Agnes Mary Clerke had no formal education and, despite the gender bar of the male-dominated professional scientific world, she became one of the most important astronomers and science writers of the Victorian period, and has a moon crater named in her honour.
Hear me speak about Agnes as part of the Illuminate Herstory festival at the EPIC Museum of Irish Migration in Dublin’s CHQ on 8 January 2017. The event was broadcast on Periscope.
Emigration helped Clerke to succeed professionally. Clara Cullen has pointed out that women could to some extent participate in science in nineteenth century Ireland – for example, the Dublin Zoological Society admitted women as full members from 1830, and Trinity College admitted women to public lectures which it deemed “suitable for ladies”. Would Clerke have flourished had she remained in Ireland? It is possible that her career would have suffered in the scientific climate of late nineteenth-century Ireland, with the financial floundering of the great houses that were home to private astronomical observatories.
Clerke’s Early Life
Agnes was born in Skibbereen, Co. Cork in 1842. She and her sister Ellen were home-schooled by well-educated parents. Their brother Aubrey later described their home as an “environment of scientific suggestion.” Their father, John William Clerke, was a bank manager with a degree in Classics from Trinity College Dublin. He erected a telescope in the garden of their home and would let the children peer at Jupiter’s satellites and Saturn’s rings. As a child, Agnes’s father taught her the basics of astronomy, while her university-educated brother, Aubrey, tutored her in mathematics.
In 1861, the family relocated to Dublin so that Mr Clerke could take up a job opportunity. Agnes suffered from poor health so, from 1867, she and Ellen began to overwinter in Italy. They spent most of the period between 1867 and 1877 in Italy’s libraries, studying music, the history of Renaissance science, and the Italian language.
London and Agnes’s Scientific Coming-of-Age
But London offered clearer professional opportunities for both Agnes and her brother Aubrey, who was called to the Bar there. The family were reunited there in 1877 and lived in fashionable Kensington. From then, Agnes made a career as a writer for the Edinburgh Review. She published over fifty articles on topics ranging from Italian history, to “The Chemistry of the Stars,” the aurora borealis, and the history of astronomy. She was commissioned to write scientific biographies for the Encyclopaedia Britannica and contributed a staggering 159 entries to the first edition of the Dictionary of National Biography.
With the British Museum on her doorstep, Agnes began to study astrophysics and started work on her first major book, A Popular History of Astronomy.
The Popular History and Being “Popular”
Published in 1885, the Popular History became an instant classic. It was aimed at both specialists and at a wider audience, written in clear language but without oversimplification. In her own words, it was “an attempt to enable the ordinary reader to follow, with intelligent interest, the course of modern astronomical inquiries …”
Without a formal education, Clerke’s keen, enquiring mind and her lifelong passion for astronomy gave her a talent for writing on complex topics without compromising on detail. She intended her work to reach as wide an audience as possible, declaring in The System of the Stars (1890),
“Astronomy is essentially a popular science. The general public has an indefeasible right of access to its lofty halls, which it is all the more important to keep cleared of unnecessary technical impediments …”
In the words of historian Bernard Lightman, Clerke “redefin[ed] the role of the popularizer at a time when an explosion in the growth of knowledge and increasing specialization within science widened the gulf between professional scientists and the reading public.” A contemporary wrote:
“It is sometimes thought that popular works are of less value to the world than the more technical investigations, but […] The popular work helps every investigator, as well as the general reader, while the special investigations appeal to very few, and thus make but little impression upon the world’s thought. Good popular writing is therefore as necessary to scientific progress as the most technical researches, which can exert but little influence because of their very abtruseness.”
She was also concerned about being up-to-date. She worked hard on new editions of her books, not just adding new prefaces but updating the information, performing extensive revisions, adding whole new chapters, and brand new illustrations. The System of the Stars was nothing if not up-to-the-minute. The second edition included the newest possible information and images. Indeed, all of her astronomy books contained striking photographs of nebulae, planets and comets, gleaned from her international network of correspondents. The photographs made Clerke’s books scientifically up-to-date and visually exciting.
