This is the first book to look in detail at amateur astronomy in Victorian Britain. It deals with the technical issues that were active in Victorian astronomy, and reviews the problems of finance, patronage and the dissemination of scientific ideas, including the relationship between the amateur and the professional in Britain. It contains a wealth of previously unpublished biographical and anecdotal material, and an extended bibliography with notes incorporating much new scholarship.
This long-awaited new edition of the Victorian Amateur Astronomer brings Allan Chapman’s ground-breaking research on the role of the amateur in the development of astronomy to a new generation. He shows that while on the Continent astronomical research was lavishly supported by the state, in Britain such research was paid for out of the pockets of highly educated, wealthy gentlemen – the so-called ‘Grand Amateurs’. It was these powerful individuals who commissioned the telescopes, built the observatories, ran the learned societies, and often stole discoveries from their state-employed colleagues abroad.
In addition to the ‘Grand Amateurs’, Victorian Britain also contained many self-taught amateurs. Although they belonged to no learned societies, these people provide a barometer of the popularity of astronomy in that age. In the late 19th century, the comfortable middle classes – clergymen, lawyers, physicians and retired military officers – took to astronomy as a serious hobby. They formed societies which focused on observation, lectures and discussion, and it was through this medium that women first came to play a significant role in British astronomy.
Readership: Undergraduate and postgraduate students studying the history of science
or humanities, professional historians of science, engineering and technology,
particularly those with an interest in astronomy, the development of astronomical
ideas, and scientific instrument-makers, and amateur astronomers.
Allan Chapman is a graduate of the University of Lancaster, and he received his D.Phil. from
the University of Oxford. He holds three honorary doctorates from British universities, and
was the 2015 Jackson-Gwilt Medallist of the Royal Astronomical Society. He is the author of
eleven other books on the history of science and around 200 articles in international academic
journals. He teaches in the Faculty of History at Oxford University, is a Member of
