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Journal of Victorian Culture 12.2 (2007) 267-272

Geometry
Alice Jenkins
University of Glasgow

A great deal was at stake for Victorian writers and readers of geometry textbooks. These books embodied and encoded the struggles between [End Page 267] English and Continental mathematics, between tradition and reformin pedagogy, between patrician and artisan ideas about education, between abstract and practical knowledge. Geometry emerged as a core part of the education of the English gentleman in the eighteenth century; by the Victorian period it was also becoming an important part of the education of artisans, children at Board Schools, colonial subjects and, to a rather lesser degree, women. Many segments of the literate population were expected or urged to be acquainted with enough geometry at least to conduct a variety of practical tasks, and a wide range of educational material was produced accordingly. But the importance of Euclid editions and textbooks in Victorian Britain was not just a product of their number and usefulness. Geometry was the locus of a cluster of urgent debates about the role of education in the age of mass literacy. Geometry textbooks thus became a topic of lasting and often heated public argument conducted in an extraordinary range of fora.

'Simson's Euclid' was perhaps the best-selling, and almost certainly the most commonly cited, geometry textbook of the nineteenth century. In 1845 Henry Brougham noted that 'no rival has ever yet risen up to dispute with Simson's Euclid the possession of the schools'.12 And its reach went far beyond the schools: it was enormously widely bought by adult learners of many kinds. Such was the prestige and ubiquity of this edition of the Elements, produced in 1756 by the Glasgow professor of mathematics Robert Simson, that even rival editions frequently described themselves by reference to it. But in fact to call Simson's Euclid a single book is misleading: a wide variety of editions, selections, and formats based on it were produced, usually containing the first six books of the Elements, but sometimes including selections from among the later books, or cut to just the first or first and second. Versions were published to suit different pockets – literally as well as metaphorically. As early as 1830, 'pocket' editions of Euclid textbooks based on Simson's were being published at slightly lower prices than the full size formats. As one would expect, prices fell substantially over the course of the century. In 1825, for example, one could buy a copy of the '21st and only genuine' edition of Simson in octavo for 8 shillings; a smaller format cost 5 shillings in 1845, and by 1866 only sixpence. These, of course, were the prices of new books: the market for used copies was very large indeed. In Daniel Deronda George Eliot mentions Simson's Euclid as the staple of the Victorian secondhand book trade.13

However, though Simson's Euclid was frequently recommended as the book from which learners should work, to call it a 'textbook' begs the question of the nature of the genre. Geometry textbooks and [End Page 268] the writing associated with them (particularly prefaces, polemical pamphlets, and reviews) are an interestingly untypical subset of Victorian textbook history. In most disciplines, there is an important difference between the writings which constitute the subject matter and the textbooks which mediate those writings for learners. In the caseof geometry, however, many Victorian commentators believed that in Euclid's Elements the content of the discipline had been so entirely covered and so perfectly presented that the two categories were actually the same. Thus, a reliable edition of Euclid was in itself the best poss-ible geometry textbook, despite the fact that the Elements had notbeen intended or designed for such a purpose. Contrary to this view, however, mathematical reformers argued that the Elements were not only outdated as to their content but also unsuitable in their presentation for many kinds of learner. Arguments raged in specialist edu-cational circles about whether the Elements constituted a textbook,and whether better alternatives were currently available or could be...

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