ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Serving Two Publics? Prestige, Popularisation, and the Problem of Audience(s) at the Royal Institution

• In Event: Popularisation and the 19th Century History of British Science

English Abstract

This paper examines a curious problem affecting London's flagship site for science communication. Since 1825 the Royal Institution (Ri) has pursued two concurrent lecture series: the Friday Evening Discourses for its members and Christmas Lectures "for juveniles." While both programmes ostensibly served the Ri's Charter to "diffuse knowledge," they developed markedly different audiences, social functions, and relationships to evolving British publics.

Focusing on the 20th century, this paper analyses a period when both series were established on the London circuit but facing transformative changes. The members-only Discourses cultivated exclusivity through restricted attendance and formal social rituals, utilising the Ri's research laboratory to attract cutting-edge researchers presenting contemporary work. The Christmas Lectures embraced mass accessibility, initially through print, then via radio and television after forming an early relationship with the BBC in the 1920s. Both series simultaneously leveraged growing nostalgia through historical demonstrations and appeals to the institution's Faraday-era legacy, though to different ends.
Archival evidence reveals persistent challenges, particularly how the Discourses' elite character sat uneasily alongside democratising trends in the Christmas Lectures, both in the theatre and for audiences watching at home.

This paper demonstrations how the Ri's 20th-century programming revealed difficulties in addressing the disparate and evolving British publics. Its institutional identity looked simultaneously forward to cutting-edge science and backward to historical mythology, split across two series serving elite patrons and the broadcast nation. Examining correspondence, attendance records, and broadcast archives, this paper illuminates struggles balancing scientific exclusivity and accessibility as forms of cultural capital.

Author

• Katy Duncan, Royal Institution