Women took part in a variety of popular and popularly promoted activities relating to the sciences and natural history during the early nineteenth century, and their work as readers, writers, teachers, collectors, and artists has been widely documented. They learned about these areas of knowledge through cultural media such as instructional books, expository poetry, magazine essays, and public lectures, and by hand-on work. Did women themselves label these activities as "popular science"? Did they construe what they were doing as sociability, or recreation, or moral or intellectual responsibility to themselves or others, or earnest contributions to knowledge? To what extent did gender norms of that time or of particular social groups define the activities as "science" or "popular science," and how did women's engagement itself come to play a part in articulating these differences?
Because the category of "popular science" as understood later on did not necessarily map onto women's experiences of science during the decades 1800-30, my paper will highlight early nineteenth-century accounts about women in science, and then consider how gender became part of the history of delineating "popular science" from "science." The paper will begin with an overview of practices of women in relation to the sciences and natural history. It will focus next on representations of these activities in print media, 1800-30. Then it will turn to accounts of actual experiences by women in the culture of science during those decades. The principal resources for this analysis will be the genre of introductory natural history books for women, children, and general readers; the multi-vocal content of several women's magazines, including "The Moral Zoologist," an illustrated series that ran in The Lady's Magazine , 1800-05; and life-writing by the plant physiologist Agnes Ibbetson from the years 1809-22.
Phrenology is a particularly useful case for studying how a science could become widespread in 19th-century Britain. Unlike many other sciences, phrenology had a very distinct beginning in Britain when J.G. Spurzheim arrived in 1814. Additionally, we can recognise phrenological elements and themes relatively easily wherever they later appeared. An interesting question, therefore, is how did the phrenological activity of one man (Spurzheim) lead to the phrenology phenomena of the 1830s which included scores of phrenological societies, periodicals, books, pamphlets, busts and other artefacts, and widespread belief in and knowledge of phrenology? Clearly 'phrenology' somehow spread from Spurzheim to others in Britain. Hence I will discuss the cultural changes we might call the dissemination or diffusion of phrenology from 1814-1830s through lecture tours.
The word 'diffusion' is often considered unfashionable in the history of science because it evokes a sense of an old-fashioned naïve scheme of scientific knowledge being spread solely by the actions of disseminators thereby overlooking the agency of the majority of people involved in the process- the public. (Cooter & Pumfrey, 'Separate spheres and public places', History of Science, 1994) Secondly, the word diffusion is often associated with outmoded notions of popularization in the sense of vulgarization. (Hilgartner, 'The dominant view of popularization', Social studies of science, 1990) In this sense diffusion was used to reinforce belief in proper scientific knowledge increasingly distanced from the degraded forms spread about through popularization.
Since we are now alert to these dangers, I think diffusionist thinking can be of more use than harm. Any diffusionist account today would have to rely on the fact that the diffusion of knowledge can only be an active and not a passive process. It is a truism that knowledge is not externally inserted into someone's head but actively created there. Such knowledge formation is by definition an active creation. (Boyer, The naturalness of religious ideas. 1994)
We should not limit our conceptions of lecture tours only to the lectures themselves. The occasion of lectures inspired local printed reviews and handbills and increased sales of phrenological items such as busts and prints. In most cases the lecturer was the guest of local physicians or converts and many personal contacts were made before and after the lectures themselves. These more intimate interactions often resulted in more profound effects or influences (as in the conversion of George Combe.) The history of phrenology as well as the findings of modern marketing and innovation diffusion studies (e.g. Rogers, Diffusion of innovations. 1995) strongly suggest that knowledge of phrenology was spread primarily through personal contacts in addition to and with the aid of phrenological artefacts (including texts).
Thus the meaning of public lectures for us as historians should not be limited to the oral delivery of a speech by an individual to a group but should be seen as an occasion for increased thought and talk about a science over a period of several days before and after the actual lectures. Individuals who experienced the talk and array of artefacts displayed at lectures were more likely to be either converted or to reject phrenology. Some of those who attended lectures were inspired by the experience to form local phrenological societies or to tell others about phrenology. Most phrenological societies appeared in the wakes of the main phrenological lecturers and were joined by a core of believers converted by the lecturer. Those who were converted by itinerant lecturers sometimes became lecturers themselves (like Combe or D.G. Goyder) and in turn created further occasion for inciting interest in and discussion of the science.
