The 1830s would have been a good time to be a member of a British lending library. You could have read the first editions of John Herschel's Preliminary Discourse, Mary Somerville's On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, or Charles Babbage's Reflections on the Decline of Science in England . If you knew someone with a subscription to Fraser's Magazine for Town and Country, you could have read the original serialized version of Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus. These works all appeared at a time of fierce political and social unrest, which was also the height of the “useful knowledge” movement. This movement was sure that cheap steam-powered printing would place exactly these kinds of intellectual and scientific books in the hands of the masses and change Britain forever. James Secord's meticulously researched Visions of Science tells us that they did indeed change Britain—but not at all in the way that was expected.

Secord approaches the pivotal science texts by treating them as books—tangible, commercial objects purchased and read by particular people in particular places. This helps us see them afresh, without our vision obscured by the long shadows they cast over the intellectual history of the nineteenth century. Looking at the material aspects of the books helps us understand how they were read and used by people at the time. Consider Herschel's Preliminary Discourse, commonly named as one of the pillars of Victorian scientific practice. In 1831, readers did not uniformly see it as a serious philosophical text. Even the publisher was not sure how to think about it, and sold it with three different title pages so readers could customize it as one part of a cyclopedia, the first volume in a series on natural philosophy, or a stand-alone work. Even then, it was not regarded as an instruction manual for inductive science. Darwin did not sing its praises because it taught him to do science—rather, it inspired him to make science a vocation. With the Discourse Herschel wanted to make its readers think and act differently. In fact, Secord tells us, it is perfectly recognizable as a “conduct manual,” an early nineteenth-century genre that taught proper manners. Herschel was trying to persuade his readers that scientific behavior had to begin in politeness.

Many of these classic science books were deeply concerned with this question of how to demonstrate that science could be practiced in a genteel, respectable way. Lyell's Principles was, Secord argues, not a cosmological treatise so much as it was a manifesto for the respectability of science. Its original £2 cost showed that the book was aimed at the wealthy and influential readers whose approval Lyell needed (the working classes would have to wait for the cheap edition). Similarly, we can watch George Combe's Constitution of Man drift toward respectability over decades of new editions. And we are only able to understand how this is possible through careful attention to the material culture of printing: machine printing made typesetting cheap, so works that sold well could be continually revised in order to encourage readers to purchase subsequent editions. The first version of Constitution might look suspiciously radical, but later editions worked hard to present phrenology as respectable knowledge.

Visions of Science takes the reader through seven of these classic texts, demonstrating how close attention to publishing practices, printer's profits, and reading cultures reframes the way we think about them. Sometimes this is a matter of enriching relatively well-known stories (as with the Preliminary Discourse), sometimes of introducing fascinating new narratives. The chapter devoted to Mary Somerville's Connexion is a masterful account of how French mathematics, women's rights, working class education, and natural theology combined to form an unexpectedly influential book that would go through ten editions over forty years.

Secord observes that many historians consider the early Victorian era's attempts at diffusing scientific knowledge to be a failure, but contends that this is only true if measured against the utopian predictions of the time. Britain's working class did not become well educated and pacified. The texts discussed here did change the country, but they did so by convincing the middle classes that science was gentlemanly, respectable, and safe. The generation who read them was persuaded that “science was about everyday conduct, ordered hierarchies, and well-balanced minds” (244). And they put those principles into action: when T. H. Huxley and John Tyndall read Carlyle, they were inspired to reform science with his values in mind. By the end of the nineteenth century, these books looked less like manuals for manners and more like philosophical manifestos. Secord's remarkable achievement is to both uncover the way they were originally read and how they were transformed by their readership, all through his careful attention to the books as physical and economic entities. In short, Visions of Science shows how the history of science can profit from conversation with the history of the book. It should be read by anyone interested in science and literature, reading practices, or Victorian intellectual culture. It could even work well in an undergraduate survey as an introduction to some of the major scientific issues of the nineteenth century (such as, for example, professionalization in science, uniformitarianism, science and religion). This is a remarkable book about books.