This is not a book that is primarily concerned with ecclesiastical history, nor is its main focus religious history as more broadly conceived. None the less, it is a book of considerable importance for historians of the Church of England, and to a lesser extent of religious nonconformity, as well as to those who wish to understand the place of religion in English and Welsh life in the period.

The parish has often been central to the concerns of local historians. Recent work, especially that of Steve Hindle on the poor law from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, has demonstrated the importance of an understanding of the working of a unit that was at the base of English and Welsh local government and ecclesiastical life. This book, which also has much on the poor law, but also considers the ways in which local xenophobia, marriage patterns, the creation of new civil and ecclesiastical parishes and the extent to which the inscriptions on gravestones can be seen as expressions of a sense of belonging and local attachment, extends the study of the workings and significance of the parish into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While changes in poor law administration, developments in local government, and public health provision, with the professionalisation that accompanied them, might all be seen as developments that eroded parish life, this book argues for the continuing strength of a sense of local attachment in the period.

This leads to important insights into the ways in which the parish was seen and understood by its inhabitants. Snell's arguments are developed on the strength of a formidably detailed understanding of the considerable body of legislation, administrative enactments and contemporary commentary, both civil and religious, that related to parochial administration. This work is backed by the judicious use of statistical analysis that has been a characteristic of the author's earlier work on nineteenth-century religious life. His material on gravestones demonstrates that there is scope for imaginative fieldwork to complement documentary analysis. There is a polemical strand to the book, encapsulated in its final plea for a fuller appreciation of the benefits of the quality of social life that was provided by the parish.

The quotation from T. S. Eliot that prefaces Parish and belonging speaks of the worth of life lived in community, but also of the lack of value of such a life unless ‘lived in praise of GOD’. Yet the creation of new parishes meant that by 1911 58 per cent of the total number of them in England and Wales were not coterminous for civil and ecclesiastical purposes. This ‘decoupling of the civil from the ecclesiastical, and the separation of local boundaries for secular and religious purposes’ raises important questions as to the extent to which the continuing sense of ‘belonging’ that was seen in other areas of parish life remained significant in its religion.

Snell points to what he considers to be the ‘fundamental similarities’ between the Poor Law Commission and the Ecclesiastical Commission, and the work of these two bodies is considered in relation to their effect on parish life. Yet the work of the Ecclesiastical Commission – the Church Building Commission was another central body that might be seen to be part of the involvement of the centre in the local concerns of the Church of England – was intended to strengthen the parochial ministrations of the Church. The extent to which the Church's concern with the parish, whether expressed from the centre or through its parish clergy, accorded with the continuing sense of local identity that is identified in this book is one of the most important questions that it raises for the historian of religious life. The example of what might be interpreted as popular protest at the consecration of a new church in ‘a mill village’, despite the deep local feeling that was demonstrated has, with its references to pigs and parsons, a strong fiscal undertow. This relates more to the stronger evidence of opposition from patrons, tithe owners and incumbents anxious about the effect that new churches would have on existing rights than to any more widely based sense of parish identity. Yet the complex skein of rights and customs that constituted the establishment, and which began to unravel in the course of the nineteenth century, only remained relevant to contemporary needs through the continuing engagement of local communities with its structures.

The evidence that is provided by clergymen who acted as guardians, gave evidence to official enquiries and wrote about the New Poor Law of 1834 is important to the argument of this book. Their position in the world of the Poor Law Commission was ambiguous as they worked within a framework that cut across the boundaries of the parishes that they served. It reflected the problems that were faced by the Church as its clergymen sought to find their place in a changing society. More work on their position would provide important insights into what might be seen as their quest for a new identity. The extent to which the clergy took on new roles in addition to their pastoral responsibilities is an important indicator of the place of the Church of England in local society, although in the case of nonconformist ministers, it is important to make a greater distinction than is done in this book between those that were organised on a connexional basis and those with a more settled ministry. The development of the Wesleyan Reform movement was, for example, shaped by the tensions that were generated when questions of local identity were ignored by ministers whose loyalty was ultimately to the central institutions of their denomination. The nuanced and penetrating analysis of the attitudes and assumptions that arose from a sense of local identity which this important book provides demonstrates the continuing significance of the parish community in any understanding of religious life in the period.