Dominic Janes contributes this engagingly written and handsomely produced volume, filled with pertinent illustrations, to “the minor industry that is anti-Catholicism studies” (21). Other scholars, including Walter Arnstein, Edward Norman, John Shelton Reed, Frank Wallis, Michael Wheeler, John Wolffe, Nigel Yates, and myself, have approached this topic from a variety of perspectives: biographical, institutional, literary, and political-social. Janes, a cultural historian, is interested in anti-Anglo-Catholicism as the point of convergence of, among other factors, commodity fetishism, pollution fears, anthropological uncovering of fertility and sex goddesses, the ambivalent Anglo-Catholic body (primitive and modern, Catholic and Protestant, male and female), and quasi-pornographic Gothic entertainments. He explains his theory clearly and uses it as an analytical tool. He attends to material culture, a source that historians increasingly find fruitful. (The Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition catalogue, Victorian Church Art [London, 1971], might have been worth consulting.)

The book is organized into an introduction, four substantive chapters, and conclusions. The introduction, in addition to laying out the theory, provides necessary qualifiers for the terms evangelical, ritualist, Anglo-Catholic, Low Church, and anti-Catholicism (which label movements that change over time). Above all, according to Janes: “When individuals are anti-Catholic, it is crucial to emphasise that they are against the vision of Catholicism that they have in their heads” (23). The introduction also underlines the conceptual, chronological, and geographical boundaries of the study. It is not about reality, but about perceptions of reality; not about idolatry, but about accusations of idolatry; not about Anglo-Catholicism, but about the imagining of Anglo-Catholicism. It covers the period 1840–60 and focuses on London, with special reference to the popular disturbances, litigation, and political intervention surrounding the introduction of ritualism to the churches of St. Paul, Knightsbridge, and St. Barnabas, Pimlico.

Chapter 2 accomplishes two tasks. It sets out the background of the emergence of ritualism in the early Victorian Church of England by examining the impact on church furnishings of romanticism and the Gothic revival in architecture, as mediated by A. W. Pugin, the Cambridge Camden Society, and John Ruskin (who accepted the moral value, but not the theology, of Catholic art). It examines what the Ritualists thought they were doing: representing “not a copy of Roman Catholicism but … Anglican sacramentalism expressed via … a Gothic Revival version of the English sublime.” The opponents of ritualism were animated not by the realities of nineteenth-century Roman Catholicism but by “a Rome that sparkled, sprawled, and stank in the Protestant imagination. Those attacks were laced with misogynist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic expressions of disgust” (50). Chapter 3 is a detailed discussion of the pamphlet war, public disturbances, and litigation in ecclesiastical courts and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council provoked by the advanced ornaments introduced by incumbents William Bennett and Robert Liddell at Knightsbridge and Pimlico. Janes also treats briefly a similar episode involving Bryan King in Stepney. This microhistory allows him to speculate on the class nature of antiritualism and provides a platform for the final three chapters.

Chapter 4 begins with an analysis of antiquarian writings on comparative religion (especially on Hinduism and Buddhism) to grasp how the Victorians framed the understanding of ritualism in terms of fertility and sex. This segues into an analysis of the discourses of denunciation, especially the tropes of harlotry, idolatry, pollution, and the cross perceived as phallic symbol. Chaper 5 explores the erotic associations of the literary Gothic genre and the construction of narratives for profit: “The wider cultural role of anti-Catholicism represented … a fantasy of wish fulfilment providing the vicarious acting out of atrocities of sex and violence” (155). Antiritualists thus turned filth into clean cash, as did Victorian industrialists. (Interestingly, Sir John Pope-Hennessy remarked on “how large church commissions bulked in the work of the major Victorian … designers” [Victorian Church Art, vii]. Antiritualists were not the only ones turning popish filth into cash.) The conclusions bring together the various strands of Janes's argument, using several theoretical models, especially Edward Said's orientalism and Freud's projection and displacement. Consumers of religion must be taught to recognize meretricious goods; yet by implication the commercial world is given to meretricious marketing. Ritual is “Othered” as a “feminised abomination”; yet the Other is a fantasy in the antiritualist's mind. However, “disgust always bears the imprint of desire” (169).

Janes's book coruscates with ideas, but the argument is somewhat discursive; occasionally the author moves from one topic to another without completing the analysis. For example, Janes links anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism at several places in the book, but then he offers no systematic analysis. Again, he contends that opposition to ritualism goes beyond law, theology, institutional church history, and the rise of Evangelicalism and Dissent to include Chartism. To show this, he links Charles Westerton, people's churchwarden of St. Paul’s, Knightsbridge, and incumbent Robert Liddell's main antagonist, with Chartism on the grounds that the former had once belonged to William Lovett's National Association (which denounced “papistical” Anglicanism [165]) and had praised popular poetry. However, Westerton's involvement with Lovett (who challenged Feargus O’Connor's leadership) and the Complete Suffrage movement, together with the middle-class titles on offer at his circulating library (no Cobbett or Paine), cast doubt on his Chartist credentials. Moreover, the Chartist understanding of the Middle Ages and the Reformation, drawn from Cobbett's History of the Protestant Reformation (1829) and William Howitt's History of Priestcraft (1833), was highly sympathetic to the former and highly antipathetic to the latter. Did The People's Paper and Reynolds's Newspaper represent the Pimlico, Knightsbridge, and Stepney controversies? (G. W. M. Reynolds himself adopted the Chartist view of the Reformation and defended Roman Catholicism during the Papal Aggression crisis.) Much better evidence is needed before a Chartist element in the affair can be proven. Another problem is the London-centeredness of his case study and sources. A comparison with contemporary controversies over St. Saviour’s, Leeds, and the Free Church of England schism in the West Country (both involving ritual) might have expanded Janes's analysis. In sum, however, Janes's book is thoughtful, thought provoking, informative, for the most part convincing, and a welcome addition to the literature on Victorian religious controversy.