This mode of diffusion is essentially a wave of effects model (as in Renfrew's Archaeology and language: the puzzle of Indo-European origins 1987). The wave of effects model of diffusion is promising because it requires only that one individual's behaviour modifies others in some way- in affecting their ideas about the relationship between brain and mind for example. Thus we would expect to find phrenologically inspired behaviour and artefacts spreading through personal contacts through communities linked via channels of social interaction. A more specific look at the peripatetic lecturing of phrenologists reveals such a wave of effects as phrenology spread outward from Spurzheim- all the while changing as it passed through the hands, or rather heads, of successive people.
The proliferation of reading audiences which occurred in Britain during the first quarter of the nineteenth century radically altered the social and cultural context of the sciences in the period. In particular, as commercial publishers sought to take advantage of the unprecedented demand for cheap print revealed by the success of radical working-class publications like Cobbett's Political Register , they developed new genres of publication which proffered self-consciously 'popular' science--distinct from earlier genres of learned, polite, or practical science, and from devotional and theological works. This development occurred in tandem with the specialization and breakdown of the traditional learned forum of the bourgeois monthly miscellanies. As new, professional, and self-consciously 'literary' magazines (e.g. Blackwood's , New Monthly , London ) increasingly excluded traditional scientific contributions, so new commercial science magazines rapidly increased in the years after 1815. This paper examines the rise of 'popular science' as an attempt to shape and exploit the shifting marketplace for print in this volatile period.
The first part of the paper considers the changing pattern of scientific publishing, drawing on bibliometric data to outline the rise of new genres of popular science publishing in both books and periodicals, comparing these with more established genres. I also examine the role of particular key publishers and authors in developing these new forms of publication, and analyse in detail the varied characteristics of such works. The second part considers the reactions of certain key interest groups to these new commercial publications, notably the evangelicals and 'Broughamites' who in divergent ways were concerned by the emergence of new forms of cheap literature. I examine the attempts of these groups to intervene in the literary marketplace, focusing on the importance of their distinctive distribution networks in distinguishing different reading audiences for the sciences.
One branch of the natural sciences that was extremely 'popular' in the nineteenth century is natural history. People from all ranks of society participated directly in collecting, identifying and preserving specimens. An even wider audience encountered objects of natural-historical interest during visits to collections housed in public museums and private country houses. Natural history collections are often considered from the collector's point of view, in terms of practices of specimen acquisition, exchange, classification and so on. However, if we are really to get to grips with the role of collections as instruments of popular science, it is essential also to understand how they were interpreted by the people who went to see them. In this paper I tackle just this issue. Working from firsthand visiting accounts, I reconstruct the experiences of country-house visitors, including visitors to Walton Hall, home of the traveller naturalist Charles Waterton (1782-1865). I focus on the early decades of the nineteenth century as these witnessed a rapid expansion of visiting opportunities.
Collected natural history objects did not just speak for themselves. For example, the spirit in which a visit was undertaken—as a gentlemanly social or professional visit, as one checkpoint amongst many on the itinerary of a larger picturesque or antiquarian tour, as an exercise self-improvement—profoundly shaped each visitor's preconceptions about what he or she ought to experience. In addition, visitors were very often guided—intellectually and geographically—through collections by guidebooks, catalogues, labels, human guides, and so on. Furthermore, particular collections, and indeed collectors, would often be already known to visitors through their reputations--propagated in periodicals, engravings, memoirs, and so on. Visits to natural history museums thus provided opportunities for people to form their own collections: collections of experiences constituted in response to diverse textual, pictorial, oral and three-dimensional sources. An understanding of how collected natural history objects were actively appropriated by their audiences will provide a window onto the more general ways in which people made sense of science in the nineteenth century.
