About Knowledge

Knowledge

Knowledge was a British popular science magazine published in London from 1881 to 1918. Its full title was Knowledge: An Illustrated Magazine of Science, and it was founded by the astronomer Richard A. Proctor, the leading populariser of astronomy of the Victorian era. The magazine began as a weekly periodical and became a monthly in the mid-1880s; it was published first by W. H. Allen, from 1881 to 1891, and then by Witherby & Co., from 1891 to 1918. Proctor edited it himself, contributed heavily to it, and used it as the first home for many of his discoveries and theoretical deductions. The magazine was known above all for its extensive correspondence columns, which made its readers participants rather than spectators. After Proctor's death in 1888 the editorship passed to Arthur Cowper Ranyard, an astronomer of solar physics and astronomical photography, and after Ranyard's death to the publisher and ornithologist Harry Forbes Witherby, under whom it continued to 1918. It should not be confused with any modern publication of the same name: this Knowledge belongs wholly to the age of the amateur astronomer, the correspondence column and the illustrated monthly part.

Richard Proctor, the founder

Richard Anthony Proctor (1837–1888) was, in the judgement of the historian of star atlases Ian Ridpath, the leading populariser of astronomy of the Victorian era, whose star atlases were the forerunners of Norton's Star Atlas and whose beginner's guide Half Hours with the Stars shaped generations of amateur observers. His early career was a struggle: the Dictionary of National Biography records that publishers were sceptical, that his Handbook of the Stars (1866) was published only with a friend's assistance and barely paid its expenses, and that for Half-Hours with the Telescope (1868), a book that reached its twentieth edition before his death, he was paid £25. He taught mathematics at a private military school at Woolwich, resigned an honorary secretaryship of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1873 to lecture in America, and made his name on the platform in the United States and Australasia. In 1881, the year he married in America and settled for a time at St Joseph, Missouri, he founded Knowledge in London. A pioneer of popular science writing, he edited the magazine for several years and remained its defining presence until his death.

Founding in 1881: a weekly of science

Knowledge started as a weekly periodical in 1881, and Proctor's own biography summarises its character: a popular weekly magazine of science that had a considerable circulation, in which he wrote on a great variety of subjects, including chess and whist — a reminder that "science" in Proctor's hands was a broad church of rational recreation as well as astronomy. The full title announced the method: an illustrated magazine of science, in which pictures were part of the instruction. Proctor was the first editor and a significant contributor, and many of his discoveries and theoretical deductions first appeared in the magazine — that is, Knowledge was not merely reporting its founder's science but publishing it, giving the periodical a research function alongside its popular one. Proctor was sometimes assisted in editorial duties by Edward Clodd, the writer and populariser of evolution. In the mid-1880s the magazine changed its rhythm: most modern summaries date its conversion to a monthly to 1885, while the Dictionary of National Biography says the weekly was converted into a monthly in 1886; the honest statement is that it became monthly in 1885–86 and remained so for the rest of its life.

The correspondence columns

The feature for which Knowledge was best known was its extensive correspondence. The standard reference summary — James Mussell's entry in the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland — names the extensive correspondence columns as the magazine's hallmark, and the magazine's own spin-off publications confirm the emphasis: the Knowledge Diary and Scientific Handbook, reviewed by Nature for 1901, allowed its owner generous space for each day and made specific provision for recording correspondence. In a popular science magazine of the 1880s and 1890s, correspondence was not filler. It was the mechanism by which amateur observers reported what they had seen, disputed interpretations, and had their observations answered by working astronomers. Proctor, who had built his career by teaching beginners to use small telescopes, edited a magazine in which the beginner's letter stood beside the professional's article. That two-way traffic is the main reason Knowledge is still cited by historians of popular science: it documents a readership that observed, measured and argued, not one that merely read.

Publishers: W. H. Allen, then Witherby

The magazine's publishing history divides cleanly in two. W. H. Allen published Knowledge from 1881 to 1891; Witherby & Co. published it from 1891 to 1918, and the magazine's office in London issued its bound annual volumes under the Knowledge Office imprint, as with the 1897 volume, Knowledge: An Illustrated Magazine of Science Literature and Art, which gathered that year's twelve monthly issues, principally known for science, astronomy and natural science contributions. The Witherby connection deepened after 1894, when editorship passed into the publishing family itself. A magazine that survived thirty-seven years, two publishing houses, the death of its founder and the death of his successor owed its continuity in part to this institutional base: after 1891 Knowledge belonged to a firm whose own head would eventually edit it.

