Simon Naylor
Victorian England, as is well known, produced an enormous amount of scientific endeavour, but what has previously been overlooked is the important role of geography on these developments.
Naylor seeks to rectify this imbalance by presenting a historical geography of regional science. Taking an in-depth look at the county of Cornwall, questions on how science affected provincial Victorian society, how it changed people’s relationship with the landscape and how it shaped society are applied to the Cornish case study, allowing a depth and texture of analysis denied to more general scientific overviews of the period.
History of Science, Historical Geography, Nineteenth-Century and Natural Sciences
Introduction: A Biography of a Scientific Region
1 Confined to a Small Round
2 Healthy Recreation and Headwork
3 The Sweet Road to Improvement
4 The Depths of the Billows
5 A Large Natural Greenhouse of England
6 More Facts, More Remains
7 A Furious Tempest
Conclusion
'Regionalizing Science ... provides a sophisticated and empirically grounded new regional geography of scientific culture in the nineteenth century. Beyond the richly detailed evocations of Cornish science its wider relevance to historical geographers and historians of science is not in doubt. It also sits very nicely within Pickering & Chatto's Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century series, and is testament to a long-standing and productive conversation between historical geographers and historians of science.'
– Diarmid Finnegan, H-Net Reviews (read the full review here)