In the late 1850s and early 1860s, the physicist John Tyndall spent much time exploring the Alps, combining mountaineering with scientific observation. After reading Tyndall's Mountaineering in 1861: A Vacation Tour (1862), the barrister and mountaineer Alfred Wills observed that the book was ‘bold, manly & suggestive & will do good – and I am glad indeed when I find a true man of science uttering straightforwardly what many think but will not say’ (British Library, BL63902-874E-10-51). For Tyndall, the arduous physical performance associated with mountaineering was a highly effective vehicle for establishing his authority as a man of science, and he published several books that combined science and travel. Yet, as Heather Ellis argues in Masculinity and Science in Britain, 1831–1918, Tyndall's performance as a ‘true man of science’ formed part of a construction of what it meant to be a man and a scientific practitioner in the nineteenth century, which was neither straightforward nor stable. Ellis promises an in-depth examination of how British male scientific practitioners navigated an unstable masculine ideal, which did not always square easily with the changing roles of scientific theorists and practitioners.
As the title hints, Ellis focuses much of the book around the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), which was founded in 1831. Ellis examines the changing structure of BAAS annual meetings, and the ways the meetings and their attendees were portrayed and discussed, both privately and publicly. For example, in Chapter 2, ‘The changing public image of the “man of science”, 1600–1830’, Ellis shows that the performance of gender was important for men in the BAAS, regardless of whether women were allowed to attend the scientific and social aspects of the meetings or not. Through attempts to reinvent the image of the ‘man of science’ and the BAAS, gender norms were also significant for men in relation to other men. Was the ‘true man of science’ a recluse, an aristocrat, an experimentalist, a gentleman or something else? Chapter 4 – ‘“An effete world”: gendered criticism and the British Association’ – suggests that attempts to create an aristocratic atmosphere at the BAAS, for example by inviting women, evoked criticisms of theatricality and foppish self-display. The question of authenticity gained further traction through discussions on meritocracy and science.
Ellis makes an interesting observation, that because much of the present scholarship on the relationship between gender and science has focused on retrieving forgotten and marginalized voices, primarily female, there has been less attention devoted to examinations of how gender norms affected men and their scientific practice. The reason for this is fairly obvious, of course, as historians of science, technology and medicine generally left the practice of writing internalist hagiographies of the white, rich male ‘geniuses’ in the previous century. Yet, as Ellis rightly points out, this does not mean that studying masculinity and science is outdated. In fact, by exploring how there was no set and easily defined masculine way of embodying scientific practice, Ellis illustrates that gender and science were both unstable categories entangled in a continuous renegotiation throughout the nineteenth century.
However, this is not as novel an argument as is it is made to be. For a work on gender and science, this book suffers from a surprising lack of engagement with the historiography on masculinity and science, as well as on nineteenth-century science more generally. This is particularly clear in Chapter 5, ‘Thomas Carlyle, the X-Club and the hero as man of science’, where Ellis puts the spotlight on the Red Lions and their role in developing the friendship circles of men who would later be known as the X-Club. This and the following chapter would have benefited from an engagement with books such as Ursula DeYoung's biography of John Tyndall, A Vision of Modern Science (2011), and Bernard Lightman's Victorian Popularizers of Science (2007), which both detail Huxley and Tyndall's fascination with Thomas Carlyle. Some engagement with the Osiris special issue on Scientific Masculinities (2015) edited by Erika L. Milam and Robert A. Nye, and in particular the article by Michael Reidy, ‘Mountaineering, masculinity, and the male body in mid-Victorian Britain’, would also have expanded and strengthened Ellis's otherwise interesting arguments. Although there are parts of Masculinity and Science in Britain, 1831–1918 which BJHS readers are sure to find interesting, well written and clear in argumentation, the book does not fully deliver on its promise of providing the first in-depth study of British scientific masculinity in the nineteenth century.
