The Philosophical Breakfast Club

by Laura J. Snyder

  2 See Whewell to Hare, July 13, 1841, WP Add. ms. 216 f. 28, in which Whewell recounts what Hare had told him earlier.

  3 Todhunter Papers, St. John’s College, A1, p. 26.

  4 See Bristed, Five Years in an English University, p. 119.

  5 Cited in Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century, p. 163.

  6 Hare to Whewell, December 17, 1840, in Stair Douglas, Life and Selections, pp. 209–13.

  7 Murchison to Harcourt, June 3, 1842, in Morrell and Thackray, eds., Gentlemen of Science: Early Correspondence, p. 353.

  8 Jones to Herschel, December 31, 1840, RS: HS 10.366.

  9 See William Whewell to Ann Whewell, April 13, 1841, in Stair Douglas, Life and Selections, p. 220.

  10 Ibid.

  11 Whewell to Mrs. Murchison, March 16, 1841, in Todhunter, William Whewell, vol. 2, p. 296.

  12 Whewell, Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, vol. 1, p. iii.

  13 Herschel, Preliminary Discourse, pp. 115, 130, 135, 300, 350.

  14 Whewell to Herschel, December 4, 1836, in Todhunter, William Whewell, vol. 2, pp. 248–49.

  15 Whewell, Architectural Notes on German Churches, 3rd ed., p. 294.

  16 Ibid., p. 26.

  17 Whewell, Architectural Notes, 2nd ed., p. 118.

  18 As Ruskin had argued in his Wordsworthian “The Poetry of Architecture,” which originally appeared in 1837–38.

  19 Whewell, Architectural Notes, 2nd ed., p. 34.

  20 See Lockhart to Herschel, April 5, 1841, RS: HS 11.305.

  21 Jones to Herschel, July 27, 1841, RS: HS 10.370.

  22 Jones to Herschel, June 1, 1841, RS: HS 10.368.

  23 Jones to Herschel, July 1841, RS: HS 10.369.

  24 Herschel to Whewell, April 17, 1841, WP Add. ms. a. 207 f. 46.

  25 Ibid.

  26 See Berg, The Machinery Question, p. 300; Morrell and Thackray, Gentlemen of Science: Early Years, p. 91, and Rimmer, Marshalls of Leeds, p. 105.

  27 See Wyatt, Wordsworth and the Geologists, pp. 84–91.

  28 See Rimmer, Marshalls of Leeds, p. 68.

  29 See Stair Douglas, Life and Selections, p. 190; Morrell and Thackray, Gentlemen of Science: Early Years, p. 200; and Whewell to Herschel, July 25, 1841, in Todhunter, William Whewell, vol. 2, p. 300.

  30 Dorothy Wordsworth to Jane Marshall, September 10, 1800, in Rimmer, Marshalls of Leeds, pp. 16–17.

  31 See Rimmer, Marshalls of Leeds, pp. 69–77.

  32 Ibid., p. 99.

  33 See Thomas Carlyle, Reminiscences, vol. 2, p. 220.

  34 See Rimmer, Marshalls of Leeds, pp. 31–33, 103.

  35 Whewell to Herschel, July 25, 1841, in Todhunter, William Whewell, vol. 2, p. 300.

  36 Galton, Memories of My Life, p. 60. The quote is, more accurately, “cycle and epicycle, orb in orb,” from Book VIII of Milton’s Paradise Lost.

  37 Carlyle, Reminiscences, p. 277.

  38 Thomas Carlyle to Jane Carlyle, September 3, 1841, in The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, vol. 13, pp. 241–43.

  39 Carlyle, Letters to Her Family, 1839–1863, p. 27.

  40 Personal correspondence with Noah Heringman.

  41 Whewell to Hare, July 13, 1841, WP Add. ms. c. 216 f. 28.

  42 Whewell to Hare, October 16, 1841, WP Add. ms. c. 215 f. 60.

  43 Stephen, The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, pp. 95–96, 97. The story of the pugilist was also told by Bristed in Five Years in an English University, p. 86.

