As is widely known, the Bridgewater Treatises on the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God as Manifested in the Creation (1833-36) were commissioned in accordance with a munificent bequest of the eighth Earl of Bridgewater, the Rev. Francis Henry Egerton (1756-1829), and written by seven leading men of science, together with one prominent theological commentator. 1 Less widely appreciated is the extent to which the Bridgewater Treatises rank among the scientific best-sellers of the early nineteenth century. Their varied blend of natural theology and popular science attracted extraordinary contemporary interest and 'celebrity', resulting in unprecedented sales and widespread reviewing. 2 Much read by the landed, mercantile and professional classes, the success of the series 'encouraged other competitors into the field', 3 most notably Charles
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Great have been the recent revolutions in the book trade. Cheapness, combined with elegance, is the universal order of the day, and historians, poets, novelists, who used to come out in two guinea quartos, or fifteen shilling octavos, or even twelve shilling duodecimos, are now compressed into little five shilling volumes, each of which often contains nearly twice as much as was formerly sold for the same sum. Congregational Magazine (1837) 2It is now generally accepted that both the conception and practices of natural enquiry 1 in the Western tradition underwent a series of profound developments in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century-developments which have been variously characterized as a 'second scientific revolution' and, much more tellingly, as the 'invention of science '. 3 As several authors have argued, moreover, a crucial aspect of this change consisted in the distinctive audience relations of the new sciences. While eighteenth-century natural philosophy was distinguished by an audience relation in which, as William Whewell put it, 'a large and popular circle of spectators and amateurs [felt] themselves nearly upon a level, in the value of their trials and speculations, with more profound thinkers', the science which was invented in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was, as Simon Schaffer has argued, marked by the 'emergence of disciplined, trained cadres of research scientists' clearly distinguished from a wider, exoteric public. 4 Similarly, Jan Golinski argues that the 'emergence of new instrumentation and a more consolidated social structure for the specialist community' for early nineteenth-century chemistry was intimately connected with the transformation in the role of its public audience to a condition of relative passivity. 5 These moves were underpinned by crucial epistemological and rhetorical shifts-from a logic of discovery, theoretically open to all, to a more restrictive notion of discovery as the preserve of scientific 'genius', and from an open-ended philosophy of 'experience' to a far more restrictive notion of disciplined 'expertise'. Both of these moves were intended to do boundary work, restricting the community active in creating and validating scientific knowledge, and producing a passive public. 6 Intimately connected with these changes was the creation of the familiar diffusionist notion of 'popularization' in which scientific ideas are viewed as being communicated in a basically linear process from the (expert) context of discovery and validation to the (lay) context of passive public consumption. 7 It is no coincidence that this sense of the verb 'to 2 popularize' was developed in English at just the same time that the word 'scientist' was invented to describe the new experts who sought to develop such an audience relation. 8 Indeed, it is now increasingly recognized both that this notion of popularization was a crucial element in the self-fashioning of the emergent scientists of nineteenth-century Britain, and that it continues to do imp...
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