ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the role of "Dublin" on the development of the late Victorian ethereal preoccupations of George Francis Fitzgerald, Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin, and William Fletcher Barrett, Professor of Experimental Physics at the Royal College of Science, Dublin. It outlines Dublin engagements with the "ether" episode during its apotheosis and explores how this particular scientific debate was intertwined with a highly dynamic late Victorian urban space. In this chapter, the city of Dublin has worked as both a bounded physical entity and as theoretical device. The chapter turns now to Trinity College Dublin and focuses on a city life, which in marked contrast to Barrett's, was disposed toward making connections between ether and matter. The ether forged an important nineteenth-century space for science in Dublin, in which a discourse on, as Connor configures it, the "mentality of matter" and the "materiality of mind" could be played out.
