2008 Joseph H. Hazen Lecture: Listening to Darwin’s Money
Janet Browne, the Aramont Professor of History of Science at Harvard University, delivered the second Joseph H. Hazen Lecture on 21 May 2008 at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. In her talk, “'The advantage of a private income': Charles Darwin, evolutionary theory, and the natural economy of households," Professor Browne drew on Michel Foucault’s prescriptive that historians examine the silences of the past, those myriad everyday, unarticulated things. One of the more powerful silences of the 19th century in England, she suggests, was the absence of talk about money. Using Darwin’s account books, Professor Browne demonstrated how such records not only provide an open door to a large and wealthy Victorian household, they also provide a link between natural selection and the operation of Down House.
Darwin began keeping his account books shortly after he married Emma (Emma recorded her own accounting). The books demonstrate the language of bookkeeping, a moral, methodical and meticulous description of the ordinary day. They represent a miniature Malthusian world, a place in which Darwin could affirm his role as provider, a place of credits and debits that extracted order from chaos.
The 2008 Hazen Lecture was sponsored by the History of Science Society; the CUNY Liberal Studies Bioethics, Science and Society Lecture Series; the Metropolitan New York Section of the History of Science Society; and the Section for History and Philosophy of Science and Technology of the New York Academy of Science. The Hazen Lectures are made possible by a generous donation from Cynthia Hazen Polsky, whose father, Joseph H. Hazen, was a long-time supporter of the history of science.