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Background and Foreground: Getting Things in Context

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

David Knight
David Knight
Affiliation:
Editor, British Journal for the History of Science, Department of Philosophy, University of Durham, 50 Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HN, U.K.
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Extract

Historians generally grumble at the liberties taken with letters and papers by editors and biographers in the past, while reviewers may complain at the professorial pomposities which interfere with the reader's interaction with the text. Certainly, reading is not a mere matter of information retrieval or of source-mining, but a meeting of minds, and any over-zealous editing which makes this more difficult will have failed. Editors, whether of journals or of documents, are midwives of ideas—self-effacingly bringing an author's meaning and style into the world. What reviewers praise is the unobtrusive, and what they damn is ‘a manner at once slapdash and intrusive’, making allowances perhaps for an ‘introduction which is as admirable as his footnotes are useless’. When in the 1960s new technology brought us a flood of facsimile reprints of scientific works, some avoided these problems by appearing naked and unashamed: but for a text on phrenology, or for Goethe's Theory of Colours, a fig leaf or two of commentary is really necessary to help the innocent reader to interact with the book. Facsimiles of nineteenth-century editions of Wilkins' papers, of some Newton correspondence, or of Henry More's poetry are even more problematic; the reader should know that these editors' assumptions cannot be taken for granted, and that their introductions are themselves historical documents. The exact reproduction of misprints and misbindings (giving pages out of order and misnumbered) is of dubious assistance to the modern reader.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , January 1987 , pp. 3 - 12
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 1987

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References

1 The great example of bad documentary editing is Hawkesworth's account of Cook's voyage of 1773; see Beaglehole, J.C. (ed.), The Journals of Captain James Cook, I, Cambridge, 1955, ccxlii ffGoogle Scholar. The remarks quoted come from recent issues of the TLS.

2 Combe, G., The Constitution of Man, (1847), Farnborough, 1970Google Scholar; Goethe's Theory of Colours, (1840), London, 1967, (with new index)Google Scholar; Wilkins, J., Mathematical and Philosophical Works, (1802), London, 1970Google Scholar; Edelsten, J. (ed.), Correspondence of Sir Isaac Newton and Professor Cotes, (1850), London, 1969Google Scholar; More, H., The Complete Poems, (ed. Grosart, A. B.) (1878), Hildesheim, 1969Google Scholar; Hooke, R., Posthumous Works, (1705), London, 1971Google Scholar, is an uncorrected reprint, misdescribed as a second edition, where the confusions of the page numbering in the Royal Institution copy reproduced are understated on the verso of the title page.

3 See my 'History of science in Britain: a personal view', Zeitschrift für allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie, (1984), 15, pp. 343–353.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Merz, J.T., A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century, London, 1904–1912 Vol. I, pp. 12, 8Google Scholar. My friend was Sir Harold Hartley.

5 Sabra, A.I., Theories of Light from Descartes to Newton, 2nd edn., Cambridge, 1981Google Scholar, has some rather dangerous ‘translations’ on pp. 97, 228, 252, 281, where modern views and notations are used to express old ideas. For translation in the ordinary sense, see the two translations of Hegel's Philosophy of Nature which appeared in 1970: by A.V. Miller (Oxford), and by M.J. Petry (London). Petry's is fully annotated, in three volumes; without such editorial guidance it is almost impossible to make sense of the text; merely putting it into English is not enough.

6 Darwin, C., On the Origin of Species, (1859), Cambridge, Mass., 1964, p. 497Google Scholar. For Darwin's vocabulary, see Barrett, P., Weinshank, D.J. and Gottleber, T.T., A Concordance to Darwin's Origin of Species, 1st edn., Ithaca, 1981.Google Scholar

7 Gjertsen, D., The Classics of Science, New York, 1984Google Scholar; Kuhn, T.S., ‘The function of dogma in scientific research’, in Crombie, A.C. (ed.), Scientific Change, London, 1964, pp. 347–369Google Scholar. Toomer's, G.J. translation of Ptolemy's Almagest, London, 1984Google Scholar, appeared too late to be noted by Gjertsen.

8 Howard, J., Darwin, Oxford, 1982Google Scholar; George, W., Darwin, 1982Google Scholar; in her Lamarck, Oxford, 1984Google Scholar, L. Jordanova aims simply to set him in context, and the result is a tour de force.

9 Hull, D.L., Darwin and his Critics, Chicago, 1973.Google Scholar

10 See my The Nature of Science, London, 1976Google Scholar [actually 1977], for science as an intellectual, social and practical activity; for a new view of the interaction of science and Christianity, see Russell, C.A., Crosscurrents, Leicester, 1985.Google Scholar

11 Inkster, I. and Morrell, J. (ed.), Metropolis and Province, London, 1983Google Scholar; Russell, C.A., Science and Social Change, London, 1983.Google Scholar

12 Mackenzie, D.A., Statistics in Britain, 1865–1930, Edinburgh, 1981Google Scholar; W.J. Hornix at Nijmegen University is working on chemistry and the dye industry.

