Converting Britannia: Evangelicals and British Public Life, 1770–1840, by Gareth Atkins

Abstract

The illustration in the Conclusion to this ambitious and impressive book—an etching of Thomas Stothard’s painting Britannia Recommending the Sacred Records to the Attention of the Different Nations of the World, donated c.1824 by the Baptist Robert Bowyer (the creator of ‘the Bowyer Bible’) to the British and Foreign Bible Society—is used by Atkins to sum up his own aims and achievements: ‘If the image of Britannia encapsulates what Evangelicals were trying to do, this book has thrown new light on how they went about it. It has charted the development of Evangelical networks in the Church of England, the City of London, the East India Company, the Royal Navy and in broader officialdom, both in Britain and abroad. It has shown, too, how this gave Evangelicals disproportionate influence over the discourses surrounding these institutions, and thus over the tone of public life’ (p. 246). His focus is on the ways in which Evangelicals, both clerical and lay, pursued and manipulated power in a range of public spheres to promote those deemed ‘serious’ (in Evangelical parlance) and to achieve their reformist ends. The book is based on very wide research over many years in archives and printed materials, and on the large database Atkins constructed of the complex relationships between the multiple protagonists (pp. 7, 32 n. 29). It will greatly benefit political, religious, social and institutional historians of the period, who will have to take account of its findings, but historians of religious thought and religious publications will find some gaps.