Marjorie Wheeler‐Barclay . The Science of Religion in Britain, 1860–1915 . (Victorian Literature and Culture Series.) Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. 2010. Pp. x, 311. $45.00.

Abstract

In this book, Marjorie Wheeler‐Barclay starts from the assumption that some early British classics within the academic discipline now commonly known as the comparative study of religions have frequently been analyzed to ascertain their contribution to the present state of knowledge in the field, but without a sufficient view to elucidating their role in Victorian discourse on religion. To remedy this, she discusses in detail six writers who justifiably can be taken to exemplify the full scope of non‐theological Victorian writing on religion and the religions. In her introduction, the author argues “that their work is best regarded not as a cause of, but as a response to, the sense of cultural disorientation that was engendered by religious turmoil” (p. 2), claiming that the “widespread interest in the ‘utility’ and human ‘meaning’ of all forms of religious belief and practice offered a favourable atmosphere for the creation of a comparative study of religions” (p. 7). Chapter one consequently details some major influences that had shaped the perception of religion and religions by the early decades of the Victorian period, most notably the evolutionary ideas propagated by Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer. Following this setting of the stage, the author discusses in the following six chapters the lives and works of Friedrich Max Müller, Edward Burnett Tylor, Andrew Lang, William Robertson Smith, James George Frazer, and Jane Ellen Harrison; each of the chapters moves from vital biographical information via key themes and concepts to an outline of the contemporary reception. In her conclusion, Wheeler‐Barclay reaffirms her conviction that the “Victorian ‘science of religion’ was a reaction to and a reflection of the sense of crisis that had troubled the educated classes of British society as the traditional Anglican cultural elite came under increasingly successful attack, a process that had reached its most intense phase in the years between 1850 and 1890” (p. 247). Summarizing the individual positions taken by the authors discussed in her book, she notes that “while the science of religion was not able to create a new cultural consensus, it had contributed in ways not always easy to trace to a new and more wide‐ranging conception of religion” (p. 252).