“Deftly recreates this age of marvels” — The Economist

The Philosophical Breakfast Club received a rave review from Tom Chatfield of The Economist and MoreIntelligentLife.com.

“Laura J. Snyder deftly recreates this age of marvels through the lives of four remarkable men. In doing so, she tells a greater tale of the rise of science as a formal discipline, and the triumph of evidence-based methods of inductive reasoning.”

“Much of the delight of Ms Snyder’s telling lies in her eye for detail. . . . [She] gives flesh to her four remarkable subjects. . . . Ms Snyder does not spare colour in these portraits, which convey what it meant to be men of science at a time when ‘there was no graduate education in science, and no scientific careers to pursue.’”

“Ms Snyder . . . is a sure-footed guide to the mores and foibles of 19th-century Britain. From the pecuniary costs of living as a Baronet, to the insults meted out to brilliant females who dared to outdo men at mathematics, she holds up her mirror to an age at once startlingly modern in its hunger for knowledge and almost medieval in its weights of tradition.”

“The members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club left behind some lavish gifts. This volume offers them up delightfully.”

See the full review, including images of Babbage, Herschel, Jones and Whewell, here.