:Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences;The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802–1856

Abstract

Bernard Lightman and Ralph O'Connor both provide major contributions to the study of popular science in nineteenth-century Britain. Covering opposite halves of the century, the two books are read profitably together. Both further undermine the adequacy of the “diffusion” model of popularization, demonstrating that popular science did not passively translate specialist knowledge for mass audiences. Both stress the importance of literary and visual culture, whether polite or popular, in creating appealing narratives of nature for new audiences. Both position popular science writing in relation to the world of publishing and print culture. Lightman offers by far the fullest and most comprehensive account of the popularization of science in Britain during the second half of the nineteenth century yet to be undertaken, and his study revises our understanding of Victorian popular science in significant ways. Examining in considerable depth more than thirty of the period's most prolific and influential popularizers, many of whom have received little or no prior attention from historians, Lightman compellingly demonstrates that the emergence of the professional scientist created a golden age of popularization, as publishers eagerly sought out writers able to communicate with the broader audience made accessible by revolutions in print culture. Not practitioners themselves, many of these popularizers resisted in various ways the agendas and authority of the scientific elite, particularly those like Thomas Henry Huxley who were claiming for professional scientists the sole right to speak for and about science to the public. Indeed, in a radical and convincing re-interpretation, Lightman argues that Huxley, often regarded as the period's greatest popularizer, was reluctantly driven into the field by the success of popularizers whose motives were at odds with his own, was compelled to adopt many of the same narrative and rhetorical strategies he decried in these popularizers, and was successful in displacing them only to a limited degree.