Industrialised Conversion: the Religious Tract Society and Popular Science Publishing in Victorian Britain

Abstract

The book trade was industrialised in the middle of the nineteenth century, and cheap books began to appear in large numbers.  The emerging mass market tempted some publishers to minister to what they perceived to be the public taste, and contemporaries began to complain about the rise of unauthorised speculations which were likely to lead readers astray.  Men of science were among those complaining, since their authority was shaky and did not extend into the realm of popular publishing.  Members of the Christian churches were also vociferous in expressing their fears that industrial technology was removing the religious spirit from print.  Christian commentators pointed to the increasing numbers of infidel and secular works, particularly in the sciences, and called upon religious publishers to fight back.

Among those which did so was the evangelical Religious Tract Society, which was committed to using printing technologies to reach the mass audience, and whose committee had become experts in the use of print to effect personal spiritual transformations, particularly conversion.  In the 1840s, the Society was beginning to publish popular science works whose Christian tone was intended to counter the separation between science and faith which the secular and infidel publications appeared to be producing.  This thesis studies the Religious Tract Society as a way to investigate the rise of popular science publishing in the mid-nineteenth century, and to reassess the relationship between science and faith under industrialisation.

Chapter One introduces the Society and its aims, discusses why it decided to begin publishing popular science, and examines how it reconciled the commercial and spiritual aims of business.  The second chapter considers the competition, and asks what the RTS had to do to function effectively.  The solutions included the physical appearance of the works, and the ways in which they were marketed and distributed.  But the works not only had to reach their readers, they had to be read, and be convincing.  Chapter Three considers how the Society’s writers constructed Christian tone, and tried to persuade readers of the importance of placing the sciences in a theological framework.  Their writing practices are the focus of Chapter Four.  In the writing, as in the publishing as a whole, we see again the apparent tension between commercial and spiritual worlds, with writing represented both as working spiritually for Christ, and physically for money.

By considering a publisher which was not associated with practising men of science, but which brought the sciences to an enormous audience, this thesis takes the historical study of popular science publishing beyond existing studies of men of science as popularisers and middle-class readerships.  It also reforms our understanding of the relationship between science and religion in nineteenth-century Britain, which has remained relatively untouched by the histories of practice and of popular science.

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