Science on Grub Street? Nicholson, commercial authorship and scientific journalism

The first editors of the new commercial scientific periodicals were outsiders, operating on the margins of the scientific elite. The skills required to launch and run Nicholson's Journal were derived from long experience with commercial authorship and the business of general periodical journalism, both far from entirely respectable activities in Britain in the turbulent years around 1800.Footnote ¹⁵ Some of these many skills were concerned with the management of text: dealing efficiently with the flow of original material from correspondents; finding, extracting or abstracting articles from other publications; translating from French or German; authoring editorial material; and gathering and sifting scientific news. Others required the management of people or business relationships: dealing sensitively with correspondents, mediating disputes in print, promoting public visibility by advertising and other means, and negotiating terms with engravers and printers to produce issues and with booksellers to distribute them. Text and commerce came together in the constantly recurring monthly task of assembling interesting material for a press deadline and ensuring that copies found their way into the hands of readers – hopefully with the whole process turning a profit.

In launching his Journal, William Nicholson drew on two decades of experience in the world where words met pounds, shillings and pence.Footnote ¹⁶ He had moved to London in about 1778, following two voyages as a midshipman in the East India Company and subsequent employment as a European agent for the master potter Josiah Wedgwood.Footnote ¹⁷ Seeking to live by his pen in this global centre of print, Nicholson formed close friendships with similarly ambitious and impoverished young writers, especially the radical author, dramatist and occasional actor Thomas Holcroft, and the novelist and political theorist William Godwin.Footnote ¹⁸ All three soon became involved in periodical journalism and other forms of commercial authorship, with Nicholson grinding out anonymous essays, poems, reviews and light literature for periodicals and collaborating with Holcroft on a novel.Footnote ¹⁹

Nicholson combined these literary connections with fruitful endeavours in scientific print.Footnote ²⁰ His first major publication, in 1782, was a popular introductory textbook on natural philosophy which subsequently went through five editions.Footnote ²¹ Another introductory work, The First Principles of Chemistry, followed in 1790, along with a Dictionary of Chemistry in 1795.Footnote ²² These books were classic examples of commercial scientific authorship, written with an eye to established markets, especially those for medical and school textbooks. They sold well, and brought Nicholson some moderate prosperity.Footnote ²³ By 1797, the year he started the Journal, he was married and renting a large house in Soho Square, where he ran a mathematical school and gave scientific lectures.Footnote ²⁴Nicholson's Journal was founded on a solid if unexceptional reputation built on his activities as a scientific author and on his knowledge of electricity, chemistry and the inventions of the ‘mechanical arts’; it was soon used by Nicholson to publish his greatest personal scientific achievement, the first decomposition of water with the Voltaic pile.Footnote ²⁵

Complementing this scientific acumen was Nicholson's long-time immersion in the world of general monthly periodical journalism. In 1797 the monthly periodical press in Britain consisted of the reviews, such as the Monthly Review, the Critical Review and the British Critic, and the magazines – like the long-running Gentleman's Magazine, the Universal Magazine and the Monthly Magazine.Footnote ²⁶ Nicholson's personal connections in this world and his ability to operate the levers of business that governed it were extensive: he even briefly edited his own monthly review periodical, the General Review of British and Foreign Literature, in 1806.Footnote ²⁷

But it was the magazines with which Nicholson's Journal had most in common, both in the way they encouraged a link between reading and active authorship of contributions, and in their commitment to the diffusion of knowledge. They were general-readership publications which encompassed all kinds of information, from antiquarianism to agriculture, aiming at, in the Monthly Magazine's case, ‘the advancement of mankind in useful knowledge and the genuine principles of reason and liberty’.Footnote ²⁸ Much of the text was sourced from the magazine's own readers, whose letters would usually have a rapid passage to print as articles in the next monthly issue. Some articles were on scientific matters, and even occasionally contained minor original scientific findings.Footnote ²⁹ Additional content was provided by reprinting text lifted from other publications.

