Month: September 2009

Bernard Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 564 pp. £31 hb. ISBN 0226481182. If there is one text that should be compulsory reading in science and literature in the nineteenth century, it must surely be this. It may have taken fifteen years to produce but…

Bernard Lightman and Aileen Fyfe (eds), Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). pp 432. hb £31. ISBN 0226276503. The study of ‘popular science’, one of the biggest growth areas in the history of science, is fraught with definitional difficulties. As Jonathan Topham reminds us in his illuminating…

Martin Willis, Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines: Science Fiction and the Cultures of Science in the Nineteenth Century (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2006), viii + 272pp. £26.50 pb. ISBN 0-87338-857-7. In Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines, Martin Willis presents us with an entertaining and illuminating series of case studies reflecting on the popular imagining of…