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.

Setting aside any question of ‘faith and doubt’, superficially associated with the history of the mid-nineteenth century, there was as much a tendency as ever during that period for people to look heavenwards with their questions. The author of an 1856 article in Chambers's Journal noted that:

If anything characterizes nineteenth-century attitudes towards science, it is its increasing popularization by just such a plethora of books and discussions, to say nothing of the enthusiasm of writers and publishers such as Robert Chambers himself. The scale of space attracted a readership negotiating its way between traditional biblical motifs, and models that corresponded with emerging astronomical data, and it is unsurprising to find that in his own popularizing volume, Chambers expressed one in terms of the other.

The author of the above Chambers's article, however, correctly identified a trend among popularizers during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Science writers and their readers shifted their attention beyond the Earth beneath their feet and into space, our satellite, the neighbouring planets, and what might be found there.

Because science was becoming a professional enterprise in the nineteenth century, an inquiry into the ‘centrality’ or ‘marginality’ of scientific ideas at mid-century entails two separate questions. First, why did a given idea influence other researchers or fail to influence them? Where professional networks made themselves effective gatekeepers of credibility, this becomes in the first instance a question about the functioning of those networks. But there was also a popular audience for scientific ideas, and another way to assess the perceived ‘centrality’ of a scientific discourse would be to ask how well it was known to this broader community, and why they regarded it as fundamental or incidental to the scientific enterprise. By the later nineteenth century, this is less a question about the validation of competing claims than about the apportionment of finite public awareness. The universe of authenticated science was growing large; in the general-interest monthlies and nascent magazines of ‘popular science’, new ideas competed for attention with hagiographic surveys of past achievement. Many claims regarded as credible by researchers were nevertheless ignored by the reading public. For a new idea to be celebrated as a groundbreaking discovery, it needed to possess not only credibility but visible social implications. Indeed, popularizers often promoted scientific ideas by converting statements about nature into statements about human society.

The present chapter considers sidelined sites of science in the late-Victorian period, precisely the moment during which many historians have characterized the sciences as having transformed into specialized professions based in academic and government-sponsored research facilities, like the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. The growth and character of these facilities have received much historical attention; yet, surprisingly, their forerunners have not. If we agree that a significant institutional shift took place during this period, we might ask what were those forerunner institutions and what became of them?

Several histories of Anglo-American scientific institutions have contributed to a ‘canon’ of nineteenth-century science as a progress story of a shift from ‘amateur’ to ‘professional’ science in which the former involved individual, leisurely endeavours and the latter professional teams, working in ‘Big Science’ at new research institutions. Contemporary late-Victorian discourse championed state-supported research while bemoaning the inadequacy of private initiative. More recent laboratory studies, in turn, have tended to celebrate specialized, extra-domestic sites – museum, laboratory, observatory – while sidelining ‘private’ domestic spaces. The image has emerged of ‘domestic’ science as quaint and idiosyncratic, although various scholars are succeeding in dismantling this skewed representation.

One of the best documented cases of a nineteenth-century amateur tradition, located at the private estate of John William Strutt, third Baron Rayleigh, Terling Place, in Essex, has helped create this idiosyncratic imagery.

‘The year 1866 was marked by a strange incident, an unexplained and inexplicable phenomenon … which disturbed the maritime population and exciting the public mind in the interior of continents.’ Thus, began Jules Verne's classic science fiction adventure Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Published in 1870, the novel began with reports of an unknown monster sinking a number of ships. Verne's description of the sightings, the rumours and the debates surrounding the creature's existence accurately reflected the sea serpent periodical literature of the time.

Although sea serpents are most often associated with myth and legend, in the nineteenth century they achieved a margin of scientific legitimacy that they never had before or since, capturing the imagination of a public trying to make sense of the vast new developments in science. The discovery of fossils, particularly dinosaurs, provided tangible evidence for the existence of creatures which had been regarded as belonging to the realm of the fantastic. As paleontologists discovered plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs, a dramatic increase in sightings of sea serpents also occurred.

British science in the early twenty-first century seems largely institutionalized; sophisticated laboratories, commercial companies and governmental organizations control the production and distribution of scientific knowledge to such an extent that it is difficult to imagine that science was not always part of the British hegemony. Indeed, there is a popular, if ahistorical, perception that science has always been practised from within such a power structure. Despite the continued opposition of, among others, animal rights activists and certain scientific ethics lobbying groups, professional science appears insulated against, and unconcerned by, any voices raised in protest. Yet, the rise of the scientific institution in the late nineteenth century reveals that the central and dominant position of professional science did not go uncontested and that public resistance was not as marginalized as it appears today. State-supported (if not funded) scientific laboratories, the most important symbol of professional science in the last quarter of the century, found to their cost that the ideology of institutional science was anathema to some sections of the Victorian public and to try to sideline their contribution to scientific debates would result in voluble opposition.

The founding of the British Institute of Preventive Medicine in 1889 is one of those important moments in the history of the scientific laboratory that reveals how professional scientific culture was once a site of vigorous and violent conflict over authority.