In his Journal, Nicholson continued or adapted key practices of magazine periodicals already familiar in Britain. Among them were easy and rapid access to print, allowance for debate and disagreement, an active editorial hand, and reprinting of material sourced from other often expensive or hard-to-find publications consonant with Nicholson's stated aim to ‘collect and disseminate the Transactions of Philosophers, Chemists, and Manufacturers, with speed and precision’.Footnote ³⁰ Nicholson clearly drew inspiration, as contemporary commentators realized, from journals devoted to science already in existence on the Continent, most notably the Journal de physique.Footnote ³¹ Nonetheless, the conventions of magazine publication and reading in Britain provided the dominant context for Nicholson's project, and practices employed in Nicholson's Journal, such as reprinting articles from other publications, and the anonymous authorship of some material, were part of the cultural matrix of general periodical journalism of the period. Alexander Tilloch's rival Philosophical Magazine adopted a similar model, and its editor also drew on a similarly extensive background in print journalism.Footnote ³² In the operation of the new journals, scientific reputation and judgement were united with skills and textual practices drawn from the world of commercial print.

The Journal, the source of Nicholson's increased reputation and his usefulness to scientific devotees, was intimately, if somewhat paradoxically, connected with his outsider status. Being an editor was problematic: despite both Nicholson's Journal and the Philosophical Magazine becoming widely read fixtures of the British and European scientific worlds, neither Nicholson nor Alexander Tilloch were ever elected fellows of the Royal Society – the elite centre of so much scientific activity in Britain. To the society's aristocratically minded president, Sir Joseph Banks, ‘journalism’ was at best ungentlemanly, and at worst politically suspect.Footnote ³³ Tilloch was compelled to withdraw his candidacy for fellowship after being specifically told that he would be blackballed due to his editorship of a scientific periodical and a newspaper (the Star). Nicholson's Royal Society aspirations also ended ignominiously, with Banks said to have dismissed him as a ‘sailor-boy turned schoolmaster’ as he manoeuvred to block his election.Footnote ³⁴ In the Banksian ideal, ‘an author’ (meaning a commercial author) might be useful to science, but he was hardly fit to associate on an equal level with science's independent, gentlemanly elite. The marks of Nicholson's authorial successes could also be a hindrance, reducing to the stubborn ink stains of writing for money, and the stigma of journalistic ‘trade’ in words.

Furthermore, the periodical press carried specific problematic associations of its own. The links between some periodicals (especially the Monthly Review, Analytical Review and Critical Review and the Monthly Magazine), and a catch-all notion of revolutionary ‘Jacobinism’, however tenuous they may have been in reality, were frequently played up by Church-and-King critics in the 1790s in the aftermath of the French Revolutionary Terror.Footnote ³⁵ The fact that these periodicals were largely in the hands of religious Dissenters only fuelled suspicion.Footnote ³⁶ In 1798 the reactionary counterattack, the Anti-Jacobin Review, promised to ‘review the Monthly, critique the Critical, and analyse the Analytical Reviews’, and thus to take a stand against ‘the Jacobin faction, in the bosom of our country’, and ‘the torrent of licentiousness, incessantly rushing forth from their numerous presses’.Footnote ³⁷

A hostile critic, professing to know him by the company he kept, might well have had reason to suspect Nicholson of involvement in this ‘faction’. Two of his close friends from the 1790s, Thomas Holcroft and John Thelwall, were actually indicted for high treason in a notorious series of trials in 1794.Footnote ³⁸ Thelwall, in particular, was a prominent member of the famous London Corresponding Society, an organization of working men agitating for political reform.Footnote ³⁹ Appearances certainly suggested links to a disreputable radical underworld – and Joseph Banks, of course, was fearful of admitting to the Royal Society anyone who showed any suggestion of being ‘addicted to politicks’.Footnote ⁴⁰ What Nicholson's ‘politicks’ actually were is less clear. He appears to have espoused a more moderate or at least more private position than his friends, avoiding political action or declarations in print.Footnote ⁴¹ Nonetheless, he was closely involved in William Godwin's revisions of drafts of Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), which only narrowly avoided prosecution for seditious libel.Footnote ⁴² Nicholson and Godwin had both known George Robinson, the publisher–bookseller concerned in Political Justice, since the 1780s, and Robinson had published Nicholson's First Principles of Chemistry.Footnote ⁴³ The connection proved essential for the launch of Nicholson's Journal in 1797.

