Our understanding of the range of exhibition spaces for Victorian popular science, and the correspondingly diverse experiences they provided for audiences, has undergone significant modification over the last ten years. Whilst metropolitan establishments such as the Royal Polytechnic Institution, Egyptian Hall, Wyld's Great Globe and Royal Adelaide Gallery probably remain the best-known known examples of institutions providing a potent mixture of instruction, amusement and spectacle, a wealth of recent scholarship has demonstrated that there was also an increasing variety of alternative exhibition spaces that have been for too long in the shadow of these large and iconic London establishments. A trip to the Polytechnic or Egyptian Hall might well form part of the itinerary of a visitor to London; for most though, such trips were the exception rather than the rule. Two key research trends have driven this emergence of a more nuanced picture of Victorian popular science. The first is a move away from studies of the metropolis towards an exploration of the provision of lectures, demonstrations, classes and exhibitions in British provincial towns and cities. For inhabitants of towns and cities beyond London (and potentially for many Londoners as well), a lecture at the local mechanics' institute, a magic lantern show of natural history given as a Sunday school treat, the hullabaloo of a travelling menagerie arriving in the marketplace, or a freak show at the annual fair were more likely to have constituted their experiences of popular science.

The connection between science, showmanship and popular display was enduringly compelling for nineteenth-century audiences in Britain. Writing in 1872, in the Leisure Hour, John Timbs remembered some of the most popular of the scientific exhibitions that had taken place in London during the preceding fifty years. The electric eel employed by Faraday was, in fact, one of several that would be exhibited at the Adelaide Gallery of Practical Science on the Strand – this time for just one shilling – where feeding time proved to be an especially attractive performance once it was realized that the fishes captured their prey by discharging an electric shock. Faraday's experiment and more general zoological accounts of the acquisition, careful nursing and behaviour of the eel were reported widely, not least by Timbs himself, who, as founding editor of the Year-Book of Facts in Science and Art, had given the fish star-billing on the frontispiece of the 1840 edition.

E. S. Dallas’s review of George Eliot’s Felix Holt the Radical (1866) exemplifies the way nineteenth-century literature, and realism in particular, often defined its practice through visual tropes. The period had an almost compulsive fascination with visuality because it was the crucible for working through broader tensions between the material and the ideal, imagination and reality, the seen and the unseen. Dallas’s praise is typically double-edged in that seeing is simultaneously knowing and feeling, an epistemology and a phenomenology. His praise equates the truth-value of Eliot’s work with the vividness of her pictorial style, defined as the capability of imagining a scene as if it was a painting. Nonetheless, for all Eliot’s corresponding realism, Dallas’s invocation of the proverb actually emphasizes that seeing is a perceptual, subjective process. The concrete 'seeing' of Eliot and her readers is lauded precisely because it is an ideal and imaginative, yet embodied, act. Seeing might be believing, but the Victorians' fascination with processes of perception and illusion, often explored through optical devices, meant they were all too aware of how such belief could be misplaced.

The multivalent discourses of nineteenth-century visuality are evident in the conflicting function of the large number of pictorial and optical tropes in literary texts. Taken as a whole, their prevalence reflects the intimate relationship between literature and the burgeoning variety of visual media. Many studies have demonstrated their creative interaction, whether through tracing the influence of different visual arts and technologies upon individual writers or through more general explorations, such as the impact of photography and painting upon conceptions of realism. One notable study by Martin Meisel has gone so far as to argue that a common aesthetic style, combining narrative with pictorialism, runs through much nineteenth-century literature, painting and drama.