Birth of a Word, 1833

As addressed a few essays ago, we all use everyday words and never think about the origins of those words and the maybe enormous implications of their adoption. At least not until some author or other makes that word centerpiece of a larger story. Such is the case with the word “scientist.” Its common use arose in 1833 according to author Renée Bergland in “Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science” (2024). Bergland is Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Simmons University in Boston.

“Natural Magic” is defined by Bergland in the context of the overlapping 19th-century times of Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) by this: “The study of nature embraced many overlapping approaches. Collecting and classifying objects was called natural history. Deducing general laws was the work of natural philosophers. The search for God - the Christian God – in the natural world was the purview of natural theology. Along similar lines, mysterious natural forces and transformations – changes related to life and death, electricity and magnetism, the formation of crystals and gases – had long been understood as natural magic.”

The significance of this turn to “scientist” is that now practitioners became biologists, geologists, and botanists, suggesting something more of the specialization in the sciences that we recognize today as descriptive of courses of study. It was not that there were trained teachers and professors in these specialties; not at first. More usually, it was that both teacher and student worked together to learn the subject matter at hand as partners on a path to learning in that particular “ist.”

That is the way things were for newly established Amherst College for boys in Massachusetts and the Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary for girls that Emily Dickinson attended, later Mt. Holyoke College. Yes, the boys and girls were channeled to separate institutions in that time in Massachusetts, but that did not mean that girls could not study in the sciences. Not only could they, but it was encouraged for them more than was so for the boys. The boys were still in the main immersed in classical Latin studies.

So, if you are wondering how it is that Emily Dickinson, known best for her poetry, is coupled in this book along with Charles Darwin, as a figure of the “Dawn of Science,” it is because she actually was taught in the sciences in that 19th-century window of time when encouragement to do so was more usual for girls than for boys. She was an outstanding student and loved formal learning. Darwin was not, and he did not especially care for the learning environments in which he was in the Britain of his time. Yet, look how they both excelled as adults, each in her/his own way.

And look, too, at how the study of science changed over time, from subject matter encouraged for girls, at least in 1840’s Massachusetts, to subject matter not for girls in the runup to our own time. Isn’t that crazy?

But it explains how Emily Dickinson came to study science as a young woman, which informed her poetry, which is how it comes to be that she is paired with Charles Darwin in this book, whom she never met. It dates a leaving behind of Natural Magic, marked by Bergland as the 1833 introduction of the word “scientist.” All that in just the history of this one word. Bergland’s book is indeed a treat for telling a story of words in the first half of the 19th-century.