The business relationships behind the running of Nicholson's Journal were complex, and characteristic of a man deeply immersed in the print trade of the late eighteenth century, adept at negotiating its financial intricacies; unfortunately the absence of surviving systematic records only allows a partial reconstruction.Footnote ⁴⁴ Heralded by extensive advertising in the newspapers, the Journal launched as a joint venture between Nicholson and George Robinson's established publishing–bookselling firm, with the first issue appearing in April 1797 under the Robinson imprint.Footnote ⁴⁵ The ownership of the copyright continued to be divided equally between Nicholson and Robinson during the first year of publication, but in 1798, apparently frustrated by Robinson's costs absorbing most of the takings, Nicholson decided to take the project forward on his own.Footnote ⁴⁶ From then on, he was sole proprietor of the periodical, controlling the copyright himself and contracting directly with printers.Footnote ⁴⁷ Nicholson still needed the G.G. & J. Robinson firm to sell and distribute the Journal from their shop in Paternoster Row, and a shifting and occasionally strained arrangement continued until the Robinsons' temporary business collapse in 1804.Footnote ⁴⁸ Without a necessarily clear distinction between editor and publisher (Nicholson united both roles), running Nicholson's Journal clearly required numerous specialized business skills in addition to scientific judgement. The Journal was one among several projects in which Nicholson attempted to unite scientific, literary or engineering interests with commercial motives.Footnote ⁴⁹ All these projects fused two goals. They aimed to advance the material and intellectual welfare of society by the improvement of technology and the diffusion of knowledge, and they aimed to be a profitable business concern. Nicholson's Journal had a similar double objective of social improvement by widening access to scientific knowledge, and of commercial success for its editor. Managing the diffusion of scientific knowledge with scientific journals was coupled to managing the worldly details of print commerce.

Lasting prosperity, however, proved elusive. Nicholson's financial circumstances were frequently what one contemporary referred to obliquely as ‘embarrassed’.Footnote ⁵⁰ In 1806 alone, his old comrade Godwin had to bail him out of debtors’ prison no less than fifteen times, and when Nicholson died in 1815, it was, according to his friend the surgeon Anthony Carlisle, ‘in the deepest poverty’.Footnote ⁵¹ Two years before its editor's death, Nicholson's Journal had been absorbed by Alexander Tilloch's Philosophical Magazine.Footnote ⁵² It had appeared monthly until then despite all of Nicholson's spells in prison and other financial troubles.Footnote ⁵³

This was the world in which Nicholson's Journal operated: a world of booksellers and hack journalism, business contracts and unsettled debts, periodicals and printer's ink. It carried associations with radical politics and religious dissent, and was subject to the Janus-faced rewards of ‘trade’ and commercial authorship in Britain: respect for demonstrated industriousness and condescension for perceived ungentlemanliness.

What journal science looked like

Periodicals grow old as heavy bound volumes on a library shelf; in youth they had a more colourful existence, and were treated differently. What is now a permanent record or a historical source was once an ephemeral object in a stream of monthly, weekly or daily knowledge, interpreted in terms of its place in that stream and its relation to other such objects. To grasp the meaning of Nicholson's Journal for those whose eyes fell upon it when the ink was barely dry, our unit must be the single monthly issue: not (to borrow the terms of the Mechanics' Magazine) the ‘ponderous tome’ which preserves it, but the ‘winged sheet’ which it used to be.Footnote ⁵⁴ It was this slim and fragile sheaf of stitched papers which delivered information on the latest experiments on heat or the most recent developments in galvanism, which contained a reply attacking the claims of an article from the last number, which transmitted the latest news on the doings of French chemists or carried an essential translation of an article from one of their journals. Now ossified into a permanent record, it was once caught up in the flow of current events.

