Twenty-three years before Friedrich Nietzsche wrote his own, explosively post-Christian Ecce homo, an anonymous Ecce homo had appeared in England which depicted the life and teaching of Christ as marking the irremovable foundation and unsurpassable pinnacle of modern ethics. In this fluent and rigorously-researched study, Ian Hesketh situates the sensational appearance of this Ecce homo in 1865, and its secret authorship by the future Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, John Robert Seeley, in the context of nineteenth-century book history. Hesketh reconstructs the prehistory and reception of Seeley's undogmatic and morally forceful ‘Victorian Jesus’, the historicity of whose miracles Seeley left an open and even subordinate question, in order to enter the culture of anonymous authorship in mid-Victorian Britain. Seeley sought to preserve his anonymity, ultimately unsuccessfully, so as to prevent his work from becoming publicly stereotyped by association with a ‘church party’, and to save himself from reprobation by his Evangelical family. Hesketh explores the interplay, and latent tension, between Seeley's desires, and the interest of his canny publisher, Alexander Macmillan, in fomenting gossip over the book's authorship in order to boost its sales. Hesketh also makes vivid the impetus which Ecce homo gave to gathering debate over the ethics of anonymous authorship in the public sphere. Seeley emerges as the adherent of an increasingly ‘incorrect’ practice, leaving many readers frustrated that the true ends of the book were obscure so long as the identity, and hence the character, of its author were unknown. By firmly grounding an important individual case in its cultural and commercial contexts, Victorian Jesus marks a substantial advance in the history of Victorian religious publishing, which is still understood more in outline than in the kind of depth that Hesketh offers in this book. His attention to Macmillan's role in shaping and marketing Seeley's religious writings, in particular, may repay similar application to the history of other incendiary Victorian texts. There remains scope for further consideration of Seeley's intellectual-historical significance, which – given Hesketh's primary concern with publishing history – is here treated more suggestively than exhaustively. For instance, Hesketh, partly following Duncan Bell, regards Ecce homo as the foundation of Seeley's larger concern with the universal history of ‘the founding and development of Christ's society’ (p. 213), an interest further worked out, for example, in his Life and times of Stein (1878). Seeley once claimed that this work was the sequel to Ecce homo (p. 165). But whilst Seeley's Stein is certainly a rich text, laden for instance with comparisons between England and Prussia, it is also a notably secular work, especially when it is compared to the writings of Seeley's Oxford counterpart as Regius Professor, William Stubbs. Did Seeley, therefore, ultimately wish to advance a Christianised understanding of history, or was it his intention rather to subordinate religion to politics? As well as offering a fascinating study of nineteenth-century book history, Victorian Jesus affords a reminder of how much work remains to be done in arriving at properly contextual understandings of nineteenth-century intellectual history.