The history of Sunday schooling in Britain has been a neglected focus of recent religious historical studies; therefore, Caitriona McCartney’s is a welcome addition to the historiography. As Caitriona McCartney rightly indicates, in her thorough introduction to the volume, some early studies of this social and educational phenomenon argued that they had working-class origins and were a means of social control. Other scholars have puzzled over its decline, pointing to the disastrous effects of the First World War as the chief reason for this. McCartney's work challenges these prior arguments, building on the work of Hugh McCleod, Sarah C. Williams, and Michael Snape in demonstrating the vitality and influence of these religious institutions upon the religious education of successive generations. Beyond their evident decline from the early twentieth century to the present, the impact of their form of Christian socialization was still being felt well into the 1970s, according to the testimony of former Sunday-school attendees, such as the politician, Lord Roy Hattersley, and the actress Dame Patricia Routledge.

McCartney's detailed and well-researched new history of Sunday schooling has chapters on the period before the First World War, which evidences that Sunday-school attendance was a normal and important aspect of working-class childhood at that time. McCartney's extensive chapters on Sunday schooling during the First World War, and on the religious life of the British forces during the conflict, show that though the conflict decreased the number of scholars and teachers, schools were important sites of connection between those at the front and the home front. Across these chapters, McCartney demonstrates that servicemen themselves believed that Sunday school had provided a good foundation for living a Christian life, contrary to those who critiqued the depth and quality of servicemen's beliefs at the time.

In the chapter following, McCartney indicates the importance of Sunday schools in the process of thanksgiving and remembrance for those lost during the war, and that, despite the loss of scholars and teachers, numbers attending schools remained steady, if in overall decline. Here, McCartney continues to recount the ongoing and uneasy relationship between the wider churches and Sunday schools, the latter perennially feeling misunderstood and unsupported by the former. As McCartney next illustrates, across her chosen period in this long history (and indeed beyond it), Sunday schools were engaged in professionalizing their staff and reforming their approach and pedagogy. The work and activities of the Canadian-born George Hamilton Archibald, the introduction of his graded-approach to Sunday-school organization, and new styles of teaching were key to this, and these won a level of support across the Protestant denominations, including those of the Church of England. The Bible, however, remained the substantive content of lessons regardless of such reforms. In a final chapter, McCartney focuses upon the international network created amongst Sunday schools produced by migration, and the ways in which schooling informed and shaped children's perceptions of the wider world.

McCartney's work highlights the onset of the decline of Sunday schools which, despite this, remained critical to the religious formation of generations of children. Paradoxically, this period of decline was also one in which the training and role of Sunday school teacher was professionalizing. What then generated the decline? Applying Frank Prochaska's thesis, McCartney points to the ways in which, across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the State increasingly trespassed upon the work of the churches, in this case through several Education Acts, which gave maintained schools responsibility for religious instruction. Whether these Education Acts and the rise of maintained education, resulting in differently defined forms of religious education, made Sunday schools surplus to requirements is a moot point. Further indications of why the schools continued to decline in the post-Second World War period are pointed to in Naomi Thompson's Young People and Church Since 1900: Engagement and Exclusion (2017).

If one were to be critical of McCartney's otherwise excellent study at all, it would be that in delineating its period so tightly it fails to provide the reader with a stronger sense of the narrative of what went before the years in question. How did Sunday schools develop in the period prior to the one under scrutiny? Additionally, this is a history of a particular form of Protestant mission to children. To my mind, McCartney dismisses all too lightly similar Roman Catholic work amongst children, e.g. catechetical classes (19), which surely deserve equal scrutiny as a similar and equally systematic form of religious socialization. Likewise, this reviewer would have liked more engagement with studies of the history of Sunday schooling in other national contexts (e.g. Elise Leal, “All Our Children May be Taught of God: Sunday Schools and the Role of Childhood and Youth in Creating Evangelical Benevolence,” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 87, no. 4 [2018]: 1056–1090), at the very least to see what comparisons between these phenomena across the Anglophone world yields by way of insight.

As an historian of religion and childhood and I might say, in passing, someone who still values my own attendance at Sunday school and recognizes its influence upon my own religious life, I am grateful for McCartney in providing renewed focus upon this rich and neglected area of religious educational history. Her study should gird our loins for a renewed interest in the history of religion and childhood in general, and the history of Sunday schooling in particular.