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.