Science of Discworld III

as cleaners, perhaps as secretaries to some of the senior staff, and women earning their own money was a massive wedge driven into a male-dominated society. In that society, it was rare even for courtesans to have control of their own funds, to that extent Mimi in La Bohème is more realistic than Flora in La Traviata . The laws and customs then were very different from what we accept as ‘normal’ now: young women and older ones were exploited sexually, large numbers of workmen died from industrial accidents and pollution. 4 Only through their suffering – and their triumphs – could the next generation be built.
    Today’s Britons are an integral part of this onward and upward process, and in order to see why the triumphs of our real Victorian history have lessons for us now, we must understand what happened then.
    There was one major difference, among millions of individual tiny differences, between Victorian Britain and Russia (or China). TheBritish had several sources of social heterogeneity, dissidence, of exposure to the public eye of things being done or understood in different ways. From the Baptist chapel to the Quaker meeting house, from the Catholic cathedral with its sweet music and incomprehensible prayers to the Jewish synagogues with their strangely cloaked and hatted congregants who turned into your lawyer or your accountant during the week, religion was obviously diverse. In Poland and Russia, there were pogroms (particularly during the late nineteenth century); in England, there were only taxes. Even in English prisons, very different religious practices were respected, perhaps as much in the breach as in the practice, but the theory was well known and encouraged – if not enforced – by the law. This freedom of thought, word and deed lasted. After the Second World War, after the defeat of Nazism at immense cost, with London still in ruins and food rationed, Sir Oswald Mosley was an avowed fascist whose Blackshirts came down to the East End of London to promote their racist views. Jack was involved in street fights with them about once a month. Even then, he was pleased that their horrible speeches were permitted by the law. In the USA or Russia, Mosley would either have been in jail or elected president. There was a context of heterogeneity, of difference being more than accepted, being valued with a smile. And this was part of an unbroken tradition, going back to Victorian times.
    The big difference that made Victorian Britain successful, itself fostered recursively by all the success stories within it – and by the disparate nature of these successes, such as Quakers, railways, big beautiful bridges, fewer starving children, control of some diseases – was in the ambience, the context, which promoted difference . It has been fashionable for a particularly naive kind of historian of science to point to the social context of scientific theories, and to pretend that science is therefore entirely socially driven. It is usually claimed, by the same token, that this provenance denies science its authority, so its truths merely follow social convention.
    Victorian evolutionists provide a precise refutation of that view.Wallace, for example, was born to poor parents, was apprenticed to a watchmaker for a while (obviously one of our wizards had been instructed to achieve this), then became a successful – though indigent – land agent, then a more successful animal and plant collector. He never made enough money to join the upper middle class, even after his star had risen alongside Darwin’s.
    Darwin was a junior aristocrat, his parents were well off, and it would have been entirely proper for him to have become a curate – and, indeed to have written Theology of Species . Other pro-evolutionists, as various as Owen (mistaken by Darwin for an anti-evolutionist because of his careful analysis of the anatomical implications of the Darwin/Wallace natural-selection idea), Huxley, Spencer, Kingsley, were all from different strata of society. We have seen that the first printing of Origin of Species was inadequate for the market, and all copies were sold by the second morning after publication. Would that have happened in nineteenth-century India? In Russia under the czars, or after the revolution? In the United States … possibly. And in the German part of Prussia. Dickens’s stories, critical as they were of the existing order, were anxiously awaited by all strata of society in England – and