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ISBN: PB: 9780226481197

ISBN: HB: 9780226481180

University of Chicago Press

May 2010

568 pp.

23x15 cm

2 tables, 68 halftones

PB:
£37,00
QTY:
HB:
£52,00
QTY:

Categories:

Victorian Popularizers of Science

Designing Nature for New Audiences

The ideas of Charles Darwin and his fellow Victorian scientists have had an abiding effect on the modern world. But at the time "The Origin of Species" was published in 1859, the British public looked not to practicing scientists but to a growing group of professional writers and journalists to interpret the larger meaning of scientific theories in terms they could understand and in ways they could appreciate".Victorian Popularizers of Science" focuses on this important group of men and women who wrote about science for a general audience in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Bernard Lightman examines more than thirty of the most prolific, influential, and interesting popularizers of the day, investigating the dramatic lecturing techniques, vivid illustrations, and accessible literary styles they used to communicate with their audience. By focusing on a forgotten coterie of science writers, their publishers, and their public, Lightman offers new insights into the role of women in scientific inquiry, the market for scientific knowledge, tensions between religion and science, and the complexities of scientific authority in nineteenth-century Britain.

About the Author

Bernard Lightman is professor of humanities at York University, Toronto, editor of the journal Isis, editor of "Victorian Science in Context", and co-editor of "Science in the Marketplace", all published by the University of Chicago Press.

Reviews

"Bernard Lightman's long-anticipated volume on Victorian scientific popularizers constitutes a monumental contribution to the history of Victorian intellectual life. His vast range of research, cogent analysis, appreciation for personality, and elegant writing explore an entirely new landscape for understanding the culture of late Victorian science. His book is a splendid achievement of probing, mature scholarship that should command a broad audience" – Frank M. Turner, Yale University

"Unwrap the presents under a Victorian Christmas tree, and you would be likely to find an accessible, attractively illustrated book on science. The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed an extraordinary blossoming of popular publications about the natural world. Bernard Lightman sheds a flood of light on the authors of these volumes, from suffragettes and spiritualists to vicars, secularists, and celebrated discoverers. These remarkable men and women are the pioneers of modern science writing, and this deeply researched study is an indispensable guide to their world" – James A. Secord, University of Cambridge

"Bernard Lightman's 'Victorian Popularizers of Science' is a remarkable, important, and consistently fascinating book. It has changed the way I can think about science in the Victorian era, and I am sure it will do the same for everyone interested in the subject. Lightman has read a vast range of popular scientific literature and, with encyclopedic scholarship and a strong understanding of historiographical method, teaches us both what it said and why it matters. He represents a world of scientific discussion rarely noticed by Victorian scholars and remaps the topography of Victorian science" – George Levine, Rutgers University

"By focusing our attention on the army of popularizers who brought science into Victorian homes through their mass-produced books, Lightman has changed our understanding of the science of the period. These popularizers – most of whom were not members of the scientific establishment – reworked contemporary accounts of the natural world into innovative narrative forms, often embedded in a moral and religious framework. Not only has Lightman rescued these writers from oblivion but he has also cogently argued their historical significance" – Geoffrey Cantor, University of Leeds

"The book is a substantial work of scholarship rather than a casual read, and it offers much for historians of science as well as students of popular writing" – Jon Turney, Times Higher Education Supplement

"[This] book will be the basic resource for scholars interested in understanding the background of the thousands of popular science works... It includes a path-breaking recovery of the lives, interests, and limitations faced by female nature writers" – Philip J. Pauly, Science

"A major contributions to the study of popular science in nineteenth-century Britain... Lightman offers by far the fullest and most comprehensive account of the popularization of science in Britain during the second half of the nineteenth century yet to be undertaken, and his study revises our understanding of Victorian popular science in significant ways" – Jonathan Smith, American Historical Review

"'Victorian Popularizers' is not just a history of science 'from below', although it effectively capitalizes on that literature. Rather, it is an important story of how some Victorians rebelled against the claim that only scientists should have authority over science. Lightman deftly shows how questions of authority were bound up in matters of publishing, church reform, professionalization, gender dynamics, visual spectacle and social change, and he makes substantial contributions to understanding the relationship between those matters and science. Historians interested in any of these issues will find this book enriching and thought provoking. The author's insights into the world of Victorian science publishing offer important lessons for our own era's continuing struggle with the question of scientific authority" – Matthew Stanley, Endeavour

"The focus on diferent groups and types of popularizers... proves to be very insightful. Lightman demonstrates just how different they were in terms of their agenda, their mediums, their audiences and their socioeconomic situation. His broad panorama allows for illuminating comparisons" – Oliver Hochadel, Nuncius

"[Full of] sharp and unexpected insights, and every reader will learn much from it" – David Knight, Isis