The production and communication of scientific knowledge in Victorian Britain was entangled with life writing. This was because as science gained prestige in the nineteenth century, scientific practitioners had to justify their own cultural authority to make claims about the natural world that could be trusted by colleagues and an interested public. This involved articulating a common set of what Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison call “epistemic virtues” that connected the moral character of scientific practitioners with their observations. The particular set of epistemic virtues that came to dominate Victorian science stressed the importance of hard work and self-help alongside self-denial and self-sacrifice. These epistemic virtues were, moreover, articulated in life writing. Such writing often took the form of biographical accounts of historic and contemporary figures that highlighted the moral character of their subjects. But self-writing in the form of diaries, memoirs, and other autobiographical statements were also prominent in helping to establish the authority of the scientific observer. This paper thus explores the various ways such life writing informed the construction of scientific authority and will focus on the physicist John Tyndall who utilized both biographical and autobiographical genres in order to cultivate his own scientific self and expertise while communicating the utility of science to a broader public.

New Zealand newspapers contained numerous reports of scientific affairs in Britain. Most of these were based on reports in newspapers and magazines received from “home” and many were published verbatim in as many as a dozen local newspapers. John Tyndall’s experiments, lectures and opinions received hundreds of reports; Thomas Huxley’s thousands. This paper addresses the general question of how knowledge travels by comparing reports of Tyndall’s numerous controversies in New Zealand and British newspapers. After a brief survey of reports about Tyndall in the emerging New Zealand press of the 1850s and 1860s, I will examine New Zealand reports on three controversies of the 1870s: Tyndall’s disputes with medical men over germ theory and spontaneous generation; the bitter antagonism between Tyndall and North British physicists, especially P. G. Tait, over glacier motion and energy physics; and the near-universal condemnation of the philosophical excesses of Tyndall’s Belfast Address. The general conclusion is that New Zealanders regarded Tyndall more highly than did his British contemporaries. The big question is why.

This paper examines the crucial role of paratexts in shaping the production and reception of scientific texts, with a focus on translations of Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871). Drawing on Gérard Genette’s influential concept of the paratext—the material and textual elements that frame and mediate the reader’s engagement with a work, such as book covers, title pages, prefaces, notes, and promotional materials—this study explores how these features guided interpretations of Darwin’s ideas. Although Genette’s framework has been widely applied across disciplines including media studies, translation studies, and print culture, it has received limited attention in the history of science. By analysing translated editions of The Descent of Man from diverse cultural and linguistic contexts, this paper demonstrates how paratextual elements not only instructed readers on how to approach the text but also constructed varied and sometimes conflicting images of Darwin and his work. These differing paratextual visions, shaped by local cultural, political, and intellectual contexts, reveal how scientific texts were framed to align with specific agendas and audiences. This study therefore underscores the value of paratextual analysis for understanding the global dissemination of scientific ideas. It argues that attending to the paratextual dimensions of scientific texts expands our understanding of the development of science by illuminating the contingent and localised processes through which scientific knowledge was produced, interpreted, and consumed.