Science Serialized: Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals (review)

For twenty years now, historians of science have been leaving their seats in special collections to find inspiration in the stacks of the periodicals room. They are part of a general exodus of scholars away from elite subjects toward those that consider the role of the public and its middlebrow ways. This change in venue has helped to challenge basic assumptions about the role of science in modern culture. Most contested is the assumption that scientific ideas bubble up in the laboratory and then spill over to the rest of us, who drink of knowledge in a diluted and somewhat sullied form. This "diffusionist" model of scientific ideas fails to explain many things. As Roger Cooter and Stephen Pumfrey point out in their 1994 article "Sepa-rate Spheres and Public Places: Reflections on the History of Science Popularization and Science in Popular Culture" (History of Science 32 [1994]: 237-67) it fails to account for the power of readers, critics, and public intellectuals to influence (downstream, as it were) both the course and the content of scientific disciplines.

Science Serialized comes to press as scholars are trying to figure out better ways to model the historical relationship between science, the press, and the public. Its essayists nod to Cooter and Pumphrey, as do its editors, Geoffrey Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth. With one exception, the essays focus on Britain. They cover a variety of topics, including natural theology, botany, meteorology, astronomy, evolution, psychology, and animal husbandry. The authors look at these subjects as they are presented in a variety of publications, from women's magazines and elite quarterlies to science serials and radical broadsheets. Most focus, however, on middlebrow and highbrow general-interest magazines such as the Athenaeum, Contemporary Review, and Nineteenth Century.

Apart from their common discussion of British science and periodicals, the essays in Science Serialized do not cohere especially well. This is in part due to the introduction, which links contributors together in groups of two and three but offers no theme, approach, or debate that binds them as a whole. Taken individually, a few stand out. Roger Smith's excellent essay on psychology argues that midcentury press debates about the relationship between mind and brain helped to frame the approaches used later by the field of psychology as it came of age in the 1870s. This is a clear blow to the diffusionist model of science, since it cannot explain how psychology could have "trickled up" from the press to the lab hospital. The essays by Jonathan Smith, James Paradis, and Harriet Ritvo are likewise very good, making the case that Victorian naturalists (here, Grant Allen, Charles Darwin, and James Ewart) presented their work in the popular press with deadly seriousness. Periodicals were not some pedantic forum for instruction, but a stage that made and destroyed scientific reputations. Many of the other essayists tell fine stories but do not connect them adequately to issues of broader significance in a way that would have made them more appealing to a wider audience.

Still, there are hidden treasures in Science Serialized that one finds reading it cover to cover. So much has been written about the history of science and religion that it is understandable why Cantor and Shuttleworth spend less than a page discussing it. Yet this is one of the most interesting themes throughout the book, addressed in most of the essays and the central subject of six of them. Conflicts over faith, free will, and materialism fill the pages of Science Serialized. While it has been popular since the nineteenth century to call such conflicts part of a centuries-long "war" between science and religion, these essays show why we need a better metaphor. To me, the fracas seems more akin to a political caucus where science and religion are the dominant issues, but too messy to be neatly opposed. Most attending this caucus have loyalties and feelings toward...