The changing character of the systematic study of nature and its status in public life in nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland cannot be understood without close attention to the history of the periodical press. Of course, a variety of periodical formats were central to the circulation of scientific knowledge claims. Throughout the century the range of periodical genres and formats in which scientific views and news circulated was vast and constantly expanding. Scientific topics found their way not only into the publications of scientific societies and other specialised journals, but also into a wide swathe of the general press, not to mention serially published encyclopaedias and even daily papers.

But the history of science and the press is not simply a history of transmission and circulation. The press was also a key factor in the changing status of science in Victorian culture, the evolving identity of scientific practitioners, and debates over the nature of knowledge. Paradoxically, the fluid and wide-ranging array of venues for scientific exchange developed alongside an emergent idea that there was one periodical genre that had a privileged claim to the publication of new knowledge claims: the specialised scientific journal. Whether controlled by a commercial publisher or a scientific society, these publications were compilations of papers largely dedicated to original claims, written (and signed) by active investigators, who were expected to take responsibility for their contents. By the end of the century periodical authorship in this narrow sense had taken on immense importance in defining a life in science. Understanding this tension between diversification, on the one hand, and efforts at standardisation and consolidation, on the other, reveals a great deal about evolving configurations of the scientific public, popular science and scientific expertise.

The Rise of a Scientific Press

The intertwined history of science and periodicals in British and Irish contexts is commonly agreed to have begun with the founding of the Philosophical Transactions in 1665. According to the common narrative, the Transactions initiated a new publishing format that made scientific communication more efficient and trustworthy, and thus hastened the flowering of modern science.