Chatting Up the Sciences: The Mid-Victorian "Lecture-Gossip"

Chatting Up the Sciences:The Mid-Victorian "Lecture-Gossip" Anne B. Rodrick (bio) In 1860, the popular lecture was described as "now almost a necessity in modern civilization" ("Lectures and Lecturing" 199). Popular lecturers experimented with form and content as middle-brow audiences flocked to thousands of literary and philosophical societies, athenaeums, mechanics' institutions, and new, purpose-built municipal spaces to participate in the performative consumption of knowledge. One such experiment was the lecture-gossip, a specific combination of entertainment and education in easily digestible morsels that was consistently described as "racy," lively, End Page 202 and vivid. It was a form briefly applied to literature and the social sciences as a way to present complex ideas to underprepared listeners, but its most successful application was within the sciences, where a chatty and familiar approach to the phenomena of the natural world promised to reinforce the pedagogical purposes of the popular lecture while acknowledging the growing preference for entertainment over sober and serious instruction. Between 1830 and 1860, the number of popular lectures on some aspect of "science" declined from about sixty per cent to about thirty per cent of a regular lecture season. This decline was alarming, signalling as it did a move away from the lecture's roots in the work of the learned society or the mechanics' institution. Critics, educators, lecturers, and committees scrambled for ways to continue to reach listeners with "serious" material, as the entertaining appeared to endanger the educational: "Globules of instruction dissolved in tumblers of amusement, were like delicate comfits to a hungry man; they tantalized without satisfying the appetite; they enfeebled the powers until they rejected solid meat, whilst the light food they craved yielded no nourishment" ("Proceedings of Institutions" 621). Phenomena in the physical sciences could be illustrated with miniature volcanoes, optical illusions, colour-changing reactions, and other forms of spectacle (Hewitt 83). The biological sciences were significantly less visual, yet an informed appreciation of the natural world was a fundamental part of the unsectarian Christianity that helped define English middlebrow culture. A number of platform speakers addressed this tension by choosing subject matter appropriate to the well-established "sermon in the stones and the running brook," which looked at the natural world through a religious lens. A much smaller number of speakers turned instead to the lecture-gossip, whose tone and vocabulary invited the listener into a relationship defined by shared humour, a "can-you-believe-that" appreciation for the remarkable, and a performative disregard for boundaries of class and education. The human voice was the "tumbler of amusement" in which the globules of scientific knowledge were suspended. The lecture-gossip combined characteristics of several established genres. The "literary gossip" had for decades facilitated a kind of faux intimacy for readers who wanted their poetry and prose spiced with inside information on the literary world. Translated to the lecture platform, this approach would bind disparate audiences into a temporary elitism that required little effort beyond the purchase of a ticket. The useful-knowledge publication, by mid-century a ubiquitous, inexpensive, and ephemeral category of print culture, described and explained the world in language that ranged from the didacticism of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge to the political radicalism of Henry Hetherington's Halfpenny Magazine of Really Useful Knowledge. And the scientific journal, rooted in the learned societies of the previous century, presented brief summaries of phenomena alongside longer, more arcane analyses. Each of these genres relied upon a specific authorial End Page 203 tone implying that the reader was peculiarly able to appreciate the material shared within its pages. The lecture-gossip drew from all of them, building as well upon the extent to which "gossip is natural and familiar" ("Institute Intelligence. Chelsea" 43) and might domesticate unfamiliar knowledge. In form and content, the lecture-gossip occupied a space between the purely educational and the purely entertaining. "'Gossips' are not simply amusing," noted one review ("Gilbert White" 281). "Underlying the more humourous sic vein is a rich fund of valuable information, conveyed in the most pleasing manner possible, and irresistibly winning all hearts," noted another (Kidd 1 Nov. 1861). Matter and manner were equally crucial to...