Making science public for the Victorians was a matter of performance. Mid-Victorian exhibitions were places where science and showmanship crossed paths. Audiences thronged there to witness the latest technological and philosophical marvels. Making science and its products visible, pulling in the crowds and amazing them with nature's wonders was part and parcel of the business of making science and its products real to its audiences. From the elegant lecture theatres of august establishments like the Royal Institution, to popular Galleries of Practical Science and Halls of Science, exhibitionism was the order of the day. Tracing the histories of these displays and the cultures that sustained them can therefore tell us a great deal, not only about changes in Victorian science but about the ways in which the Victorians went about making sense of the rapidly changing world about them too. Exhibitions mattered because they made science's place in consumer culture materially explicit. Visitors were taught to see scientific productions and performances as commodities too. To make sense of this culture of display therefore, we need to think more about the material technology that underpinned these performances and the ways in which audiences responded to the experience. This will help answer some deceptively simple questions: what did Victorians see at exhibitions and how did they see them?
In this paper I want to answer these questions by pursuing the suggestion that technologies of display were themselves objects of display as well for scientific performers and their audiences alike. Technologies like magic lanterns or oxy-hydrogen microscopes were not just means to an end. They were an important element of what was being put on show. Scientific performers put considerable effort into the production of novel and distinctive demonstrations, in part at least because one of the things they were demonstrating was their own ingenuity and skill as performers. E. M. Clarke's Directions for using Philosophical Apparatus (1842), for example, provides ample illustration of the efforts devoted to spectacular performances. The Royal Polytechnic Institute's giant induction coil is another example of the considerable resources devoted to such things. Looking at this material culture can tell us about both the production and the consumption of scientific display - about the labour and resources that went into successful performances and the ways in which audiences understood those experiences. This in turn can tell us more about the place and significance of scientific technologies of display in the context of broader Victorian popular and consumer culture.
The town of Manchester offers the historian an important site for the exploration of the definitions of popular science in mid-nineteenth-century England. Not only did Manchester observe itself but, as the centre of the industrial north, it was also closely observed by the whole country. Tensions between the social classes that made up the rapidly expanding population of the town as well as the emergence of a local middle-class liberal elite can fruitfully be investigated in relation to science as the perceived emblem of progress - economic and moral. Against a backdrop of Chartist unrest and the rise of the Anti-Corn-Law League (the only effective challenge to Westminster in this period), the promotion of sites of popular science and the anticipated audience experience was made unusually explicit. I shall investigate the aims behind the provision of such sites (ranging from Mechanics' Institutes, museums, public parks and field clubs to the home and the church), and, as far as possible, the response of audiences to them. Comparison with other cities will establish the potential of Manchester as an important site in itself, thus making it possible to produce generalisations concerning the ways in which class and gender determined how "popular" science was encountered, experienced and defined in the mid-nineteenth century.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, there was a growing number of ways in which Victorians could experience the sciences in the flesh, by visiting zoos, exhibitions, and museums. Nevertheless, print remained an important medium for the communication of the sciences, particularly as industrial technologies made printed matter cheaper, more accessible and more highly illustrated than ever before. In this paper, I will examine the relationship between reading printed accounts and visiting actual collections, displays or sites. Part of this relationship has already been examined from the point of view of guide books, where publications were intended to enhance the visiting experience. In this paper, I intend to focus on works which are not explicitly guide books and are not linked to specific sites, but which nevertheless attempt to imitate the experience the reader would have if they actually saw the animals or geological features for themselves.
Among the works I shall examine are Thomas Milner's Gallery of Nature: or, pictorial and descriptive tour through creation (1846), and William Martin's Pictorial Museum of Animated Nature (1848-9). As their titles suggest, both made good use of wood engravings, a method of illustration which made it possible to incorporate pictures into the text cheaply, and was suitable for use with steam-printing machines. Both titles make explicit reference to the attempt to mimic the experience of visiting a museum, or touring the natural world, but it is striking that their authors set out to achieve this aim in different ways. The Gallery is primarily a descriptive narrative, with copious illustrations, while the Pictorial Museum is a collection of images of animals, with accompanying descriptions. One mimics the experience of being shown around by a learned friend, while the other represents the lone visitor to a museum faced with numerous, but sparsely labelled, exhibits. These two works thus represent quite different attitudes to the visiting experience. They also convey differing notions of the role of the display, and the input expected from the visitor/reader.
