364 Lightman
community resources; through evening study at mechanics’ institutes,
community clubs, and pubs; through cooperative societies; and through
contact with secularist lecturers and periodicals.^84 By the second half of
the century, increased contact with scientifi c ideas was made possible by
the communications revolution, which provided cheap reprints of scien-
tifi c texts and more affordable periodicals with scientifi c content, by the
establishment of free libraries, by the explosion of middle- class popular
science, and by working- class educational initiatives. During the fi nal de-
cades of the century, the Victorian Left “capitalized” on the ideological
power of science through the creation of a socialist science. Rejecting the
elitist, capitalist science of the scientifi c naturalists, based on evolutionary
notions of a struggle in nature and society, socialist propaganda in period-
icals, pamphlets, and books offered a scientifi c validation for radical social
ideals. Darwin had shown that struggle in nature was countered by natu-
ral sociability and mutual support within species. Insisting that science
was common property, or collectively owned, the proponents of socialist
science challenged the cultural authority of Huxley and his allies.
No doubt, members of the working class reacted in diverse ways to
the science they encountered, whether it originated from scientifi c natu-
ralists like Huxley, science journalists like Proctor, or even purveyors of
socialist science. But in many cases, they exercised their agency as readers
and declined to accept the role of passive consumer of knowledge. For
example, consider Tom Mann (1856–1941), engineer, trade unionist, and
socialist.^85 The son of a clerk at the Victoria Colliery, Mann started work in
a mine at the age of nine, dragging boxes of coal. When the mine had to
be closed due to an accident, the family moved in 1870 to Birmingham,
where Mann became apprenticed to engineering in a tool- making fi rm.
After completing seven years’ apprenticeship, he moved to London in
1877 to take on various jobs in engineering. While employed at Cubitt’s
engineering works he was given the task of cutting a large meteorite into
three pieces for exhibition in different museums. The meteorite’s strange
composition intrigued him, and from then on astronomy became a seri-
ous recreational activity. In the early eighties, Mann was working near
London on engines for torpedo boats. “At this period,” Mann recalled in
his autobiography, “Mr Richard A. Proctor, the astronomer, was lecturing
at Kensington on, ‘The Birth and Death of Worlds,’ I was a regular reader
of Proctor’s magazine Knowledge.” Mann convinced two of his workmates
to accompany him to the lecture. Proctor began the lecture by exhibiting
a series of pictures of nebulae “and the resultant worlds, their life and
decay.” Though Mann was engrossed by the lecture, his two companions