Frankenstein's children: electricity, exhibition, and experiment in early-nineteenth-century London

The title and subtitle of Iwan Rhys Morus' book indicate a divided loyalty. In making good the subtitle, he offers solid accounts of institutions and activities neglected by the few remaining historians of science who confine their business to an internalist chronicle of advances in high theory and fundamental experiment. Faithful to the usual canons of evidence and argumentation, Morus discusses the exploitation of electricity for amusement, the short life of the London Electrical Society, and the equivocal status of William Sturgeon, who tried to climb the slippery ladder from a gallery of science to the Royal Society and had the temerity to take on Faraday. Men who learned about electrical experiments in the popular galleries might go on to contribute to Sturgeon's respectable Annals of electricity or to participate in the first commercial applications of electricity. Morus' reviews of the early histories of electroplating and telegraphy are informed and informative. His briefer account of electrotherapy will be of particular interest to readers of this journal. What has this to do with the children of Frankenstein advertised in the title? Apart from describing grotesque effects of galvanic batteries on freshly executed criminals, Morus realizes the monstrous connotation of his title by stomping on his material now and again to make it fit a currently popular historiographical programme. This programme forces the laudable and legitimate project of relating the practice and application of science to wider aspects of society far beyond the evidence. If this programme is a Frankenstein, then Morus' book is one of its children. Let us have some examples. "Drawing on the resources of contemporary science, [Mary] Shelley could convincingly portray [in Frankenstein] the problematics of the laboratory experimenter's attempt to carve space for himself in early nineteenth-century culture." Now, Shelley's story is set in the eighteenth century; the experiment takes place in an attic bedroom; the creator, the student Frankenstein, worked alone and secretly; the inspiration for his creation came from crazy old magicians, like Cornelius Agrippa, and the required technical information from the professors in a small German university. Morus' story takes place mainly in and after the 1830s; his experimenters work and demonstrate in rooms maintained for the purpose; they are not juvenile students of occult arts but grown men trying to make a living from their science; they are not driven by shame to keep their work secret; they have no time for Agrippa; they "carve spaces for [themselves]" in well-lighted, hard-headed England, not in dark, gothic Germany. Shelley set out to write a ghost story, not to portray the lot of Morus' experimenters. "Maxwell in particular presented his electromagnetic theories as being the articulation in mathematical language of Faraday's experimental results. The integrity of the new physics thus [!] depended on the preservation and defense of Michael Faraday's reputation." Some think that the integrity of nineteenthcentury electromagnetism, which was not a British monopoly, depended on the fact that laws like Faraday's adequately represented the phenomena. But no. "The outcome of an experiment depends as much on the process of negotiation among participants as it does on the successful manipulation of apparatus." To instantiate this fundamental law of the new historiography of science, Morus "attempt[s] a deconstruction by focusing on the ways in which Faraday constructed spaces for himself, so that he could fashion a career through experiment." Fair enough. But how could Morus'