In 1815, amidst the decline of George III, the scandals of the Regency, and the defeat of Napoleon, a 26-year-old Bostonian named Joseph Ballard toured Great Britain and left a complete record of his impressions. Ballard was officially part of the effort

In this volume, the first in the series Science and Literature, editor George Levin has brought together the contributions of historians, critics, and philosophers of science to explore these relationships.
From the preface:
-The interaction between science and literature has been a subject of growing concern in criticism; the languages of science have increasingly found their way into literature and into discussions of it. And the traditional assumptions that literary people care nothing about science, scientists care nothing about literature have been belied throughout the twentieth...

Nineteenth-century England witnessed an unprecedented increase in the number of publications and institutions devoted to the creation and the dissemination of knowledge: encyclopedias, scientific periodicals, instruction manuals, scientific societies, children's literature, mechanics' institutes, museums of natural history, and lending libraries. In "Useful Knowledge" Alan Rauch presents a social, cultural, and literary history of this new knowledge industry and traces its relationships within nineteenth-century literature, ending with its eventual confrontation with Charles Darwin's "Origin...

Drawing on a wide array of literary, scientific, and popular works of the period, this book focuses on the importance of scientific knowledge and its impact on Victorian culture. It presents a social, cultural, and literary history of this knowledge industry and traces its relationships within nineteenth-century literature.

Originally published: Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913 as: England in 1815 as seen by a young Boston merchant.