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  • “Evanescent Impressions”: Public Lectures and the Popularization of Science in Ireland, 1770–1860
  • Enda Leaney (bio)

“If there be any subject more than another which should engage the public mind, it is the diffusion of scientific knowledge among the people.”1

“There is no more delightful mode, and at the same time more useful, of communicating and receiving instruction than through the medium of lectures in clear and proper language.”2

“The system of public lectures requires no eulogium from me; it has the approval of the most distinguished men in Europe; and it was the system of Athens when her schools were famous all over the world.”3

The public lecture was foundational in creating an audience for science in nineteenth-century Ireland. This article explores how the lecture forum was used to disseminate science throughout the country; it pays particular attention to the rhetoric that accompanied the promotion of science to nonspecialist audiences. Through the examination of the behavior of lecturers and audiences, I argue that science was valued by Irish audiences for cultural rather than for utilitarian reasons. The science lecture incorporated aspects of entertainment, education, and spiritual edification. These qualities allowed science to be appropriated by the middle and upper classes and to become respectable. [End Page 157]

The foregrounding of science as a marker of middle-class respectability was a relatively recent phenomenon in Ireland. The science lecture had been regarded by eighteenth-century radicals as a means of challenging prevailing assumptions regarding religion, class, education, and social mobility. But by the early nineteenth century science had been de-radicalized through its incorporation into a lukewarm discourse of natural theology and social conservatism. For Irish audiences, therefore, attendance at a science lecture became an index of civility. As science was professionalized in the 1840s, the public lecture lost its prominence as an educational instrument and was increasingly regarded as an ephemeral phase in the evolution of a national, coordinated system of science education. Perceived as a vestige of an amateur era, the public science lecture lost its prestige.

The first half of the nineteenth century saw the creation of a public culture of science in Ireland. Science, previously the preserve of an elite minority, became, in the words of the Cork chemist William Kirby Sullivan, “the property of all.”4 Irish men and women participated in scientific ventures in greater numbers than ever before; they attended public lectures and experiments, promenaded through industrial exhibitions and natural-history museums, and read about the latest scientific breakthroughs in newspapers and journals. Public interest in scientific matters was such that by the 1820s the Lancet joked that Dubliners knew the coming of autumn by the appearance of advertisements for science lectures on the walls of the city.5 The public taste for scientific pursuits seemed for some observers to threaten traditional notions of what constituted culture. The Dublin Literary Journal complained that “this is decidedly not the age of poetic admiration.”6 By the 1860s the president of the Royal Irish Academy warned that the public taste for scientific and utilitarian pursuits was so strong that the literary arts were in [End Page 158] danger of extinction.7 That some of the most spectacular public events of early Victorian Ireland (the first visit of the British Association for the Advancement of Science to Dublin in 1835, the Cork National Exhibition of 1852, and the Dublin International Exhibition of 1853) manifested a utilitarian bias could not be denied.

That the Irish public in this period was, according to one Scottish visitor, “all agog for science” is largely forgotten today.8 The architectural legacies of this public culture of science are, ironically, the National Gallery of Ireland and the National Concert Hall at Earls-fort Terrace in Dublin. Both buildings are remnants of the industrial exhibition movement.9 Recently, historians have begun to recover this scientific culture and, in so doing, have expanded our understanding of what constituted culture in nineteenth-century Ireland. But much of this interesting and innovative work has had an institutional bias, with studies focusing on museums, observatories, and elite scientific societies.10

This article seeks to expand on this work by focusing on the most...

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