Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature, and: Science Serialized: Representation of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals (review)

The poet John Keats was reputedly killed by harsh words in the Quarterly Review or Blackwood's Magazine. Men of science were made of sterner stuff, but they acknowledged the power of the leading periodicals of the day. Charles Lyell badly wanted to choose the reviewers of his Principles of Geology (1830–33), and he asked William Whewell, who had written a review of its first volume in the British Critic, to pen another on the second volume in the Quarterly. Some thirty years later, Charles Darwin feared the reception of his theory in the highbrow journals that arbitrated respectable opinion.

The esteem of periodicals in the nineteenth century has been matched by scholarly attention given to them in the twentieth century. The names of Walter Houghton (who edited the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals), Alvar Ellegård, Jon Klancher, Joan Shattock, and Robert M. Young, among others, are now identified with significant contributions to our understanding of this genre. Continuing interest is indicated by the Victorian Periodicals Newsletter. The two books under review are distinctive in their focus on science. They also represent the first harvest of the present century, appropriately informed by the web-based index to the treatment of science in sixteen generalist periodicals—an outcome of the "SciPer" project (www.sciper.leeds.ac.uk).

Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical consists of ten chapters and a very useful introduction. Its contributors are members of the SciPer team, directed by Geoffrey Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth. In their introduction, Gowan Dawson, Richard Noakes, and Jonathan Topham set the historiographic contexts for studies of the relation between science and periodicals. Young's influential thesis was that the leading periodicals provided a "common intellectual context" that included the sciences, along with literature, philosophy, politics, economics, and religion. This cultural unity was exemplified in the assumptions of a distinctively British natural theology that permeated the language of William Paley, Thomas Malthus, Lyell, Whewell, Adam Sedgwick, Robert Chambers, Darwin, and reviewers of their works. In Young's estimate, this common context fragmented after the 1860s, partly because the path from the natural to the moral sphere was jeopardised by Darwin, and also as a result of increasing specialization in science.

The authors do not respond by reexamining the highbrow reviews favoured by Young. This means that fans of the Edinburgh Review, Quarterly, or Blackwood's might be disappointed; nor, I suspect, would a reader scanning the index for the radical Westminster Review be excited to find that, just above it, the Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine sports twenty- seven lines of references. It would, however, be a pity if such a reader closed this volume, because it offers a rich and varied extension to our understanding of the periodical genre, and the ways in which it hosted both scientific content and images of the sciences. The cultural status of science was far more complex than the leading quarterlies might suggest. The gap between scientific practitioners and lay readers was already apparent before Young's mid-century fragmentation, especially in the mathematically inclined disciplines; throughout the Victorian period, a diverse range of periodicals found ways of treating the sciences that went beyond the standard reviews of scientific books, transactions, and meetings. This format provided the conditions for key reviewers such as David Brewster and John Playfair to paint their accounts of science, using a scientific book or meeting as a platform. This might approximate the scenario of elite science being disseminated to wider audiences, although that process was rarely amenable to the control that such a model implies. But beyond the highbrow journals other things might happen...