Science for the People: Popular Print and the Making of the Victorian World

Value

£320,000

Science for the People: Popular Print and the Making of the Victorian World | School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science | University of Leeds

Postgraduate students

Alexander King

Description

In Victorian Britain the sciences were regarded as key to national prosperity, harmony, and progress, but where did that characteristically modern vision of science come from?

This project examines the question afresh and provides a ground-breaking perspective, arguing that it emerged out of the new possibilities for public communication that resulted from the industrialization of book production.

In particular, it focuses on an epoch-making programme of cheap publishing that placed the sciences at the heart of a progressive and democratizing industrial society, exploring how the underlying vision of authoritative, useful, and secular knowledge transformed both the sciences and British society. 

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