Welcome!

Welcome to the new Through Lyell's Eyes blog! As I mentioned in the 'About' section of this website, this blog will aim to continue the fantastic work of its predecessor, https://libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk/lyell/. It is intended as a space for anyone who does research in the Collection and might like to share their experiences, process or findings; as well as anyone who would like to write on Lyell's life, work and world more broadly. I will be posting the same throughout my PhD. If you think you might like to contribute a post to the blog, please don't hesitate to get in touch with me at felicity.mackenzie@ed.ac.uk.

I've loved getting started on my PhD this year. My main focus has been on tracing Lyell's intellectual development 1816-1827. I've been trying to tease out Lyell's key influences by reconstructing his knowledge network(s), using previously unpublished notebooks and letters from the Collection. I'm looking forward to writing a blog post about that work soon, accompanied by some photos. In the mean time, I'm currently putting together a talk that will summarise these findings and that I'll be giving at the University of Aberdeen on 21st May 2025. It will also be available via Zoom. If you'd like to tune in, logistical details will follow on the University of Aberdeen Centre for History and Philosophy of Science, Technology and Medicine website. Please see the abstract below for details. Until then, I'm looking forward to hearing from you and to writing more soon.

Thanks for being a part of this!

Felicity

‘Where every truth is felt as well as seen’:

Reconstructing Charles Lyell’s early intellectual development, 1816-1827

Sir Charles Lyell (1797-1875) is largely remembered as an influential geologist in the specialised, modern sense of the term. This reflects the continued influence of his scientific career. As a close mentor and friend to Charles Darwin and a widely recognised authority on the earth sciences in nineteenth-century Europe and North America, Lyell profoundly influenced ideas about deep time and evolution. 

However, this paper will use the newly opened Sir Charles Lyell Collection at the University of Edinburgh to challenge this prevailing view and reconstruct Lyell’s identity and career beyond this role as scientist. It will suggest that it is equally important to view Lyell as an elite, literary gentleman and educational reformer who actively understood his geology to be part of a project of moral, cultural and political reform. Lyell’s ‘mission’ (as he would refer to it in the 1840s) was to ‘civilise’ the British polity by expanding scientific knowledge and education. Geology was at the heart of his vision for that cultural change.

The period 1816-1827 was crucial for the development of Lyell’s integrated view of geology and political change. This paper will use the Sir Charles Lyell Collection to reconstruct Lyell’s intellectual development 1816-1827, tracing his priorities, knowledge networks and key influences. The Collection reveals that Lyell was a thinker deeply engaging with ideas about moral philosophy, law, politics, authorship and human meaning; as well as, of course, being invested and active in geological debates and fieldwork. When this period is considered in detail, it becomes clear that it provides a foundational basis from which to understand Lyell's life and work.

[0031303, © Heritage Collections, University of Edinburgh]