show what I am, that it may be seen what I am not, and that the phantom may be extinguished which gibbers instead of me. … I may be accused of laying stress on little things, of being beside the mark, of going into impertinent or ridiculous details, of sounding my own praise, of giving scandal; but this is a case above all others, in which I am bound to follow my own lights and to speak out my own heart. It is not at all pleasant for me to be egotistical; nor to be criticized for being so. It is not pleasant to reveal to high and low, young and old, what has gone on within me from my early years. It is not pleasant to be giving to every shallow or flippant disputant the advantage over me of knowing my most private thoughts.
These gobbets, from autobiographies of two distinguished—one might say archetypal—Victorians, reveal rather different ways of taking the measure of a self. One displays a downplaying of accomplishment and achievement; the other writes from compulsion and consternation. One gestures toward obituary, the other toward testimony. One minimizes the role of self unveiling in assessing his significance, the other maximizes it. One is a scientist, the other a cleric. One is Charles Darwin1; the other John Henry Newman.2
In cases such as these, autobiographical styles express something of their authors’ respective stations in life. The vocation of one—the scientist—virtually required self-erasure in the cause of intellectual advancement; at one point, Darwin actually described his mind as “a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of a large collection of facts.” The calling of the other—the theologian—impressed upon him the central importance of personal conviction and individual pilgrimage; Newman wanted “to be known as a living man, and not as a scarecrow which is dressed up in my clothes” and so he intended—as he put it himself—to “draw out, as far as may be, the history of my mind.”
As these commentaries already make clear, the art of telling a life, whether autobiographical or biographical, is never a straightforward matter. Motivations differ. Strategies vary. Interests condition. Expectations constrain. Besides, autobiography and biography find themselves implicated in a wider universe of moral values, epistemological commitments, and interpretive languages. For this reason each age asks different questions of biography as it redefines itself. Accordingly, reconsidering the genealogy of autobiography and biography may give us clues to appreciating something of the character of the different societies in which such narratives are broadcast.
On the face of it at least, science doesn’t seem to sit well with biography. Science, so the standard story goes, is to do with excising the personal, with minimizing the individual, with eliminating the intimate. Replication, detachment, control, peer review, and the like are intended to downgrade the ego. Science, we are encouraged to imagine, subverts the self; technology transcends biography; objective knowledge expels subjective sensibility. So we have long thought. Indeed, the Darwin autobiography, to which I have already referred, displays a remarkable inclination toward scientific self-effacing. The same is true of Einstein’s autobiography, which, after the first page or two, plunges into the highly technical world of physics on the precise understanding that—as Einstein put it himself—the “essential being of a man of my type lies precisely in what he thinks and how he thinks, not in what he does or suffers.”
Hence it might seem that the hybrid species that features as this collection’s subtitle, “Essays on Scientific Biography,” marks a misconception. Scientific knowledge, it seems, floats free in the air unencumbered by the mundanities of everyday life. And yet, in recent years the scholarly world has been witness to a miniboom in the craft of scientific biography. Several Darwins—by Bowler, Bowlby, Brent, Clark, Desmond, and Moore—engage in a shelf-life struggle for survival, while browsing Richard Westfall’s weighty account of Newton—Never at Rest—amply demonstrates to the reader the reality of gravity! Add to this Smith and Wise’s massive biography of Lord Kelvin, Cantor’s exposition of the life of Michael Faraday, Rupke’s monumental study of Richard Owen, and Desmond’s two-volume life of Thomas Henry Huxley. A renaissance in the art of science biography is plainly well under way. Hence the time is ripe to stand back and reflect on the genre of biography in general and scientific biography in particular.
It is precisely in opposition to the spirit of disembodiment and disengagement that the new interest in scientific biography finds its appeal, and the essays drawn together here mark a significant moment in the history of this art form, constituting as they do a sustained set of reflections on the character of this species of literary endeavor. The first substantive chapter, by Thomas Soderqvist, calls his readers’ attention to the role of existential experience in the scientific life. For too long those emotional senses of elation or depression were omitted from the scientific life narrative, even though the realities of “anguish and anxiety, despair and dread, embarrassment and fear” as well as “joy, hope and love” attest to the all too-embodied experience of the scientific practitioner.
In Soderqvist’s telling, the lived experience of the scientist needs rescuing from scientistic subversion; the quotidian round is owed greater prominence, and streams of consciousness, dramatic shifts in mood, narrative polyvocality and such like, allowed freer reign. This appeal, at least at first blush, seems out of spirit with more general recent trends in the history of science; for these have sought to “earth” scientific ideas in the mundane world of social relations and economic conditions. In that scenario, the individual is all but engulfed by societal imperatives. No doubt this sociological turn has called attention to the much-neglected significance of the social, linguistic, and rhetorical condition of scientific claims; but if this is achieved at the expense of real-life passion, a good deal is lost.
