This in 1826 was the judgement of Daniel Wilson, vicar of Islington and later bishop of Calcutta, looking back on the publication on 12 April 1797 of William Wilberforce’s Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes of this Country Contrasted with Real Christianity. Wilson went on to argue that the book ‘contributed in no small measure, to the progress of that general revival of religion which had already been begun’. It subsequently became a historiographical commonplace that the book was ‘the handbook of the Evangelicals’; but its impact on British religion also had other important dimensions that need to be explored.