The manifold relationships between science and religion in Victorian Britain have been extensively studied. Historians of this subject have, within the past two decades, greatly enriched, and revised, our understanding of the diverse ways in which science and religion interacted within the broader culture. The myth of an inevitable conflict between the findings of science and the claims and practices of religion has been, effectively, obliterated. It is now commonplace to regard science and religion in nineteenth-century Britain as being compatible in the minds and lives of many, albeit not all, Victorians. Aileen Fyfe's Science and Salvation: Evangelical Popular Science Publishing in Victorian Britain is clearly situated within this newer cultural history of science and religion, and she fully acknowledges her debt to previous historians. But Fyfe's book succeeds in offering fresh insights in this well-trod territory by focusing on the particular manner in which science was perceived by Evangelical Protestant Christians. By concentrating on a group of evangelical men and women, specifically the members of the Religious Tract Society, Fyfe provides an intriguing case study of one group's efforts to deal with the potential challenges posed to its faith by the increasingly potent findings and authority of nineteenth-century science. She neatly shows that it was not necessarily the scientific discoveries themselves that challenged evangelicals; rather, it was the public understanding of the interpretations of the significance of those discoveries in geology, physiology, phrenology, astronomy, and other scientific fields that presented the major challenge. With the rapid expansion of cheap publishing in the middle of the nineteenth century—and thus the far greater number of persons who could be made aware of the latest scientific findings—it became more urgent to provide an appropriate religious framework in which a broad base of middle- and working-class men and women could react to the often dramatic announcements in science. Evangelicals saw their mission as one of preventing the public from succumbing to the forces of secularism that were a notable—although never monolithic—aspect of an emerging technoscientific age. Ostensibly neutral as well as overtly infidel popular science writings were seen as the most dangerous competition to the evangelical presses for the hearts and minds of an increasingly literate British society.

Fyfe premises her study on three important claims. The first is that because of the Protestant emphasis on popular access to the Bible, evangelicals had a crucial interest in literacy and publishing generally. However, by the second quarter of the nineteenth century, cheap publishing of newspapers and pamphlets as well as books greatly increased the diversity of both authors and audiences. Thus, the evangelical press was but one of many that competed for an audience that by the 1850s, particularly with respect to the penny periodicals, numbered not in the hundreds or thousands but in the hundreds of thousands (12). With so many souls at stake, it was all the more critical that evangelical interpretations of science were clearly, and widely, read and absorbed. Fyfe's second claim is that there were several theologies of nature available to mid-Victorian readers, not merely the celebrated version of natural theology advanced by William Paley and his followers. Among those who accepted that science and religion complemented each other, there was significant divergence between those who believed that nature could prove the existence of God (as Paley contended) and those who based their faith on Revelation but nevertheless regarded nature as a divine creation worthy of study. This latter approach had become dominant by midcentury among evangelicals. While many evangelicals were deeply interested in the natural world, and a number were actively involved in its investigation, they regarded the attempt to ground Christianity on a rational proof of God's existence as missing the point of faith and Revelation. Fyfe correctly contends that most historians who have tended to concentrate on Paley's version of natural theology have downplayed or neglected the different theology of nature espoused by mainstream Protestant Evangelicals.

Fyfe's third major claim is that most historians of science have given undue prominence to those strident subgroups of evangelicals who insisted on a literal reading of the Bible and thus tended to accept advances in geology and biology, particularly evolutionary theory, only when they could be reconciled with biblical literalism. In Victorian Britain, most evangelicals were not biblical literalists, although they certainly were vigilant about ensuring that the faithful read about the new sciences in popular texts that had a “an appropriately Christian tone” (99). For the Religious Tract Society, which was the largest of the evangelical publishers, this involved the often tricky but significant task of presenting nineteenth-century science to a public that was exposed to many secular or explicitly atheistic popular science writings. Chapter 3, “Reading Fish,” is a provocative and convincing investigation of how the Society attempted to “catch” its readers in a series of monthly publications whose authors adopted “a narrative voice that led the reader through natural history, God the Creator, his Revelation, and the Atonement” (139). Fyfe's detailed discussion of volume 49 of this monthly series—British Fish and Fisheries (December 1849)—demonstrates the Religious Tract Society's strategy of producing works that would not only reinforce the religious reader's faith and his/her knowledge of aspects of science but could, hopefully, ensnare those readers who were not Christian (or whose faith was tottering under the avalanche of new scientific information) to convert to Christianity or, at the very least, begin some serious spiritual inquiry leading to conversion. Fyfe rounds out her study with useful chapters on the economic matrix within which the evangelical publishing enterprise had to function. She provides telling examples of the (largely) effective pricing, marketing, and distribution strategies of the Religious Tract Society that were an absolute necessity in the tough competition for significant portions of a rapidly expanding audience. Equally important was the fact that Christian popular science writing was one of the few acceptable ways of making money from one's faith—though for all but the most successful and prolific evangelical authors the attempt to make an adequate income solely from writing remained daunting at best.

With its deliberate shift in focus from the more well-known and extensively studied expert men of science and professional theologians to the ranks of evangelical preachers and mass-market writers, Fyfe's Science and Salvation is a welcome addition to the recent historiography of the intertwined paths of science and religion in Victorian popular culture.