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Domestic science: making chemistry your cup of tea
Abstract
In the early Victorian home, there were plenty of scientific lessons to be uncovered. With the appropriate interrogation, everyday objects could transform seemingly mundane activities such as eating breakfast, washing clothes or reading by candle-light into household lectures that gave children a familiar base from which to explore the hidden properties and marvellous histories of common commodities. Responding to an unprecedented hunger for scientific knowledge, a profusion of introductory texts appeared in the mid-nineteenth century that directed lessons into homes across Britain and beyond. In particular, the science of chemistry found its way into this domestic setting, as writers promoted its practice and practitioners as a source of authoritative expertise on everyday life. One of the most compelling illustrations of this encounter between the public and chemistry took place over a simple cup of tea.
The idea of the school museum as an active resource for object-based learning played an important but now neglected part in programmes of educational reform during the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the opening decades of the twentieth. In this article we focus on the role of the Kew Museum of Economic Botany in supplying schools with botanical specimens and artefacts for their own museums during this period, to support a broad variety of curricular agendas, from nature study to geography and beyond. The evidence suggests that this scheme was remarkably popular, with demand among teachers for museum objects outstripping supply, and increasingly being met in other ways. Seen from the perspective of Kew, the distribution of specimens, artefacts, and visual materials to schools was a way of extending the ethos of economic botany into the classroom. For the teachers who requested specimens in large numbers, and the pupils who studied and handled them, however, such objects may have had other meanings and uses. More broadly, we propose new avenues for study that can help us to better appreciate the ways in which museum objects, expertise, and practices moved across professional, institutional, and increasingly global boundaries in this period.
This collection of essays explores the rise of scientific medicine and its impact on Victorian popular culture. Chapters include an examination of Dickens's involvement with hospital funding, concerns over milk purity and the theatrical portrayal of drug addiction, plus a whole section devoted to medicine in crime fiction. © 2015 Taylor & Francis. Louise Penner and Tabitha Sparks 2015. All rights reserved.
Tea has come to be regarded as a very popular drink, and is nowadays consumed in almost the same amounts as water. Tea has antioxidant properties, influences the organism's antioxidant status and prevents oxidative stress. Tea constitutes a very rich fluoride source. In the paper the influence of fluorides on human organism, soft and hard dental tissues and occurrence of dental and skeletal fluorosis was discussed.
The essay examines the role of domestic spaces and images in mid-nineteenth-century science writing for children. Analyses of John Mill’s The Fossil Spirit, A.L.O.E.’s Fairy Frisket, John Cargill Brough’s The Fairy Tales of Science, Annie Carey’s “Autobiography of a Lump of Coal,” and an assortment of boxed games reveal a variety of ways in which overwhelming scientific concepts are domesticated. Moreover, juvenile science literature contributes this appeasing domestication to the broader scientific discourse, consistently framing natural history in terms of human experience.
This article examines the epistemology of cookery among the middle classes in nineteenth-century Britain. Quantification, schematization, and the scientific evaluation of food and its preparation were increasingly emphasized in prescriptive cookery books and housekeeping literature. These trends are evident to some extent in manuscript cookbooks, as well. Cookery was influenced by a rise in chemists' and physicians' professional authority, and science also suggested solutions to the period's ongoing problems of food adulteration. Science and expertise, moreover, offered women and their families access to higher social status and a sense of personal and national progress. However, the scientization of cookery was an uneven and often inconsistent process, and the individual habits and knowledge systems of families, mistresses, and servants continued to play a crucial role in culinary practice.
The Mysteries of a Tea-Kettle
- Leigh