Science and the Public 363to disseminate an authoritative and collective image of science as stable,
secular, and comprehensive (since both the natural and social sciences
were included).^79
The attempt to create and maintain a large, passive, lay audience was
not immediately or uniformly successful. More egalitarian popular science
journals were only gradually replaced in the second half of the century by
journals such as Nature. Even as late as the eighties, Proctor was fi ghting to
oppose this trend. But did members of the lay audience for science accept
the role provided for them by professional scientists like Huxley? Topham
has suggested that we begin to answer this question by examining the
patterns of reading of historical actors (who read what and where) and by
studying how and why readers read what they read. This will allow us to
recover the agency of readers and to see if they subverted authorial inten-
tions and textual strategies.^80 Historians are just beginning to make use of
this promising approach. We have a model in Secord’s Victorian Sensation,
an analysis of the diverse readership of the Vestiges of the Natural History
of Creation that demonstrates how readers actively participated in forging
the meaning of Chambers’s book, and therefore the meaning of science,
for themselves. Secord draws our attention to the varied composition of
the vast reading public. We can divide the audience up by such factors
as gender, class, age, religion, and region, each of which played a role in
how individual readers interpreted the signifi cance of science. Though
the emphasis in what follows will be on the agency of members of the
public as readers—as consumers of scientifi c writing—it should be kept
in mind that these people affi rmed their agency through participation
in scientifi c activities besides reading.^81 Members of the public attended
lectures, visited museums and exhibitions, participated in trips to the fi eld
to collect specimens, and joined amateur science clubs. As David Allen has
reminded us, the Victorian public was swept by a succession of natural
history crazes, from fern collecting to seaweed collecting.^82
Working- class readers constituted an important and large segment
of the new reading audience for science created in the latter half of the
nineteenth century. How did they read professional scientists like Huxley
and science journalists like Proctor? Did they view themselves as invisible
members of a passive mass public? What did science mean to them? In her
study of working class science in the last three decades of the nineteenth
century, McLaughlin- Jenkins treats science as a fundamental component
of self- improvement and class emancipation for many working- class Vic-
torians.^83 Science was available to members of the working class in the fi rst
half of the century through their family, friends, and neighbors; through