The author of this Oxford monograph, who is professor of theology at Wheaton College, has a clear agenda: he feels that the Victorian crisis of faith has been over-emphasised and that there was just as much of a ‘crisis of doubt’ in nineteenth-century Britain. He seeks to redress the balance by focusing on the reconversion to Christianity of a number of prominent Victorian free-thinkers and secularists. Specifically, he looks at the lives and thought of seven figures: William Hone, Frederic Young, Thomas Cooper, John Henry Gordon, Joseph Barker, John Bebbington and George Sexton.

Theirs are all very much stories of reconversion, rather than conversion. All started off as Christians, brought up and firmly located in the world of Victorian Nonconformity, and then moved into prominent roles in secularist and free-thinking circles. Young was founder of the London Secular Society, Gordon became full-time paid resident lecturer with the Leeds Secular Society and Cooper was perhaps the most popular exponent of free-thinking views in London. Eventually, all moved back to Christianity, often via Unitarianism, and ended up publicly repudiating the positions which they had adopted during their secularist interlude.

The world in which these men lived and moved was a relatively narrow one – that of English provincial and metropolitan radicalism – and the journeys which they took between Nonconformity, often of a Unitarian hue, and secularism were not perhaps quite as dramatic or decisive as the author sometimes portrays them. They were all, in Professor Larsen's words, ‘plebeian radicals’ and belonged to a distinct and fairly confined social and political stratum.

Certain bigger and more general themes do emerge from this study. One is the huge influence and importance of Strauss' Das Leben Jesu in unsettling the Christian faith of susceptible and intelligent Victorian men (and it is an almost entirely male cast of characters who are paraded before us in this book, although Eliza Mills and Annie Besant are briefly mentioned in an appendix of other Victorians who reconverted). Another is the extent to which secularism and free thought were rejected primarily for moral reasons, because they were seen as fostering what Gordon memorably referred to as ‘Just-What-You-Like-Ism’. Similar high-minded moralistic considerations were, of course, important in the movement away from Christian faith of some of the most prominent Victorian doubters, notably John Stuart Mill. For the re-converts, as Larsen calls them, there was also a distaste with the dry arid intellectualism and rationalism of unbelief – several flirted with spiritualism.

I cannot help thinking that Professor Larsen somewhat overstates his case and over-emphasises the contribution that his gallery of re-converts makes to undermining the Victorian crisis of faith thesis. He is right to suggest that a good number of those once prominent in the worlds of secularism and free thought in the mid-nineteenth century came back to some kind of Christian belief and practice. He is also right to remind us that many Victorians remained comfortable in and with their Christian faith and were not hugely assaulted by doubts or qualms. Historians and literary scholars of the Victorian age are, however, equally correct to talk about a crisis of faith in the mid-nineteenth century because it does provide a very clear and dominant frame and theme for so much important writing in the period. True, it is generally at a much more socially, culturally and intellectually exalted level than among the ‘plebian radicals’ with whom Larsen engages, although they are themselves in a sense perfect examples of those who do go through a crisis of faith and emerge from it. There is nothing in any of the writings quoted in this book which remotely compares in quality, profundity or popular and lasting influence to ‘Dover Beach’ or ‘In Memoriam’. Tennyson, Arnold and George Eliot are vastly more important and influential figures than Young, Gordon and Cooper. I suspect that they are also more representative of the temper and mood of their age as a whole.

There is something of a crusade under way at the present time among North American evangelicals to suggest that several eminent Victorians, who have traditionally been seen as leaning towards theological liberalism, Unitarianism or universalism, were in fact good conservative Christians. Charles Dickens in particular has recently been the subject of such revisionist interpretation. There are times when this book comes rather close to this sort of somewhat partisan special pleading. Honest faith and honest doubt were both part of the Victorian intellectual make-up, alike among plebeian radicals and upper-class Anglicans. In a curious way, that I suspect its author did not really intend, this book goes to show how closely intertwined they were.