Science Periodicals in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Constructing Scientific Communities

Gowan Dawson, Bernard Lightman, Sally Shuttleworth, Jonathan R. Topham, Gowan Dawson, Bernard Lightman, Sally Shuttleworth, Jonathan R. Topham

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780226676517
• eBook ISBN: 9780226683461
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Modern British History
• Index: Biological Sciences

Periodicals played a vital role in the developments in science and medicine that transformed nineteenth-century Britain. Proliferating from a mere handful to many hundreds of titles, they catered to audiences ranging from gentlemanly members of metropolitan societies to working-class participants in local natural history clubs. In addition to disseminating authorized scientific discovery, they fostered a sense of collective identity among their geographically dispersed and often socially disparate readers by facilitating the reciprocal interchange of ideas and information. As such, they offer privileged access into the workings of scientific communities in the period.
 
The essays in this volume set the historical exploration of the scientific and medical periodicals of the era on a new footing, examining their precise function and role in the making of nineteenth-century science and enhancing our vision of the shifting communities and practices of science in the period. This radical rethinking of the scientific journal offers a new approach to the reconfiguration of the sciences in nineteenth-century Britain and sheds instructive light on contemporary debates about the purpose, practices, and price of scientific journals.

1

New Formats for New Readers

CHAPTER 1

Scientific, Medical, and Technical Periodicals in Nineteenth-Century Britain: New Formats for New Readers

Gowan Dawson and Jonathan R. Topham

In the Monthly Review for July 1799, the Cambridge mathematician Robert Woodhouse reflected on the effect on the “intellectual character of society” of what he presented as the first of a new kind of scientific journal—William Nicholson’s Journal of Natural Philosophy. It was, he considered, part of a recent and larger development:

When presses multiplied, and restraints were removed from them,—when writing became a trade, and the love of gain operated with the love of fame as motives to authorship,—the number of literary productions increased, and their nature was changed: the serious and unremitted devotion of twenty or thirty years, to the study of a particular science, was no longer considered as a necessary preparation for a work; and when a person imagined that he had some information to communicate, the means were ready.

Journals such as Nicholson’s, he claimed, like the “Epitomes, Abstracts, Synopses, [and] Abridgements” that had become commonplace of late, had the regrettable effect of removing incentives for profound learning. Importantly, however, their positive achievement was that they answered the desire for knowledge that had spread itself “through all ranks.” They acted as an intellectual manure that produced “more uniform utility over the whole soil” than could be produced by lumpen works of individual scholarship.1 For Woodhouse, Nicholson’s innovation thus amounted to a democratizing impulse: the new scientific journal invited the involvement of a far larger proportion of the populace in the project of natural enquiry.

As the introduction to this volume has demonstrated, the history of scientific, medical, and technical periodicals in nineteenth-century Britain is not one that can be read through the character or functions of modern scientific journals. On the contrary, the increasing range of periodicals that came into existence took a wide range of forms and functioned in a similarly wide range of ways. Only by degrees—and especially toward the end of the century—did a proportion of these periodicals come to resemble modern academic journals to a significant extent. Throughout, the history was punctuated by the production of new types of periodicals aimed at new audiences. As Woodhouse had noted on the eve of the new century, changes in the culture of print opened up new possibilities for configuring knowledge communities, and editors, publishers, and societies were quick to seize those opportunities in shaping new kinds of scientific periodicals. Charting the resultant developments in the forms and audiences of scientific periodicals is an indispensable first step in understanding their changing role in constructing scientific communities. In this chapter, therefore, we offer a broad and inevitably tentative overview of the development of scientific, medical, and technical periodicals over the course of the nineteenth century, seeking to map some of the distinctive features of that history.

Getting to grips with the scale and diversity of scientific, medical, and technical periodicals in nineteenth-century Britain is, however, a major challenge. Despite the existence of several catalogues, no satisfactorily comprehensive listing exists. The most systematic is the bibliography of British and colonial medical periodicals prepared in 1937 by W. R. LeFanu, the librarian of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, and expanded in 1984 by Jean Loudon, although even this is far from complete. It does, however, enable the historian to gain something of a sense of the rate of growth across the period, from nine British medical titles in 1800 to more than 150 in 1900.2 Gaining a comparable sense for scientific titles is less straightforward. Robert Gascoigne’s Historical Catalogue of Scientific Periodicals, 1665–1900 (1985) lists 124 British titles, selected on the basis of the degree of their use by “scientists of the time,” as measured by their citation in leading catalogues of scientific papers, rising from 11 in 1800 to 110 in 1900. The Catalogue of Scientific Serials, 1633–1876, compiled in 1879 by the American naturalist Samuel Scudder, is more extensive, listing a total of more than 550 titles published in Britain and Ireland. More extensive still (although excluding society publications) is the Catalogue of Scientific and Technical Periodicals, 1665–1895, prepared by the American chemist and bibliographer Henry Bolton, which includes more than 800 British titles, rising from 36 in 1800 to 330 in 1900. Bolton’s list, however, includes numerous general titles and many titles that reflect a very inclusive definition of “scientific and technical.”3 This inclusivity becomes quite unmanageable in John North’s Waterloo Directory of Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800–1900, series two of which (out of a planned five) lists more than five thousand titles with the subject key words “science” or “medicine,” but includes under these key words such general titles as Acworth’s Ealing Illustrated Magazine and General Advertiser and the Agnostic Annual.4

