Manufacturing nature: science, technology and Victorian consumer culture

Abstract

The public place of science and technology in Britain underwent a dramatic change during the first half of the nineteenth century. At the end of the eighteenth century, natural philosophy was still on the whole the province of a relatively small group ofaficionados. London possessed only one institution devoted to the pursuit of natural knowledge: the Royal Society. The Royal Society also published what was virtually the only journal dealing exclusively with scientific affairs: thePhilosophical Transactions. By 1851, when the Great Exhibition opened its doors in Hyde Park to an audience of spectators that could be counted in the millions, the pursuit of science as a national need, its relationship to industrial progress were acceptable, if not uncontested facts for many commentators.