Rowan Strong's Victorian Christianity and Emigrant Voyage to British Colonies c.1840–c.1914 examines what the author claims is an understudied aspect of both Victorian religion and the emigrant experience for Victorian Christians. The central theme of this study is the Anglican development of an emigrant chaplaincy program in the mid-nineteenth century, created to maintain and cultivate the faith while at sea and ultimately establish Anglican settler communities in the colonies. The most compelling section of the narrative becomes apparent in the middle chapters: the interaction of the majority Anglican emigrants with the increasing numbers of non-Anglicans, even non-Protestants, on small seafaring ships. Strong convincingly conveys the claustrophobic nature of these ships with their small, class-segregated decks and official, as well as self-appointed, pastors ministering to their respective flocks amidst an often apathetic, and sometimes hostile, crew. The inevitable and intimate interaction between denominations over the course of several weeks to months, interaction that simply did not occur back in the United Kingdom, had important consequences later in the colonies, Strong concludes.

The author focuses initially on the work of Thomas Childs, vicar of St. Mary's, Plymouth, in the 1840s, who was instrumental in the establishment of the Anglican Emigrant Chaplaincy. Understanding emigration as an involuntary choice made out of severe economic necessity, Childs stressed to his supervisors the need to make these dangerous journeys as safe and comfortable as possible, using the ministry of the faith to ease the concerns about a passage that could take months. Secondarily, he wanted to energize the Anglican faith and improve moral conduct onboard ship, ensuring strong Anglican roots arrived and thrived in the colonies. Two competing, contemporary views on emigration emerge: one from the sympathetic Childs, who saw the emigrant experience as potentially a positive one toward creating a more inclusive religious atmosphere in the colonies; the other was a more Calvinistic view of emigration wanting to export the faith with the same religious and racial hierarchical strata existing in Great Britain, especially that between Anglo-Saxon and Celt.

In the much livelier middle chapters, Strong relies on many diaries, published and unpublished, to form the backbone of his narrative. It is here where the reader encounters, in the words of the passengers, the fetid atmosphere and close quarters of the ships, as well as the competition, bigotry, and unrepressed proselytism of Victorian religion. Strong argues that these ships were floating villages, at once resembling both the vast industrial milieu then occupying Britain's cities and the small rural villages from which these families descended. They resembled the former because of the human diversity on board within tight spaces and the latter because of the comparable rigid social hierarchies of ship life with rural life.

Belowdecks we meet William Fulford, a lay Wesleyan Methodist, who began organizing Sabbath services on his 1842 voyage, leading hymn singing and distributing tracts while making common cause with Bible Christians, more evangelical offshoots from the Methodist branch. Such coordination brought what Strong calls “evangelistic energy” to the journey, a phenomenon that grew more common as the century progressed (155). In contrast, we hear from John Bunyan McCure, a Baptist minister sailing to Australia in 1852, who found the religion of nearly all others on board wanting and expressed barely disguised bigotry toward fellow passengers. The revelatory diary of John Wollaston, an Anglican clergyman emigrating in the 1840s, contains vivid descriptions of irreligious sailors who ignored services and generally had not the slightest Christian education. Angered by their continued card playing, he dramatically hurled a deck of cards into the sea after his warnings went unheeded and, reflecting the sectarianism and rivalry between the Established Church and nonconformity, wrote that without proper religious education, “Calvinism & Infidelity must spread” (205–206).

On the Catholic experience, Strong readily acknowledges the contemporary anti-Catholic bias from the source material, largely written by Protestants who perpetuated common anti-Catholic stereotypes. While the presence of Catholics on board caused anxiety for many Protestants, especially men like McCure who refused to interact with them, Strong reveals several examples of religious rapprochement on the high seas. The six Presentation nuns on board a ship bound for Australia in 1873 largely won over their non-Catholic opposition in both the first-class accommodations and steerage by their piety and good nature, a result that might only have occurred in the small confines of an emigrant ship because these disparate groups would not find reason to be in one another's company back home. Yet the story of Presbyterian Richard Powell, whose anti-Catholic bigotry emanated from his extreme dislike of the Church of England and anything resembling ritualism (an abhorrence that nearly led to blows being exchanged on his 1867 voyage), reminds the reader that anti-Catholicism remained entrenched in Victorian society throughout the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, Strong misses an opportunity to incorporate recent English Catholic historiography that presents a more nuanced approach to the public nature and work of Victorian Catholicism than his out-of-date statement about the Catholic Church keeping to itself until Cardinal Manning's participation in the 1889 Dock Workers strike. My own work on English Catholicism's very public efforts within the education debate from the 1860s onwards has redirected that view.

The essential argument of the book that the emigration experience, nurtured by the Anglican Emigrant Chaplaincy and other leaders of varying faiths, ultimately eased some of the current sectarian divisions is sound. Strong provides significant evidence that the ubiquitous Victorian Protestant partisanship between the evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics was nearly nonexistent in the ports, on the ships, and at disembarkation. He further provides multiple examples of cooperation and even mutual respect emerging between Protestants and Catholics on the long voyages. Thus, Strong argues that clergy and laity could “readily identify in the religious belief of emigrants from other denominations fundamental grounds of common Christianity” (277). He closes by placing upon that thesis further scaffolding for another: the close quarter interaction with other denominations led to newfound toleration of and respect for religious diversity in the colonies thereafter. This bold argument is however not convincing because, while there is some evidence that behaviors were moving in this direction, it looks beyond the colonial port of entry into the later lives of emigrants and thus beyond the focus of this study.