Nowhere, perhaps, is the exclusive focus on the intellectual products of science—whether sociologized or not—more dramatically shown up for its biographical inadequacy than in the case of the life that, as it were, peaks early. David Knight’s scrutiny of the pioneering electrochemist Humphrey Davy is noteworthy in this regard. In purely scientific terms, the Davy drama “comes to a climax early on, and then tails off.” But the seeming anticlimactic tenor of such a judgment turns out to be a blessing in disguise. For after all, the subject of the biography will—in all likelihood—have already sensed this decline himself. Certainly Davy did. A hermeneutical tool is thus provided for the sensitive biographer to take the measure of a whole life, not just an emaciated career. Besides, were it not for Davy’s later works of a nontechnical nature, the consolations he experienced in scenery, philosophy, and natural theology might not have been so clearly revealed. Here, a narrowly scientific account induces biographical anorexia.
All this serves to remind us that biography is not a timeless, transparent genre. It is a historical construction. Consider, for instance, our routine resort to encyclopedias in search of a date of birth, a career summary, or a key publication. Such was not always so. The famous Enlightenment encyclopedias, for example, simply did not have such entries. And the reason, as Richard Yeo tellingly has it, is that “they were seeking to record knowledge, not lives.” Just how and when alphabetically compressed lives began to feature in such encyclopedic works of reference is the subject of Yeo’s chapter, and he astutely uncovers the diverse strategies that were employed when the biographical sketch eventually achieved encyclopedic acceptability.
One notable feature, for example, was the tendency to separate the biography of a scientist from his or her work—a pattern that was long adopted in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, for example. Newton would be accorded one entry; Newtonian Philosophy another. What helped sustain such life-and-work bifurcations was the understanding that these sketches typically had moral and testimonial functions, particularly those that editors wished to advance. In the light of these unveilings, plainly it would be wise to discern the rationale of dictionary and encyclopedia editorial boards before using such entries “as primary sources for biographical material, or as evidence of contemporary images of scientists.”
Our reflections thus far indicate that the telling of a life can easily be come the vehicle for the carrying of a good deal of ideological, moral, and other sorts of cultural freight. In various ways, several chapters in this volume gravitate toward such issues. Consider first, Dorinda Outram’s observations on the links between autobiography and science during the French Revolution. What emerges from her investigations is the way that autobiography flourished among French scientific practitioners during the Revolutionary period. These changed circumstances are thus calibrated in the shifting significance of autobiography as a genre. Autobiography provided the age with ways of modeling a self that articulated what Outram refers to as “representative virtues.” Here, it is clear, the narratives of a life reflect an age’s conditions of exemplary possibility.
In his reassessment of the various biographical treatments of Robert Boyle during the Scientific Revolution, Michael Hunter teases out the ways in which, in advance of the emergence of intellectual biography as a literary form, the earliest memoirs of the great man were essentially moral tracts with heavy overtones of the eulogy. This, according to Hunter, was entirely understandable at a time when science “badly needed a pantheon.” Indeed, Boyle was elevated to just such a pedestal even during his lifetime. And it is only in recent years that the “burden of adulation” has begun to be lifted—an emancipation in turn explicable as a consequence of a widespread revision of the Enlightenment image of the scientist as the embodiment of Virtue.
Boyle is hardly unique in this respect. Many other scientists have been packaged for consumption among widely diverse audiences. Florence Nightingale is a case in point. Just how she was staged in a sequence of exemplary narratives for adolescent girls is the subject taken up for consideration by Martha Vicinus. What is exhibited here is the way in which the biographical subject became the vehicle for the transmission of a certain set of “womanly” virtues—which certainly did not include her rigid authoritarianism, her aggression, her “talent for manipulation,” and her “shameless use of others.” Tellingly, it turns out, these were the very qualities that brought her success and which her contemporaries found most attractive about her. What also becomes clear is that her scientific and medical competence was, for this youthful audience at least, minimized in favor of her organizational abilities and female caring. Sweetness and light, not science and research.
Scientific luminaries have often been depicted in protean guise, now with this emphasis, now with that, depending on the biographer and his audience. So, for example, as Geoffrey Cantor shows, Michael Faraday was constructed in the public arena in markedly varying ways: there were multiple “Faradays,” each embodying distinctive cultural values and meanings. On the one hand—and this is exemplified par excellence in John Tyndall’s Faraday As a Discoverer—Faraday was portrayed in fundamentally romantic terms. Here the pioneer student of electromagnetism assumes the persona of a pre-Raphaelite Goethe straddling Victorian science in Colossuslike heroic pose. Telling the Faraday life this way inexorably implicates the storyteller in the vocabulary of genius, prodigy, magician, seer, and such like. By contrast, “realistic” portrayals—in the vein of Samuel Smiles—do not trade in supernatural powers, but rather in the moral economy of hard work and self-help. Now the virtues of the biographical subject are expressed in terms of industry, motivation, and dedication—the very values that induced Margaret Thatcher to keep a bust of Faraday at 10 Downing Street.
