This is a past event
This talk will look at Alfred Russell Wallace and William Benjamin Carpenter's very public feud in the 1870s over the validity of spiritualism.
These respected men of science used their professional positions and scientific training to support their arguments for and against the reality of spiritual phenomena. They had numerous lectures, articles and open letters published in science journals, in the highbrow quarterlies, and in popular periodicals, and their arguments were summarized and reprinted in local newspapers.
These exchanges became increasingly vitriolic, personal, and (though prompted by the debates over spiritualism) quickly centred on their assertions and defences of their own authority as scientists.
I will show how Carpenter’s and Wallace’s insistence on their own rationality, knowledge and ability to follow correct scientific procedure, comes to make science appear narrow minded and inflexible.
I will also briefly discuss how the figure of the scientist that arises these arguments is employed in periodical fiction, using the example of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s short story ‘The Shadow in the Corner’, published in 1879, when Carpenter and Wallace’s ongoing feud was nearly a decade old
- Speaker
- Helena Ifill, University of Aberdeen
- Venue
- via Teams