This monograph claims that conflict between dissenters and the church was the main factor in strengthening partisan identities and organization in the period from the Reform Act to the 1847 general election and thus in stimulating the “political modernization” of England. After two introductory chapters that establish religion as a “hot” (7) or “lively topic” (48) through a competent if episodic survey of the period's major political controversies, Floyd examines the symbiosis between religious rivalry and partisan identity in a set of case studies. Five consecutive chapters on Durham, Nottingham, Ipswich, Bedford, and Exeter analyze every election to occur from 1832 to 1847. From a systematic reading of newspaper reports on these contests, Floyd argues that candidates felt obliged to pronounce for or against dissenting demands and that their views had a strong bearing on their prospects of election. This composite portrait of reformed electioneering confirms recent scholarly argument that Reform did indeed modernize politics, mobilizing adherents and opponents of the church alike in partisan associations at constituency level. Floyd's survey throws up many interesting nuggets, such as the unpopularity of the Anglo-Prussian Jerusalem bishopric on the Ipswich hustings (64) and the connection in Bright's electioneering rhetoric between hostility to vicars who fed off commuted tithes and demands for Corn Law repeal (42). Nonetheless, these chapters are overly dependent on bald paraphrases of reported speeches and betray a repetitious determination to reduce every constituency to the same pattern of church-dissent conflict.

The next two chapters provide weightier, if drier fare. Chapter 8 uses division lists from votes on church-state questions in the Commons to show that liberal MPs from the five constituencies usually voted on the “dissenting” and conservatives on the “establishment” side, confirming that although socioeconomic debates could muddle partisan alignment in the Reform era, disagreements over the church reaffirmed it. Chapter 9 compares baptismal registers from dissenting chapels in the five constituencies with poll books and finds that dissenters voted overwhelmingly for liberals. John Vincent long ago used poll books to identify dissenting ministers as liberal voters, but Floyd's baptismal registers show that what went for ministers also went for their flocks. Another interesting suggestion is that rank-and-file Methodists, often thought the apathetic wedge in an activist dissenting bloc, voted liberal as consistently as other dissenters (166–68).

Floyd's concluding chapter is an unconvincing attempt to read into the post-Reform decades the bold nonconformist politics of midcentury that were memorably evoked in Tim Larsen's Friends of Religious Equality: Nonconformist Politics in Mid-Victorian England (Woodbridge, 1999). For Floyd, dissenters were the “backbone” (171) not merely of Gladstone's Liberal party but of Lord John Russell’s. Yet the thesis that dissenting grievances were the tune to which post-Reform politics danced is undermined by his own case studies, which show them either complicated by or else crowded out by other issues on the hustings. Thus in Nottingham, John Walter's crusading against the New Poor Law, combined with Chartism and a hardy tradition of electoral violence, was as significant in determining elections as what candidates said about the church. Floyd notices this problem but hardly resolves it. He either converts issues such as abolitionism and free trade into essentially dissenting causes, or defends a weaker thesis in which church-state questions become “beacons” glimmering through the “murky machinations” of local conflicts (50), which it was “worthwhile” (78), rather than essential, for candidates to ignite. Moreover, as Floyd is obliged to concede, dissenters did not “command a majority of the vote in most constituencies” (173)—their numbers were often, at best, “rarely so small as to be negligible” (178). If the dissenting vote shrinks from the lead actor in the drama of post-Reform elections to a strong supporting chorus, then it is harder to believe that it determined the direction even of the liberal party.

Floyd's reserve position is that if dissenters were not rampant or even particularly militant, then they were at least “on the liberal side of every debate that concerned the relation of the church and state” (172) in this period. Even this view oversimplifies the role of the establishment in politics and presupposes a premature consensus on the meaning of liberalism. Early Victorian politics was not a see-saw that pitted liberals eager to surrender all the privileges of establishment against conservatives resolute in defending them. The sincere churchmanship of many liberal MPs curbed their willingness to accommodate dissenting demands. If they could be outbid by popular radicals, then respectable dissenters were nervous about allying themselves with figures whose faith often looked unsound. Aligning the Conservative party with the stalwart assertion of establishment principles looks more feasible, yet this defense was undermined by a high church and Tractarian critique of Erastianism and came into conflict with other, impeccably conservative priorities, such as maintaining order in Ireland. Indeed, debates about funding Maynooth College, like those about national education, embarrass Floyd by creating “strange bedfellows” (151), grouping dissenters with evangelical Tories and setting Liberal and Conservative MPs against their natural electorate. Both issues, which raised hard questions about the state's relationship with Irish Roman Catholicism and its authority over the populace, are too complex to be reduced to a tug-of-war between church and dissent. As Jonathan Parry has argued in The Politics of Patriotism: English Liberalism, National Identity and Europe, 1830–1886 (Cambridge, 2007), when nonconformists did develop their own answers to these questions the result was to disrupt the Liberal party's cohesion, as they rebelled against the “Continental” Erastianism of their Whig patrons. Floyd's book is a valuable reminder that partisan identities in modern England developed along “vertical” (178) lines of religious difference, as well as “horizontal” ones of class, but does not sufficiently recognize that these lines do not always offer a sure path through the labyrinth of nineteenth-century religious controversy.