Science, Religion and Society: Nineteenth-Century Cultural Contexts

Nineteenth-century England was a period of change. New discoveries in science and technology challenged traditions, religious creeds and the social fabric of the nation. The century saw the birth of new influential sciences such as geology; it profoundly changed the political landscape; it challenged the way people looked at questions of selfhood and national identity; it started a process of secularization that would become dominant in the twentieth century. The case studies in this book look at Dover as a symbol of Britishness, at the growing friction between science and religion in geology and entomology, at pharmaceutical lobbying, and at how the Carlylean Protestantism in Ford Madox Brown’s Work reveals a changing ‘spirit of the age’