So let us follow the issue from February 1806, fresh from the presses of William Stratford off the Strand, into the hands of a hypothetical reader. This person would have most likely purchased the issue from a London bookseller such as H.D. Symonds in Paternoster Row or John Murray in Fleet Street. The price would have been two shillings and sixpence.Footnote ⁵⁵ Those not able to buy the Journal in London could have it sent at a little extra cost by placing an order with a bookseller.Footnote ⁵⁶

Our reader would have carried home a slim, highly portable object of ninety-six pages plus three engravings, ‘handsomely printed in the octavo form’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Nineteen numbered papers were packed into this particular issue, varying in length from a fourteen-page article down to a one-page letter. Opening at random, our reader might come across a letter from the Kendal natural philosopher John Gough detailing experiments on the magnetism of iron wires, a reprint of a recent Philosophical Transactions paper by William Hyde Wollaston on the discovery of palladium, or an account extracted and translated from the Journal de physique of experiments performed by the Galvanic Society of Paris. Or alternatively: Humboldt and Gay-Lussac's experiments on the torpedo fish translated from the Annales de chimie, some ‘Observations and Enquires concerning the Heat of Air Bellows’ by the cryptically named ‘K.H.D.’, or a description of a new ‘secret Lock of ten thousand combinations’, by Nicholson himself.Footnote ⁵⁸ It would quickly have become apparent that some papers continued topics and debates which carried over from previous issues of the Journal: a letter ‘on the cause of Fairy Rings’ (rings of mushrooms) added observations to a paper from the last month (and was later responded to in its turn), while a Mr James Stodart responded to a question raised by Thomas Beddoes on the breathing of nitrous oxide. A section of short pieces of ‘scientific news’ followed the papers, including the information that a certain Captain Lewis was currently engaged on an expedition up the Missouri river – from which ‘very interesting intelligence’ might soon be expected.Footnote ⁵⁹

What emerges from this patchwork of ephemeral scientific exchange? We see quick responses to previous work, similarly rapid criticisms, questions posed and answered, ‘scientific news’ on a global scale, and reprintings of important British and French material from other publications. In contrast, the Philosophical Transactions contained none of these things. It was the pre-eminent forum for scientific print in Britain; those responsible for its contents did not refer to it as a ‘scientific journal’, and would probably have considered the term faintly dishonourable to the august name of the society had it been applied.Footnote ⁶⁰ It did not print letters, scientific news, or notices of recent books, nor did it allow authors to submit articles directly. These were the practices of journals and magazines. Since the mid-eighteenth century, when the Philosophical Transactions had shed its origins as a monthly periodical of the Republic of Letters, it had functioned as a permanent record in print of original papers chosen from those read, out loud, at the Royal Society's Thursday evening meetings at Somerset House in London.Footnote ⁶¹ At these meetings, new work was ceremonially communicated to Britain's scientific elite (fellows and their guests), establishing priority and becoming the object of knowledge and discussion in these circles long before it had passed under the printing press.Footnote ⁶² The Philosophical Transactions gave papers read behind these closed doors fixed and, in theory, distributable form, but publication was slow, taking place only twice a year.Footnote ⁶³ A paper written in July could only be read at a meeting several months later, and might have to wait almost a year before being printed.Footnote ⁶⁴

Getting printed in the Transactions required connections as well as a sufficiently impressive scientific paper. This reflected an uneasy tension between the Royal Society's status as the pre-eminent forum by which scientific research was publicized in Britain, and its actual structure, which resembled that of an English gentleman's club (complete with blackballing of unsuitable ‘journalists’). Only fellows could propose papers to be read at meetings, and most papers were by authors who were already fellows.Footnote ⁶⁵ Furthermore, not all papers read at meetings could even be sure of reaching print in a volume of the Philosophical Transactions: they were selected for this honour by the society's Committee of Papers, which was in practice identical with the Royal Society's Council. In common with other ‘memoirs’ of scientific academies or societies, the Philosophical Transactions, controlled by an elite group of insiders, was the vehicle of the slow publication of immaculately printed papers that aspired to the status of completed knowledge. It was a series of finished products.

