The Shifting Ground of Nature: Establishing an Organ of Scientific Communication in Britain, 1869–1900

Abstract

INTRODUCTIONIn the early months of 1869, a British astronomer and government clerk named Norman Lockyer (1836-1920) began asking his friends and colleagues to write articles he could publish in a new weekly scientific periodical.1 The new publication was not, Lockyer emphasized, a specialized scientific journal. Although he was soliciting contributions from Britain's most famous men of science and intended to print abstracts of technical papers and reports from foreign scientific societies, the journal was not affiliated with any scientific society and the audience for the new magazine was not solely other men of science. Rather, the commercial London publishing house Macmillan & Company was printing Lockyer's weekly, and both Lockyer and the Macmillans hoped the new publication would be read by educated laymen of all trades. Most of the men of science Lockyer consulted about his undertaking had at best modest expectations for the new publication. Lockyer's acquaintance Joseph Hooker, an eminent botanist and the director of Kew Gardens, pessimistically responded to the project by telling Alexander Macmillan, By all means make public my good will to the Lockyer periodical . . . [but] the failure of scientific periodicals patronized by men of mark have been dismal. I do not see how a really scientific man can find time to conduct a periodical scientifically, or brains to go over the mass of trash.2Today, Lockyer's magazine, Nature, is still published, and most would call it an unparalleled success - although not the kind of success its editor had initially envisioned. Modern readers know Nature as perhaps the most prestigious scientific journal in the world, a publication that scientists from every country in the world read, and where many hope to publish their work. Nature was the journal where James Chadwick announced the discovery of the neutron, Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch revealed their 'liquid drop' model of nuclear fission, and James Watson and Francis Crick described the structure of DNA.3 But Nature's, significance is not limited to the famous papers published in its pages. Before Nature became an international indicator of scientific prestige, it rose to prominence as a site where British men of science negotiated the rules and boundaries of their community during a time when the identity of the 'man of science' was undergoing tremendous shifts in Great Britain. In the 1870s and 1880s, the generation of British men of science born after 1840 adopted Nature as a venue for publicizing their forthcoming papers and, most importantly, as their preferred forum for debating the maj or scientific questions of the day, shifting scientific discussions away from the general-interest literary periodicals their predecessors and mentors had used.Recently there has been a great deal of excellent scholarship on scientific periodi- cals and the periodical press more generally in Victorian England.4 Of particular note is the Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical project jointly organized by the Universities of Leeds and Sheffield, which catalogued and analysed representations of science, technology, and medicine in the general periodical press between 1800 and 1900 in Great Britain. However, the existing scholarship on scientific periodicals has tended to focus on serials with a general or 'popular' readership and few historians have examined scientific writing intended for an audience of scientists or considered the sub-structure of the world of specialist periodicals. Historians of science tend to read specialist journals as historical sources rather than as historical phenomena in their own right; we often take the existence of scientific journals for granted, rather than view them as objects whose existence requires explanation.As a result, less scholarly attention has been devoted to either the development of specialist journals in general or to the contents of particular journals.5 There has been some influential scholarship devoted to the study of modern scientific commu- nication, including studies of journal citation patterns,6 and some scholarly attention has been focused on changes in the language of the scientific article. …