One of the great strengths of critical work on Victorian periodicals is the determined attention they pay to their own methodologies. Even more so than other scholarship, investigations of the periodical press are continually reflecting on how to read periodical literature and are always conscious of doing so from a position in the contemporary world. James Mussell continues this tradition in his Science, Time and Space in the Late Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press : his Introduction dealing not only with the periodical press theorised as ‘movable type' but also interrogating the place of the periodical in our own digital landscape. Of the substantive chapters – organised into two parts, Spaces and Times – the first considers the representation of space in various periodicals dedicated to, or partly focussed on, astronomy. The second, still on the theme of space, looks closely at science and detection in the Strand Magazine. Chapters 3-5 deal with time: the third concerned with science and authorship, the fourth with chemical discovery and the dissemination of knowledge, and the fifth with the rhythms of time within periodicals and the sciences they seek to represent. There is also a conclusion that is in some ways a refrain of the Introduction's focus on the digital, but deals more with the politics of transforming material objects into electronic ones.

In his introductory remarks Mussell reveals that he wishes to ‘locate these hybrid [periodical] texts once more in a complicated network of both people and things' (13). Moreover, he wants to show how science was represented differently within different types of periodical and how these differences both of representation and reception led to interpretative variations in the public understanding of science. This overarching schema is the foundation of Mussell's successful scholarship: while individual chapters, sometimes sections of chapters, are of varying strength, each of them contributes to the ultimately important conclusion that, by careful study and analysis of the periodical, some of the reasons for, and even the very basis of, the complex role of science within Victorian public (often non-professional) society and culture, can be revealed.

This thesis is best developed in the second part, Times, while the first, Spaces, reflects upon the problems of astronomical observations and the limitations of technological reproduction of solar bodies. The second chapter of this first part, on the Sherlock Holmes stories in the Strand Magazine , considers the similarities between Doyle's narrative methods and the methods of popular science writing that the Strand also published. This is a useful chapter, departing from the more common readings of Holmes' science as forensic in origin, but one that might have been greater than its parts were other Strand crime writers dealt with in more depth. It is, though, in the second part that the book offers its finest scholarship. Chapters 4 and 5, in particular, give a fresh insight into the role of science in the periodical press and in broader culture. Dealing in turn with authorship and authority and science writing in journals and proceedings these final two chapters are unique and distinct in their considered analysis of scientific publishing and cultural authority. Mussell's central thesis, not articulated clearly enough, in my view, in the beginning, is brought to excellent conclusion here: offering both historians of science and scholars of the periodical press important new understandings of scientific narratives and their reception.

Martin Willis (University of Glamorgan)

More details about this book can be found at the Ashgate Press website.