Part of the culture

摘要

In 1829, the historian Thomas Carlyle noted that "every little sect among us, Unitarians, Utilitarians, Anabaptists, Phrenologists, must have its Periodical". By the end of the century, periodical publishing had expanded dramatically: there were more tides, appearing more frequently, and reaching ever greater audiences. Periodicals were the closest Victorian Britain got to the mass media. In 1999, the Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical (SciPer) project was established at the universities of Leeds and Sheffield to investigate the ways in which the sciences were discussed and represented in this important medium. Scientific journals had already been well studied, thanks to their importance as a means of communicating new research between members of the scientific community. Instead, the SciPer team decided to study generalist publications, ranging from such well known literary journals as The Cornhill Magazine, to The Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine, the comic journal Punch and even The Boy's Own Paper. These sorts of publications were widely read both within and outside the scientific community. Studying them is the equivalent for the nineteenth century of thinking about how modern science is portrayed on television and radio, and in the press. Such studies can tell us a vast amount about what non-scientists think of science and its practitioners.