Claire Furlong

Department: English
Discipline: English
Research Centre/Unit: Centre for Victorian Studies

Project Summary

Bodies of Knowledge: Science, Medicine and Authority in Popular Periodicals, 1832-1850

My research explores the presence of scientific ideas in popular nineteenth-century periodicals, asking in particular how the social authority of the emergent scientific profession is mediated, constructed and challenged within these publications. I focus on the 1830s and 1840s, decades during which a professional scientific and medical community was in the process of coming into being and beginning to coalesce around elements including exclusive membership, limits to the definition of science, and separation of the professional from the popular sphere.  During the same decades, a new breed of periodical was launched: the popular penny weekly, which provided leisure reading for working- and lower-class men and women.  Studies exploring Victorian scientific authority have more often focused on professional journals and organs of middle-class culture than on popular mass-market publications such as these. My work uses as examples Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, Reynolds’s Miscellany and the Family Herald, the readers of which were consumers of scientific information, participants in popularised science and beneficiaries and subjects of new research, but increasingly excluded from the formal processes of developing scientific theory and practice.

My thesis offers a series of case studies, each one focusing on a science of the body of particular importance in working-class lives.  Examining in turn health advice, theories of class and gender, and representations of anatomy and of mesmerism, I argue for an expanded understanding of mass-market periodicals as communicators of scientific ideas, showing how such material widely informs the content of these publications from fiction to jokes to full-length factual articles.  However, the role of the periodicals is much wider than simply the transmission of received ideas.  They engage with modern science in complex and varied ways, accepting, modifying and challenging scientific theories and methods from positions informed by their political, commercial and spiritual aims as well as their editors' relationships to the scientific establishment. 

Supervisory Team

Supervisor: Professor Angelique Richardson

Second Supervisor: Professor John Plunkett

Wider Research Interests

My research interests include popular Victorian literature and culture, periodicals, science and literature, and women’s writing of all periods.

Authored Publications/Reports

Furlong, Claire. (July 2015) Book Review: The Ploy of Instinct: Victorian Sciences of Nature and Sexuality in Liberal Governance by Kathleen Frederickson, Social History of Medicine, doi: 10.1093/shm/hkv092

Furlong, Claire. () Health advice in popular periodicals: Reynolds’s Miscellany, the Family Herald, and their correspondents., Victorian Periodicals Review, (forthcoming Spring 2016)