ABSTRACT
The later part of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century were characterized in Britain by a revolution of print. The cancellation of the London booksellers' claims to perpetual copyright (ruled by the House of Lords since 1774), and the development of printing technologies (especially with the gradual introduction of the iron-frame hand press, the lithographic press and the steam press) gave an enormous incentive to book production and trade: the number of books published increased dramatically, their prices were reduced, they began to be exported to continental Europe and the United States (particularly after the end of the French blockade in 1814), and new genres were created for these varied wider audiences to whom books became accessible.1 These transformations were linked to a transformation of the notion of 'popularization' of knowledge in the same period, which was a result of what has been called the 'second scientific revolution'. This was the time of the emergence of scientific disciplines clearly differentiated in their instrumentation, social and institutional structure. Integral to these changes was a redefinition of the relation between scientific communities and their audiences: scientific communities created a restrictive boundary, in their methods and in their mechanisms of validation, from what came to be known as 'the public'. The notion of 'popularization' of scientific knowledge emerged as part of the self-fashioning of the new scientists, and it was oriented by the idea that knowledge could only be 'diffused', filtered and simplified by the experts down to the untrained, passive receivers.2 Accordingly, the first decades of the nineteenth century witnessed the production of a large number of publications, serials and educational manuals aimed at the diffusion of the sciences to a wider audience. This material served also as a means for the transmission of important religious and political values, as it evidently had enormous value for the control of a population living through the social tensions of a rapidly industrialising society.3