These observations do not exhaust the scope of this volume of essays. The ways in which Joseph Banks’s life has been used to service a variety of interests, for example, are attended to by John Gascoigne; in this case the scientific significance of one of Australia’s patriotic icons is only now beginning to surface in the context of a contemporary realization that patronage and funding are of immense importance in modern science. Again, Roy Porter altogether cleverly uses the eighteenth-century polymath Thomas Beddoes to probe the uncanny resonances between the biographer and the clinician, both engaged in the diagnostic taking of histories. Rehearsal of the detail expounded here, however, would merely be to multiply testimonials. Instead, I want to devote a final word or two to the connections between the subject and the writer of biography.
If, as we have now seen, biography can be trimmed to the sails of contemporary fashion, it is also true that biography can act as a conductor of a biographer’s autobiography. Richard Westfall’s masterly study of Newton is instructive in this regard. A Presbyterian elder, Westfall’s own commitments find voice in his treatment of Newton, influencing, for example, the way he tackles Newton’s alchemical and theological writings. Indeed, Westfall himself came to admit the deeply personal impulses of his biographical magnum opus and to concede that “biography springs from often unconscious motivations.” Such an admission has telling ramifications. For some it vitiates the integrity of a biographical treatise. But personal predispositions need not inevitably distort; to the contrary, they can be illuminating.
Something of the autobiographical interplay is clearly discernible in Charles Darwin’s enchantment of James Moore. Author of a best-selling joint biography of the self-styled “devil’s chaplain,” Moore uses his chapter in Telling Lives to recount the strategic and compositional interchanges between himself and Adrian Desmond in their construction of Darwin the man for Darwin the book. These reflections certainly cast light on the perils and pleasures of coauthorship. But they also gesture toward the ways in which autobiography and biography can intertwine and interpenetrate in fruitful, if whimsical, ways. It is arresting to see how Moore self-consciously presents himself in Darwin’s guise, ruminating as he does about also being an “ex-divinity student who had failed to enter the church and alienated his father by changing careers,” about likewise traveling in South America, fathering a daughter, and so on. The resonances are undoubtedly tantalizing. But they do leave the reader wondering whether Moore’s superlative Darwin studies are not also extended exercises in autobiographical therapy. Perhaps that’s why they make such compelling reading. Could it possibly be (to reapply an in sight from C. S. Lewis) that biographers write—even as the rest of us read—to know we are not alone?
The art of biography, it seems, is necessarily implicated in the production of what might be called controlled fictions. For there is a world of difference between a life as it is lived and a life as it is told.. We can but hope that Telling Lives in Science does not necessarily intimate “Telling Lies in Science.” Still, the ramifications of our travels with the biographers are of considerable proportions. When John Gascoigne observes that “science no less than religion needs its gallery of saints as sources of emulation to provide a sense of continuity and tradition,” this serves to remind us of the immense significance of biography within religious traditions. That biography has routinely gone hand in hand with spiritual pilgrimage and religious contemplation is scarcely surprising in the light of Charles Taylor’s reminder that the idea of a self having an inner life finds its genesis in Augustine: “it is hardly an exaggeration to say that it was Augustine who introduced inwardness or radical reflexivity and bequeathed it to the Western tradition of thought. The step was a fateful one, because we have certainly made a big thing of the first-person standpoint.” In Augustine’s case, of course, this move to the first-person dimension was central precisely be cause making “the step to inwardness” was making “a step towards God.”3
If Taylor’s account is even in the neighborhood of a correct assessment, religious traditions have a special stake in narrating lives. By the same token, in spaces where testimony looms especially large, an increased awareness of the manipulative ways by which “selves” can be packaged and commodified to suit niche markets should give pause for thought. Yet who knows? If the lessons that these scholars of scientific biography teach were taken to heart, they might even do a deal of spiritual good.
David N. Livingstone is professor of geography at the Queen’s University of Belfast. He is the author of several books, including Nathaniel Southgate Shalerand the Culture of American Science, Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders, and The Geographical Tradition.
1. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809-1882 (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1959).
2. John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Sua Vita, Being a History of His Religious Opinions (London: Longmans, 1873, new ed.).
3. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 131–32.
Copyright © 1999 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.