  44 Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson, a Memoir, by His Son, pp. 32–33.

  45 Bristed, Five Years in an English University, pp. 57, 73.

  46 Pell, The Reminiscences of Albert Pell, p. 77.

  47 William Whewell to Ann Whewell, June 18, 1841, in Stair Douglas, Life and Selections, pp. 222–23.

  48 Whewell to Hare, July 25, 1841, in Stair Douglas, Life and Selections, pp. 223–24.

  49 Although in September Whewell had told his sister that Frederic Myers, who would soon marry Cordelia’s sister Susan, would perform the ceremony, it was actually Jones who did so; in a letter of May 22, 1842, Whewell told Jones, “Worsley [the master of Downing College] has asked me to do for him the good office which you did me, of being the minister of his marriage Sunday next” (WP Add. ms. c. 51 f. 216); see William Whewell to Ann Whewell, September 7, 1841, in Stair Douglas, Life and Selections, p. 225.

  50 William Whewell to Ann Whewell, September 27, 1841, WP Add. ms. c. 191 f. 24.

  51 Jones to Whewell, October 14, 1841, quoted in Winstanley, Early Victorian Cambridge, p. 82.

  52 Whewell to Jones, October 16, 1841, WP Add. ms. c. 51 f. 213.

  53 Jones to Herschel, October 19, 1841, RS: HS 10.372.

  54 Whewell to Herschel, January 3, 1842, in Todhunter, William Whewell, vol. 2, p. 304.

  55 Whewell to Quetelet, March 21, 1842, in Todhunter, William Whewell, vol. 2, p. 305.

  56 See Hyman, Charles Babbage, Pioneer of the Computer, pp. 204–5.

  57 See John Hannavy, ed., Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, vol. 1, pp. 752–57.

  58 See Talbot to Babbage, August 3, 1840, BL Add. ms. 37,191 f. 426.

  59 See G. B. Amici to Talbot, July 21, 1840, and Talbot to Amici, July 31, 1840. In October, Talbot wrote asking Amici whether or not he had received the packet. Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot, document nos. 3926, 4117.

  60 See Talbot to Babbage, August 10, 1840, BL Add. ms. 37,191 ff. 431, 432, 596. See also Pepe, “Volta, the Istituto Nazionale and Scientific Communication,” and Meschiari, “Exchange in Science Between Giovanni Battista Amici and European Scientists.”

  61 The attendance at these Italian conferences would reach a peak of 1,611 for the 1845 meeting in Naples; after 1847 the conferences were discontinued because of revolution sweeping across Europe in 1848. See Meschiari, “Exchange in Science Between Giovanni Battista Amici and European Scientists.”

  62 See Lowenthal, “The Marriage of Choice and the Marriage of Convenience,” p. 167.

  63 Quoted in Swade, The Difference Engine, p. 133.

  64 Menabrea, “Notions sur la machine analytique de M. Charles Babbage.”

  65 See Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, pp. 6–10.

  66 McGann, “Byron, George Gordon Noel, Sixth Baron Byron (1788–1824).”

  67 Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, p. 11.

  68 Quoted in Swade, The Difference Engine, p. 156.

  69 De Morgan, Memoir of Augustus De Morgan, p. 89.

  70 Ada Lovelace to Mary Somerville, September 1, 1834, quoted in Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, p. 61.

  71 See Somerville, Personal Recollections, and Grieg Memoir, Somerville Papers, quoted in Stein, Ada, p. 52.

  72 Ada Byron to William King, April 13, 1834, quoted in Stein, Ada, pp. 44–45.

  73 See Ada Lovelace to Babbage, November 1839, BL Add. ms. 37,191 f. 87.

  74 Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, p. 13.

  75 Ibid., pp. 164, 175.

  76 De Morgan, Memoir of Augustus De Morgan, p. 89.

  77 De Morgan, A Budget of Paradoxes, vol. 1, p. 380.

  78 See Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, p. 121.

  79 Ada Lovelace to Lady Noel Byron, January 11, 1841, Lovelace Papers 42 f. 8, quoted in Stein, Ada, p. 77.

  80 See Stein, Ada, pp. 77–78.

  81 Ada Lovelace to Babbage, January 12, 1841, BL Add. ms. 37,191 f. 543.

  82 Ada Lovelace to Babbage, February 22, 1841, BL Add. ms. 37,191 f. 566.

  83 Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, p. 102.

