Science in the Marketplace

“Here is a history of nineteenth-century science that is refreshingly different. Averting our gaze from the production of knowledge by a scientific elite, the editors and their enthusiastic team take us on an exciting tour of neglected locations where an expanding audience for science was attracted and wooed. Exhibitions, galleries and museums, lecture-halls, clubs and salons all feature in stimulating essays that bring to life the experiences of the  audiences themselves. Readers will delight in the unexpected discovery that these competing sites each played multiple roles in promoting their conception of the sciences.”

“From the sedate charms of small mineralogical museums to the high drama of the Crystal Palace or electricity as a source of extraordinary theatrical effects, scientific entertainment was big business in Britain in the nineteenth century. Looking and learning was only the half of it. This very readable and important collection of essays takes us deep into the heart of the enthusiastic public response to science in the Victorian era, including careful discussion of the marketing of popular literature, electrical demonstrations, stuffed animals, smells and sounds, conversations, and hands-on-skulls phrenological readings. Every author has something new and intriguing to say about the puzzling question of how to define popularity and how something novel might spread through a society. The intention is to explore the key characteristics of public audiences for science and the birth of what might be called modern consumerism, an audience-based history that truly opens the door to rethinking the notion of a marketplace for knowledge. Any book edited by social historians such as Lightman and Fyfe must command interested attention. This provides an invaluable reexamination of the whole notion of popular science in the Victorian era.”