Nicholson's Journal was a process. Knowledge could be discussed and argued over from issue to issue, whether fairy rings or nitrous oxide, palladium or galvanism. The Journal functioned as a virtual community of knowledge exchange in print, whereby correspondents geographically dispersed around Britain – like the Kendal Quaker John Gough – could participate in a collective enterprise of ‘public science’ which had not yet been wholly eclipsed by deference to specialist expertise.Footnote ⁶⁶ It was a process in principle open to all in which many participated; entry did not depend on patronage and the transition from reader to printed writer was a fluid metamorphosis. There were strong similarities here with the workings of general periodicals. The Monthly Magazine, for example, also thrived on discussion and controversy in print, with a reliance on readers' contributions for much of its material, calling for ‘the voluntary contributions of the liberal and ingenious of all classes and professions’ as part of its goal to ‘forward the progress of mental improvement upon the most liberal and unshackled plan’.Footnote ⁶⁷

In common with these general publications, Nicholson's Journal aimed to make getting original material into print easy and fast. Its monthly pace was a major asset in enlisting and coopting readers into the flow of its sheets of scientific text. A particularly strong manifestation of this was in the rapidly progressing science of galvanism: for a few years in Britain this developed in a symbiotic relationship with Nicholson's Journal in which quick publication stimulated further results by other researchers, contributing to a stream of new experimental findings.Footnote ⁶⁸ Scientific articles were framed as letters to Nicholson, whose selection policy leaned towards printing and letting readers exercise judgement rather than enforcing strong quality control at an editorial level. Submissions would usually be printed in the next issue, appearing in under a month. The quick turnaround and regular scientific news provided by Nicholson's Journal and the Philosophical Magazine was widely welcomed. Before the launch of Nicholson's Journal, claimed a writer in the Critical Review of 1799, it was from the French Journal de physique that, scandalously, ‘we often received the first information of discoveries that were made even in our own country’.Footnote ⁶⁹

In all this, the role of the editor was essential. It was a role that required the organization and arrangement of writers and readers as well as of texts. Nicholson's Journal was geared to disseminating writing by a large and diverse community of authors amongst an even larger readership; many individuals were part of its geographically far-flung social web. The editor sat at the neck of the textual hourglass, at the site at which multiple sources of copy were processed into a single monthly issue to be reproduced hundreds of times by the printing press and widely distributed. He selected from new material sent to him by correspondents, sourced foreign and domestic papers which merited reprinting, gathered all the news fit to print, mediated disputes between correspondents, and occasionally contributed his own original work. Additionally, as we have seen, Nicholson managed the business end of the Journal's publication, negotiating with printers and booksellers to ensure that a new issue would appear at the beginning of each month to continue the process its readers had made a part of their scientific lives.Footnote ⁷⁰ Though Continental models of scientific editorship, such as that of the Abbé Rozier, founder of the Journal de physique, undoubtedly provided inspiration, in Britain it was a role largely inherited from and dependent on the world of general periodical journalism, requiring the deployment of Nicholson's experience from that world.

Nonetheless, in forging a role for the scientific ‘journalist’ in Britain, Nicholson significantly altered this role in one respect. Editors of British periodical publications had tended to be anonymous – though their identities were usually an open secret – practising what the publisher Charles Knight was later to call ‘that best of all forms of government in periodical literature – a secret despotism’.Footnote ⁷¹ Nicholson explicitly broke with this convention, asserting in his prospectus for the Journal that that practice of ‘an Author speaking of Men and Things in his own name and person’ would be one ‘calculated to inspire confidence’, encourage ‘correctness and fidelity’, and endow the work with authority.Footnote ⁷² Publicly identifying himself as the Journal's editor on each title page, and ensuring original articles were addressed as letters to himself, he fashioned an active and visible editorial role which closely tied his publication to his person. It linked the Journal's contents to the public stock value of his own reputation for editorial integrity and good judgement of scientific and technical material. The limits and responsibilities of this role were still largely ill-defined. In his January 1799 issue Nicholson printed a letter from a correspondent in Newcastle requesting information on ‘the Invention and Practice of the Art of Hat making’.Footnote ⁷³ Three issues later, Nicholson reported that he had now had time to visit ‘the manufactory of Messrs. Collinsons’, hatters, in Gravel-lane, Southwark’, and treated his readers to a detailed account of the processes involved in the making of their headgear.Footnote ⁷⁴ Other editorial responsibilities proved more taxing. Nicholson was also called upon to manage the unusual complications of anonymous and pseudonymous scientific work and commentary published in his Journal (another practice mirroring the monthly magazines), and occasionally had to act as umpire to heated disputes or critiques.Footnote ⁷⁵ He had to deal with all the problems arising from authorship, trustworthiness and ‘intellectual property’ in a scientific publication whose corresponding writers were often not known personally to the editor. The potential for conflict was compounded because the role of independent commercial journals in British science was still unclear, especially in terms of their relation to more established sources of scientific authority such as the Royal Society. The remainder of this article focuses on what was probably the most serious conflict Nicholson encountered. It concerned a practice which had long been a staple of the general periodical and newspaper press: reprinting.