Reading might initially seem like a quite different experience to actually visiting a collection, but improvements in illustration techniques helped to reduce that difference. The willingness of readers to read extended passages of text - in contrast to many museum visitors - meant that the printed page would appear to have had an advantage over collections for the purposes of popularisation. Nonetheless, the tensions visible in museums and their kin between education and entertainment also appeared in the print versions of those experiences.
The expansion of cheap print is usually assumed to be fundamental to the creation of popular science during the nineteenth century. I want to argue, however, that the industrial revolution in communication profoundly challenged existing forms of popular science that were predominately oral. My focus will be on the aristocracy, high gentry, traditional professions, and other elite social groups in Britain (and especially in London) for whom science had been communicated primarily through the spoken word. From their perspective, certain knowledge was intimate knowledge, grounded in private conversation, verbal discussions at meetings, lectures by celebrated men, and bedside medical consultations.
These forums for communication had been variously supplemented and informed by publication from the Renaissance onwards; but in the nineteenth century, and especially from the 1830s and 1840s, the relation between oral and print culture began to undergo dramatic changes within the social elite. By the 1860s, to be a man of science characteristically meant fulfilling Michael Faraday's famous dictum "work, finish, publish"; to display specialist knowledge at parties was condemned as "talking shop" and thus as inappropriate as discussing business.
I will sketch these changes, drawing especially on recent work on the history of scientific societies, clubs, lectures, and soirees. The essay will go on to suggest that underlining the centrality of an oral culture of knowledge among elite audiences allows us to understand features in patterns of publication among well known men of science, from the botanist Joseph Banks and the chemist Humphry Davy to such characteristic mid-Victorian authors such as Thomas Henry Huxley and John Tyndall.
One of the Victorian natural history fads was the aquarium, which became immensely popular during the 1850s. Its development rested upon a series of discoveries and ideologies: the chemical discovery of for example oxygen, the technological discovery of the closely glazed, or Wardian, case and the subsequent reduce of taxes on plate glass, philosophical notions of natural theology and a nature in perfect balance, the earlier interest in sea-side life boosted by excursions at various holiday resorts and the development of the microscope.
Initially the aquarium interest was primarily a domestic one with many books advising the readers on how to build a parlour aquarium but as aquariums move on this interest was also implemented on a greater scale. The Zoological Society of London built in 1853 the first public aquarium in the Zoological Gardens (the fish-house), which became very popular during its first years. Others soon followed: Paris in 1860, P.T. Barnum's in New York from 1865, Hamburg in 1869, Crystal Palace (Sydenham) in 1872 and, perhaps most famous, Brighton, also in 1872.
However, according to Lynn Barber, when the rush of public aquariums started in the 1870s they were not primarily built for instructive amusement but for mere amusement. The aquarium exhibits were often built parallel to theatres, concert halls and the like. Very early on there was ethnographic and "freak" shows at these aquariums that likely removed any kind of instructive value the public aquariums might be said to have had. However, the exception seems to be the Zoological Society Fish-House which at least during the 1850s was hailed as an equally instructive amusement as the Zoological Gardens.
This paper aims to investigate this presumed non-instructiveness of public aquariums as opposed to primarily zoological gardens, which, at least during the 1850s, were hailed as pinnacles of instructive amusement. This will mainly be done through investigating the media's reactions (for example ILN , The Times and Nature ) to the public aquariums (Crystal Palace and Brighton) and the aquariums' own guidebooks. How are the aquariums perceived in these publications? Are events at these establishments reported in the same way as those in the zoological gardens? And do these reports make specific reference to the instructiveness of these institutions? It would here be of interest to compare these reports to the ones concerning the early Surrey Zoological Gardens, an early rival to London zoo, which drew huge crowds with fire-works and balloon ascents alongside with the animals.
