J. Jeffrey Franklin takes as his topic the debate between spirit and matter in order “to tell a cumulative story about the evolution of nonorthodox spiritual and religious discourses from the beginning to the end of the [nineteenth] century” (x). Spirit and matter are broadly defined: spirit includes beliefs in an immortal soul, a divine force in the universe, and supernatural beings, while matter encompasses traditional religion when reduced to dogmatic certainty, consumer capitalism, and evolutionary science. Franklin is primarily concerned with heterodox manifestations of “Spirit” in mesmerism, spiritualism, and ultimately theosophy, which he argues paved the way for twentieth-century New Age religions.

Franklin's well-written argument is based on ten texts, most of which can be categorized as works of theology or religion, Gothic-romance novels, and travel writing. He identifies his method as “a kind of cultural historicism” with the result that “this book falls somewhere in between the history of ideas, literary studies, and comparative religious studies” (xii). He defines the key factors that made possible the development of new religious beliefs: the rise of the British Empire and a resulting “counterinvasion” of other world religions, which led to the development of comparative religious studies; Darwinism; and Broad Church latitudinarianism.

Chapter 1 gives a history of spiritualism and materialism in the nineteenth century and introduces his argument and methods, analyzing the insufficiency of conventional Christian models in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) as allowing Jane to emerge as a more compelling model of spirituality who blends invocation of God the Father with Mother Nature. The argument then develops systematically in three parts, moving from works that entertain but ultimately resist challenges to orthodoxy to those that embrace them. The three chapters in Part 1, “Challenges to Christianity and the Orthodox/Heterodox Boundary,” discuss Edward Bulwer-Lytton's occult romance novels Zanoni (1842) and A Strange Story (1862), Anthony Trollope's The Vicar of Bullhampton (1870), and Matthew Arnold's Literature and Dogma: An Essay Towards a Better Apprehension of the Bible (1873). Franklin posits that these works show the tensions Christian writers faced as they grappled with what they saw as the limitations or flaws of orthodox Christianity through their respective encounters with spiritualism, paganism, and Buddhism, before finally advocating a modified form of orthodox Christianity. Part 2, “The Interpenetration of Christianity and Buddhism,” examines “the bidirectional interpenetration of Christianity and Buddhism” (86), or the mutual influence of one religion upon the other, in William Knighton's Forest Life in Ceylon (1854) and Anna Leonowens's The English Governess at the Siamese Court (1870). Forest Life in Ceylon uses an extended debate between a Christian and a Buddhist as well as Buddhist animal stories to show the influence each religion had on the other. The English Governess, which Franklin says “may be a mockumemoir[,]” (123) because Leonowens misrepresented the scholar and modernizer Rama IV, King Mongkut, as the embodiment of evil, shifts between the genres of comparative religion and Gothic romance as she tries and fails to reconcile her conflicted reactions to the king. This entire process, Franklin argues, reflects Leonowens's attempts to work out her relationship with her difficult stepfather and a larger Western trend that represents Buddhism as either opposed to or benefitting Christianity. Part 3, “The Turn to Occultism,” analyzes the appeal of ancient Egypt in Rider Haggard's Cleopatra and of demi-immortalism in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) in order to show the development of the debate between spirit and matter as Christianity became more embattled, science more authoritative and the Spirit more widespread. Cleopatra reflects how the British fascination with ancient Egyptian religion from about 1880 to about 1910 led to an unresolvable conflict between the two; the novel overtly but unhappily returns to orthodox Christianity when it cannot reconcile it with paganism. Franklin characterizes Dracula as “a demi-immortal Oriental,” one who has physical but not spiritual immortality. Franklin argues that Dracula is more terrifying and more threatening than the demi-immortal in Bulwer-Lytton's A Strange Story, which he identifies as a response to a growing conviction that materialism was winning out over spiritualism, and that Stoker more clearly expresses his regret at his failure to reconcile spiritualism and materialism.

The final and shortest section, Part 4, “The Origins of Alternative Religion in Victorian Britain,” contains only a single chapter, “Conclusion,” in which Franklin argues that the works discussed were the foundation of the “new occultism,” which led to the development of New Age religions. Franklin focuses on Theosophy as the logical conclusion of the trends in Broad Church Latidudinarianism in Trollope's and Arnold's texts, the “bidirectional interpenetration of Christianity and Buddhism” in Knighton's and Leonowens's texts, and the attractiveness of “unholy demi-immortal figures” in Haggard's and Stoker's texts.

The brevity of the concluding chapter makes its argument less persuasive, but this does not undercut the achievement of Spirit Matters. Its reading of Dracula is an important contribution to the ongoing study of the role of religion in the novel, which has usually focused on orthodox Christianity. More broadly, by placing spiritualism in the context of orthodox Christianity and scientific materialism, Spirit Matters helps to explain the anxieties among Christians by showing that these three traditions were in dialogue with each other and not solely opponents. Its most important contribution is to analyze the significance of the porous and changing boundaries between types of religious expression, which show how Victorian orthodoxy was challenged and enriched by encounters with other religions (primarily Buddhism). The consistent references to contemporary culture in Spirit Matters, including to Scientology and Buddhism provide further evidence that we are the Victorians’ heirs and suggests the need for a volume that completes Franklin's argument, one that shifts the emphasis from the nineteenth century to the twentieth century.