Science on local, regional, and national scales: geographies of natural history in the mid- to late Victorian England

The history of science has taken a “geographical turn” at the turn of this century. Since then, historians of science have sought to understand the impact of geography on the practice, organisation and diffusion of scientific knowledge. In this paper, I look into the organisation of amateur science in provincial England through the scales of local, regional and national. The scientific societies established in the Victorian Midlands provide an excellent material to understand the close relationship between the natural history societies and geography, which has usually been taken for granted. In the Victorian Midlands, some sixty scientific societies were established for the study of local n…