13 Petry, M.J., Hegel's Philosophy of Nature, London, 1970, 1, p. 62 (see note 5).Google Scholar

14 Jacob, J.R., Henry Stubbe, Radical Protestantism, and the Early Englightentnent, Cambridge, 1983CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for an edition of alchemical emblems, see Maier, M., Atlanta Fugiens, (ed. de Jong, H.M.E.), Leiden, 1969Google Scholar; a lightly-edited reprint of an astrological text is Lilly, W., Christian Astrology, (1647)Google Scholar, reprint London, 1985, with afterword by P. Curry and modern astrological perspectives by G. Cornelius.

15 Recent papers on Priestley are interred in: Royal Society of Chemistry, Oxygen and the Conversion of Future Feedstocks, London, 1984, pp. 305–471.Google Scholar

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17 Berman, M., Social Change and Scientific Organization: The Royal Institution, 1799–1844, London, 1978Google Scholar; Forgan, S. (ed.), Science and the Sons of Genius, London, 1980Google Scholar, is the proceedings of a conference on Davy—Dr Forgan is currently working on the architecture of scientific institutions: see her paper ‘Context, image and function’, BJHS, (1986), 19, pp. 89–113.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 Ziman, J., Public Knowledge, Cambridge, 1967Google Scholar. On the publication of science, see Meadows, A.J. (ed.), Development of Science Publishing in Europe, Amsterdam, 1980Google Scholar; Brock, W.H. and Meadows, A.J., The Lamp of Learning: Taylor and Francis and the Development of Science Publishing, London, 1984Google Scholar; Black, M.H., Cambridge University Press, 1584–1984Google Scholar; Kohler, R.E., From Medical Chemistry to Biochemistry, Cambridge, 1982CrossRefGoogle Scholar, is a strongly institutional history. On sources, see my Sources for the History of Science, Cambridge and Ithaca, 1975Google Scholar; readers of Japanese should use the version ed. and tr. Kasiwagi, H., Tokyo, 1984Google Scholar. Collections of documents are regularly published by the Hakluyt Society: e.g. Lamb, W. Kaye (ed.), George Vancouver's Voyage of Discovery, 1797–1795, London, 1984, 4 volsGoogle Scholar. Many such voyages were scientific; similar methods might be applied to other episodes or institutions in the history of science: Morrell, J. and Thackray, A. (ed.), Gentlemen of Science; Early Correspondence of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, London, 1984Google Scholar, prints only letters (without ‘tops and tails’, see note 20).

19 See my ‘Chemistry and poetic imagery’, Chemistry in Britain, (1983), 19, pp. 578–582.Google Scholar

20 See my ‘Davy and Faraday: fathers and sons’, in Gooding, D. and James, F. (eds), Faraday Rediscovered, London, 1985, pp. 33–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hartcup, G. and Allibone, T.E., Cockcroft and the Atom, Bristol, 1984, p. 142Google Scholar, annotate a letter of 1946 beginning ‘My dear Cockcroft’ to point out ‘that at that time the use of surnames alone was the usual informal manner of address between colleagues’; in assessing tones of letters this kind of thing is important.

21 Pollock, M. (ed.), Common Denominators in Art and Science, Aberdeen, 1983Google Scholar; Rudwick, M., ‘A visual language for geology’, History of Science, (1976), 14, pp. 149–195CrossRefGoogle Scholar; papers, including mine, in Ellenius, A. (ed.), The Natural Sciences and the Arts, Uppsala, 1985.Google Scholar

22 Baynes, K. and Pugh, F., The Art of the Engineer, London, 1981Google Scholar; my The Age of Science, Oxford, 1986, chapter 7.Google Scholar

23 Carr, D.J. (ed.), Sydney Parkinson: Artist of Cook's Endeavour Voyage, London, 1983Google Scholar; especially chapter 10 (by J.R.H. Spencer).

24 See Blunt, W., The Art of Botanical illustration, London, 1950Google Scholar, and my Zoological Illustration, Folkestone, 1972.Google Scholar

25 See my papers, ‘William Swainson: naturalist, artist and illustrator’ (the Ramsbottom Lecture for 1984), forthcoming in Archives of Natural History; and ‘William Swainson: types, circles and affinity’, in North, J.D. and Roche, J.J. (ed.), The Light of Nature, Dordrecht, 1985, pp. 83–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26 Bridson, G.D.R., ‘The treatment of plates in bibliographical description’, Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History, (1976), 7, pp. 469–488.CrossRefGoogle Scholar