Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical; Reading the Magazine of Nature (review)

From the seventeenth century onwards natural philosophers likened nature to God's other book in which divine existence was revealed in the world's intricate design. Because nature was well ordered, its language could be mastered and glossed like a textbook of Euclidian geometry. But suppose we change the metaphor, suggested James Clerk Maxwell in a talk to the Cambridge Apostles Club in 1856. Suppose nature was more like a contemporary Victorian magazine, miscellaneous in content, jumping from one subject to another at the whim of an editor? If nature was not an ordered unity, but made up of disconnected bits and pieces, what hope was there of showing how one part could throw light on another? Maxwell clearly implied by this change of metaphor that the universe might be much more complex than his scientific forebears had supposed. A magazine of nature would not be a well-ordered textbook whose language could be easily understood. How ironic, then, that Maxwell himself was to find fruitful analogies between one part of nature and another, notably in relating the apparently disparate phenomena of electricity, magnetism, and light into one grand electromagnetic theory of light.

By the same token, as the authors of the 10 outstanding essays in Science and the Nineteenth-Century Periodical demonstrate, significant "relationships can be found between the disparate articles which make up a magazine." Hitherto, they point out, disciplinary historians of architecture, literature, science, etc., have tended to analyze specialized journals (such as The Builder) or to "raid" general periodicals (such as the Quarterly Review) only for those titles that explicitly identify themselves as germane to a discipline. This point is elegantly brought out in the present volume, one of several by-products of a five-year collaboration between literary and science historians at the Universities of Leeds and Sheffield in Yorkshire under the direction of Cantor and Shuttleworth. In this "SciPer Index" project, 16 general periodicals published in Great Britain between 1800 and 1900 were searched for references or allusions to science, technology, and medicine and some 15,000 articles and illustrations selected for synopsis and detailed indexing. The resulting electronic index, available since January 2005 at www.sciper.org, provides a magnificent research tool for scholars interested in the Victorian public's understanding of science and is a vivid demonstration of how science, technology, and medicine permeated everything in general periodicals.

The present volume analyzes six of the 15 general periodicals searched by the SciPer team. Noakes probes the much-loved humorous magazine Punch (1841-72), which acted as a reflector of scientific news items in The Times, as well as The Boys' Own Paper (1879-83). Topham mines the unfamiliar cheap miscellany Mirror of Literature (1822-29), whose editor John Timbs first coined the phrase "popular science" in 1827, and the monthly Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine (1822-29). Finally, Dowson examines the shilling monthly Cornhill Magazine (1860-64) and Stead's remarkable Review of Reviews (1890-99). (Parenthetic dates are indexed years, not the duration of the journal.) Each essay provides a comprehensive history of the journal concerned before proceeding to an analysis of its scientific content.

These analytical essays are topped and tailed by an excellent general introductory discussion (a collaborative effort by Dawson, Noakes, and Topham), and by three fascinating articles that exploit a raft of specialized, as well as general, journals. "Baby science," argues Shuttleworth, was a hot topic of gender control in the 1890s. Cantor demonstrates the thirst for scientific biographies and celebrity interviews in the general press. Finally, Gooday identifies the source of periodical discussions, speculations, and arguments concerning the utopian future of electric power as Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888).

Overall, the authorial team demonstrates the value of contextualizing science, or any other subject, within a periodical. They provide abundant examples of the ways in which scientific ideas, controversies...