Bill Jacob is a leading historian of the modern Church of England, specializing in the eighteenth century, and has also held a senior position in the Anglican diocese of London. In this book he aims to provide a comprehensive picture of religious activity in Victorian London, based on an equally comprehensive body of primary and secondary sources. Jacob is admirably even-handed in his handling of the city's many competing denominations. The Church of England naturally has the lead role, and is the subject of two excellent chapters, beginning in the 1830s, which he calls “the most unnerving decade” for that church since the 1660s. He highlights the key role played in its response to these challenges by Charles James Blomfield, Bishop of London, 1828–1856. Blomfield's heroic fundraising efforts and skill in appealing to the generosity of wealthy Londoners funded a vast project of “church extension.” It provided London with a network of relatively small parishes, contrasting with the “giant parishes” of Berlin, Paris, or Vienna. Jacob also provides extensive treatment of the major Nonconformist denominations; of Catholics and Jews, whose numbers were substantially reinforced by immigration during the Victorian years; and of a multitude of newer and smaller groups. The latter range from the Salvation Army to Theosophy to Secularism. As well as examining the internal life of the various religious bodies, Jacob is centrally concerned with their social impact. Major attention is therefore given to the role of religion in education, welfare, and moral crusading, and especially to the part played in this by women. Reviewing the historiography, Jacob notes that older works tended to focus on secularization. Victorian London was by far the largest city the world had yet seen, and for the pioneers of social history in the 1960s and 1970s, it was axiomatic that urbanization and secularization went hand in hand. However, more recent work, beginning with Jeff Cox in the 1980s, has tended to highlight the continuing importance of religion for nineteenth-century Londoners. Jacob strongly supports this more positive view. He sees the trend being toward “diversification and privatization” rather than a decline of religion. He sees religion as “pervasive” and religious views of the world as predominant, in spite of relatively low levels of church-going. His primary concern is with supply rather than demand, and he makes it clear that the supply of religion was ample in terms both of the numbers and variety of religious groups active in the metropolis, the energy they showed in propagating their faith, and their readiness to address a broad range of social ills. Jacob contends that most philanthropy was religiously inspired, with Anglicans and Unitarians being especially prominent. He provides extensive discussion of such bodies as the Charity Organisation Society, whose guiding spirit was the Unitarian Octavia Hill. As he notes, the society's emphasis on self-help and its opposition to interventions by central or local government were widely criticized by contemporaries, and subsequently by historians, as showing an unrealistic understanding of the causes of poverty. But he tries to provide an understanding of Hill's motives and of the more positive outcomes of her work. Jacob's aim is to show and explain what was done rather than to enter debates as to whether it ought to have been done differently.

There are inevitably some areas where I would have placed the emphasis differently. While Jacob is right that exaggerated reliance on the statistics of religious practice has led to the wider social impact of church and synagogue being overlooked, I think he underestimates the extent of indifference or hostility to religion. My own research on working-class religion in later Victorian London, drawing on oral history testimonies, suggests a more variegated picture. There certainly was a significant minority of households where the predominant ethos was definitely religious, and these were more numerous than historians used to assume, but there was also a significant minority of those where the ethos was hostile or indifferent to religion. This relates to a second point. Jacob is right to suggest that the religious situation varied considerably between different working-class parishes: some struggled while others were highly active. He notes examples of the latter, including many of the mission churches in poorer areas. He notes the example of St. Agatha's London Docks, which in 1875 had a day school, an evening school, three lads’ clubs, a savings club, a mothers’ meeting, and a drum and fife band. However, he underplays the handicaps the Anglican clergy faced as a result of class differences. Here Alan Bartlett's work on Bermondsey is illuminating (“The Churches in Bermondsey 1880–1939,” PhD thesis, University of Birmingham, 1987). He vividly encapsulates the gap between the Anglican clergy and most of their parishioners in one simple point. Not only did the clergy live in big houses with space for servants, but they frequently were big, athletic men, towering over the average South Londoner. One other point of disagreement: Jacob generally stresses the positive, but in his treatment of mainstream Nonconformity in the later Victorian period, he is unduly negative.

One small factual point: in suggesting that London was uniquely devout among the great Western cities of the time, Jacob goes too far. If the test of church-going is used, the level in London around 1900 certainly was considerably higher than in Berlin and somewhat higher than in Paris, but it was lower than in New York. The level of Protestant practice in the American metropolis was close to that in London, but Catholics were both more numerous there and more observant than their English counterparts. Inevitably, given the book's very broad scope, some points will be open to debate, but it will be an essential point of reference for future research on religion in the Victorian city and on Victorian cities more generally.