Felicity MacKenzie

About Felicity’s Research:

Sir Charles Lyell (1797-1875) is remembered as an influential geologist in the specialised, modern sense of the term. This reflects the continued influence of his scientific career. As an important mentor 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 (Sponsel 2018). Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830-1833) is often heralded as having ushered in a ‘revolution’ in geology by using a naturalistic, non-religious methodology in the science (Wilson 1972).

There has been limited engagement with Lyell’s identity beyond this role as geologist (Porter 1975). My PhD re-evaluates Lyell’s identity and career and fills a gap in understanding Lyell’s engagement with politics.

Lyell’s relationship to politics has largely been told as a story of accidental impact, focusing on how Lyell’s naturalistic science inadvertently supported naturalistic, humanist political ideas (Secord 1997). However, I argue that Lyell was 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 when working with Prince Albert 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. Importantly, however, Lyell’s framework for cultural progress was highly racialised, leading him to support enslavement in antebellum America. My research addresses the racial dynamics in Lyell’s ideology for the first time and examines the colonial networks in which they were produced.