Religion in Victorian Britain Volume V: Culture and Empire ed. by John Wolffe.

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS87 scious that we see now through a glass darkly, and continually pleading for a wise and gentle minimism until that time has passed away" (p. 428). Gerard H. McCarren Immaculate Conception Seminary Seton Hall University Religion in Victorian Britain. Volume V: Culture and Empire. Edited by John Wolffe. (Manchester University Press in association with the Open University . Distributed in the United States and Canada by St. Martin's Press, New York. 1997. Pp. viii, 359. $24.95.) In 1988 the Open University created a course on "Religion in Victorian Britain," accompanied by four volumes oftexts and readings with the same title. The course and books successfully reflected the state of the field at that date, but a decade of further scholarship has convinced the Religious Studies faculty that a fifth volume should be added to cover cultural and imperial contexts omitted from the original set. There are three substantial essays on the topics of gender, church music, and colonial missions, and three case studies, two on authors whose work involved mission themes and one on colonial religions in Britain. The second part of the volume consists of documents keyed to the essays . John Wolffe's "Introduction: Victorian Religion in Context," in addition to a useful survey of the recent literature, makes the interesting suggestion that Georgian Britain was not less but rather differently religious, leaving Victorian religion with no fixed reference point for its development. The first essay, by Frances Knight on questions of gender, covers a field in which most of the literature is recent, dealing with the separation ofworkplace and home, constructions of middle-class femininity and masculinity (including "Christian manliness"), single women and education, and women's philanthropy and ministry . Wölffe supplies a long essay on hymns and church music, a vital part ofthe Victorian religious experience, but omitted from many surveys because it falls between disciplines. Terence Thomas gives a general account of the British missionary movement, largely based on the Indian experience, examining the relationship between missionary and imperial expansion. The first case study, by Gerald Parsons, is a moving re-evaluation of Bishop John William Colenso of Natal, notorious for his biblical criticism, which has obscured his constructively liberal theology which respected the God-given dignity of the natives whose rights he upheld. Gwilym Beckerlegge's study of Max Müller similarly interrelates scholarly and missionary concerns: the contest for the Sanskrit professorship at Oxford is shown to center on differing views of the relation of philological studies to mission work; and Müller's later work in comparative religion was affected by his concern for the common bond shared by Christianity and primitive Indian religion. The final essay by Beckerlegge on the presence of Islam and South Asian religions in Britain itself is truly pioneering. He finds that 88BOOK REVIEWS non-Muslims (except for Parsis) came as individuals and did not form communities , but they brought new influences to some English individuals in theosophy and Vedanta; Islam produced an English community with a mosque in Liverpool led by a convert, Abdullah Quilliam, of whom he gives a fascinating account. This useful volume does not stand alone: not only is it conceived as part of an ongoing course, but its essays complement and enhance those of the original volumes for scholars. Collectively, they represent the maturation ofVictorian religious history. Josef L.Altholz University ofMinnesota Glorious Battle:The Cultural Politics ofVictorian Anglo-Catholicism. ByJohn Shelton Reed. (Nashville, Tennessee:Vanderbilt University Press. 1996. Pp. xxiv, 357. $34.95.) The subtitle of Reed's book indicates his approach. In dealing with the "Ritualist " phase ofthe Anglo-Catholic revival, one engages practices as much as doctrines , practices that constituted "symbolic affronts to central values of Victorian middle-class culture" and in some cases "actual threats to those values " (p. xxii). Clerical dress, liturgical vocabulary, liturgical artifacts and gestures, the practice of auricular confession, eucharistie devotion, the establishment of sisterhoods functioned as signs of identity to those who converted to the movement and generated vocal, occasionally violent, and eventual legal opposition from without. Reed addresses the problem of why a style of religious behavior that had been abandoned in the Church of England succeeded in attracting...