Science, Reform, and Politics in Victorian Britain

'... immaculately researched and lively ... This study of the life and work of the social Science Association, is more than just and institutional history. It provides a valuable insight into the particular conditions and concerns of mid-Victorian Britain and will undoubtedly prove essential reading for the considerable academic audience on this period.' History ...extremely well-informed...He has successfully synthesized a huge amount of information and made a very useful contribution to the history of the Victorian public sphere. Thomas William Heyck, Northwestern University, Historian ...magnificent in scope and relentlessly revealing about mid-Victorian culture, society, and politics. [Goldman] achieves the highest standards of scholarship and historical writing. Albion Goldman's research is impressive. A must read for advanced students of Victorian Britain. Essential. Choice Valuable. Victorian Studies Goldman brings together a range of arguments in favor of thinking more broadly about the nature and context of the British state between 1860 and 1880 and in ways beyond the purview of the SSA. American Historical Review Goldman's is a book of ambitious scope. He largely makes good on his ambitions. Victorian Studies Goldman demonstrates how the SSA was a crucial step in the development of the modern administrative state founded on professionalism, administrative expertise, and an apeal to scientific knowledge. These larger themes make this book of interest not only to historians of the social sciences, public health, and medicine but to all historians of nineteenth-century Britain as well as those concerned with the origins of the modern state. Journal of the History of Medicine Goldman has written an admittedly 'messy' book (345). For this he should be commended. His is the first full-scale history of the Bristish Social Science Association (SSA)--but it is more than just that. In Goldman's hands the SSA becomes 'a window through which to observe the mid-Victorian generation and...an opportunity to generalise about the age as a whole'. As a result this, also is a wide-ranging study of politics, administration, gender, class, and ideas in nineteenth-century Britain. It is complexed and nuanced--hence the messiness--and makes some suggestive comparisons with Germany and the United States. Journal of Modern History The book is impressively thorough in its attention to both historiographical context and Victorian context. Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences