Missionaries were painted perhaps too memorably, too evocatively, by Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens in the middle of the nineteenth century. It can be hard to see past the creepy St. John Rivers, thundering the Book of Revelation while dreaming of subjugation, or the culpably detached Mrs. Jellyby, eyes turned on Africa while family and community disintegrate. These resonant figures may explain why, to many modern scholars, missionaries are somewhere on the spectrum between bad faith and insane. Their religious zeal seems little more than a cover for narrow-minded selfishness and British imperial design.

Yet missionaries did not see themselves as either narrow-minded or imperial functionaries. Indeed, missionaries presented themselves—as Werner's thoroughly researched, well-written study makes plain—in language that may surprise us: as “cosmopolitan,” “citizens of the world” charged with understanding difference (2–3). Werner sets about understanding this self-conception animated by the urge to flesh out “those values that missionaries themselves claimed to be central to their work” (3). Earnestly, Werner takes on missionaries’ own “earnest efforts to square an Enlightenment humanist ethos with evangelical Christianity” (3). The result is a text that enriches our understanding of the Victorian missionary project and reopens scenes of missionary work in a number of key Victorian novels.

Chapter 1 explores the evolution of, and debates about, cosmopolitanism in the nineteenth century. Werner focuses especially on how Victorian culture came to embrace the cosmopolitan ideal: The Great Exhibition, she suggests, was a key moment in the development of a new understanding of cosmopolitanism as not “at odds with British nationalism” but constitutive of it—not to mention a means of distinguishing Britain from supposedly “anti-cosmopolitan” France (40). Werner argues that missionaries embraced the ideal of the “universal” or “common brotherhood” as an exciting new way of charging their endeavor and connecting it with the spirit of the age (43). Yet not everyone was equally convinced. Werner reads Bleak House, at the chapter's conclusion, as evidence of far more than mere dislike of missionaries as people who left “every place worse than they found it,” as Werner reminds us, Dickens memorably put it (67). Werner suggests that the novelist's animosity speaks, instead, to a deep suspicion of those whose ideas of Christian benevolence were rapidly becoming rooted in the idea of the global and the transnational above the local.

Missionary “cosmopolites” worked actively and diligently, Werner shows, in lectures, periodicals, books, and travel literature in the early part of the century to refute freighted readings of evangelizers as “mere” enthusiasts, driven on by passion above reason (3). Some of the most fascinating material in the book comes in chapter 2, where Werner explores missionary literatures that frame the evangelical agenda as animated by Enlightenment ideals and humanistic values, “including political self-representation, inalienable rights, tolerance, freedom of conscience, and the necessity of scientific progress” (71–72). This especially intrigued the poet Robert Southey, and in the chapter's second half, Werner explores how Southey embraced missionary work as a means of advocating for the supposed “liberation” of native peoples from the tyranny of their own communities. Indeed, Southey emerges as a close approximation of the “bad-faith” actor, preaching Christianity as a means of justifying Britain's imperial gain—by violence, if necessary (2).

In fact, as the book progresses, claims of “missionary cosmopolitanism” start to emerge as something of the cover we suspected. Missionary writers may have tugged on the idea that we are all connected, that the devout Christian in Streatham was a branch of the same family as the “otherwise unfathomably foreign people in the South Seas, India, or elsewhere” (111). But, as chapter 3 notes, ideas of commonality only went so far. After all, if natives and missionaries were of the same extended family networks, then inter-racial unions were not only legitimate but appropriate. And yet by the 1820s, missionary societies were firmly set on outlawing all inter-racial relationships and on strengthening claims of British Christians’ supposed superiority. Missionaries may not emerge, then, in a radically new light in this study, but Werner's rich understanding of the language and debates missionaries engaged still allows for fresh readings of familiar novels. Sensitivity to the fraught missionary conversation about family relationships, for instance, helps shake out a little more from St. John Rivers's determination to wed his reluctant cousin Jane. By embracing a woman literally of his own family, Werner argues, Rivers seeks to stave off the risk of a more dangerous union with a woman of his wider kinship network. Rivers is eminently temptable, as his passion for Rosamund exemplifies, and missionary groups were concerned about supposedly “alluring” native women. Brontë's representation of St. John Rivers may suggest a consciousness on the writer's part of the thorny implications of “universal kinship.”

Werner's final chapter compares two different editions of Sydney Owenson's The Missionary: An Indian Tale, the first from 1811, the second a post-Uprising reissue entitled Luxima, the Prophetess. Werner contends both that the changes between the two are more substantive than earlier scholars have appreciated and, critically, that those changes indicate a collapse in the ideal of a universal brotherhood in the wake of the bloody events of 1857–8. In evangelical letters, diaries, and publications, Werner finds a decided uptick in a language of incomprehension, a collapse in the faith in shared kinship, and she discovers a similar shift in the revision of the text. After the Uprising of 1857, in other words, missionaries had to move to a new language, a new means of self-conception, to justify their project and their relationship to those they sought to convert.

Werner leaves little time to explore what happened next—cosmopolitanism remained a “structuring ideal,” she indicates in the coda, yet in a more “superficial” form (169, 170). It might have been interesting to explore what cosmopolitanism came to mean in, say, the late-century imperial “awakening,” but Werner's attention shifts to the meaning of cosmopolitanism for contemporary evangelicals. Still, this book is a serious and elegant contribution to Victorian studies’ debates about religion, empire, and cosmopolitanism, one that helps make visible again the complexity of a movement we too often flatten out.