Science in the City: Scientific Display and Urban Performance in Victorian Travel Guides to London

Abstract

Willis offers the first analysis of scientific representations in travel guide books to London. Taking a range of travel guides from the 1860s to the end of the century, Willis considers which scientific sites travel guides chose to promote to the tourist reader, and investigates what kinds of representations of science their narratives provide. This allows for two key questions: first, how did science contribute to visions of London as a city, and second, in what ways did travel guides mediate science to achieve this. Willis concludes that travel guides are the location of a particularly rich interaction between science and the humanities, where literary writers (often of some repute) give science a powerful place in an emerging modernity through language.