‘To monopolize the beauties of all the modern scientific publications’: reprinting and conflict with the Philosophical Transactions

Let us take another look at our issue from February 1806. Nicholson's Journal was by then a recognized venue for original publication on a variety of topics, especially galvanism and chemistry. But simultaneously it was a print technology which synthesized and reproduced knowledge and information originating from a variety of sources spread across the scientific world. In our February issue, we find translations of articles from scarce French journals such as the Journal de physique, the Annales de chimie, and the lesser known Magasin encyclopédique, along with material extracted from a volume of the Philosophical Transactions. Adopting a procedure of long-standing use in the magazine and newspaper press, Nicholson harvested material from a wide variety of pre-existing print sources both domestic and foreign, no doubt using his connections with booksellers to gain access to rarer material. Other issues of the Journal included reprinted material originating from presses not only in London and Paris but also, for example, Turin, Leipzig, Berlin, Dublin, Manchester, Stockholm, New York and Philadelphia.Footnote ⁷⁶

Reprinting mattered. Far from being merely a way to fill space, it was central to Nicholson's vision of his project. Getting access to scientific print could be challenging. This was true especially for provincial men of science of modest means, but even for a wealthy individual living in London, the Napoleonic Wars seriously hampered the availability of Continental serials.Footnote ⁷⁷ The Transactions, Proceedings or Memoirs of scientific academies or societies (both British and foreign) presented a particular problem, highlighted by Nicholson in the Preface to the Journal's first issue. Considering ‘the very limited circulation of academical Transactions’, due to ‘their price, their number, their extent, distance of publication, difference of language, labour of perusal, and the efforts of mental abridgement’, he noted that some of their best papers must remain ‘unknown to a very large class of men of science’. Those ‘extreme few’ who were ‘so fortunate as to have access to all the expanded sources of philosophical intelligence’ might still benefit from the Journal's original papers, but his aim to ‘collect and disseminate’ knowledge was at least as important.Footnote ⁷⁸

Not everyone saw it this way. The first volume of Nicholson's Journal did receive positive reviews in the Monthly Review, Critical Review and Analytical Review (all reform-minded periodicals in Dissenter hands), with the Monthly Review hailing Nicholson as ‘richly entitled to the thanks of the public’ for implementing ‘the idea of a scientific journal’ – which the reviewer saw as characteristic of Continental science – in Britain.Footnote ⁷⁹ But the Anglican and government-aligned British Critic was less approving. While grudgingly admitting the existence of ‘several persons’ with scientific interests who were without ‘the means of purchasing, or of borrowing, the new scientific publications’, the anonymous writer declared,

These were concerns around what we would now term ‘intellectual property’, and the ethics of copying knowledge from other publications to sell as part of one's own.Footnote ⁸¹ Nicholson had vowed in the Preface to his first issue never to ‘infringe that first and most sacred property which men hold in the products of their own understanding’ – yet he had meant this to apply primarily to unpublished private knowledge. If material was already ‘before the Public’, Nicholson claimed the freedom to reprint it, though always with reference given to the publication from which it was sourced.Footnote ⁸² The dispute between Nicholson and Joseph Banks would turn around the problem of the boundary between the domains of private and public, and the rights of reprinting public knowledge.

As we have seen, the Philosophical Transactions did not have a publication system geared towards a rapid passage from laboratory bench to printed page. That was not its aim: six-month delays in publication were incidental when producing volumes which asserted a status of permanent, polished, authoritative contributions to scientific knowledge.Footnote ⁸³ As a partial compensation for the delay in the appearance of its volumes in print, the Royal Society did provide its authors with ‘separate copies’ (what we would now term offprints) of their papers, which could then be circulated privately. Clearly, this limited distribution to those with some access to the author, direct or indirect; before the Transactions was published, the circulation of Royal Society knowledge in Britain still mostly took place within the scientific elite.

