Peter Pharos

Though technically I have an account, I have steered clear of Substack, which gives me the vibe of a methadone clinic for recovering Twitter addicts. The vertiginous dopamine highs of hundreds of likes and multi-thread comments have long gone. Instead, users administer tiny amounts of artisanal interactions to one another. Humblingly, a good part of the site is Dear Diary stuff.

It feels odd today, but there was a time when science was considered an aristocratic pursuit. Tycho Brahe was a nexus of Danish noble lineage, Lavoisier was the intellectual face of the Ancien Régime, while Darwin was the happy beneficiary of decades of haute bourgeois accumulation. Even Newton, often taken as the plebeian of the lot, was the son of a wealthy landowner – 17th century Cambridge was not known for recruiting from the working classes.

Early in Charles Dickens’s A Tale Of Two Cities, a wine cask rolls out of a cart in a Paris street. It promptly breaks, spilling its contents. Hilarity ensues. Men abandon their “business or (…) idleness” and drop to their knees to drink. Women drench their headwear in the little pools that have formed, and squeeze them into the mouths of their infants. A shock to us, but perhaps also to Dickens’s contemporaries.