The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity by Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber, Princeton University Press, 拢19.95/$29.95, ISBN 0691117543 Reviewed by Michael Cross
TALK about happy accidents. This month it is 250 years since Horace Walpole, prototype Goth novelist, coined the word 鈥渟erendipity鈥� in a letter to his diplomat friend Horace Mann. Publishers love anniversaries, so we could expect someone to mark the occasion with a slim volume titled something like Serendipity: The word that changed the world.
Luckily, a far bigger treasure was already in hand. Back in the 1950s, Robert Merton, even then a giant of sociological thought, explored with his colleague Elinor Barber the word鈥檚 origin and social and academic meanings. The result, by most people鈥檚 standards a significant piece of scholarship, lay 鈥渃arefully unpublished鈥� for 45 years until it appeared in Italian in 2002 and now in English.
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Is one neologism really worth a book? In this case, yes. Partly because serendipity is a candidate for the word most people would like to take to a desert island (Merton and Barber explore some reasons why). But mainly because there is sociological method in the whimsy. Like 鈥渙n the shoulders of giants鈥�, also exhaustively investigated by Merton, the word is frequently enlisted in the science wars. Mostly, of course, by those who would play down the importance of Pasteur鈥檚 鈥減repared mind鈥�.
Most delightful, though, is how the word鈥檚 history enacts its essence. For 79 years, serendipity lay dormant, an obscure reference in an unpublished letter by an unfashionable writer. Only in the 1880s did it enter literary use; dictionaries only from 1909.
Thence Merton鈥檚 own serendipitous encounter. In the slump of 1933, the impoverished postgrad student didn鈥檛 expect to retrieve his stipend from the bank, so he took up a bookshop鈥檚 offer of credit and blew the lot on a new edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Which he sat down and read. Few minds came better prepared than Merton鈥檚.