Victorian London was a place of violent contrasts: a ‘World City’ where industrial and imperial wealth rubbed up against prostitution and poverty. Metropolitan sprawl was always a religious as much as a social problem: when the crusading journalist W.T. Stead labelled London a ‘Modern Babylon’ in 1885, he was drawing on a long tradition of evoking the moral decay beneath the urban glitz. Yet as W.M. Jacob reminds us in his new book, laments about the lapsed faith and loose morals of the masses were also calculated. Pious Jeremiahs wanted to be proven wrong: to inspire their hearers to redouble their efforts and to dip into their pockets. Judged in those terms, Jacob argues, they had tremendous success. Even a church in impoverished Paddington could in 1898 boast three curates and fifty-one district visitors; communicants’ guilds; branches of the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament; temperance organizations; boys’, girls’ infants’ and Sunday schools; communicants’ classes; Bible classes; debating clubs; sports clubs; a savings bank; a burial club; a goose club; a missionary association; an embroidery guild; a library; free meals; a choir school; and a penitentiary, many of these with separate women’s and men’s branches (p. 90). Hyperactive philanthropists also evolved associations to tackle a staggering array of specific problems: the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Christian Associations; Boys’ and Church Lads’ Brigades; Christian Policemen’s Association; Public House Brigade; League of the Cross; Bands of Hope; Cabmen’s Shelter Fund; Diocesan Police Court Missioners; Bible Flower Mission; Blue Ribbon Army; White Cross League, among numerous others. Such concern often translated into bricks-and-mortar. The faithful were often flush enough to secure prominent building plots at junctions or atop hills. Jacob’s main concern, however, is what went on around and outside those looming buildings. There were chained Bibles at railway stations (p. 37) and scriptural mottoes on waiting-room walls, while hospitals, workhouses and large shops conducted family-style prayers for inmates and employees. While readers familiar with Callum Brown may not be surprised to discover a culture drenched in ‘discursive Christianity’, the weight of detail that Jacob brings to bear underlines just how ubiquitous it was.

Religious Vitality reopens a neglected front in the study of religion in modern Britain. The focus of recent research on the period between the 1920s and the 1960s has overshadowed the nineteenth century, and while Sarah Williams, Jeffrey Cox and others have examined popular religion in parts of London, until now no comprehensive overview has been attempted. This matters all the more because religious and social commentators like Charles Booth were fixated with London. Jacob draws on the researches of Booth and others to offer a twelve-chapter roadmap of its religious institutions. The first three establish the historical setting, the historiographical context and the broad contours of religious change. Jacob is not a strong believer in the secularization thesis: the product, he suggests, of pessimistic Victorian rhetoric and more recently of the reductionism of sceptical historians and sociologists. In a half-echo of E.P. Thompson, he urges us instead to take Victorian religiosity seriously: ‘Their Christian motivation cannot be written off. They must be judged according to their actions and their view of those actions, in the context in which they lived’ (p. 9). Yet this is not a simplistically ‘optimistic’ account, either: Jacob sees urbanization as atomizing the connections that made rural communities feel like they ‘belonged’ in churches, whether or not they attended them. The vitality Jacob surveys is, then, qualified: a description of how religious bodies sought to attract or educate or moralize the populace rather than of worship or ‘lived religion’ as such. Hence chapters three to seven offer a taxonomy of the structures and fortunes of the Church of England, Nonconformity, ‘Migrant Religious Groups’ (chiefly Catholicism and Judaism) and ‘New Religious Groups’, ranging from the Mormons to the Salvation Army, mesmerism and Labour Churches. The treatment of some smaller groups can sometimes seem cursory, and migrant or transient communities, such as European Protestants, who had their own churches, and South Asian ‘lascars’, who did not, receive minimal coverage. Likewise the culturally influential Scots and Welsh expatriate churches are curiously passed over. Yet Jacob’s focus on numbers and influence is a tacit rebuke to historians prone to magnify the importance of the esoteric and recherche. Put another way, the book tells a very Anglican story, for while provincial cities have often been seen as bastions of nonconformity, in London the Church of England was not just entrenched in archaic parishes and City institutions, but well-placed to appeal to new money too. Nonconformists, by contrast, built and filled ‘Mega-Chapels’ that could seat thousands, but by the end of the period were running out of steam as suburbanization, snobbishness and new forms of leisure sapped their numbers and finances; Catholics struggled to maintain the allegiance of Irish families. Chapter eight covers women’s activities, including domestic visiting, ‘Bible-Women’, nursing, nuns and the settlement movement. Chapters nine to eleven deal with philanthropy; elementary education; and secondary and adult education, underlining the sheer scale of religious endeavours in a period when the state largely stood aloof. Finance was often a worry: at St Mark’s, Kennington, needlework done by girls in the afternoon was sold to raise funds (p. 265), while Cardinal Wiseman obtained an indulgence from Pius IX for Catholics who contributed to their Poor Schools Committee (p. 269). Nevertheless, denominational teacher training colleges, girls’ schools and higher education institutions proliferated, thanks both to institutional funding and individual munificence, such as the £300,000 and art collection bequeathed by Thomas Holloway to the college that bears his name.

This book, then, offers both a conspectus and reams of detail: there are plenty of pointers here towards further research. In placing religion at the centre of metropolitan social and cultural life it advances a significant point that historians should note. And there are also subtler revisionist comments, too, some of which deserved more development: e.g. ‘in the period after 1870 children were better instructed in the Christian faith by Board schools, denominational schools and Sunday schools than they had ever been before’ (p. 282). Yet there is a nagging sense that it also emphasizes the limits of the vitality it explores. If this was never a hostile environment for Christians, it could often be indifferent: perhaps the working classes were just too tired to go to church regularly, or put off by the demands of bourgeois churchgoing and behaviour? Ultimately it seems that the problems the churches sought to solve were simply too big.