The late nineteenth century and early twentieth century saw the establishment of a distinct form of science writing, “popular” science writing. Ostensibly directed towards the “laity” or the “man in the street,” it also enabled communication between scientists in distinct sub-disciplines, and may have been directed towards those who controlled university funding.

Its status in relation to technical science writing has been extensively debated, in books by Shinn and Whitley (1985), and articles by Hilgartner (1990), Cooter and Pumfrey (1994), Myers (2003), Secord (2004), O’Connor (2009), Schmalzer (2012) among others. Scholars in the field of literature and science have also studied it, and the present paper, as well as discussing what we are to do with the contested term “popular,” will ask what literary studies can bring to the study of popular science writing. It will focus on examples primary from the physical sciences in the early twentieth century, including work by A S Eddington and Oliver Lodge.

Professor Michael H Whitworth is the author of Einstein’s Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature (2001) and many other articles and chapters on literature and science. He was the co-founder, with Alice Jenkins, of the British Society for Literature and Science. He is a Tutorial Fellow in English at Merton College and Professor of Modern Literature and Culture in the English Faculty.