About the Author

Ruth Barton taught history at the University of Auckland; social science methodology at Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Western Australia; and mathematics at Victoria University of Wellington.

Reviews

"The X Club is Barton's long-awaited "big book"--a culmination of immense amounts of research and writing into the subject of these characters, of 'living with these men for decades'. As always, her scholarship is superlatively precise. . ."-- "Journal of British Studies"

"The book is more than a story of the X Club members; Barton gives deserved attention to a wide range of previously neglected collaborators, members of what she terms the wider 'X-network' including, crucially, nonscientific actors from the worlds of rational dissent, liberal theology and the universities. In so doing, we are able to understand, more clearly than ever before, the complex ways in which members of the X Club formed part of a wider cultural elite in mid-to-late nineteenth-century England. . . . What Ruth Barton has achieved with The X Club is no mean feat. . . . [It] will make a significant contribution to the historiography of Victorian science, not least because of the depth and intricacy of the archival research on which it is based. It is a rich, detailed and insightful microhistory of the lives, relationships and wider networks of a very significant grouping of scientific men."-- "Metascience"

"A detailed account of one of the most influential networks in Victorian science. It is a book that no other scholar could have produced. Rarely does a historian exhibit such thorough knowledge of the historical actors under investigation. . . . This is a scholarly volume that changes a lot of what we think about the X Club, which is important. As Barton observes, this was a group that wielded social influence and institutional power throughout two crucial decades in which the role of science in society was profoundly changed. It is a subject that matters to historians of science and to a wider readership concerned with science's relationship with society and the state. The X Club promises to be the definitive work on this influential network for a long time to come."-- "Isis: a Journal of the History of Science Society"

"The outcome of several decades of research, Ruth Barton's magisterial group biography of the nine men who made up the X Club was well worth waiting for. . . . Barton displays a truly impressive command of both detail and broader historical themes, combining macro- and micro-historical approaches to impressive effect. . . . Her lively sympathy with the dilemmas and challenges facing her protagonists brings them imaginatively to life. The X Club is to be warmly recommended to anyone with an interest in British science in the nineteenth century. It provides an exemplary study of the interactions between class, expertise and the institutions of Victorian science, and has important resonances for the study of other times and contexts in the history of science and for historical studies more generally."-- "Intellectual History Review"