ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Charles Lyell’s Principles of Reform: Reconstructing Lyell’s Early Intellectual Development 1816-1833

• In Event: Hidden Legacies of Slavery and Freedom in the History of Science

English Abstract

This paper will use the newly opened Sir Charles Lyell Collection at the University of Edinburgh to re-evaluate Charles Lyell’s (1797-1875) early intellectual development and in turn, offer a new perspective on his identity and career. Lyell has often been treated as an influential geologist in the specialised, modern sense of the term. His relationship to politics has largely been told as a story of accidental impact, focussed on how Lyell’s naturalistic science inadvertently supported naturalistic political ideas. This paper will suggest that re-examining the key years of Lyell’s intellectual formation (1816-1833) offers the opportunity to situate Lyell as an elite, literary gentleman and educational reformer who actively understood his geology to be part of a project of moral, cultural and political reform. Lyell’s ‘mission’ (as he would refer to it in the 1840s) was to ‘civilise’ the British polity by expanding scientific knowledge and education. Geology was at the heart of his vision for that cultural change.

This paper will build on the work of James Secord, Roy Porter, Ralph O’Connor and Adelene Buckland to locate Lyell as a ‘man of letters’ within a broader context of reform in Britain in the 1820s and 1830s. It will position Lyell as a transitional figure between late Scottish Enlightenment social theories about science and society and the context of reform in elite London society during this period. This places Lyell alongside figures such as Henry Brougham and Leonard Horner. Crucially, this paper will highlight the highly racialised undercurrents of the aforementioned Scottish Enlightenment social theory and the influence that these had on Lyell’s own approach to enslavement and abolition in antebellum America.

Author

• Felicity MacKenzie, University of Edinburgh