Science, Time and Space in the Late Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Movable Types (review)

As the title suggests, this book examines the dispersal of the most ubiquitous types of writing across the printed pages of that most miscellaneous and disparate of literary forms, the periodical. Given the potentially vast scope of any such exercise, James Mussell has wisely chosen to examine some specific late-nineteenth-century interventions of science in the London-based periodical press. His selected journals range from the specialist proceedings of London scientific societies (Journal of the British Astronomical Association) to newly founded popular science periodicals (the English Mechanic), and from trade journals (Chemist and Druggist) to mass-market general and literary publications not usually associated with an engagement with scientific discourse (the Illustrated London News and the Strand). The analyses offered in the five main chapters are structured around two broad axes: space and time. These categories organised the scientific discourse of the time, but Mussell also uses them to organise characteristics (periodicity, mobility, heterogeneity, and velocity of distribution) of the late-nineteenth-century periodical press. In addition, Mussell's book is sensitive to the tension between the miscellaneous nature of scientific discourse in periodicals and the increasingly hierarchical construction of disciplinary knowledge in the academies. "Science in the periodical press is not an isolated representation of a distant practice," he rightly observes, but one that "shares the vicissitudes of readership, processes of production, and relationship to the marketplace common to all periodicals" (17).

Much of Mussell's analysis is intelligent and original and, drawing upon his work with the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (ncse) digitisation project, is informed by his awareness that "the final material status" of both texts and scientific ideas is "not a pre-given, but must be established" (55) through mediation, interpretation, and (sometimes) extrapolation. Examining the remarkable divergence between two photographic reproductions of the Milky Way in Sagittarius in the March 1891 number of the populist science journal Knowledge, Mussell cogently notes that as the "reproductive stage" was evidently "not a transparent stage in a chain," the journal could no longer claim to be a "site for elite scientific practice" (54). Its position as a vehicle for the legitimisation of amateur astronomy was undermined, and the space for the authentication of astronomy was reclaimed by the Royal Observatory, a process symptomatic of the formal institutionalisation of scientific discourse in the period. In perhaps the most compelling juxtaposition of the temporal and the spatial in the book, Mussell examines the relationship between the meetings of learned societies and the frequency of publications by taking a single year, 1890, and noting the shifting space, away from the laboratory and into the meeting rooms of learned societies, that typified the foreclosure of disciplinary narratives in the late nineteenth century.

Mussell's reading of the serialisation of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories in the pages of the Strand is both original and liberating in its implications. Mussell sees the runaway success of Doyle's stories as evidence of a popular appetite for a scientific methodology that allows for guilt-free reading of the narrative plots of detective fiction: Holmes's exposition of scientific method is translated and mediated by Watson, who embeds the narrative in the cultural hinterland of the Strand's resolutely middle-class (and middle-brow) readership. It would have been fascinating here to compare the Strand's successful (and populist) espousal of scientific method with the failure of other periodicals to benefit from an explicitly antiscientific position. The serialisation of Joseph Conrad's parable of scientific method gone astray, The Secret Agent (1907), in the pages of the American journal Ridgway's a decade later offers a chastening reminder of the importance of placing a text within an established readership context.

Mussell occasionally overreaches himself. Discussing the consumption of mass-produced goods, he observes that "mass culture is thus predicated on the recognition" that "not only are diverse individuals all consuming the same things, irrespective...