In Reading the Book of Nature, a meticulous and magisterial work, Jonathan Topham provides a creative and compelling account of the making, marketing, and reception of the Bridgewater Treatises. Published on the cusp of the Victorian age and financed to the tune of £8,000 by the eccentric Reverend Francis Henry Egerton, the Earl of Bridgewater, the eight best-selling books had a profound effect on the relations between science and Christianity in the following decades. In his careful examination, Topham offers a masterful synthesis of book and intellectual history that systematically uncovers the production and legacies of books too often caricatured in previous scholarship as Paleyite natural theology illustrated ad nauseam. Topham shows that the books, understood as material artifacts as well as conduits for new conceptions of scientific and religious knowledge and practice, helped to secure the cultural centrality of science and paved the way for intellectual and social transformations that the Bridgewater authors themselves struggled to accept.

Reading the Book of Nature is organized into three main parts. These appear after an extended and illuminating prelude, irresistibly entitled “Trouble over Bridgewater.” In this prelude, Topham unearths the efforts to meet the Earl's wishes, as orchestrated by the President of the Royal Society and his ecclesiastical advisers. The result—eight relatively expensive books written by eminent natural philosophers, men of science, and medical practitioners—was by no means inevitable. Criticism of how the bequest was disbursed abounded at a time when the form of patronage that it aimed to uphold was becoming increasingly controversial. Nevertheless, the books proved a success and effectively met a set of needs and expectations associated with a rapidly changing intellectual and publishing landscape.

Part one then takes up the question of writing and offers a penetrating and painstaking investigation of what it meant to be a Bridgewater author. By exploring the professional, personal, and philosophical challenges each of the authors faced, Topham demonstrates the difficulties of penning a book thought worthy of the £1,000 each writer received from the Bridgewater bequest. Questions of argument, style, tone, sources, illustrations, and much else besides were negotiated differently by each author. By setting out the diversity of approaches, Topham sheds light on practices of authorship in this period. In the second chapter, Topham offers clear and concise summaries of each of the Bridgewater Treatises and, along with registering clear differences, identifies some of the overarching concerns that united the series. As Topham points out, all the authors distanced themselves from a rationalistic natural theology that was thought to threaten the need for, and the primacy of, divine revelation. All, too, made concerted efforts to sanctify scientific advances and render them supportive of mainstream Christian convictions about God's goodness, providence, and creative power.

The second section turns to the cultures of publishing and printing that were critical to the widespread influence of the Bridgewater Treatises. Building on extensive previous scholarship, Topham offers a fascinating tour of publishing houses, printing technologies, reviewing practices, and periodical serialization. Along the way, we learn the importance of page size, margin width, font spacing, plate production, and other design features that made the volumes stand out as weighty works attractive to affluent, learned, and fashionable readers. While this limited ownership of the volumes, Topham shows how they reached a wider and less elite audience by way of lending libraries and serialization in popular periodicals. As abundant examples attest, those forms of dissemination were not neutral and in diverse ways transformed the import of the books.

The final section takes reading as its central concern and delves deeply into the religious and scientific uses to which the treatises were put. The first chapter in this section, chapter five, is among the most interesting and creative. Here, Topham examines how the treatises enriched forms of piety in the Christian family. The tragic story of Ellen Parry, for example, reveals a world of early Victorian religious devotion and uncovers a neglected context in which science and religion were brought into combination. Topham continues this line of inquiry by looking at how the treatises were integrated into family prayers, courtship, parenting, and more.

In the remaining chapters of the final section, Topham covers with the same sharp eye for intriguing detail the uses made of the treatises by preachers and anti-religious orators, by men of science concerned about careers and reputation, and by scientific investigators keen to push beyond the epistemic boundaries of theistic science without being accused of rank materialism or atheism. In chapter six, the significance of several treatises in the rhetoric of religious and anti-religious pulpit and platform performers shows how the books, like print culture more generally, were intimately connected to early-Victorian oratorical culture. The complex remediation from print text to spoken word could, perhaps, have been given more consideration, but Topham nevertheless draws full attention to this important context through well-executed examples.

As chapter seven reveals, men of science, too, found in the Bridgewater Treatises a resource to pursue several different and at times conflicting aims. Against what might be expected, Topham shows that the treatises, in certain respects at least, gained little traction at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, where they were often swept into controversies about theology and institutional reform. Outside that Anglican sphere, the treatises proved useful in supporting reformist and Scottish visions for university education. Complexities of this kind are carefully analyzed by Topham in the final chapter of the section which, among other things, shows how the sophisticated if conservative handling of final causes, natural law, and design by several of the Bridgewater Treatises were turned to good use by those working to bring the organic world fully under the reign of natural law. Among those keen to follow that track was Charles Darwin, whose use of a quote from William Whewell's Bridgewater treatise to introduce On the Origin of Species (1859) was indicative of the famous evolutionist's debt to, and overturning of, Bridgewater-style natural theology. Other figures, including the comparative anatomist Richard Owen, the Unitarian man of science William Carpenter, and the liberal Anglican theologian Baden Powell, are explored with equal sophistication.

Reading the Book of Nature is itself finely produced both in terms of its material form and its intellectual organization. There are copious and concise footnotes, a comprehensive index, a bibliography that runs to forty-three pages, and several informative appendices. Topham also provides a guide to those who might use the book for teaching purposes, a function that he clearly had in mind alongside well-honed scholarly aims. The experience of reading was significantly enhanced by all these features, and Topham's book embodies a powerful case for the continued relevance and unique value of printed academic works of such quality, durability, and versatility.