The outgoing governor of the Bank of England is considering dropping Charles Darwin from the £10 banknote and replacing him with Jane Austen. While I am not a UK citizen, I am nevertheless, mildly perturbed at the notion of a romance novelist replacing a distinguished scientist on a banknote. A better choice would be Rosalind Franklin or Dorothy Hodgkin.
My shields are up so Liberal Arts majors may flame away. 
What, the bloody Queen isn’t enough of a lady? 
Afraid I’m with you, though at least I know who Jane Austen is. Of the other folks on the UK notes, I know only Adam Smith and James Watt.
I’ve no problem with a writer being on a banknote. Actually, why do we have people on notes anyway? We could have quotations, sonnets or works of art. Or for that matter, equations, chemical models and circuit boards.
They really should let me design them. I’d start by taking the queen off.
Or buildings. The EURO designers had the quandry of what to show without upsetting various member nations, so they had the idea of depicting generic architectural styles, which was a pretty neat solution.
:eek:
Though Austen’s stories have romance in them, she is more than a “romance novelist”. She was an innovator of literature who sought to break away from the overhanded tragic gothic heroine storylines in favor of smart, independent-minded main characters.
Both writers and scientists are worthy of being on banknotes.
Dickens was on the 10-pound note at one time: http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/Pages/about/withdrawn_notes.aspx
So I don’t see why Austen shouldn’t be.
Well, if you folks over in the UK aren’t using Darwin, can we borrow him for a bit? Andrew Jackson has no business being on money in the first place, so I’d be all for replacing him w/ Darwin to tweak the creationists.
No-one is stopping you, but as America can’t even get itself together enough to drop the $1 bill for a coin, I do not see it happening anytime soon…or ever. The USA will probably collapse into complete ungovernability long before anything like that happens.
I have a science degree and have published in scientific journals, and I am much perturbed by your perturbation. This sort of narrow-mindedness does not reflect at all well on on scientists or their cheerleaders.
I suspect you are are not an actual scientist. Actual scientists are usually smart enough to know that science is not the only valuable field of human endeavor.
Charles Darwin vs. heaving breasts. I know which one I’d pick.
They used to be abstract designs or allegorical figures. Actual persons is a fairly recent innovation.
I ardently hope that whoever might replace Darwin on our £10 notes here in Britain, it won’t be Jane Austen. She is my all-time un-favourite classic author – I find her novels drive-me-mad unreadable; and I have tried get into them. If she were to come to feature on our “tenners”, I’d feel like an impassioned creationist might feel about Darwin’s picture on the notes; would be moved to – as far as possible – boycott them, and carry on all my cash dealings in lower and higher denominations.
I feel that in the main, over the years and decades we have had – through quite frequent replacements – an admirably eclectic selection of famous Brits depicted on our banknotes: there have been military types, writers, musicians, scientists, do-gooders, economists, financiers…
I wish we did the same in Canada. We’ve had the same collection of former Prime Ministers, plus the Queen, for decades, though multiple note redesigns.
We haven’t had a prime minister ever on any Australian bank note. The only politicians that we’ve had were Henry Parkes (premier of New South Wales and “father of federation”) and Edith Cowan (first woman elected to any Australian parliament). Since decimal currency came in 1966, we’ve had a very diverse range of people on our currency.
OK, so who might be a better choice? I’d suggest:
Emmeline Pankhurst
Ada Lovelace
Edith Cavell
Grace Darling
Lady Godiva would be my choice.
Is Dame Judy Dench eligible, or do you have to be dead first?
I vote for Helen Mirren.
Who would want prime ministers when you have Dame Edna?
The obvious problem with all those suggestions is that none of them is obvious. For the lower denomination notes, the Bank of England quite sensibly has the policy that the person should be recognisable - both as a name and as an image. Some of those names (Franklin, Hodgkin, Lovelace) are largely unknown to the general public, some of the others (Cavell, Darling) are remembered as names without most people really knowing what it was that they were ever famous for and none of them could be picked out by most people in a police line-up.
Nor is it the case that putting them on a banknote would change that. The obvious exception to the recognisable rule is Elizabeth Fry. But she remains largely unknown, despite currently being on the £5 note! I once found myself at the back of a supermarket queue in which everyone ahead of me was chatting about this, because none of them had the faintest idea who she was or what she had done.
Whatever else can be said about her, Austen is at least recognisable, in both senses.
In the case of Franklin and Hodgkin, there would be two further issues. One is that they are too recent. Churchill will be the first from the mid-twentieth century. The other is that the first mid-twentieth century scientist to feature will almost certainly be Turing. His name is the one that now always comes up in these discussions, so much so that Churchill is probably the only mid-twentieth century figure the Bank of England could have chosen for the new £5 note instead of him without there being a huge fuss.