ABSTRACT
The first half of the nineteenth century witnessed an explosion in the number of scientific societies, institutes and associations across Britain. Scholarship investigating the place and function of scientific organizations across the nineteenth century had, until the early 2000s, focused attention on institutional histories, largely economic, political and experimental. As scholars are discovering, the poetry written by nineteenth-century scientists can shed light on both the social and cultural meanings of scientific work and, of course, on scientific organizations. The Royal Polytechnic Institution is one of the most fascinating examples of commercial scientific institutions. Commercial scientific institutions might have valued public entertainment and the profit this brought above the dissemination of scientific knowledge but this should not lead to an assumption that these organizations were either non-scientific or below other organizations in an accepted hierarchy of science. However, in the 1860s another scientific organization, the X-Club, was initiated to give greater impetus to the reformist agenda within the Royal Society.
