Popular Science in the Victorian Periodical

Abstract

Although the Victorian age 'portrayed itself through its journals and popular press, cultural and social historians largely ignored the scientific press until after the Second World War. Indeed, it was not until the publication in 1957 of Alvar Ellegard's monograph, The Readership of the Periodical Press in Mid-Victorian Britain , and Derek Price's chapter on the exponential growth of science journals, in Little Science, Big Science (1963), that historians of science awoke to the significance of Victorian periodicals.1 Literary and cultural historians were quicker off the mark, helped by the launch of the interdisciplinary periodical Victorian Studies in 1957, and the appearance of the first volume of Walter Houghton's magisterial Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals in the same year. It was Michael Wolff, as editor of Victorian Studies, who spawned the Victorian Periodicals Newsletter in January 1968. This led to the formation of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, which stimulated the work of Wolff, Walter Houghton, Scott Bennett, John North, Barbara Schmidt, and Joel Wiener in the United States of America, and of Lionel Madden, Diana Dixon, and Joanne Shattock at the Victorian Studies Centre in Leicester. Despite the inter-disciplinarity of this research, few historians of science ventured into Wolffs 'golden stream' of periodicals until after