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      By the late nineteenth century, every problem in the middle-class world seemed ripe for a scientific solution. The Victorian bourgeoisie used the term “science” so often that many historians today no longer take the term seriously and treat the word as little more than a synonym for “good” or “new.” Nevertheless, middle-class women and men were being scientific—at least as far as they defined the term—in their reconstruction of society. To understand what they meant by science and what they thought they were doing, we have to go back to the early nineteenth century and look at what constituted science then. It was this conceptualization of science that the bourgeoisie learned in school and then applied to their world in the late nineteenth century.¹⁵

      Today, educated men and women are reasonably confident of what they mean when they use the term “science.” It is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “in modern use, often treated as synonymous with ‘Natural and Physical Science’, and thus restricted to those branches of study that relate to the phenomena of the material universe and their laws.… This is now the dominant sense in ordinary use.” What the early twenty-first-century middle class recognizes as science is almost exclusively experimental: physics, chemistry, and biology. ¹⁶

      In the nineteenth century, the bourgeoisie was equally sure of what they meant by the term “science” and it incorporated more methodologies than just experimentation. Much of what we now call “technology” was then considered science, so engineering marvels like the steam locomotive, the massive iron and glass buildings of the Centennial, and the Brooklyn Bridge were all examples of scientific progress to Victorians. In addition, many nineteenth-century sciences, in particular the life sciences, had not adopted the experimental process that we today associate with science but had retained the rational models developed by Bacon and Newton during the Scientific Revolution. Perhaps the most significant scientific advancement of the nineteenth century, at least in popular culture, was made by Charles Darwin using one of these alternative methodologies. Darwin’s theory of evolution, which so sparked the bourgeois imagination, was based on taxonomy. One historian of science has written that “[t]he search for systematic schemes of classification [had] dominated the life sciences during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,” and that same search for order captured the Victorian bourgeoisie in the nineteenth. ¹⁷

      The Darwinian revolution in popular middle-class thought was two-fold. What has been well studied is how the theory of evolution became part of the bourgeois world view, along with a related concept known as Social Darwinism. But what has largely been missed is that besides offering a general theory, Darwin also offered an example of a scientific methodology to an increasingly well-educated middle class. This methodology—taxonomy—was reinforced by science courses offered in Victorian high schools and colleges. In addition, new disciplines, like the “social sciences,” and existing ones, such as the law, borrowed this methodology from the sciences and created detailed classifications of human behavior during this period. By the start of the twentieth century, taxonomy was commonplace throughout middle-class society.¹⁸

      Because our conception of science has changed and because members of the middle class used the term so often during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is easy to overlook this metaphor as the basis of the bourgeoisie’s reconstruction of their world. Just as the middle class began to apply taxonomy throughout everyday life, the scientific community shifted away from classification to experimentation as its paradigm. Historians of other fields, well versed in their generations’ understandings of science, often seem unaware of the earlier traditions. As but one example, a legal historian recently claimed that “Langdell’s [a leading late-nineteenth-century law professor and the inventor of the casebook method of legal study] proudest boast was that the law was a science, and his method was scientific. But his model of science was not experimental, or experiential; his model was Euclid’s geometry, not physics or biology.” That analysis misses the point; the model Langdell used was scientific at the time he used it. But we do not have to take Langdell at his word; we can look at what he created with his “scientific” approach to legal education: a detailed, hierarchical outline of the law. Langdell is but one example of this broad Victorian obsession with classification. ¹⁹

      Another example should help make this scientific metaphor as it relates to middle-class culture somewhat less esoteric. As Chapter 7 will develop in more detail, historians have viewed Philadelphia’s late nineteenth-century hinterland as a classic statement of the American railroad suburb. Historians claim that a variety of motives both pushed and pulled the Victorian bourgeoisie from the city to the country: a long-standing American distrust of cities; an equally durable rural ideal; the availability of cheap land and transport; the development of inexpensive construction techniques (the balloon-frame house); and racial and ethnic prejudice. My work indicates that Philadelphia—at the time the nation’s third-largest city—did not suburbanize in conformity with this model until well into the twentieth century. What the city’s nineteenth-century middle class did do, however, was to develop a greater specialization in the use of land throughout the Victorian metropolis. In other words, they created a taxonomy of space. Changing bourgeois residential patterns—both within the city and without—were simply one manifestation

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