This essay investigates the shifting centrality/marginality axis of scientific authority in nineteenth-century Britain by comparing two key works of the newly-developed discipline of sexology: Psychopathia Sexualis (1886–1902) written by Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Sexual Inversion (1897) written by John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis. Examining the production and dissemination of the two works highlights the contested authorial positions within the new discipline. It reveals that the boundaries between the role of sexologist and that of the sexological case study of the (male) ‘sexual invert’ were fluid. While the concept of ‘sexual inversion’, which was developed by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who claimed that same-sex sexuality is a form of gender inversion, theoretically included forms of female ‘sexual inversion’, in this context, it refers to male same-sex love. The psychiatrist, Krafft- Ebing developed new sexual taxonomies and published them in 12 revised editions of his magnum opus on sexuality. Ellis, scientist and literary scholar, is today better remembered for his involvement in the first study in English of same-sex sexuality than its initiator Symonds, a Renaissance scholar, literary critic and self-identified ‘sexual invert’. By comparing the production of Psychopathia Sexualis and Sexual Inversion and their impact on British culture, I hope to unveil some of the forces that shaped the battle for sexological authority in late nineteenth-century Britain. I argue that, unlike in European branches of sexology, which were firmly anchored within scientific tradition, British sexology was partly indebted to the literary realm.

Perhaps more than any other historical period, the Victorian age emphasized the link between the management of morals and the social health of the nation. If an individual could exercise control over his or her own behaviour, regulating undesirable propensities and developing positive faculties, then society would function according to the organic principles of steady growth, gradual development and eventual transformation. The tradition of self-help books promoted this idea of governance in that they offered practical guides to the working and middle classes about almost any aspect of human life, from conduct to cooking. Samuel Smiles's Self-Help (1859) was a hugely influential early example of a genre of writing that has again become popular for its advocacy of the benefits of individual action as a means towards self-knowledge and personal development. Then, as now, this idea of self-help was underpinned by hard work and perseverance, both virtues that had currency in all classes of society.

It might seem curious to group practical guides to the mind with cookery books, but a defining characteristic of the Victorian period was its preoccupation with seeing the hidden patterns that lay beneath the surface of things. Of special interest were explorations of the workings of the human mind because they provided insights into individuality and autonomy, and in particular the significance of will. The practices of physiognomy and phrenology fed this interest in mind and body, providing readings of external (physical) appearance that illuminated internal (mental) form.

In the February 1869 issue of Belgravia magazine, an essay entitled ‘Women and Men’ opens with a trio of questions: ‘What is a woman? What is a man? Are women men?’ The writer then takes issue with a particular ‘strong-minded woman’, Lydia Becker, who had campaigned for women to appear on the voting register in Manchester, and finally arrives at the heart of the article: ‘Although Miss Becker appears to have had her innings in the registration court at Manchester, her grand field-day … was at Hull, when at the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science she attracted one of the most crowded audiences, by reading a paper with this extremely grotesque title: “On the supposed Differences in the Minds of the two Sexes of Man.”’ As it happened, Becker's title was slightly, though significantly, different: ‘On some supposed Differences in the Minds of Men and Women with regard to Educational Necessities’. While Belgravia dismisses Becker's paper as ‘singularly illogical’ and ‘based on a delusion’, the prominence given to its substance, including the three propositions that form the kernel of Becker's argument, is noteworthy. Take, for instance, the second proposition: ‘That any broad marks of distinction which may at the present time be observed to exist between the minds of men and women collectively, were fairly traceable to the influence of the different circumstances under which they passed their lives, and could not be proved to inhere in each class in virtue of sex.’

Victorian England witnessed the curious intellectual union of scientific naturalism and the belief in magic as these two seemingly opposed systems of thought rose to prominence in the second half of the nineteenth century. The doctrine of the former was formulated in part by the demands of scientists such as Thomas Huxley and John Tyndall. Naturalist thinkers wished to establish a scientifically directed culture and to eradicate religious belief and other such ‘superstitious’ thought entirely. Scientific naturalism maintained that belief in any non-physical agencies was superstitious and indicative of a culturally dysfunctional society. The doctrine of the latter was expressed in esoteric societies such as the Theosophical Society and the Hermetic Society and sought to establish, within the natural world and governed by natural laws, the mystery and spirituality traditionally associated with religious thinking and belief in magic. The people who belonged to these esoteric and magical societies that were springing up at the end of the century understood magic as the interaction of the human will and imagination with visible and invisible correspondences within the natural world in order to effect change.

To read the geological work of John Ruskin from the early 1860s until the mid-1880s is to look at a marginalized science through the lens of a marginal – and, ultimately, marginalized – practitioner. The inception of the dense, professional Geological Magazine in 1864 does show that able work was being done by an increasingly self-aware international community. But while geology was not being practised less, its significance in Victorian scientific culture was diminishing. Not only the question of evolution, but questions about the nervous system, solar power, sociology and the relation between mind and body began to edge geology out of its former place. The science which had fed controversy about the age of the earth, the historical accuracy of the Bible and the origin and evolution of life began to shift to a science of filling informational gaps. Geology's leading practitioners certainly resisted being relegated to the sidelines. As the Oxford geologist John Phillips lectured to the British Association in 1864: