In his preface to Eminent Victorians (1918), Lytton Strachey memorably mocked the Victorian penchant for commemorating the dead in ‘two fat volumes’ packed with masses of ill-digested material. William Goode might have been expected to attract a contemporary hagiographer: son of another prominent London clergyman, he exemplifies how sharp-elbowed middle-class Evangelicals had learned to work their establishment connections, moving smoothly from St Paul’s School to Trinity College, Cambridge, and thence via a succession of curacies and incumbencies in the capital to become, eventually, Editor of the Christian Observer (1847–9), President of Sion College (1854) and Warburton Lecturer at Lincoln’s Inn (1854–8). Throughout his career he published widely, and largely on the strength of this Palmerston made him Dean of Ripon (1860–8). Yet Goode did not attract a memorialist, save for his widow, who assembled a short collection of extracts from correspondence she received after his death. There has been no major study of his writings or influence. In part, this bespeaks the paucity of archival material, but it also owes something to scholarly fashions: although the Tractarians were for many years a tiny and recherché minority, they have spawned a major academic publishing industry. Those who sparred with them tend to be written off, as though their supposed lack of sophistication – a retrospective and highly subjective judgement – somehow absolves us from taking them seriously. This has been compounded by sympathetic scholars. Although by the 1850s and 60s there were probably more Evangelical clergy than ever before, including an Archbishop of Canterbury, students of the movement have tended, with some exceptions, to focus on its earlier, more obviously ‘heroic’ epoch. Still, it is striking that Goode – cited in W.J. Conybeare’s famous Edinburgh Review essay on ‘Church Parties’ as representative of his tribe – has only ever been accorded a walk-on part in thematic studies. He probably ought to have been among the subjects, for instance, of Michael Hennell’s influential Sons of the Prophets: Evangelical Leaders of the Victorian Church (1979).

Crawford M. Stevener’s carefully researched monograph, based on his recent doctoral thesis, sets out to remedy this neglect. It focuses on Goode’s published output, for he was an ardent and prolific asserter of Evangelical understandings of the Church of England, its doctrines and its history. ‘He had a legal mind that led him into litigious controversies that marked his ministerial career and occasioned much of his polemical writing’ (p. 7). To understand his scholarship, however, context is key: Stevener has trawled a wide range of Victorian periodicals to explain fully what prompted Goode to write and how his contemporaries received his major works. The manuscript source base is not ample, but Stevener squeezes an impressive amount from it: while many a Victorian biography does not even name wives and daughters, this book covers Goode’s family in some detail. It is organized thematically: chapters on his early and late career bookend examinations of Goode’s response to the excesses of Edward Irving (‘Modern Prophecy’), his attack on what he saw as the Tractarian overemphasis on tradition (‘Scripture and tradition’), his defence of Evangelical interpretations of the Anglican formularies regarding salvation (‘Baptism’) and his rejection of the doctrine of the Real Presence (‘Eucharist’). Goode is shown to be a scholar whose strength lay less in his incisiveness or originality than in his command of the previous three centuries of divinity. If sixteenth-and seventeenth-century English theology was his forte, he was also capable of trading quotations from the Church Fathers with Tractarian opponents. As Stevener observes, their compendiousness made his books useful as reference works, although it also helps to explain why modern scholars have generally made so little of him. Contemporaries remarked on the weight of his scholarship and not always admiringly. Goode’s magnum opus, The Divine Rule of Faith and Practice (1842), tipped the scales at a massive 1,446 pages and was privately mocked by Newman as unreadable. Even otherwise friendly Evangelical reviewers warned that it was in danger of being crushed by its own bulk, and it was significant that Goode had to subsidize its publication, reportedly to the tune of some £700. Yet weightiness undoubtedly had its uses. Goode’s advice behind the scenes helped to secure favourable verdicts in a succession of legal disputes over doctrine: the Stone Altar and Oakeley cases in 1845, the Gorham Judgment of 1850 and the opening salvoes of the Denison Affair in the mid 1850s, all of which helped to reassure wavering Evangelical churchpeople that the Church of England remained fundamentally sound.

The overall picture that emerges from this book is likely to strike some readers as paradoxical. Here was a bookish and rather retiring scholar who was also a compulsive polemicist; an ardent enemy of Tractarianism who also steered clear of premillennialism and prophetic excesses in his own party; an amiable individual able to discourse with William Dodsworth and Dr Pusey when he met them on holiday, but who also crossed swords with some of the most rebarbative figures of his day, including Bishop Phillpotts of Exeter and the Baptist giant Charles Spurgeon. Refreshingly, Stevener is not interested in reconciling these things or explaining them away. Goode was a man of his time: a combative scholar whose output was tailored to the needs of the moment. Was he influential? He was certainly well-known in Britain and among Episcopalians in North America, although the insistence that he was ‘impactful’ needs to be balanced against partisan realities: his writings were most convincing to people who were convinced already. Nevertheless, it is often forgotten that Victorian Evangelicals just as much as any other church party wrote and read serious historical scholarship. Like many a nineteenth-century name, Goode is not well-known today. But he provided an arsenal of arguments on which Evangelical Anglicans have continued to draw, and for elucidating that, Stevener deserves our gratitude.