  84 Ada Lovelace to Lady Noel Byron, September 15, 1843, quoted in Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, p. 264.

  85 Lovelace, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine,” Note A, p. 696.

  86 Ada Lovelace to Lady Noel Byron, February 1841, quoted in Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, pp. 144–45.

  87 Ada Lovelace to Woronzow Grieg, January 15, 1841, quoted in Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of N
umbers, p. 141.

  88 Augustus De Morgan to Lady Noel Byron, January 21, 1844, Lovelace Papers 344, quoted in Stein, Ada, pp. 82–84.

  89 Lovelace to Babbage, summer [n.d.] 1843, quoted in Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, p. 198.

  90 Lovelace, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine,” quoted in Swade, The Difference Engine, p. 170.

  91 On this point Swade is very good; see The Difference Engine, pp. 169–70.

  92 Babbage to Lord Lovelace, November 17, 1844, quoted in Stein, Ada, p. 208.

  93 Cited in Moseley, Irascible Genius, p. 155.

  94 Babbage to Angelo Sismoda, BL Add. ms. 37,191 f. 582, quoted in Hyman, Charles Babbage, Pioneer of the Computer, p. 185.

  95 Draft of letter, Babbage to François Arago, December 1839, quoted in Collier, The Little Engines That Could’ve, p. 172.

  96 See Robert Peel to William Buckland, BL Add. ms. 40,514 f. 223, quoted in Hyman, Charles Babbage, Pioneer of the Computer, pp. 190–91.

  97 See Swade, The Difference Engine, pp. 135–41.

  98 See Secord, A Victorian Sensation, p. 441, and Hyman, Charles Babbage, Pioneer of the Computer, p. 192.

  99 Draft of letter, Charles Babbage to Robert Peel, November 6, 1842, BL Add. ms. 37,192 f. 176.

  100 Charles Babbage, “Recollections of an Interview with Sir R. Peel on Friday Nov. 11 1842 at 11 am,” BL Add. ms. 37,192 f. 189–94.

  CHAPTER 11. NEW WORLDS

  1 Herschel reported this comment in a letter published in The Athenaeum, October 1, 1846, p. 1019. See Kollerstrom, “John Herschel on the Discovery of Neptune,” p. 152.

  2 Smith, “The Cambridge Network in Action,” p. 399.

  3 Adams, “Memoranda” dated July 3, 1841, in Adams Papers, St. John’s College, W.16, quoted in Smith, “The Cambridge Network in Action,” p. 400.

  4 See Smith, “The Cambridge Network in Action,” pp. 400–401.

  5 Airy to Whewell, June 25, 1846, WP O.15.48 f. 5.

  6 Le Verrier to Galle, quoted at http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/history/HistTopics/Neptune_and_Pluto.html.

  7 See Smith, “The Cambridge Network in Action,” p. 406.

  8 Herschel to Wilhelm Struve, December 1846, quoted in Buttmann, The Shadow of the Telescope, p. 162.

  9 Herschel, Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, pp. 25–26.

  10 Whewell, On the Philosophy of Discovery, pp. 273–74.

  11 Ibid., p. 274.

  12 Whewell, Novum Organon Renovatum, p. 87.

  13 Whewell, “Address,” p. xiii, and Herschel, Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, p. 60.

  14 A nice discussion of this controversy is in Standage, The Neptune File.

  15 Le Verrier, letter, The Guardian (London) 26 (October 16, 1846): 404, quoted in Kollerstrom, “John Herschel on the Discovery of Neptune,” p. 152.

  16 Herschel, letter, The Guardian (London) 27 (October 28, 1846): 421, quoted in Kollerstrom, “John Herschel on the Discovery of Neptune,” p. 152.

