This book examines Irish Catholics, Jews, atheists, female sex workers, and male homosexuals through the lens of legal history, and more specifically the rhetoric of the law. Dennis Grube justifies this somewhat motley collection of topics on the grounds that religious dissenters, like sexual nonconformists, were both defined and Othered by the law, and placed firmly on the immoral side of a moral-immoral binary. Sexual offences were seen as a blow against religion and morality (135). Adultery and divorce might have found a place in this table of contents; Grube quotes one commentator as arguing that sodomy between consenting parties did not disturb the peace or harm the social fabric, while adultery did (129).

Grube insists at the outset that “This is not a book about empire” (7). He nevertheless deploys “Britishness” in his analysis throughout the book. His repeated references to “British moral values” (151), however, do beg some kind of foreign reference point. Victorian discussions of sodomy included Sir Richard Burton's sotadic zone, for example. If, on the other hand, the moral codes were taken as universal (one might propose that upright people everywhere despise certain behaviors), it is hard to see what analytical value “Britishness” would have. Grube is also insistent that “this is not a book about class” (7). However, he presents Queen Victoria's objections to Jews in Parliament in terms of her attachment to a landowning aristocracy rather than a mercantile elite. In a later chapter, we are told that Lord Somerset was “but for his homosexuality . . . clearly an acceptable ‘British’ man . . . of aristocratic blood, an equerry of the Prince of Wales, in every sense a ‘true born Englishman’” (138). It seems that class was too useful to dispense with entirely, after all.

Some of the difficulties Grube encounters may stem from the task he set himself, approaching slippery and ambiguous forms of sexual and religious difference through legal language that—by its very nature—must maintain the appearance of firm distinctions. A great deal of scholarship in recent decades has taken liminality, ambiguity, and hybridity as its main focus. Grube acknowledges this obliquely, mentioning fears of double loyalty or sham conversions, and at times more directly, as when he summarizes Judith Walkowitz' remarks on the Contagious Diseases Acts' function to “clarify the relationship between the unrespectable and respectable poor” (115). This sort of thing is hard to express in terms of Grube's preferred binary (Others vs. Establishment), yet perhaps the law was deployed to clarify and fortify distinctions that threatened to collapse in everyday life.

Grube is inclined to take a teleological approach to political reform, as when he writes of the opposition to the atheist Charles Bradlaugh's admission to Parliament: “the incident also signified how slowly British lawmakers as a group were moving towards the full religious liberty that was the logical endpoint of nineteenth-century liberalism” (73). Many reformers in this era quite openly favored incremental and partial remedies, an attitude that does not sit well with a quest for rapid social transformation in the name of “logical endpoints.” Inconsistency, in this analysis, could be an astute political balancing act rather than a failure to accept the dictates of logic. Perhaps there is something inherent to the activity of lawmaking itself that contemplates or necessitates hypocrisy, rule-bending, and other states of exception. On the subject of free speech, Britons could pride themselves on sheltering political fugitives like Karl Marx and the Russian anarchists—who, conveniently, were not assailing the British government—while harassing Irish Catholic priests who dared to incorporate political statements into their sermons.

Grube acknowledges Victorian hypocrisy, but is unsure how to integrate it into his interpretation of Othering. He writes, “Prostitutes had to be ostracized by the law because they represented uncontrollable passion. Their profession by its very nature seemed destined to undermine Victorian morality” (122). One crucial distinction has to be what was illegal according to the letter of the law versus what was de facto tolerated. As Grube admits, the Prince of Wales and many other Establishment figures associated with fallen women. And by now it is hardly original to point out that “the love that dare not speak its name” was the subject of many publications, scientific and otherwise. In his discussion of Oscar Wilde's trial, Grube refers to a sociologist who has suggested that the Victorians feared scandal more than homosexuality itself. Pursuing this line of thought, however, would have resulted in a very different book.

At the Margins of Victorian Britain might have benefited from a deeper exploration of the actual Victorian reasoning about the marginalized groups. Some anxieties—for example, the concern that atheists could not give evidence in a courtroom because no oath would bind them—may seem obsolete or frivolous to us, but for some jurists the issue seemed real enough. Even the White Cross League's impracticable proposal equating loose women (the “morally insane”) with idiots and imbeciles, thus requiring their arrest and protective care (123), was grounded—in some fashion—in contemporary doctrines about mental illness and public health. It is possible to treat a position as ultimately specious and irrational while also explaining its apparent cogency and persuasive power for some people at the time. This is true even when it appears that the reasons offered were little more than special pleading for a bigoted position. Anti-popery zealots would have countered their critics with anecdotes about Catholic rampages in seventeenth-century Ireland, but even these febrile arguments mirror some offered in certain circles today about the perils of tolerating illiberal and militant religious minorities in a liberal society. Organizing the book around the Victorians' Others and construing them in a strictly functionalist sense—they were scapegoated because society required scapegoats—risks leaving us with an incomplete understanding of the Victorian debates.