The article offers some reflections on the main findings of the 'Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical' (SciPer) project, as well as giving an overview of the growing field of interdisciplinary scholarship in this area. It argues that the periodical press, as the dominant form of cultural circulation in the period, provides perhaps the most important source for understanding the cultural roles of science in nineteenth-century Britain. It also notes how attention to diverse periodical reading audiences, including radicals, women and children, can contribute to recent historiographical work on science popularisation and science in popular culture. The article concludes by enumerating the incentives for combining the study of periodicals as a genre in their own right with methodologically informed research into nineteenth-century science, and suggests that this is an attractive way forward for both literary scholars and historians of science.
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