ABSTRACT
In 1811, for instance, a subsequent editor of Eclectic Review Josiah Conder lamented that with ‘a fearful majority’ of readers, the reviews were ‘a substitute for all other kinds of reading—a new and royal road to knowledge’. From relatively small range of periodical forms at end of eighteenth century, there had by the 1830s developed a plethora of forms directed to a vast range of increasingly differentiated reading audiences. In order to examine some of the ways in which periodicals functioned in creating reading audiences for science, the authors focus on a ten-year run of one periodical—the third series of the Youth’s Magazine and Evangelical Miscellany. The Youth’s Magazine (1805–67) was a monthly founded at private risk by committee members of the largely nonconformist Sunday School Union, and intended for the older children of middle-class evangelicals. The employment of such reading practices to create pious associations was critical if scientific and other secular reading was not to erode religious sensibility.
