Staged in London's Hyde Park, the Great Exhibition of 1851 occupies a prominent place in many a narrative on nineteenth-century Europe. A celebration of modern industry, capitalism, technology and progress—notions that all found elegant expression in Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace, the exhibition hall—this first world's fair also attested to Britain's dominant position in that new world. Accordingly, historians have tended to read the Great Exhibition as clear evidence of a broader process of secularization in the modern age. The Crystal Palace was thus a temple that lauded not God, but the triumphs of men and modern science. And whereas surveys of church attendance in 1851 suggested that Britons were keeping their distance from organized religion, some six million people purchased tickets to see the wonders on display in Hyde Park.

In his fascinating volume, Geoffrey Cantor invites us to reconsider the Great Exhibition's status as an icon of secularity. It was that, for sure, but, he reveals, contemporaries also invested the Great Exhibition with considerable religious significance. In some quarters, the fair was glossed as an opportunity to celebrate what divine grace made possible and promote the sacred call to world peace. In others, it was viewed as a threat not just to Christian belief and piety, but the very idea of Britain as a Christian nation. Moreover, Cantor shows, contemporaries went to great lengths to frame the Great Exhibition along religious lines. Church officials, Protestant and Catholic, gave countless sermons on the topic. Laymen and clergy contributed articles to newspapers and wrote pamphlets about the fair. Religious organizations ran booths within the Crystal Palace and provided information on local religious services to those attending the Exhibition. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury's benediction and Queen Victoria's greeting at the opening helped set the event in a religious context.

Cantor's study is a welcome addition to the revisionist literature on religion in Victorian Britain, and in modern Europe more generally. It demonstrates that, at least at mid-century, the worlds of religion and science remained intimately linked. Drawing on an extensive study of British print culture, the book also usefully reminds us that religion still provided a powerful lens through which people perceived and discussed contemporary happenings—and that priests, ministers and other religious figures continued to command considerable attention as public commentators. Furthermore, by shedding light on the religious aspects of this celebration of modern, industrial Britain, Cantor's inquiry enriches our understanding of the profoundly religious elements in nineteenth-century articulations of British national identity.

In a series of eight concise chapters, Cantor unfolds an engaging narrative. Following a brief discussion of Britain's religious landscape circa 1851, he highlights the religious qualms that many British had toward the Great Exhibition: not only would it be a modern Belshazzar's Feast, they worried, but it would occasion a Catholic and heathen invasion of the island. By April 1851, Cantor shows in chapter 2, most of these concerns had subsided, in part because of the involvement of Christian leaders and organizations in the preparations for the exhibition. If church officials were absent from the main organizing committee, they were highly active in what Cantor calls the “vast organizational framework underpinning the Exhibition” (49). In chapter 3, the focus shifts to the efforts made to minister to the visitors' religious needs. Within the Protestant fold, various organizations sized up the Exhibition as a missionary moment differently. Anglican groups like the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge took a more prophylactic approach, seeking to counteract the fair's spiritual and moral evils, whereas associations connected to dissenting communities (notably the Evangelical Alliance and the Religious Tract Society [RTS]) used the occasion to to proselytize and convert. Chapter 4 examines religious responses to the Crystal Palace and some of the exhibits, most notably Pugin's Medieval Court (praised by Catholics, disparaged by staunch Protestants) and the extensive display of Bibles organized by the British and Foreign Bible Society (ostensibly a celebration of printing and publishing). Cantor then surveys the various ways in which churchmen strove to make sense of the entire phenomenon. In chapter 5 he notes that Protestants were divided: some engaged in apologetics on behalf of the Exhibition, whereas others branded it as “utterly insubstantial and irrelevant” (138) to decent Christians. Catholics, we learn in chapter 6, were also prone to criticize the Exhibition as part of a broader Protestant anti-Catholic plot. Jews however tended to praise it as part of their effort to assimilate into British society. There were also those optimistic Protestants, Cantor shows in chapter 7, who tied the Exhibition to a progressive vision of internationalism and world peace. The book concludes with a brief account of the Exhibition's close and a more systematic review of the different denominations' religious responses to the Exhibition.

On balance, Cantor has delivered a thoughtful, well-researched study that succeeds in showing that there was a religious dimension to the Great Exhibition. But at the end, though, one is left with a major question: what was the broader response to the churches' concerns about the fair? For ultimately, the story Cantor tells is highly church-centric. We learn what the religious publications had to say and what leading figures in various religious communities thought and did. But how does all this compare to those who did not view the Great Exhibition through religious lenses? Did “secular” papers consider the churches' concerns to be newsworthy? And how did individual Britons respond to the churches' programs and publications, especially relative to the other activities and materials available in connection with the Exhibition? These are precisely the types of questions that still need answers in order to determine how significant religion really was to the Great Exhibition of 1851.