  17 Herschel, diary, RS: HS MS 584, quoted in Smith, “The Cambridge Network in Action,” p. 416.

  18 Herschel to Sheepshanks, December 17, 1846, RS: HS 16.49.

  19 See Smith, “The Cambridge Network in Action,” p. 415.

  20 Whewell to Herschel, November 3, 1846, RS: HS 18.206, and December 29, 1846, RS: HS 22.294.

  21 Herschel to Jones, [n.d.] 1846, RS: HS 22.295.

  22 Herschel to Le Verrier, January 9, 1847, quoted in Kollerstrom, “John Herschel on the Discovery of Neptune,” p. 155.

  23 Brewster, “Whewell’s Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences,” p. 292.

  24 See Hubell and Smith, “Neptune in America: Negotiating a Discovery,” p. 269.

  25 On this point, see Kollerstrom, “John Herschel and the Discovery of Neptune,” p. 156.

  26 J. F. Tennant to W. H. M. Christie, January 23, 1892, quoted in Smith, “The Cambridge Network in Action,” p. 396.

  27 Anonymous, “John Couch Adams.”

  28 Quoted in Anonymous, “Review of The Life and Letters of Adam Sedgwick.”

  29 Adams to Airy, September 2, 1846, quoted in Smith, “The Cambridge Network in Action,” p. 401n.

  30 Herschel, letter, The Guardian, October 25, 1846, quoted in Smith, “The Cambridge Network in Action,” p. 422.

  31 See Chapman, “Private Research and Public Duty,” p. 122.

  32 Sheepshanks to H. C. Christian, April 7, 1847, quoted in Smith, “The Cambridge Network in Action,” p. 419.

  33 De Morgan, Memoir of Augustus De Morgan, p. 129.

  34 Challis, “Account of Observations,” p. 145.

  35 Quoted in Warwick, Masters of Theory, p. 108; see also Smith, “The Cambridge Network in Action,” p. 401, for the claim that Airy did not understand Adams’s calculations.

  36 J. W. L. Glaisher, “Memoir,” in Adams, The Scientific Papers of John Couch Adams, vol. 1, p. xliii.

  37 Babbage to Adams, February 12, 1847, BL Add. ms. 37,193 f. 410.

  38 Adams to Babbage, March 13, 1847, quoted in Hyman, Charles Babbage, Pioneer of the Computer, p. 212.

  39 See Anonymous, “Lord Rosse.”

  40 Babbage to Ada Lovelace, September 22, 1850, quoted in Moseley, Irascible Genius, p. 208.

  41 See Nasmyth, James Nasmyth, Engineer, p. 86.

  42 Hyman, Charles Babbage, Pioneer of the Computer, p. 230, and Buxton, Memoirs of the Life and Labours of the Late Charles Babbage, pp. 117–18.

  43 Babbage to Rosse, August 27, 1852, quoted in Collier, The Little Engines That Could’ve, p. 218.

  44 Babbage, “Preface to the 3rd Edition” of “Thoughts on the Principles of Taxation with Reference to Property Tax and Its Exceptions,” pp. 32–56, quote on p. 41, The Works of Charles Babbage, vol. 5.

  45 See www.pbs.org/empires/victoria/empire/great.html.

  46 See Anonymous, Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations.

  47 Flanders, Consuming Passions, p. 12.

  48 Albert, “The Exhibition of 1851.”

  49 See Leapman, The World for a Shilling, p. 87.

  50 Babbage, The Exposition of 1851, p. 62.

  51 Quoted in Piggott, Palace of the People, p. 5.

  52 See Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, p. 1.

  53 Picard, Victorian London, p. 10.

  54 Ibid., pp. 215–17.

  55 Ibid., and Flanders, Consuming Passions, pp. 3–4.

  56 Picard, Victorian London, pp. 4, 220.

  57 Ibid., p. 56.

  58 Flanders, Consuming Passions, pp. 16–17.

  59 Picard, Victorian London, p. 222.

  60 Ibid., pp. 220–21.

  61 Leapman, The World for a Shilling, p. 176.

  62 Charlotte Brontë to Rev. P. Brontë, June 7, 1851, in Shorter, ed., The Brontës, vol. 2, pp. 215–16.

  63 Quoted at www.pbs.org/empires/victoria/empire/great.html.

  64 See Jones to Whewell, October 15, 1851, WP Add. ms. c. 52 f. 152; John Herschel to Margaret Herschel, October 16, 1851, abstract in Crowe et al., A Calendar of the Correspondence, p. 434.

