"Victorian Popularizers of Science" focuses on the journalists and writers who wrote about science for a general audience in the second half of the nineteenth century. Bernard Lightman examines more than thirty of the most prolific and influential popularizers of the day, investigating how they communicated with their audience. By focusing on a forgotten coterie of science writers, Lightman offers new insights into the role of women in scientific inquiry, the market for scientific knowledge, tensions between religion and science, and the complexities of scientific authority in nineteenth-century Britain.
Bernard Lightman is professor of humanities at York University, Toronto, editor of the journal Isis, editor of Victorian Science in Context, and coeditor of Science in the Marketplace, all published by the University of Chicago Press.
"The book is a substantial work of scholarship rather than a casual read, and it offers much for historians of science as well as students of popular writing." - Jon Turney, Times Higher Education "Bernard Lightman's excellent Victorian Popularizers of Science combines an unusually comprehensive sweep with strikingly meticulous research. In so doing, it makes a compelling case for the importance of the legions of self-conscious popularizers." - Gowan Dawson, Times Literary Supplement.