The inscription on his funeral monument describes George Gilfillan as “critic, poet, divine.” At the height of his career, he was renowned as “Gilfillan of Dundee,” his name inseparable from his beloved Scottish city. According to that Dundee poet of dubious merit, William McGonagall, the people flocked “to hear him night and day,” and he was “the greatest preacher of the present day” (154). Gilfillan was indeed a force in Victorian Scotland, famed for his sermons, public lectures, and literary and historical essays. A Presbyterian minister, he was a dissenter from the established Church of Scotland and a “Broad Church” Christian. In politics, he was a liberal, and a champion of the rights of the laboring orders. He was, in short, a representative of the urban, dissenting, liberal, and provincial culture that thrived across Britain in the mid-Victorian years.

In this beautifully crafted book, Aileen Black of the University of Dundee provides the first scholarly biography of George Gilfillan and a lively exploration of the cultural life of mid-Victorian Dundee. Gilfillan comes across as an attractive figure. The youngest son of a Presbyterian Seceder minister, his father died when he was a child—after informing his wife on his deathbed that she was soon to “be a widow, and a poor widow” (21). Educated amid poverty at Glasgow University, the young Gilfillan wished to pursue a literary career, but, needing an income, he followed his late father into the ministry of the United Associate Secession Church and in 1836 became minister of the School Wynd church in Dundee, where he would remain until his death forty-two years later. An eloquent preacher, Gilfillan gathered a loyal congregation representing different social orders, and he made his church a center for cultural and philanthropic activities. In 1847, the United Associate Secession Church united with the Relief Church to form the United Presbyterian Church, which became arguably the most liberal and progressive of Scotland's Presbyterian denominations. Although he did not take an active role in ecclesiastical politics, Gilfillan's preaching and publications greatly influenced the United Presbyterian Church's liberal direction. His was a world-affirming Christian faith, thoroughly engaged with the “march of mind.” He was open to the theories of Charles Darwin, embraced the “higher critics” of the Bible, rejected notions of eternal punishment, supported revision of his Church's creedal standards, and insisted that revelation was progressive and ongoing. He was a prominent critic of the Moody and Sankey Scottish evangelistic campaign of 1873–1874, denouncing the emotionalism, and what he viewed as the anti-intellectualism, of the heated revival meetings.

It was, however, as a literary and political figure that he made his major contributions and gained greatest renown. As a poet, he was less than distinguished, and his main contribution, Night, a Poem (1867) was, as Dr. Black notes, unremarkable. But in an era that revered oratory, Gilfillan was a master of the popular lecture, and he became Dundee's leading public intellectual. From the platform, he championed free trade, factory reform, the rights of labor, sanitary reform, popular education, “moderate” temperance (for he liked a drink), the extension of the franchise, national self-determination for Hungary, the abolition of American slavery, and Italian unification. He sponsored visits to Dundee by a host of worthies, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Louis Kossuth, and David Livingstone. He promoted various initiatives for working-class improvement, including workingmen's clubs, lending libraries, and courses of lectures, and he endeavored to introduce popular audiences to the highest achievements in literature. He was the author or editor of some forty-four books, including biographical studies of celebrated poets and authors, popular editions of their works, and historical studies of Covenanters and eminent Scots. With an emotional, florid style, he evoked the feelings and aspirations of his heroes, past and present.

In two of her most engaging chapters, Dr. Black explores the phenomenon of mid-Victorian working-class poets—largely self-taught men and women, who sought to convey the realities of urban life in simple, colloquial, forceful language, who often held radical political views but needed wealthy patrons for financial support, and who too often succumbed to the temptations of alcohol and died young. Gilfillan promoted the careers of a number of such figures, including Alexander Smith, William Thom, and Elizabeth Campbell. He searched continually for the next Robert Burns, believing firmly that poetic genius was not dependent on birth or social status. He was also committed to preserving and promoting the diverse cultures of the British provinces against the increasingly pervasive influence of the London metropolitan culture. As Dr. Black shows, Gilfillan's reputation was beginning to flag in his final years, as the public lost its taste for his sort of florid language, and as more professional standards emerged in historical and literary scholarship. But his death in 1878 was a major event in the life of Dundee and was marked accordingly.

This is a splendid contribution that reveals much about Gilfillan's life and the Scottish provincial dissenting civic culture that he embodied. Dr. Black writes well and is especially effective in her explorations of Gilfillan's literary and political endeavors. Her grasp of historical theology and ecclesiastical history is less secure. She mistakenly equates non-elect infants in Westminster Calvinism (their fate determined by God's eternal decree) with unbaptized infants (102–103). Her claim that historians have viewed the United Presbyterian Church as “the last refuge of reactionary, introverted zealots” (215) is dubious; on the contrary, such leading ecclesiastical historians as J. R. Fleming, A. C. Cheyne and Donald Smith have viewed it as liberal and progressive. It was certainly the first Scottish denomination to ease the terms of subscription to the Westminster Confession. But Dr. Black's portrayals of Gilfillan's Broad Church Presbyterianism and sympathetic humanity, and of the rich and vibrant civic provincial culture of Victorian Dundee, are vivid and convincing.