Popular Anglican journalism from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the vast abundance of newspapers and periodicals, has been surprisingly little studied by historians. The Church Times is now digitised, but there has been no proper mapping exercise of the wider literature. Even major Victorian journals such as the Christian Observer and The Record are poorly understood, and remain barely-researched and un-indexed. Little wonder, therefore, that the humble Anglican parish magazine has been neglected with the rest. Dismissed as ephemera, or as ‘mere amateur scribbling’, these magazines have often been mocked as dull, uninspiring, worthless productions, ‘a metaphor for backward thinking, the antithesis of cultural progress’. G. K. Chesterton joked that ‘I read my parish magazine: it is an effort of local patriotism in which I believe I stand alone’ (pp. 5, 193). Historians have also often been blind to the significance of the parish magazine as an invaluable source for understanding Anglican culture. In this attractive and persuasive volume, Jane Platt seeks to redress the balance and to reclaim this literature as worthy of scholarly attention. She samples magazines from 359 parishes, admittedly a small proportion, in the dioceses of Carlisle, Oxford and London/Southwark. The analysis begins with the first commercial parish magazine inset in 1859, and ends just after the Prayer Book Controversy, seventy years later. Platt demonstrates that although these Anglican missives often antagonised Nonconformists, they were an integral part of life in many parishes. The widespread binding of magazines until the First World War demonstrates their original status as items to be treasured. Churchmen of all persuasions threw their energies into the competitive marketing of insets which could be purchased and personalised by local clergy, such as Charles Bullock's Home Words (Evangelical) and A. R. Mowbray's The Sign (Anglo-Catholic). In 1900 the Church Times could justly claim to be the best-selling Anglican newspaper, with a circulation of 45,000, but the SPCK's magazine inset, Dawn of Day, sold ten times as many copies. Platt assesses their cultural content (such as the chivalrous heroes in serialised fiction), their contemporary anxieties (such as the erosion of traditional theology), their attempts to ‘improve’ the working-classes, and both their intended and actual readership. She argues that the parish magazine gave the Church an entrée into many homes, but had uses beyond the religious, not least as a local trade directory because of the numerous advertisements. It also gave a voice to obscure authors and editors, a forum where ‘the humblest curate could be heard as loudly as any archbishop’ (p. 9). These voices from Anglicanism in the parishes deserve to be heard, and this volume is to be applauded for bringing such a rich archival source back on to the scholarly agenda.