One of the most interesting things about the nineteenth century aquarium is that it enabled Victorians to observe a piece of (hopefully) functioning nature and not just a pair of lions or a single chimp in a concrete cage. The aquarium, especially the notion about an aquarium in perfect balance, made it possible to view a piece of complete nature. What effect did the aquariums have on the Victorian appreciation for and view of nature? Did what they saw in the aquarium (predation, death and decay) in any way damage the notion of a "perfect" nature? Is it possible that the aquarium even fostered an early appreciation of ecology? The nineteenth century zoological gardens seldom offered the opportunity to see several wild animals in the same exhibit, at least nit until Hagenbeck's panorama.
'Miserable relics called specimens confront you everywhere', complained a Sheffield student of his college's biological (or 'diabolical') museum in 1897, 'Standing at the door you may observe a pot full of deceased & diseased frogs [and] in a large glass case to the left you see bones of many defunct animals, all neatly arranged with an eye for effect.' Late nineteenth-century Britain was littered with collections of natural objects on display, from those within the grand architecture of city-centre museums, to the commercial museums displaying oddities for sixpence, to teaching cabinets in the backrooms of schools. A large public museum could see hundreds of thousands of visitors pass through its doors in a year; a medical school collection might be used to train generations of surgeons. And yet while historians of science and medicine have paid careful attention to the readers of scientific texts, visitors to museums remain largely silent. This paper will begin to engage with museum audiences in the late nineteenth century by asking, who visited these collections? How did they react? And what role did curators play in their experience?
The late nineteenth century is a noteworthy period to assess the changing audiences for museums; distracted by the emergence of the laboratory as a site for biomedical science, historians of science and medicine have neglected the study of other sites in this era. Just as municipal museums were attracting visitors from across the social spectrum on an unprecedented scale, so medical schools and the new university colleges were closing the doors of their museums, seeking to cleanse them of their associations with the circus and fair, and attempting to construct a more élite audience from the ranks of students and professional clinicians and scientists. The first task of this paper will therefore be to chart the changing audience constituencies over the course of the Victorian era. The second will be a synchronic comparison of different museum types in the late century, using guidebooks, reports and visitor responses to construct accounts of the experience of museum visiting.
The third point of analysis will engage with those who owned and ran collections. Just as museum audiences have been overlooked in the consumption of popular science, so curators have been overlooked as its producers. How did the changing status and role of the curator - from janitor to expert professional - impact upon a visit to the museum? Just as texts were read and used in ways unimagined by their authors, however, so there were distinct disparities between curator's intentions and visitors' responses to collections and displays. I will argue that although museums professionals, by imposing didactic display methods and audience discipline, sought to wrench their collections from their origins as exotic freak shows, the experience of visiting such collections in both the early and late century (and beyond) was always centred around wonder and horror, a fascination with the exotic - possibly educational, certainly entertaining.
Based on a series of science lectures given in Manchester, a nine volume set, titled Science Lectures for the People , was published from 1867 to 1880. The publication of these lectures marked the growing success of a medium for communicating science to the Victorian public. Building a career as a popularizer of science only became financially viable from about the middle of the nineteenth century, when a healthy market for books and essays aimed at a mass reading audience was established. The more successful popularizers often supplemented their income by establishing a reputation for themselves as gifted lecturers who could weave stories about nature that fascinated large crowds. Richard Proctor, J. G. Wood, and Robert Ball were among the most well-known popular science lecturers. Their frequent trips on the lecture circuit were an important component of their careers as poplarizers of science.
Focussing on Proctor, Wood, and Ball, and their audiences, this paper will analyse lecturing as a site for popular science from 1860-1900. Drawing on accounts in local newspapers and other contemporary sources, I will examine the strategies adopted by popularizers in their attempts to make science accessible to their audiences, including their narrative style and their use of visual images. I will explore the various technologies used in displaying visual images. In discussing the most important of these technologies, the magic lantern, I will touch on the types of slides used by lecturers, the companies who produced them (especially Newton & Co., Fleet St., London), and one of the journals devoted to this technology of display, The Optical Magic Lantern Journal and Photographic Enlarger: A Magazine of Popular Science for the Lecture-room and the Domestic Circle . In addition, I will consider the relationship between lectures and popular science as conveyed in print culture, dealing with the way that popularizers used one medium to enhance their reputations in the other medium. I will also raise the issue of why so few women were involved in popular science lecturing, in marked contrast to the large number of women who wrote popular science books. Finally, I will discuss the experiences of the audience when they encountered this form of popular science.
