Evolutionary Naturalism in Victorian Britain: The 'Darwinians' and their Critics (review)

Bernard Lightman's name is closely connected with two topics that are among the most important for scholars of the Victorian period. His groundbreaking first book, The Origins of Agnosticism (1987), established him as one of the world's most significant scholars of the complexities of the impact of science on Victorian religious faith. More recently, books such as Victorian Popularizers of Science (2007) provide important new insights into the lay audiences for Victorian science. These two strands of his work inform most of the essays in the volume under review, the earliest of which dates from 1989, but most of which appeared in the last decade.

Discussions of the Victorian crisis of faith traditionally centred on the literate elites, whose diaries, letters, and novels provided the bulk of the primary sources through which scholars assessed the ebbing of the sea of faith. The impact of science-particularly of Alfred Tennyson's "terrible muses," geology and astronomy-was the central focus of such scholarship, but again the emphasis was on the elite writers and readers whose ideas about evolution, energy, and entropy seemed to have had such a profound impact on the Victorians. In recent decades, however, historians of science have turned their attention away from elite science and its practitioners in an attempt to assess wider questions about scientific audiences and the roles that non-expert readers and writers played in creating, disseminating, and responding to the scientific discoveries that reshaped Victorian Britain (see, for example, James Secord's Victorian Sensation [2000] or Gowan Dawson's Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability [2001]).

In several of the essays in this collection, Lightman applies the methods and insights of reception-based histories of science to well-established themes-notably those of faith and doubt-and also to the closely connected question of the professionalisation of Victorian science. Recent scholarship challenges the idea that Charles Darwin's evolutionary ideas were a banner under which a group of would-be scientific professionals united in order to drive the parson-naturalists and the Oxbridge Anglican elite out of British science. Lightman's introduction shows how inadequate this story has become, particularly the assumption that scientific naturalism-the assumption that nature can be explained entirely by natural as opposed to supernatural causes-became dominant in the late nineteenth century. Lightman instead emphasises the continuing power and influence of Christianity in its many different forms and analyzes the diversity of both those lumped together as professionals and those who opposed them. The latter group, long overlooked as history's losers, are in particular need of greater scholarly attention, and in this volume Lightman makes important contributions toward providing it.

Given Lightman's focus on audience and reception, however, it seems appropriate to ask who the audience for the present volume is intended to be. The quality and importance of the scholarship is beyond doubt, but the same cannot be said for Ashgate's publishing strategy. This book is part of their Variorum series, which republishes articles with their original pagination and formatting. The series is presumably intended to facilitate access to items that would otherwise be difficult to find, but with the availability of many scholarly journals online and the fact that most of the essays in the present volume are from edited collections that are still in print, few items are difficult to find in libraries. There are, of course, scholars whose natural medium is the short article, rather than the longer book, and in such cases a collection like this would present an ideal opportunity to assess the overall shape and scope of their work; Lightman is, however, as adept at the monograph as he is at shorter pieces, and he provides overviews of his work in several excellent monographs. One cannot, therefore, help wondering why books like this still appear in the twenty-first century, particularly at such an astronomical cost. Who does Ashgate imagine is going to buy them...