  65 William Whewell to Ann Whewell, November 30, 1851, in Stair Douglas, Life and Selections, p. 420.

  66 William Whewell to Ann Whewell, March 27, 1841, in Stair Douglas, Life and Selections, p. 219.

  67 Whewell, “Inaugural Lecture, the General Bearing of the Great Exhibition on the Progress of Art and Science.”

  68 Babbage, The Exposition of 1851, p. 189.

  69 Quoted in Wyatt, Wordsworth and the Geologists, p. 6.

  70 See Ross, “Scientist: The Story of a Word.”

  71 Picard, Victorian London, p. 223, and Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, pp. 132–33.

  72 Babbage, The Exposition of 1851, p. 98.

  73 Ibid., pp. 80–88.

  74 Ibid., p. 112.

  75 Ibid., p. x.

  76 See Darwin, Autobiography, p. 108.

  77 Lord Playfair to Babbage, December 1, 1864, quoted in Moseley, Irascible Ge
nius, pp. 244–47.

  78 Sedgwick to Herschel, October 10, 1847, excerpt in Crowe et al., A Calendar of the Correspondence, p. 355.

  79 Recounted by Herschel in a letter to his daughter Caroline in January 1855, quoted in Buttmann, The Shadow of the Telescope, p. 176.

  80 Jones to Whewell, November 21, 1850, WP Add. ms. c. 52 f. 146.

  81 See Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, p. 358.

  82 See Levenson, Newton and the Counterfeiter.

  83 Buttmann, The Shadow of the Telescope, p. 177.

  84 Ibid., pp. 178–79.

  85 Maria Edgeworth to Harriet Butler, December 3, 1843, in Edgeworth, Letters from England, pp. 596–97.

  86 Whewell to Sedgwick, May 12, 1854, in Stair Douglas, Life and Selections, p. 408.

  87 Sidgwick, “Philosophy in Cambridge,” pp. 241–42.

  88 See Winstanley, Early Victorian Cambridge, p. 238.

  89 William Whewell to Cordelia Whewell, May 12, 1855, in Stair Douglas, Life and Selections, p. 440.

  90 Jones to Whewell, March 24, 1852, WP Add. ms. c. 52 f. 161.

  91 Todhunter, Notes, Todhunter Papers, St. John’s College, A1, p. 33.

  92 Whewell to Herschel, January 3, 1854, in Todhunter, William Whewell, vol. 2, p. 399.

  93 William Whewell to Kate Marshall, January 2, 1854, in Stair Douglas, Life and Selections, p. 433.

  94 Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, pp. 391–92.

  95 Whewell, Astronomy and General Physics, p. 207.

  96 London Daily News, quoted in Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, p. 282.

  97 Cited in Brooke, “Natural Theology and the Plurality of Worlds,” p. 237.

  98 Locke, “Celestial Discoveries.”

  99 Locke, “Great Astronomical Discoveries,” August 25, 1835.

  100 Locke, “Great Astronomical Discoveries,” August 27, 1835.

  101 Locke, “Great Astronomical Discoveries,” August 28, 1835.

  102 Poe, “Richard Adams Locke.”

  103 See Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, pp. 202–15, and Evans, “The Great Moon Hoax.”

  104 On January 1 he thanked an American, Captain Caldwell, for alerting him about it; Caldwell visited him at the Cape later in the month. John Herschel to Captain Caldwell, January 1, 1836, Copy, RS: HS 25.15.1. Herschel recorded Caldwell’s visit in his diary, January 12, 1835, in Evans et al., Herschel at the Cape, p. 210.