"Dawson and Lightman have assembled twelve probative contributions that reveal how scientific naturalism was more (and less) than a label for secular commitments among intellectual elites who seized cultural authority from the Anglican establishment under the aegis of professionalized science. The community of adherents was forged from sublime experiences during Alpine mountaineering, political maneuvering for unfettered science funding, battles over foundational principles in paleontology, and a system of education by standardized examination. . . . These analyses are significant for problematizing scientific naturalism as a historiographical category and showing how variations on the theme illuminate the Victorian period. Recommended."

A. C. Love, University of Minnesota | CHOICE

"Succeeds wonderfully in fleshing out the idea of scientific naturalism. . . . Taken together, this volume's essays provide a valuable overview of scientific naturalism and, even more so, a winning introduction to the movement’s charismatic personalities and their relationships with one another. The book will prove profitable reading for historians of science and for students of Victorian culture."

Miguel DeArce, Trinity College Dublin | Journal of British Studies

“As a rule, books about -isms are boring: bloodless, spectral accounts of impalpable abstractions. Victorian Scientific Naturalism breaks that rule decisively. It lifts the curtain on a cast of hundreds, with their ideas fleshed out in committees, clubs, and ad hoc coalitions. Positivists and theists, agnostics and idealists, Broad Churchmen and Broad Scientists, dissenters and Dissenters, freethinking ladies among them—genial antagonists and cobelligerents, all united in spurring liberal and secular trends. As in good theater, the characters develop through their relationships as well as their beliefs, actors arrayed in shifting tableaux before a noisy popular chorus. Art, politics, literature, and religion are integral to the unfolding drama, not just backdrop. The authors of Victorian Scientific Naturalism, like their subjects, do not always speak with one voice, but for this reason alone, in their multiple fresh perspectives, we have our best guide yet to the roles of the ‘scientific’ in Victorian culture.”

James Moore, Open University, Milton Keynes

“If they are to stay useful, historians’ categories require constant vetting. In this outstanding volume, ‘Victorian scientific naturalism’ gets the probing analysis it has long deserved. The results—sometimes surprising and always engaging—will be obligatory reading for anyone interested in Victorian science, Victorian religion, and their complex interactions and legacies.”

Gregory Radick, University of Leeds

“A sterling set of essays that lifts the lid on T. H. Huxley’s propagandist network in the Victorian afternoon. Out goes the old paradigm of a monolithic group of professionalizers; in its place we have a probing study of disparate characters, for whom nature was the new source of cultural authority. The authors enhance our understanding of ‘scientific naturalism’ as it was pushed into the curriculum, into pulpit-replacing Sunday lectures, and even into the moral bedrock.”

Adrian Desmond, coauthor of Darwin’s Sacred Cause