Nicholson, aware of this and critical of the society's publication model, wrote to Sir Joseph Banks in March 1802. The letter was polite, deferential and somewhat audacious: Nicholson wanted the Royal Society's blessing on his wish to reprint the offprints of Royal Society papers in his own journal, before the appearance of the full half-volume of the Philosophical Transactions in which they were contained.Footnote ⁸⁴ Nicholson had done this on at least one occasion, and his letter to Banks was prompted by hints from ‘certain Fellows’ that he had ‘deviated from or offended the wish or usage of the Society’ in doing so. He reminded Banks that Continental scientific journals were already in the habit of printing translations of offprints sent to fellows' correspondents abroad, and hoped that the Royal Society would not require that ‘Journalists within the realm should be put in a less favored Situation than foreign philosophers’. Nicholson's proposal would certainly have considerably widened early access to new scientific knowledge announced under the Royal Society's auspices, but it also posed a serious challenge to the Royal Society's property in and control over that knowledge. The plan threatened to undermine both the sale and perhaps even the epistemic authority of the Philosophical Transactions, whose best papers would now appear for the first time in Britain as cheap, commercial, ‘journalistic’ print.

Banks was not willing to let this happen. Nor would he concede a mere journalist's veiled critique of the Royal Society's publication operation. In his reply he first disputed Nicholson's convenient identification of the distribution of offprints as the papers' ‘true first publication’ and hence his claim that it was appropriate to reprint them: first publication was emphatically when the full Transactions was ‘Publish[e]d for Sale’. He then asserted that, while foreign journalists might provide a useful service in translating from the offprints, the British scientific world was ‘sufficiently supplied by the Publication of the Transactions’ and the customary reprinting from its papers by Nicholson and other ‘British journalists’ after the volume's publication. He finally indicated that even that privilege might be retracted ‘if any farther liberties are taken’.Footnote ⁸⁵

There was worse to come. Undoubtedly Sir Joseph was already mistrustful of the new scientific journals operating outside the bounds of what David Millar termed ‘the Banksian Learned Empire’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Banks was notoriously jealous of the Royal Society's privileges, and to all appearances Nicholson's Journal already threatened what John Gascoigne, writing of Banks's opposition to the Astronomical and Geological Societies, has called ‘the traditional role of the Royal Society as the clearing house for the scientific capital of the nation’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Nicholson's letter would only have confirmed these suspicions. When Nicholson wrote to Banks six weeks later asking permission to dedicate the first volume of the new octavo series of his Journal to Banks,Footnote ⁸⁸ Sir Joseph paid him the insult of declining the offer:

‘Hostility’ was an ominous word coming from the most influential gentleman of science in Britain. Nicholson replied assuring Banks of his commitment to the rights of intellectual property as expressed in the Preface to his Journal: he would respect the society's ‘demands’ and would never presume ‘to violate the property of any man or body of men’. Nonetheless, he reaffirmed his position on ‘the Evils’ which still ‘remained without prospect of redress’ in the Royal Society's publication process, informing Banks that he hoped to write with further reasons why his proposal would be ‘of advantage to the Royal Society and the Public at large’.Footnote ⁹⁰Nicholson's Journal, its editor hoped, could still become the channel by which new knowledge read at meetings of the Royal Society might be transmitted rapidly and cheaply to those outside the scientific elite.

