Science, Reform, and Politics in Victorian Britain

Abstract

This book is a study of the relationships between social thought, social policy and politics in Victorian Britain. Goldman focuses on the activity of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, known as the Social Science Association. For three decades this served as a forum for the discussion of Victorian social questions and as an influential adviser to governments, and its history discloses how social policy was made in these years. The Association, which attracted many powerful contributors, including politicians, civil servants, intellectuals and reformers, had influence over policy and legislation on matters as diverse as public health and women's legal and social emancipation. The SSA reveals the complex roots of social science and sociology buried in the non-academic milieu of nineteenth-century reform. And its influence in the United States and Europe allows for a comparative approach to political and intellectual development in this period.

Working towards the ‘welfare of the world’: Britishimperial networks of philanthropy in the nineteenth century

“…Their work was focused on the policy arena: philanthropists 'investigated and counted' to justify their demands for reform, as well as to make their own claims for political and social power. 76 A collective biographical approach that links all these colonial intergenerational philanthropists through their correspondence as they journeyed across the empire reveals the importance of friendships, family and 'informal networks' for the sharing of ideas and data regarding education, medical, social and political reform around the empire in the mid-to late-nineteenth century. 77 It reveals how the policy arena was gendered…”

“…44 Carpenter became a key mover in the National Reform Union from which the SSA emerged. 45 Matthew Hill led this section of the SSA and as a result Carpenter and the Hills worked closely together. Mary became one of the key campaigners in the Punishment and Reformation Section of the SSA together with Matthew Hill and his daughters.…”

‘The Too Clever by Half People’ and Parliament

“…It shaped the Taunton Commission and Endowed Schools Act 1869; the Royal Sanitary Commission and the Public Heath Act 1875; the Married Women's Property Act 1870, the Habitual Criminals Act 1869, and the Prevention of Crimes Act 1871. 75 The SSA was uniquely important -but it was not unique. The British Association for the Advancement of Science, the Charity Organisation Society, even -for a short whilethe National Association for the Advancement of Art, were among those organisations that lobbied and sought to influence government action.…”

TRANSLATED LIBERTIES: KARSANDAS MULJI'STRAVELS IN ENGLANDAND THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE VICTORIAN SELF

“…87 It was also firmly international, a network of voluntary associations with nodes not only in western Europe and North America, but also in the colonies-including, for example, efforts at Social Science Associations in both Bombay http://hdl.handle.net/1807/95443 and Calcutta by the 1860s. 88 Although not a member of the Bombay branch of that society, Mulji was active in the 1850s in the Students' Literary and Scientific Society affiliated with Elphinstone and two of its splinter groups (the Dyan Prasarak Mandli and the Buddhi-Vardhak Hindu Sabha), nodes in the city's interlinked network of scholarly, religious, and political associations, many of which were explicitly designed to disseminate scientific knowledge to non-specialist audiences. 89 The kind of ethnographic portrait of England that Mulji offers in his travelogue feels poised between these two traditions.…”