Science and Reviews

Walter Houghton, whose name is now rightly identified with the study of Victorian periodicals, has presented them as one of the most striking cultural phenomena of the century. The grounds of this assertion are threefold: the sheer number of publications (several hundred reviews, magazines, and weeklies), the constellation of prestigious contributors, and the kind of audience (Houghton 1982, 1). G. M. Young described the leading journals as written by and for the ‘articulate classes, whose writing and conversation make opinion’ (G. M. Young 1936, 6). The leading journals, beginning with the Edinburgh Review from 1802 and the Quarterly Review from 1809, constituted the intellectual forum of the nation, an aspect of the public sphere which Habermas has seen as characteristic of liberal bourgeois regimes from the eighteenth century. Historians of Victorian science are well aware of the presence of science in the major periodicals of the day, particularly by the time of the Fortnightly (1865) and Contemporary (1866) reviews, the crucial platforms for publicists such as Huxley, Spencer, Tyndall, and Lewes. But there is very little explicit analysis of scientific reviewing, even though it is recognized that men of science such as Playfair and Brewster wrote extensively in review journals, the latter depending on them for income.