Largely completed by the time of the author's death in 2011 and published thanks to the efforts of Chris Wrigley and David Bebbington, this volume extends Michael Watts's magisterial survey of Protestant Nonconformity in England and Wales from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. The dominant note is a melancholy, long, withdrawing roar. In his preceding volume, Watts suggested that the numerical expansion of evangelical Nonconformity had been fuelled by bumptious conviction. Its social bases were a conversionist theology of sin and redemption and shared experiences of social and political marginalisation. This volume documents the chipping away of those foundations and shows that it was Nonconformists themselves who wielded the pickaxes. It sceptically assesses Nonconformity's intellectual leaders, the pulpit princes and the professors at ministerial colleges whose search for accommodation with higher criticism or natural science merely confused and demoralised potential recruits. Watts argues that ardent simpletons such as Charles Haddon Spurgeon, William Booth or Thomas Cook made better recruiting sergeants for Nonconformity than anguished philosophers such as the Unitarian James Martineau, who could not outline the faith that they wished their hearers to embrace or be sure it was Christian. Moreover, the cultural mainstreaming of Nonconformists stopped the growth in the congregations gathered into being by Evangelical itinerants. The embrace by chapel-builders of ‘Suburban Gothic’ was an economic disaster, soaking up precious funds and fixing denominations in particular places (often the wrong ones) while the urban ‘settlement’ movement failed to interest those who were ‘too poor for dissent’. The relaxation of sectarian discipline was an own goal, because it was easier to bind congregations through the prohibition of worldly amusements rather than to expand them through the provision of harmless pleasures. The demographic stagnation that resulted from these missteps sapped Nonconformity's waxing political ambitions too, meaning that it could neither overawe nor sufficiently assist the Liberal party into enacting the moralising social reforms or interventionist foreign policies that many of its preachers demanded. The trajectories that Watts outlines are certainly familiar from existing historiography or have been deepened by work published immediately before or after 2011. The emphasis on the holes punched by Nonconformists in their theological and cultural distinctiveness has found striking confirmation in Dominic Erdozain's work on the ‘secularisation of sin’ or in S. J. D. Green's on the decay of English Puritanism. None the less, this volume will keep its place as a standard work. It contains many penetrating and often mordant sketches of individuals, but is also comprehensive in its coverage. While standard works on this period often concentrate on Congregationalists as the most articulate fraction of Nonconformity, Watts is as attentive to the differing conclusions to be drawn from Baptist or Methodist experience. He is not admittedly catholic in his sympathies. Nonconformity tends to mean here Evangelical independency, with Quakers, Unitarians and Presbyterians assigned only cameo roles. Moreover, if the interpretation is a plangent, it is never a simplistic one. Watts shows for instance that in flailing for purpose, Nonconformists made lasting contributions to the professionalisation and bureaucratisation of philanthropic activity or the development of international humanitarianism. In noticing such achievements, Watts can explain even as he undercuts the hubris of the ministers who strained every nerve to liberalise Evangelical Protestantism. His account fittingly ends with a quotation that reads either as a denial or as an ironic confirmation of the realities that it has patiently sketched: John Clifford's cry that after the election victory of 1906 Nonconformists had ‘entered into a new world . . . the dawn of a new day’.