‘Signs of the Times: Caricaturing the March of Intellect in the Age of the Machine’

Professor Jim Secord, University of Cambridge

Tuesday, May 6, 2025 at 4:30pm 

Classics 110

Introduction by James (Jim) Chandler

The early nineteenth century witnessed a transformation in communication technologies and public attitudes towards science. In Britain, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (1826-1846) prospered at this critical juncture. One result was an outpouring of comic images caricaturing ‘the march of intellect’ and ‘the schoolmaster abroad’. Reproduced today on everything from coffee mugs to academic dust jackets, these images risk becoming stereotypical icons of a particular view of the period, in which enterprises like the SDUK are seen to have failed. Yet at the time they were published, these caricatures were ambiguous indicators of concerns over new forms of knowledge, often with highly specific references to contemporary books and events. As part of the play of fashionable talk in the culture of the salon, they sparked lighthearted banter, flirtation, discussion and debate.

James (Jim) Secord is Emeritus Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow Commoner at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He has published many books and articles on the history of science during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age (OUP, 2014) and Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago, 2000), an account of the public debates about evolution in the mid-nineteenth century and winner of the Pfizer Prize of the History of Science Society. Other publications include Controversy in Victorian Geology (Princeton, 1986), editions of works by Mary Somerville, Charles Lyell, and Robert Chambers, and selections of Darwin’s Evolutionary Writings for Oxford World’s Classics. From 2008 until its completion in 2022 he was Director of the Darwin Correspondence Project. He is currently completing a book on the historiography of science.

March of Intellect (1829), Robert Seymour