A collection of essays exploring the questions of what counted as knowledge in Victorian Britain, who defined knowledge and the knowledgeable, by what means and by what criteria. During the Victorian period, the structure of knowledge took on a new and recognizably modern form, and the disciplines that we take for granted took shape.

Introduction ; Science in nineteenth-century England: plural configurations and singular politics ; Classifying sciences: systematics and status in mid-Victorian natural history ; Victorian social science: from singular to plural ; Political economy and the science of economics in Victorian Britain ; Reason and belief in Victorian mathematics ; Victorian classics: sustaining the study of the ancient world ; The evolution and dissemination of historical knowledge ; Specialization and social utility: disciplining English studies ; The organization of literary knowledge: the study of English in the late nineteenth century ; 'Old studies and new': the organization of knowledge in university curriculum ; The promotion and constraints of knowledge: the changing structure of publishing in Victorian Britain ; Libraries, knowledge and public identity ; Measuring the world: exploration, empire and the reform of the Royal Geographical Society, 1874-93 ; Civic cultures and civic colleges in Victorian England ; Intimacy, imagination and the inner dialetics of knowledge communities: the Synthetic Society, 1896-1908 ; The Academy abroad: the nineteenth-century origin of the British School at Athens ; The strange late birth of the British Academy