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  • Chapter 8 - Mary Somerville’s Sound Accomplishments

  • Edited by James Grande, King's College London, Carmel Raz, Max-Planck-Institut für Empirische Ästhetik
  • Book:
    Sound and Sense in British Romanticism
    Published online:
    24 August 2023
    Print publication:
    07 September 2023, pp 183-200
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  • Summary

    Mary Somerville (1780–1872) is best known for her importance to debates about popular science and education, her contributions to optics, and her philosophical reflections on astronomy and nature. However, less attention has been paid to her writing on sound. Building upon recent scholarly interest in Somerville, as well as in the intersections between nineteenth-century music and science, this chapter initially homes in on her survey of acoustics, which formed part of her best-selling treatise On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1834). It goes on to explore how Somerville’s poetically inflected scientific rhetoric portrays sound as at once material and immaterial, a source of objective knowledge and a metaphor for unknowability. Amid the burgeoning print culture of the 1830s, Somerville’s writing belongs to an expanding tradition of female authorship on scientific and musical knowledge. It also anticipates the efforts of later nineteenth-century intellectuals and educators to disseminate and popularize music theory and the science of sound for a wider public.