Cogent, compelling, and creatively crafted, this collection of scholarly essays examines some of the many processes by which scientific knowledge was made, marketed, and consumed as “popular” in nineteenth-century Britain—keeping clearly in mind that no one is quite sure what all the concept of “popular” may turn out to mean. As helpful and astute as editors as they are as scholars, Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman provide an articulate introductory chapter, in which they explain the conceptual framework within which they have organized these materials, selecting the metaphor of the marketplace to help situate the historical complexities encountered in the study of “popular science” in its many variations. Likewise, their editorial decision to employ a three-part thematic organization (rather than a more conventional chronological approach) that focuses on orality, print, and display works especially well, as it simultaneously offers a clever resolution of some of the difficult historiographical challenges such projects often face and provides a conscientious response to the complex interdisciplinary needs of its potential readership.

The scholarly contribution made by such insightful and intellectually agile editorial work is too often overlooked and too frequently undervalued. Here, it makes all the difference, bringing together in purposeful juxtaposition high-quality essays that gather meaningful momentum as the reader makes her way through the volume, each essay playing off of and adding new facets of understanding to the ones that precede and follow.

The volume's first section, “Orality,” opens with an essay by James Secord, in which he provides a finely nuanced discussion about the changing nature and interrelationship of scientific conversation and shoptalk as they manifested themselves in multifarious settings during the nineteenth century. The reading of formal scientific papers and less formal scientific conversations worked together to create and help define the public (“polite”) skill sets expected of scientific practitioners. Finding their scientific chitchat not always welcome in social settings, practitioners increasingly sought their own society, making opportunities to socialize with other similarly trained investigators across workbenches and at laboratory teas. This early division between the social and the professional settings for scientific talk may well have contributed to the “two cultures” communication gap identified by C. P. Snow in the mid-twentieth century. In turn, Snow's debate, as Secord suggests, may also have helped make the problem of how to talk about science “the topic of lively conversation it remains today” (53; although, it is worth remarking, the most active participants in such current discussions, as this volume itself illustrates, are historians, philosophers and sociologists of science, linguists, and others, not practitioners themselves). The second and third essays in this section offer fascinating case studies of how public lecturers and lecturing contributed to the diffusion of phrenology (John van Wyhe on Spurzheim and Combe) and popular science (Lightman on Buckland and Pepper). Both carefully consider the relationship of speakers and their audiences, content and contexts, rhetorical choices and responses as lecturers learned, through trial and error, how to balance their powers of persuasion with information and educational goals with entertainment in their oral performances.

In section 2, “Print,” Jonathan R. Topham offers an astute examination of both components of the term “popular science” as they evolved alongside of and embedded within aspects of the early nineteenth-century book trade. Although no unified view of the concept was shared by those working in the publishing industry, the emergence of the concept itself played a significant role in the wider reconceptualization of science, science books, and their potential audiences. Equally attuned to the subtle interplay of writer, reader/viewer, and text, Fyfe's essay carefully explicates the complex interaction of print guides, labels, and objects in the public's experience and narrative construction of natural history museums, while Graeme Gooday's chapter articulates how early spokesmen for electricity selected metaphoric frames and progress narratives to promote its safety and “utility.” By comparison, Ann Shteir's discussion of female botanical writers’ discursive choices employs a disappointingly conventional binary distinction between “scientific” or “technical” (masculine) language and more flowery (feminine) “literary” style that unfortunately sustains a traditional privileging of the former and disregards the ways that writers’ choices of various styles of diction and narrative forms across the technical/expository–fictional/poetic spectrum were all equally and fully “literary” as they enabled their users to achieve particular rhetorical purposes and target specific readerly expectations.

All four essays in the final section, “Display,” however, offer fresh and original interdisciplinary perspectives on the embodied experience of science, drawing upon art history, theories of representation, museum studies, rhetorical analysis, reader response, cultural theory, mass communication studies, and book history, among others. Each author offers a clear explication of his or her own historical and critical methodology while investigating different facets of the complex public engagement with scientific objects and texts as encountered in natural history displays of country houses (Victoria Carroll), the Crystal Palace (Richard Bellon), scientific demonstrations (Iwan Rhys Morus), and public museum collections (Samuel J. M. M. Alberti).

By putting into active practice what they preach about the importance of innovative and attentive styles and forms of public science communication, most of the contributors to this volume themselves provide new and admirable practical models for “popularizing” the value and usefulness of their own unique and eclectic styles and forms of analysis. Although this reader would have welcomed the inclusion of a final “meta”-epilogue, Fyfe and Lightman are to be commended for their exceptionally intelligent editorial design work—as the joint force behind this “multiauthor monograph,” they have succeeded in producing a rejuvenated form for “popular” scholarly texts that should serve as a model for future volumes of collected essays, no matter what their disciplinary marketplace.