The growth and diversification of scientific, medical, and technical periodicals in nineteenth-century Britain is clearly in part a reflection of larger patterns in periodical production during this age of the industrialization of print. Figures from the Waterloo Directory suggest something in the order of a tenfold increase in the number of periodical titles across the century, while average circulation also increased very markedly. It is not surprising that from early on in the nineteenth century, commentators felt themselves to be living in an age in which periodicals exerted a new dominance. That dominance, relative to other types of publication, only increased as the century progressed.5 Statistical analysis of the entries in LeFanu’s list of medical periodicals and Bolton’s list of scientific periodicals suggests that the pattern here was broadly comparable (fig. 1.1). Indeed, scientific, medical, and technical periodicals were affected by many of the factors that caused the growth of periodical literature more generally, including the expansion and diversification of reading audiences and the wholesale industrialization of print manufacture and distribution. In what follows, we connect the history of scientific periodicals to that larger history, exploring features that are common as well as those that are distinct.

FIG. 1.1. Scientific, medical and technical periodical titles listed in Henry Carrington Bolton’s A Catalogue of Scientific and Technical Periodicals, 1665–1895, Together with Chronological Tables and a Library Check-List, 2nd ed. (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1897); and W. R. LeFanu’s “British Periodicals of Medicine: A Chronological List. Part 1: 1684–1899,” Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine 5 (1937): 735–61, 827–55. The chart displays the number of journal titles in publication in each decade of the nineteenth century. The entries in Bolton’s and LeFanu’s lists were cross-referenced with entries in COPAC (www.copac.ac.uk), Zeitschriftendatenbank (www.zeitschriftendatenbank.de), the Hathi Trust Digital Library (www.hathitrust.org), and the US National Library of Medicine’s PubMed catalogue (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/) to establish the exact publication dates of each title. Where this was not possible, or where information was inconsistent, journal titles were excluded from the data sample. The “combined” category records titles that are listed in Bolton’s list, LeFanu’s list, or in both, and is hence smaller than the sum of the two component parts. We are grateful to Konstantin Kiprijanov for compiling the data and producing this chart; the original data are available for download at conscicom.web.ox.ac.uk.

This chapter begins by reviewing the surprisingly large range of scientific, medical, and technical periodicals that existed in Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century, including a growing array of both society publications and commercial journals, before examining the rapid expansion in types of periodicals after 1815. In these years, the increased commercialization and mechanization of the book trade, together with the growth of reading audiences, underpinned a variety of initiatives to produce new types of scientific periodicals, including cheap weeklies and natural history monthlies. Moreover, learned societies began to emulate the commercial press with new forms of society publication. The second section examines the middle years of the century, when many of the efforts to produce commercial periodicals on particular scientific subjects met with financial disaster but society publications proliferated, and when an increasing range of commercial periodicals were directed at occupational groups, including not only medical practitioners but also miners, engineers, architects, and pharmaceutical chemists. The final section explores the changed circumstances of the periodical press in the late Victorian period, following the removal of taxes in the 1850s and 1860s and including further technological developments in book production and distribution. It charts the establishment of commercially sustainable journals in a growing range of scientific fields, and the growth of scientifically important “popular science” journals—a context out of which Nature emerged—while also showing that the period witnessed a continuing growth of occupationally oriented journals, not least in relation to medicine. Finally, it explores the emergence of university-oriented professional journals in the last decades of the century.

EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY PERIODICALS

While the number and range of scientific, medical, and technical periodicals published in Britain at the dawn of the nineteenth century was distinctly restricted by the standards of that century, close inspection reveals it to have been greater than historians might expect. The form of scientific periodical of the longest standing was the volume of transactions, published by a learned society. Of these, the oldest was of course the Royal Society of London’s Philosophical Transactions, which, after being a private endeavor for almost a century, was taken firmly under the society’s control in 1752, becoming formally tied to the society’s other activities.6 Over the final years of the century the practice of issuing transactions was emulated by new learned societies elsewhere in the kingdom—namely, the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society in 1785, the Royal Irish Academy in 1787, the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1788, the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 1792, and the Dublin Society in 1799—as well as by the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1788. They were also emulated in the capital by new, more specialist bodies—notably, the Royal College of Physicians in 1768, the Society of Antiquaries in 1770, the Society of Arts in 1783, the Medical Society in 1787, and the Linnean Society in 1791. These publications, typically in large (quarto) format, were rooted in the learned societies they served, and were not typically produced with a view to financial return, though they might find themselves subje...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Introduction: Constructing Scientific Communities
• PART 1   New Formats for New Readers
• PART 2   Defining the Communities of Science
• PART 3   Managing the Boundaries of Medicine
• Acknowledgments
• Select Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index