ABSTRACT
Analyses of the popularization of Victorian science have moved away from the view that popular accounts can only ever offer ‘diminished simulacra—simpler, weaker, or distorted in proportion to the distance between the learned and lay communities’. The new monthly would assist as a ‘common centre for the inter-communication of ideas’, providing a means of negotiating the vast archive of print culture from around the Empire. In June 1893, William Stead announced that his new journal Borderland would be devoted to ‘the study of phenomena which lie on the borderland which Science has hitherto, for the most part, contemptuously relegated to Superstition’. After Borderland ceased publication in 1897 Stead’s long-cherished project, the Daily Paper, included the promotion of ‘psychometry and telepathy’ in its aims for improving the mental health and physical culture of the nation. Thomas Alva Edison or his onetime assistant Nikola Tesla were entrepreneurs, uninterested in conveying a pristine image of science cloistered from the market.
