Bernard Lightman

The Visual Theology of Victorian Popularizers of Science: From Reverent Eye to Chemical Retina

This essay examines the use of visual images during the latter half of the nineteenth century in the work of three important popularizers of science. J. G. Wood, Richard Proctor, and Agnes Clerke skillfully used illustrations and photographs to establish their credibility as trustworthy guides to scientific, moral, and religious truths. All three worked within the natural theology tradition, despite the powerful critique of William Paleys argument from design set forth in Charles Darwins Origin of Species (1859). Wood, Proctor, and Clerke recognized that in order to reach a popular audience with their message of divine wonder in nature, they would have to take advantage of the developing mass visual culture embodied in the new pictorial magazines, spectacles, and entertaining toys based on scientific gadgets emblematic of the reorganization of vision. But in drawing on different facets of the emerging visual culture and in looking to the images produced by the new visual technologies to find the hand of God in nature, these popularizers subtly transformed the natural theology tradition.

Marketing knowledge for the general reader: Victorian popularizers of science

During the second half of the 19th century, science journalists and not professional scientists established many of the traditions of contemporary popular science. For the first time, there was an explosion of publications in popular science, as the rise of a mass reading public and new printing technologies combined to create a viable market that could be exploited by publishers. As professional scientists were trying to edge women and Christian clergymen out of science, a new space opened up for those with little or no formal training to forge careers in science journalism. These popularizers of science developed new narrative techniques and drew on vivid visual images to present audiences with stories of a natural world of wonder and divine activity.

Evolution and Victorian culture

In this collection of essays from leading scholars, the dynamic interplay between evolution and Victorian culture is explored for the first time, mapping new relationships between the arts and sciences. Rather than focusing simply on evolution and literature or art, this volume brings together essays exploring the impact of evolutionary ideas on a wide range of cultural activities including painting, sculpture, dance, music, fiction, poetry, cinema, architecture, theatre, photography, museums, exhibitions and popular culture. Broad-ranging, rather than narrowly specialized, each chapter provides a brief introduction to key scholarship, a central section exploring original insights drawn from primary source material, and a conclusion offering overarching principles and a projection towards further areas of research. Each chapter covers the work of significant individuals and groups applying evolutionary theory to their particular art, both as theorists and practitioners. This comprehensive examination of topics sheds light on larger and previously unknown Victorian cultural patterns.

The many lives of Charles Darwin: early biographies and the definitive evolutionist

This article focuses on the early book-length biographies of Darwin published from his death in 1882 up to 1900. By making 1900 the cutoff point I can examine the biographies produced when the iconic figure was not yet set in stone, and before the rediscovery of Mendels work in the early twentieth century and the anniversary celebrations of 1909 changed the way in which Darwin was regarded. Darwins biographers dealt with three major themes. First, several biographers emphasized his scientific abilities, in particular his powers of observation and his prowess in conducting experiments. Second, many biographers discussed his character, a key issue in determining whether or not he could be trusted as a scientific guide. Finally, his scientific theories and religious beliefs, and how they related to the evolutionary controversy, formed a topic taken up by most biographers. By focusing on these three themes, the biographies published before 1900 were important in shaping the image of Darwin that was forming in American and British culture.

The Circulation of Knowledge Between Britain, India and China

In The Circulation of Knowledge Between Britain, India and China, twelve scholars examine how knowledge, things and people moved within, and between, the East and the West from the early modern period to the twentieth century.

Mid-Victorian science museums and exhibitions: ‘The industrial amusement and instruction of the people’

The Royal Polytechnic Institution, Wylds Globe and the Royal Panopticon were part of a family of institutions that existed in the post-Great Exhibition era that shared a common approach to popularizing science based on the blending of education and entertainment. Studying them helps us to understand the Victorian fascination with science, especially in the third quarter of the century. It draws our attention to the important role of popularizers of science who worked in these museums and exhibitions. Once their role is added to our account of the cult of science, a very different picture emerges that forces us to reconsider the standard story of the dominance of the scientific scene in the second half of the century by figures such as Darwin, Huxley and Tyndall.

Scientific naturalists and their language games

For nineteenth century British scientific naturalists like Charles Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley, and John Tyndall, translation, and the issues of language that it raised, were crucial. Dealing with these issues became a major part of their strategy to reform British science, and it involved opening up the scientific community to French and German research. Early in their careers, both Huxley and Tyndall invested time translating science books from the continent into English. Later, as they themselves wrote books that were in demand across the channel, they, and Darwin, put a great deal of time and energy into locating the best possible translators for their writings. Translation was not only a key to reforming British science; it was also essential as a means of circulating the evolutionary worldview of scientific naturalism globally. But Darwin, Huxley, and Tyndall were not fully prepared for the challenges they would encounter in authorizing translations of their own works.