The Journal never achieved this role. Whatever slim chance Nicholson might have had of persuading Banks to embrace his publication model dramatically evaporated just over a week later in what can only have been a singular piece of perfectly timed bad luck. Relying on previous advice on the probable time of publication of the Philosophical Transactions from Banks's librarian, Jonas Dryander, Nicholson had reprinted offprints of two Royal Society papers in his Journal for June 1802, expecting them to appear shortly after the Transactions had reached the booksellers' shelves. But the publication of the Transactions was delayed, and Nicholson found he had accidentally printed two previously unpublished Royal Society papers in a single issue.Footnote ⁹¹ It must have looked like a deliberate provocation, a blatant violation of the Royal Society's property, and a presumably apoplectic Banks summoned Nicholson to his house on the afternoon of 4 June ‘to converse with him on the subject of his last publication’.Footnote ⁹² Nicholson did his best to patch up the damage and assure Banks that it had all been a mistake, and that he would ‘neither desire nor claim nor intend to exercise any other power over the Royal Society's Copy than what they think fit to grant’.Footnote ⁹³ Nonetheless, the damage had been done. Banks used the situation to tighten the Royal Society's grip on control of its own print, arranging for the society's Council to adopt a motion requiring that all subsequent offprints carry a stern warning to authors against allowing reprinting of their papers until a month had elapsed from the day the relevant Philosophical Transactions volume had appeared.Footnote ⁹⁴ It represented a hardening of rules which both added an extra month of delay to Nicholson's reprinting of papers and asserted the Royal Society's property in scientific authors' printed knowledge over and above the choices of the authors themselves. Reprinting, a practice deeply associated with British magazine periodicals and daily newspapers, had been embraced by Nicholson as an essential practice in his Journal. The conflict of journalism's values with the alternative publication regime of the Royal Society highlights the limits of efforts to use journals to rapidly and widely disseminate all new scientific knowledge at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Conclusion: the lost labours of a ‘journalist’

Of the two brave new scientific journals launched in 1790s Britain, one now has an unbroken publication history stretching back over two hundred years and continues to be published to this day. The other is Nicholson's Journal. After Alexander Tilloch's Philosophical Magazine absorbed Nicholson's publication in 1813, its subsequent operation as a joint concern with the successful bookseller–publisher Richard Taylor provided a lasting foundation for the enterprise.Footnote ⁹⁵ In contrast, Nicholson ultimately lost out in the world of commercial authorship, periodical journalism and printer's ink, dying in poverty without leaving his family ‘even the credit or the means to bury him’.Footnote ⁹⁶ His Journal enjoyed modest success during the first decade of the nineteenth century, with its editor a well-known figure in the British scientific world – but he remained fundamentally an outsider. The scientific elite might use his publication when it suited them, taking pleasure in its announcements of their discoveries, but, with Joseph Banks at the helm of the Royal Society, they would never admit its editor to their gentlemanly inner circle. He was condemned, as one obituary put it, to ‘the common fate of projectors, to be continually employed without enjoying any material advantage from his labours’.Footnote ⁹⁷ His publication gave inspiration to subsequent founders of scientific journals in Britain, but he himself, commercially minded author and journalist rather than gentleman of science, did not provide a model to emulate.

Nonetheless, telling a story that ultimately ends in failure has its advantages. Nicholson's Journal is unencumbered by any destiny of future glories: there is no long and distinguished subsequent publication history connecting its beginnings smoothly to the ‘modern scientific journal’. From Nicholson's point of view, as he worked to manoeuvre his fledgling publication in relation to more established vehicles of print like the Philosophical Transactions, the scientific journal was still not an inevitable success story, nor even a fully stable genre. By looking at Nicholson's struggles in the world of commercial print, and the features of British science which occasionally frustrated his efforts, we can begin to acquire a sense of the contingencies and transformations at work in the information economy of scientific knowledge around the turn of the nineteenth century. Nicholson's Journal illustrates how features which might at first glance seem to us like wasteful peculiarities eventually eliminated, such as the practice of reprinting, were central to the definition of what a ‘scientific journal’ constituted around 1800 – and a central source of conflict with the Royal Society's very different publication model. And, as I have argued, it is precisely features like reprinting which foreground deeper cultural connections with the disreputable world of general periodical journalism, the world of the struggling commercial author and the dilettante correspondent, the bookseller's trade. As the divide between expert scientific and general culture became better defined later in the nineteenth century, with the consolidation of ‘popular science’ as a print genre to mediate between those inside science and those outside, scientific journals transformed into exclusive, specialist, expert and eventually professional publications. In this new scientific print culture there was a place neither for the publication strategy emanating from Joseph Banks's gentlemanly and clubbable Royal Society meetings, nor for William Nicholson's project for an inclusive, accessible science carried on and distributed through commercial journals. I have sought to recover how scientific knowledge moved in print in the early nineteenth-century world in which these two alternatives uneasily coexisted, when the scientific journal was still a potentially troublesome innovation rather than a venerable institution.