Arthur Cowper Ranyard, the second editor

Proctor died in 1888, and Arthur Cowper Ranyard took over the editorship. Ranyard (born 1845) was a pupil of Augustus De Morgan, trained to the law before mathematics and astronomy prevailed; he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society at eighteen, co-operated in founding the London Mathematical Society, and served the Royal Astronomical Society as honorary secretary for six years. His obituary in Popular Science Monthly, recording his death on 14 December 1894, describes a man predominantly interested in solar physics and astronomical photography, who undertook three expeditions at his own expense to observe the solar corona during eclipses and studied the structure of the stellar universe. He completed Proctor's Old and New Astronomy after its author's death, and in the pages of Knowledge, the obituarist wrote, he struck out a line for himself: the magazine fairly shone with its reproductions of solar photographs. Under Ranyard, then, Knowledge leaned into photographic astronomy at the moment when photography was transforming the science.

Harry Forbes Witherby and the later years

After Ranyard's death, Harry Forbes Witherby took over the editorship, and he carried the magazine through to its final issue in 1918. Witherby (1873–1943) was of the publishing family: the firm of Witherby, originally legal and maritime stationers, was run in his generation by the sons of Henry Forbes Witherby, and Harry entered the family firm after leaving school. He is now remembered chiefly as an ornithologist — founding editor in 1907 of the magazine British Birds, and later of The Handbook of British Birds (1938–1941) — but his editorship of Knowledge came first, and it placed a general science monthly in the hands of a working naturalist and professional publisher. That combination suited the magazine's later identity: the 1897 annual volume's description emphasises astronomy and natural science together, and the Knowledge Diary for 1901, issued from the Knowledge Office, was built around astronomy — 120 pages of printed matter with the principal astronomical data for the year, a calendar of notable events, useful tables, reprints of articles from Knowledge, and star maps showing the heavens for each month. Nature, reviewing the Diary, suggested planet rising and setting times would help beginners — a glimpse of the magazine still serving Proctor's original audience of new observers in its third decade.

The next generation: Mary Proctor in Knowledge

The magazine's reach extended into the founder's family. Mary Proctor (1862–1957), Richard Proctor's daughter, became a populariser of astronomy in her own right in the United States. University of Melbourne scholarship on her career records that by the age of twenty-three she was writing articles about North American astronomical mythology for her father's journal Knowledge — her apprenticeship in print before her breakthrough as a lecturer at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, where a talk intended for the Children's Pavilion succeeded before an adult audience and won her a three-year speaking contract. Knowledge thus served as a training ground for the second generation of the Proctor enterprise in popular astronomy, as it had been the platform for the first.

The end in 1918 and the surviving record

Knowledge's final issue appeared in 1918, after thirty-seven years. It had outlived its founder by thirty years and its second editor by twenty-four, a lifespan that places it among the durable titles of Victorian popular science rather than the ephemeral ones. Its bibliographic footprint is well kept: the catalogue record gives OCLC 173328045, and HathiTrust holds full-view archives in two spans, 1881–1886 and 1888–1916; a later reprint description of the collected run gives volumes 1 to 40, November 1881 to December 1917. That the run can still be read, in large part, in digital libraries is fitting. Knowledge was created by a man whose previous books had barely found publishers, and it became the periodical through which his science — and his correspondents', and his successors' — reached the public. For this directory it is listed, deliberately, as the historical London magazine of 1881–1918, distinct from any later or modern title that shares its very common name.

Knowledge and the popular science tradition

Knowledge matters because it shows what popular science publishing was before the profession of science journalism existed. Its founder was a researcher who lectured; its second editor was a researcher who photographed eclipses at his own expense; its third was a publisher who founded a specialist journal of his own. Its science was carried not only in articles but in correspondence, diaries, star maps and photographic plates, and its founder could move in its pages from the construction of the Milky Way to chess and whist without breaking the magazine's contract with its readers, which was that rational curiosity was one subject. When Proctor founded it in 1881, he was, as his modern champions put it, a pioneer of popular science writing. Knowledge is where that pioneering was done, weekly and then monthly, for nearly four decades.