Ebenezer Howard, a professional stenographer, inventor, and founder of the Garden City movement, was deeply impacted and inspired by the eclectic nonconformist progressive religions that emerged in nineteenth-century Britain, including the Free Church, and also Spiritualism and Theosophy. It is this diversity of religious contexts that animates discussions of Howard's emergence as an important prophetic and even practical religious thinker in this new “spiritual” biography, informed by the insightful use of hitherto underutilized local archival heritage materials. These add a key critical richness to our understanding of Howard's often idealistic religious viewpoints and his attempts to translate these into actual built environments. The uniqueness of this text is the carefully constructed story of Howard's lifelong spiritual and intellectual growth, and his attempts at practical realization of his social notions in spatial and built form. The text's more personal reflection adds a new contextual layer to scholarly work on Howard, whose designs undoubtedly inspired multiple international suburban developments and influenced twentieth-century urban planning worldwide.

Knight's point of departure in looking at Howard's spiritual arc is the request of a dying Howard for a colleague to remember the importance of the “spiritual dimension” in his life and work (3, 203). Howard's long commitment to recognizing many spiritual paths also enlivened his plans for an ideal society, explored later in the text through detailed analyses of the development of the first two garden cities at Letchworth (1904) and Welwyn (1919). These meticulous case studies elucidate the political, religious, and practical production of new living arrangements, and the debates and impasses that molded the actual creation of these communities.

Knight explores Howard's career as not only a utopian visionary, but as an early environmentalist whose major work, To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898) later reformed as Garden Cities of To-morrow (1902), suggested the building of smaller towns consisting of an urban/suburban core surrounded by farmland or greenbelt, as a more unifying approach for insuring workers’ health, general well-being, and social cohesion. Knight outlines Howard's conceptual indebtedness to several important thinkers such as popular socialist writer Edward Bellamy and political reformer Henry George, who both supported common ownership of land, but the text also emphasizes relationships between Howard's religious upbringing and subsequent connections to more esoteric modes of thinking as well as his conceptual adjustment to the needs of politicians and capitalist investors who were key to the realization of his goals.

Knight argues persuasively that an early adventure to America, home of Transcendentalism, had a profound effect on Howard's thinking. This foray included an early stint at homesteading in Nebraska and influential experiences in Chicago just rebuilding after the fire. It was in Chicago where he was first introduced to Spiritualism through an assignment to produce a shorthand rendition of a speech by important and popular medium Cora Richmond that sparked his budding interest in feminism, the spirit world, cooperative communities, and through a spiritualist reading group also exposed him to other socially engaged ideas and texts, such as Benjamin Ward Richardson's Hygeia: A City of Health (MacMillan, 1876) that undoubtedly influenced his later work on garden cities. Returning to Britain at the age of twenty-six, he laid the foundations for future work as both a stenographer and free-thinking reformist. Both he and his wife Lizzie became increasingly focused on Spiritualism as a panacea for social and even physical ills.

Howard came to lament the enormous overcrowding and social inequalities in London made apparent by religious and sociological tracts from several religious organizations that eventually informed a loosely organized Christian Social Union, that agitated for reforms thought to helpfully impact the impoverished masses. Howard's emerging thinking clearly was informed by his desire to change the physical fabric of workers’ realities, even if in the end his actual garden cities attracted often middle-class residents.

Knight's biography emphasizes the impact that Howard's personal religious struggles and convictions, family relationships, and his own inner dialogues with reformist thinkers, had on the maturation of his ideas. The book's attention to a carefully constructed chronological narrative allows readers to journey with Howard through early iterations of his developing ideas, emerging from a variety of spiritual and sociological sources.

One of the first practical plans was for an ideal circular community he called Unionville from 1890, which emphasized the intimate connections between town and country, and stressed “freedom of thought and individual liberty” (63). By 1898 Howard published his penultimate 1898 To-morrow that soon culminated in the more exemplary and practical Garden Cities of 1902. Howard viewed himself as a culmination, as he told the members of the London Spiritualist Alliance several years after the latter's publication, of other earlier social ideals. Moreover, he credited supernatural assistance in the dissemination of his ideas, and soon translated his vision into the formation of organizing associations that helped build the actual Arts and Crafts styled garden cities of Letchworth and Welwyn.

Besides Howard's more personal and familial considerations of spiritual attitudes, the book also details what happens to the spiritual dynamics of the early garden cities when those of differing spiritual traditions join in a community setting that emphasizes the optimistic ideals of social kinship in unity, and the book reveals a continuing stubbornness of denominational differences between liturgical and evangelical groups. The budding interest in Theosophy and Spiritualism in the settlements is emphasized, as are attempts at ecumenicism.

Knight concludes that Howard's complex spiritual life continued to develop beyond his views on town planning. This important in-depth meditation on the impact of contemporary spiritual movements on Ebenezer Howard reveals a constantly developing spiritual core that animated a philosophical idealism that nonetheless led to practical physical demonstrations in the influential Garden City movement.