Religious Vitality in Victorian London by William M. Jacob (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Religious Vitality in Victorian London by William M. Jacob Mary Heimann Religious Vitality in Victorian London. By William M. Jacob. (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2021. Pp. viii, 348. £75,00. ISBN 978-0-19-289740-4.) Victorian London, like other great cities, has often been presented as a place where religion went to die. Contemporary sermons, pastoral letters, reports, newspaper articles and novels portrayed the capital sensationally, as a sink of immorality, heathenism, infidelity, religious indifference, the modern Babylon. Secularization and urbanization, popular theories of the 1960s which only began to be challenged by scholars in the 1980s, still exercise considerable hold over the popular imagination. In this densely packed survey of religious life in Victorian London, W. M. Jacob argues for the pervasiveness of religiosity—a term which goes well beyond formal church affiliation or attendance—at every level of society. Religious Vitality in Victorian London offers a useful service in bringing together two generations of scholarship on how the Church of England, together with a variety of Nonconformist and Dissenting traditions, fared in the Victorian religious marketplace. Like them, Jacob frames much of the discussion through the prism of social class and gender; the focus on London enables the study meaningfully to incorporate Judaism and Roman Catholicism into his analysis. Jacob's definition of "religion" follows trends in post-1990s scholarship in including nominal, tacit, or implicit faith. The monograph further builds on the work of others in bringing into "religiosity" what Jacob terms "quasi-religious" movements (including even ethical and humanist movements), and "parareligions" (including phrenologists, spiritualists, theosophists, and occultists). By bringing both supernaturalist and secularist organizations under the blanket term "religion," it could be argued that Religious Vitality in Victorian London expands the term "religion" so far as to invalidate comparisons with earlier works about the decline of religion, thereby weakening its revisionist claims. [End Page 417] Religious Vitality in Victorian London concludes that "in the context of the massive social disturbance of migration, urbanization and industrialization religion continued to be a vital core ingredient framing the nature of this great modern metropolis" (p. 308). While this statement might not come as news to specialists in Victorian religion, the message still needs to be heard by non-specialists and students, for whom W. M. Jacob offers a careful, detailed compendium and discussion of religious activity of all sorts which took place in London during the reign of Victoria. Mary Heimann Cardiff University Mary Heimann Cardiff University Copyright © 2023 The Catholic University of America Press