Victorian popularizers of science: designing nature for new audiences

Abstract

Victorian Popularizers of Science focuses on the journalists and writers who wrote about science for a general audience in the second half of the nineteenth century. Bernard Lightman examines more than thirty of the most prolific and influential popularizers of the day, investigating how they communicated with their audience. By focusing on a forgotten coterie of science writers, Lightman offers new insights into the role of women in scientific inquiry, the market for scientific knowledge, tensions between religion and science, and the complexities of scientific authority in nineteenth-century Britain.