The 1880s and 1890s saw an enormous growth of both expert and 'popular' literature on the new electrical technologies of lighting, telephony and (latterly) wireless. As recent scholarship on lay audiences for science publishing has emphasized, readers of popular literature on such prima facie technical subjects were by no means passive and uncritical recipients of expert accounts. For the case of electricity this is not just because readers of popular presentations, textbooks, and articles wrote, speculated and experimented on the subject for themselves. Readers on electricity also had important stakes of their own in deciding whether or not to assimilate this mysteriously invisible yet powerful agent into their daily household life. These stakes ranged as widely as health, safety, shareholdings, domestic economy, household maintenance and social success, and informed both the reading and the writing of much electrical literature. Accordingly, much literature was addressed to meet public concerns on these points, explaining what electricity could do and with what levels of danger, cost, luxury and fashionability while drawing a discreet silence over expert embarrassment at not being able to explain to puzzled readers what electricity actually was.
The first theme in popular literature I consider in this paper is electricity as a commodity of the glamorous upper classes and gas as the default commodity for the less ambitious 'middling types'. As the electrical industry had shrewdly ensured that Lord & Lady Churchill and Lord Salisbury as well as Queen Victoria were prominent consumers of electric lighting, readers on certain popular treatments of the subject were addressed as potential consumers of an exciting new technological luxury. For example, Charlotte Robinson's column in Queen, the royal court newspaper, showed genteel lady readers how, if properly installed, electricity could render their homes into fit for social encounters with the most fashionable élites. The gas lobby, produced a counter literature of gossipy articles and newspaper snippets that highlighted social fiascos resulting from failed electric lighting systems which left dinner hosts embarrassed, guests in confused darkness and chaperones in a state of moral alarm. Gas-oriented book writers in the 1880s such as the gas appliance manufacturer William Sugg and his daughter Jenny emphasized by contrast the homely and reliable nature of gas as the ideal (if not very sophisticated) medium for cooking, lighting and heating in middle class homes. Given that electricity remained an elite commodity for decades thereafter, and gas remained the preferred medium of cooking for even longer, the effectiveness of their popularizing in persuading householders to keep consuming gas should not be underestimated.
My second, countervailing, theme is the rival representations of both electric lighting and its more established gas counterpart as posing hazards to health and risks to property. Writers sympathetic to the gas industry used book and journal publications to alarm householders about the dangers of fire and electrocution posed by domestic electricity, alluding to the spectacular destructiveness witnessed in the public displays discussed by Morus in Frankenstein's Children. Defenders of electricity supply used the same media as well as standard textbooks to emphasize the unsanitary, polluting and corrosive qualities of gas light, as well as the dreadful smell and explosive tendencies to which gas was infamously prone. The gendered authorship (and presumed readership) of such literature is revealed in the prevalence of men in discussing the fire risks posed by electrical installations and the greater prevalence of women in discussing the issues of home hygiene and cleanliness posed by the rival forms of illumination. I argue, however, that the complex representation of electrical lighting as a product of both engineering modernity and domestic management blurred readers' and writers' expectations of the gendered nature of their audience.
The connection I propose between these two themes is that the popular strategy of electrical writers in glamorizing their subject as an aesthetic domestic phenomenon proved to be an effective means of overcoming householders' epistemological and moral anxieties concerning the new illuminant vis-à-vis gas. While electrical popularists could not tell their otherwise well-informed readers what electricity was, nor persuade them that is was absolutely safe or economical to use in the home, they could at least use enticing narratives of domestic luxury and comfort to temporarily distract their audiences from such troubling matters.