Reading the Magazine of Nature

“For the Victorian reading public, periodicals played a far greater role than books in shaping their understanding of new discoveries and theories in science, technology, and medicine.” Indeed, not only were many notable nineteenth-century scientific texts first published in magazines and journals, the periodical press also provided an important source of income for many of its seminal practitioners. In a book edited by a host of scholars, Geoffrey Cantor, Gowan Dawson, Graeme Gooday, Richard Noakes, Sally Shuttleworth, and Jonathan R. Topham, Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical (2004) seeks the “common intellectual context” of nineteenth-century science in popular, religious, political, comic, juvenile, and monthly periodicals. As the editors write, “historians of science still often use periodicals as relatively transparent records of the opinions either of authors of individual articles or of particular publics, rather than considering periodicals as objects in themselves.” The editors thus refuse to consider the periodical as mere background. Their aim is to “reinterpret the place of science in nineteenth-century British culture by combining insights from the history of popular science, cultural and literary studies and periodical studies.” By locating science in more unlikely textual spaces, the editors map a much more complex and diffused science than would otherwise be encountered in highbrow quarterlies, such as Edinburgh Review, Quarterly, Blackwood’s, and Westminster Review.

This title, in addition to two others, entitled Culture and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Media (2004) and Science Serialized: Representation of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals (2004) were written by the SciPer team, directed by Geoffrey Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth, a project that ran from 1999 to 2007 and was jointly organized by the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies in the Department of English Literature at the University of Sheffield and the Centre for the History and Philosophy of Science in the School of Philosophy, Religion and the History of Science at the University of Leeds.

All three volumes substantially add to our knowledge about the role of science in a wide variety of magazines, journals, monthlies, and quarterlies.

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