Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- 1 Margins and Centres
- SECTION I Shifted Centres
- SECTION II Contested Knowledges
- 7 ‘Supposed Differences’: Lydia Becker and Victorian Women's Participation in the BAAS
- 8 A Fair Trial for Spiritualism?: Fighting Dirty in the Pall Mall Gazette
- 9 ‘This is Ours and For Us’: The Mechanic's Magazine and Low Scientific Culture in Regency London
- 10 How did the Conservation of Energy Become ‘The Highest Law in All Science’?
- 11 ‘Scriptural Geology’, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and Contested Authority in Nineteenth-Century British Science
- 12 ‘This House is a Temple of Research’: Country-House Centres for Late Victorian Science
- SECTION III Entering The Modern
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
9 - ‘This is Ours and For Us’: The Mechanic's Magazine and Low Scientific Culture in Regency London
from SECTION II - Contested Knowledges
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- 1 Margins and Centres
- SECTION I Shifted Centres
- SECTION II Contested Knowledges
- 7 ‘Supposed Differences’: Lydia Becker and Victorian Women's Participation in the BAAS
- 8 A Fair Trial for Spiritualism?: Fighting Dirty in the Pall Mall Gazette
- 9 ‘This is Ours and For Us’: The Mechanic's Magazine and Low Scientific Culture in Regency London
- 10 How did the Conservation of Energy Become ‘The Highest Law in All Science’?
- 11 ‘Scriptural Geology’, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and Contested Authority in Nineteenth-Century British Science
- 12 ‘This House is a Temple of Research’: Country-House Centres for Late Victorian Science
- SECTION III Entering The Modern
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
Summary
In his pamphlet Observations on the Education of the People, Henry Brougham links scientific education with a stable working populace. For Brougham, science was a unity, and reflection upon it would reveal an ordered world, functioning correctly. ‘The more widely science is diffused’, he writes, ‘the better will the Author of all things be known’. Yet, this view of science, predicated as it was upon a unified Nature, was actively critiqued in the early nineteenth century. Cheap, mass-market periodicals such as the Mechanic's Magazine emerged from a combination of technological innovation, philosophical radicalism and entrepreneurial opportunism, to provide a textual space for an alternative scientific culture. These titles foregrounded dialogue, preventing the ‘thematic finalization’ necessary to disseminate unified Nature as a final signified. Their textual community, lying outside of ‘high’ scientific discourse and yet at times engaging with it, allowed members to negotiate and appropriate, in a dialogic exchange, the contested signs of the industrial age.
This chapter seeks to recover this rival scientific discourse and, by exploring its foundation in the textual community that supported it, identify its codes, constructions and participants. The chapter is organized into three sections: the first considers the foundation of the Mechanic's Magazine and the strategies employed by the editors to carve out a readership from within the reading audience of the new ‘mass’ journals such as the Mirror of Literature.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Repositioning Victorian SciencesShifting Centres in Nineteenth-Century Thinking, pp. 107 - 118Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2006