Clerke’s position as a woman in astronomy
In London, Agnes and Ellen attended meetings of the Royal Astronomical Society. As women, they were only able to attend at the President’s discretion. A contemporary noted that Agnes would often be seen at the meetings, “surrounded by leading astronomers, genuinely keen to hear her opinion on some knotty point.” Clerke became a founding member of the non-discriminatory British Astronomical Association in 1890.
Clearly, her position as a woman in astronomy was not straightforward. Her responses to professional opportunities tells us a lot about how she negotiated a scientific world that excluded women at the highest levels.
In 1889, she was offered a job as a “computer” at Greenwich’s Royal Observatory, well below her abilities and status. She declined, feeling that her time would be better spent writing and keeping up with the current literature. She was then offered a better position in the USA, as chair of astronomy at Vassar College – the first women’s college in the USA – but she did not wish to leave her brother and sister. (It is worth noting that one of Vassar’s founders was the famous American astronomer, Maria Mitchell.) Finally, Sir George Baden-Powell invited Clerke to join an expedition to Novaya Zemlya for the solar eclipse of 1896, but she rejected this offer because it would interfere with her publication schedule.
These instances demonstrate that Clerke was not willing to compromise on her mission to communicate the most recent developments in astronomy to the widest possible audience. She was right to focus on her publications – they made her name. Her reputation blossomed thanks to the success of the Popular History. In 1888, she spent three months at the Cape Observatory in South Africa at the invitation of its director, Sir David Gill. This was her first taste of working in a professional observatory and the observations she made there were published. She dedicated her final major work, Problems in Astrophysics to Gill, “whose suggestion and encouragement prompted its composition and animated its progress.” James Glaisher, president of the Royal Astronomical Society, said that Problems in Astrophysics was “not merely an astronomical history, but a work of actual constructive thinking in our science.”
In 1892, she was awarded the Royal Institution’s Actonian Prize for her contributions to astronomy. In 1903 she and Margaret Lindsay Huggins became the fourth and fifth women members of the Royal Astronomical Society. They were honorary members and not full fellows – by the Society’s constitution, only men could be full members. This would change in 1916, when Tyrone-born Annie Maunder became the first female fellow.
Clerke circumnavigated the professional limitations placed on women by the male-dominated scientific elite. As historian of science Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie has pointed out, Clerke and other female astronomers of the age used their talents to promote the position of “amateur” science. Despite being disbarred from professional memberships and from the prestigious positions her work merited, Clerke earned the respect of her peers and paved the way for the acceptance of women within professional scientific circles.
Clerke died suddenly in 1907 following a short illness, and was buried in London.
Sources:
Cullen, Clara. “Laurels for Fair as Well as Manly Brows.” Lab Coats and Lace: The Lives and Legacies of Inspiring Irish Women Scientists and Pioneers, edited by Mary Mulvihill. WITS, 2009, pp. 9–21.
Huggins, Margaret. Agnes Mary Clerke and Ellen Mary Clerke; An Appreciation. For private circulation, 1907.
Lightman, Bernard. “Constructing the Victorian Heavens: Agnes Clerke and the ‘New Astronomy’.” Natural Eloquence: Women Reinscribe Science, edited by Barbara T. Gates and Ann B. Shteir. University of Wisconsin Press, 1997, pp. 61-75.
Macpherson, Hector Jr. “Miss Agnes Mary Clerke.” In Popular Astronomy, vol. xv, 1907, no. 6, June-July 1907.
McKenna-Lawlor, Susan P.M. “Agnes Mary Clerke (1842-1907), historian and active promoter of astrophysics.” Whatever Shines Should be Observed (quicquid nited notandum). Samton, 1998, pp. 56-69.
See, T.J.J. “Some recollections of Miss Agnes M. Clerke.” Popular Astronomy, vol. xv, no. 6, June–July 1907, pp. 323–6.