Experiments in Computational Criticism #1: The Rise of Darwin in Victorian Science

**This post was originally written in February of 2017**

I spent last night constructing a series of data visualizations which demonstrate why Darwin is probably the most famous Victorian scientist today.  Typically, Darwin’s Victorian fame is evidenced by his existence as a cultural phenomenon (for instance, satires of his theory in Punch and other magazines) , and by the praises other Victorian scientists laid at his feet.  I constructed a series of data visualizations to point out that Darwin’s importance is also demonstrated by the fact that as the nineteenth-century progressed, scientists referred to Darwin more and more frequently in publications intended for other scientists, even after Darwin’s death.

I took as my corpus the annual reports of the meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) between 1834 and 1900.  My visualization illustrates the normalized frequency of references to scientists’ last names across this corpus: for instance, a value of 0.015 suggests that of all the lemma published in the Report of the […] Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science that year, 0.015% of those lemma were that last name.  Most scientists, like Huxley, Lyell, and Tyndall, had moments of popularity, and then were referenced less as the century progressed.  Lyell and Tyndall were mentioned most in the 1860s, and Huxley in the 1870s.  But Interest in Darwin trended upward right up until the end of the century.

“Darwin” vs “Lyell”

“Darwin” vs “Tyndall”

“Darwin” vs “Huxley”

However, the real test of Darwin’s fame must be to compare him to that other paragon of British science, Isaac Newton.  Despite the fact that Darwin has the advantage of novelty, Newton is still mentioned more frequently in the publications of the BAAS.  However, the two show very similar upward trends over the course of the century.

“Darwin” vs “Newton”

My Victorian comparisons to Darwin–Tyndall, Lyell, and Huxley–all worked in similar fields (to the extent that those fields existed as distinct entities in the nineteenth century).  Is there a “hard science” equivalent to Darwin’s centrality to British science?  James Clerk Maxwell is a good option.  As the century drew to a close, Maxwell too saw a posthumous fame within the reports of the BAAS, likely due to late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century reconfigurations of Maxwell’s work on electricity and magnetism.

“Darwin” vs “Maxwell”

That Darwin was referenced more frequently by scientists as the century progressed comes as no surprise.  As I noted, historians of science have long been making analogous claims with other forms of evidence.  However, this method of looking at the publications of the BAAS for clues about which figures were most important to Victorian science can also result in some surprises.  For instance, given the debate surrounding Tyndall’s materialist arguments when he was president of the BAAS, one might expect that Tyndall was a central figure in the 60s and 70s.  However, searching this corpus suggests that Huxley was actually far more visible in the British Association during those years.

“Huxley” vs “Tyndall”