Victorian science and popular visual culture

In this issue, we explore the intersection between Victorian science and popular visual culture. The Victorian period is especially important for understanding how they became intimately intertwined. During the second quarter of the nineteenth century, a new and enlarged popular culture developed in England that was distinguished by its increasingly pictorial character. The rise from 1830 to 1860 of illustrated weeklies like the Penny Magazine, for example, made diverse imagery widely available and affordable for the first time. During the same period the public enthusiasm for science began to grow, reflected in the sensation caused by the debate over Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), and in the vast crowds drawn to the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations held in London in 1851. This was followed by the public fascination with sea life, fern collecting, and dinosaurs. The interest in science and the thirst for images came together in the visual displays to be found in scientific museums, exhibitions, lectures, and publications. London museums such as the Adelaide Gallery (founded in 1832) and the Polytechnic Institution (founded 1838) were the scene of spectacular demonstrations of electrical science. The Crystal Palace’s series of life-sized reconstructions of some of the more impressive fossil animals that geological research had revealed, built by the sculptor and illustrator Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, were first put on view in 1854. Scientific lectures by entertaining speakers with a knack for visualizing scientific theories through vivid experiments, such as Michael Faraday and John Tyndall, could be seen at the Royal Institution, at other scientific institutions, and at lecture halls around Britain. Finally, books on science for the public contained more and more illustrations, some in lavish colour. Science became an important component of rational recreation for the middle class and educated members of the lower class. The incorporation of a powerful visual dimension enhanced the entertainment value of knowledge. Increasingly, scholars have investigated these themes by pointing to the relationship between visual culture, the public, and science in the Victorian period. Instead of focusing on elite culture, recent studies of visuality have emphasized the visual culture of the Victorian public (Otter 2008; Armstrong 2008; Nead 2007). In doing, so scholars have followed Richard Altick’s lead in his magisterial Shows of London (1978). Historians of science, and those engaged in the study of literature, have turned their attention to the visual culture that was an integral part of Victorian science. We have investigated the role of spectacle (Morus 1998); reconstructed forgotten scientific exhibitions and museums (Morus 2007; Lightman 2007a); analysed the reorganization of vision that created a new kind of observer (Crary 1990); examined the role of vision and the culture of observation in modernity (Willis Early Popular Visual Culture Vol. 10, No. 1, February 2012, 1–5

The Mid-Victorian period and the Astronomical Register (1863-1886): ‘A medium of communication for amateurs and others’

The landscape of astronomical journals changed forever in 1863 when the first issue of the Astronomical Register was published (Figure 1). Unlike the previous journals, which catered primarily to elite astronomers who worked at the universities and the observatories, the Astronomical Register was also created for those who at times found the papers that filled the Royal Astronomical Society journals to be too mathematical. Part of a growing body of amateur astronomers, the readers of the Astronomical Register were interested in observation rather than theory. They also formed a significant portion of the Victorian public that voraciously read ‘popular’ astronomy books by Mrs Somerville, Richard Proctor, Robert Ball and Agnes Clerke. Being educated professionals, including lawyers, doctors, clergy, teachers, businessmen, and their wives and daughters, as well as the better-off members of the working class, they did not have the financial resources available to the gentlemen of science who operated the most powerful telescopes (Chapman, 1998: xiii). The journal’s relationship to the Royal Astronomical Society and its publications was highly complicated. The editor sought a broader readership that was not limited to elite observers and official astronomers. This meant creating a new niche in the periodical world – one that might overlap somewhat with the niche occupied by the Royal Astronomical Society’s Memoirs and the Monthly Notices, and the observatory publications, but that also carved out some new territory. In the end, the Astronomical Register represented the leading edge of the new ‘popular’ astronomy journals that began to be published in the 1860s, a time when the number of ‘popular science’ journals peaked (Barton, 1998: 2; Sheets-Pyenson, 1971: 11, 55, 1985: 551). The publication of the Astronomical Register was part of the flood of print that washed over the British public, and its story illuminates how readers participated in the production of knowledge through their contributions to the science journals that they read. An analysis of the correspondence column in the Astronomical Register, I would argue, is particularly useful for tracking the two-way communication that took place between editors, would-be professional astronomers and readers.

Popularizers, participation and the transformations of nineteenth-century publishing: From the 1860s to the 1880s

Focusing on the editors, journalists and authors who worked on the new ‘popular science’ periodicals and books from the 1860s to the 1880s, this piece will discuss how they conceived of their readers as co-participants in the creation of knowledge. The transformation of nineteenth-century publishing opened up opportunities for making science more accessible to a new polity of middle and working class readers. Editors, journalists and authors responded to the communications revolution, and the larger developments that accompanied it, by defining the exemplary scientist in opposition to the emerging conception of the professional scientist, by rejecting the notion that the laboratory was the sole legitimate site of scientific discovery and by experimenting with new ways of communicating scientific knowledge to their audience.