Commercial and Sublime - (Sci & Culture in the Nineteenth Century) by Hsiang-Fu Huang (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The astronomy lecturing trade in Britain experienced a theatrical turn in the early 1800s, as practitioners relied on larger and more elaborate visual aids to enhance the scenic and dramatic effects of their traveling spectacles. Commercial and Sublime explores this phenomenon in the long nineteenth century, a time when astronomical shows rose in popularity and the lecturing trade developed a commercial side where business, profits, and competition took center stage. Astronomy lecturing during this period, Hsiang-Fu Huang reveals, also heavily exploited the notion of the sublime, where displays and the rhetoric of awe and wonder were meant to arouse religious sentiment by pointing to the sublimity of the universe and the Creator behind it. His book explores the various practitioners, sites, curriculums, apparatus, and audiences of popular astronomy lectures, focusing specifically on those outside the scientific elite whose commercial endeavors opened up a flourishing market for various types of performances, including Lent shows in theaters, courses in learned or mechanics' institutes, and itinerant lectures around provincial towns and in the surrounding countryside.

Review Quotes

Hsiang-Fu Huang's lucid and deeply researched book opens the world of popular astronomy in Regency and early Victorian Britain. He shows how public lecturers created and cultivated an audience by using ingenious machines for theatrical display. A century before Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson, these cosmic impresarios instilled in the public mind a sense of the sublime mysteries of the universe.--Jan Golinski, University of New Hampshire

About the Author

Hsiang-Fu Huang is associate professor of history at Nankai University in Tianjin, China. He is also an honorary research associate in the Department of Science and Technology Studies, University College London. Huang is currently a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society.