Scientific publishing and the reading of science in nineteenth-century Britain: a historiographical survey and guide to sources

Abstract

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...

Phases of physics in J. D. Forbes’ Dissertation Sixth for the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1856)

“…In Britain the potential readership grew as literacy rose and publication costs came down, but also as public appetite for "improvement" literature increased. 32 In Scotland, the Encyclopaedia Britannica was the second most borrowed title from the Leightonian Library at Dunblane, being checked out 48 times between 1780 and 1833. Its borrowers included ministers, writers, surgeons and landed gentlemen.…”

Producing Spatial Knowledge: Map Making in Edinburgh, c.1880–c.1920

“…Furthermore, the role of the publisher -as well as other agents discussed in the previous section -takes on a formative role in the context of decisions about which work to publish and how to present it. 112 The reader, too, has the capacity to interpret knowledge in individual ways. Fixity of meaning cannot be established simply through printing and mass-production.…”

Popular Science as a Means of Emotional Engagement with the Scientific Community

“…However, the division has not always been there, and science as a social category has not always been regarded as a domain of specialized knowledge inaccessible to average citizens. Current research on popularization of science often cites examples of active public involvement in the 18 th and the first half of the 19 th centuries, when sciences were accessible to lay persons and, in fact, attracted many amateurs who ended up making scientific contributions (see for example, Bensaude-Vincent, 2001;Lightman, 2000;Topham 2000). Bensaude-Vincent (2001: 102) calls them "enlightened amateurs."…”