The Ashgate publishing house has made a speciality of issuing collections of papers by important scholars, with the papers reprinted in facsimile so that they can be cited equivalent to the originals. The volume under review is a valuable addition to the series. It makes available a series of papers by Bernard Lightman originally published in various journals and edited volumes, and ranging over the period from 1989 to the present. In this time, Lightman's interests have moved from the ‘scientific’ (or evolutionary) naturalists of the title to the study of Victorian popular science writing. But as he indicates in his introduction, he has not been able to lose sight of the original topic because the conflict between the radical programme of the scientific naturalists and their more conservative opponents was fought out to a large extent in the arena provided by the increasing public demand for books and articles about science and its implications.

Unlike some contributions to the Ashgate series, this volume has a substantial introduction, providing an overview of the intellectual territory and references to literature published since the original articles appeared, including the author's own Victorian Popularizers of Science (2007). The first article is also an original publication based on a conference paper, and it too provides a substantial and authoritative survey of the origins of scientific naturalism and the debates among historians, such as Frank Turner and Lightman himself, who have sought to provide a more nuanced interpretation of the movement and its influence than that originating in the triumphalist rhetoric of the movement's own supporters. In his introduction, Lightman also identifies some outstanding problems which will be addressed at a forthcoming conference he is organizing. Are there more figures who should be included – Darwin himself, perhaps? Is phrenology an important precursor of naturalism, and if not, why not? This collection is anything but a record of a completed project – it provides a foundation in what has been achieved but also looks forward to further studies.

Experienced readers will be aware of the topics covered here – the book is presumably intended for libraries, given its price. We have the origins of naturalism in the Victorian crisis of faith, whose constituent doubts were by no means all engendered by science. The question of the relationship between T.H. Huxley's agnosticism and traditional nonconformism is explored. Perhaps most important of all is the contested status of the naturalists' programme, the extent to which they had to defend themselves against an active conservative opposition, the tensions that existed within the movement itself and within the scientific community, and the necessity of distinguishing respectable dissent from the rabble-rousing of the outright atheists. One of Lightman's most memorable articles is his account of Huxley's deathbed struggle with the statesman–intellectual Arthur Balfour. Another article shows how attitudes to John Tyndall in the popular press changed after his Belfast Address of 1874 highlighted his apparent materialism. We also see Lightman moving into his newer field of study with contributions on the popular writers who continued to defend natural theology. One recent article I had not spotted before draws a comparison between these writers and Samuel Butler, noting that the latter was simply more honest and more aggressive in his refusal to allow the element of design to be eliminated from the evolutionary project.

This volume is the record of a major achievement and will be very useful in making that achievement more easily available to a new generation of scholars. I will conclude with a minor quibble about the format of the Ashgate series, highlighted by the introduction's references to more recent publications on the topic. Here Lightman mentions studies which, because of the facsimile reproductions, cannot be included in the main body of the text. For instance, Gowan Dawson's important point about the critics' efforts to identify naturalism with ‘immoral hedonistic ethics’ is substantiated in the Tyndall article with a reference to Dawson's thesis – his book Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability (2007) can only be noted in the introduction. Could there not be room for a page or two of additional comments and references at the end of each article, thereby providing the reader with a surer guide to what has happened since the original publication? In the case of an ongoing project like Lightman's, this would be particularly useful to the younger scholars who are presumably the intended audience.