The subject of the relationship of religion and politics in nineteenth-century Britain deserves much fuller treatment than it has received. In a highly religious age, the existence of different forms of Christian allegiance exercised a powerful constraint on policy-making. The denominational pattern also went a long way towards determining how electors chose to vote. These are the themes of this book, which argues that the divide between Church and Chapel was more salient in constituency politics, and consequently in divisions in the House of Commons, during the 1830s and 1840s than has often been supposed. Recognising the difficulty of demonstrating this thesis for the whole country, the author, who teaches at Washington University, St Louis, has preferred to concentrate on five boroughs: Durham, Nottingham, Ipswich, Bedford and Exeter. The rhetoric used by participants in the various elections in each of these places has been examined through the local press, a topic that, after two useful scene-setting chapters, occupies the remaining five chapters in part i of the book. Two other issues are explored in part ii. One is the way in which the MPs for these boroughs voted in parliamentary divisions. This analysis reveals that Liberals mainly took the side of religious freedom and that Conservatives predominantly supported the established Church. The other issue is the pattern of constituency voting by Nonconformists. The author has painstakingly scrutinised chapel records to discover the names of Nonconformist electors and has examined exactly how they cast their votes. It is established that known Nonconformists were much more likely to vote Liberal than the population at large. The results of both enquiries are set out in tabular form in appendices that occupy fifty-seven pages of the book. The findings are discussed in two chapters that constitute the most original parts of the volume, since such detailed investigation has never previously been undertaken for this period. The book convincingly demonstrates that, for the places under examination, Church/State issues were central to constituency politics (though most in 1835 and least in 1841); that party allegiance correlated closely with parliamentary voting on such issues; that Nonconformists were overwhelmingly Liberals; and that Methodists were no different from other Nonconformists in their Liberal preferences. The last finding is the most important in terms of existing historiographical opinion, for many writers have supposed that Wesleyans were still Tories in this period. Perhaps the results have been unduly conditioned by the choice of boroughs investigated, for it may be surmised that in places where Dissent was weaker the evidence for the author's case would be less persuasive. Nevertheless the detailed analysis confirms the argument of Norman Gash in Reaction and reconstruction in English politics, 1832–1852 (Oxford 1965) that the alignment of Nonconformists and Anglicans with Liberals and Conservatives respectively was already established by the 1830s.