A bible, as an ink-and-paper object, may be many things: book, commodity, stock-in-trade, devotional space, work surface, recyclable stack of paper, gift, counter-gift, relic, study aid, scaffolded syllabus, unprocessed data, or a notebook. This thesis examines bibles under all these guises—bibles read or handled, mostly by evangelicals, in nineteenth-century Britain and the British Empire.

In the nineteenth century, bible-reading was shaped by evangelical enthusiasm for bible distribution, developing printing technologies, and the entwined histories of mission and empire. Bibles became ever more ubiquitous, and were handled in new theological and social contexts. Evangelical culture prized the materiality of the Bible as an object, celebrating the sale of bibles by the British and Foreign Bible Society, or commending those whose reading left their bible worn and tattered. Where such volumes have survived, the marks, notes, and signs of use in them give hints about what the Bible was to its readers and users in the context of the evangelical tradition and the changes of industrialisation.

My method is to examine these signs of use and reconstruct the stories behind them: a variation of object biography, or microhistory of the book. Drawing on scholarship in book history, especially on used books and marginalia, I explore some of the ways in which the Bible is distinctive, and the practices shaped by its material features as well as readers’ assumptions about the immaterial word of God that it was taken to represent.

Each chapter highlights a small group of contrasting marked bibles. In the first chapter, I use a case study from the nineteenth-century prison to introduce my method. Prison reformer Elizabeth Fry’s bible has numerous neat, devotional, often somewhat personal marginal notes; bibles handled by prisoners offer an alternative angle on the meaning of use or damage.

Chapter Two also spans an imbalance of power and privilege, looking at bibles specially printed and stamped by the Bible Society for distribution to formerly enslaved readers in the British West Indies. The biographies of these bibles, presented and presented back, suggest questions about the role of bibles in transaction and gift exchange.

Chapter Three compares bibles from either end of the century, belonging to two missionaries, Henry Martyn and Charles H. V. Gollmer. These readers’ commitment to mission gives their bibles some similar features. But whereas Henry Martyn’s focus on translation makes his reading multi-layered, section-by-section, and comparative, Charles Gollmer’s evangelistic strategy puts pressure on the book to function like a card index, infinitely flexible, and inexhaustible.

The fourth chapter thinks further about how the Bible was studied by individual readers in a context of more accessible, more affordable books. The page, as a material and conceptual feature, offered a system of scaffolding which organised the contents of the Bible for comprehension and learning. Bible publishers, and studious readers, made inventive adaptations to the pages of their books. When study made the biblical text familiar, the bible could be used differently as an object, so that my final case study examines a bible belonging to James Russell Woodford, used for sermon preparation after the work of learning had already been done.

Throughout this thesis, I find that the nineteenth-century Bible can be examined as an extreme example of the nineteenth-century book—a book pushing the limits of reading and handling practices. Attending to the material evidence of bible-use illuminates the connected histories of bibles, the Bible, and the reading habits, faith, and social lives of bible users in this period.