Content area
Full Text
Recreating Newton: Newtonian Biography and the Making of Nineteenth-Century History of Science, by Rebekah Higgitt; pp. vii + 304. London and Brookfield, VT : Pickering and Chatto, 2007, £60.00, $99.00.
Since the 1980s historians such as Patricia Fara, Simon Schaffer, Larry Stewart, and Richard Yeo have demonstrated the divergent uses to which Isaac Newton's seemingly unquestionable authority was put in scientific and wider cultural enterprises, and shown the corresponding need to be sensitive to the complexities of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Newtonianism. Rebekah Higgitt's meticulously researched Recreating Newton explores an aspect of nineteenth-century Newtonianism that will reward scholars of Victorian science, historiography, biography, and literature. What distinguishes it from the existing literature on Victorian Newtonianism is its painstaking examination of key biographies of Newton that, with a few exceptions, have been overlooked by historians, but like all biographies, tell us as much about the preoccupations of the biographers as their subject. The later biographies also help Higgitt demonstrate that "scientific" history-"history derived inductively from archival 'facts'" (189)-was being consciously developed by British natural philosophers keen to probe, question, and defend the work and character of the "archetypal scientific hero" in a period earlier than scholars have supposed British historians began to adopt the methods of Leopold von Ranke and other German scholars (100).
Three of the biographies analysed here-the first English translation of Jean- Baptiste Biot's entry on Newton for the Biographie Universelle (1822), David Brewster's hugely popular Life of Sir Isaac Newton (1831), and Francis Baily's Account of the Revd. John Flamsteed (1835)-are not, strictly speaking, Victorian works, but later editions of Brewster's text were printed well into the 1870s, and all the biographies helped define the terms of the Victorian debates on Newton's moral and scientific characteristics. Many readers will share my disappointment that there are only passing references to...