As the past thirty years of historical studies have demonstrated, modern Britain cannot be understood outside of the fabric of influences and ideologies woven by its empire. That religion, gender, class, and race have been crucial components in the construction of British identities has formed a touchstone of much recent work on the culture of empire, but as Alison Twells reminds us in this detailed and engaging analysis, at the center of a rapidly forming middle-class identity and culture in the early nineteenth century was a historicized understanding of the Christian Bible that constructed the entire world—both in Britain and abroad—as the legitimate target of a vigorously reforming missionary philanthropy. Men and women alike partook of this heady new universalizing moral imperative, and in a study that builds a single analytic comprehending both home and foreign missions, Twells produces one of the only works to examine closely the relationship between domestic and overseas humanitarianism. Issuing initially from evangelical philanthropic impulses, Twells argues that in encompassing both working-class and “heathen” sinfulness in a single project, “missionary domesticity” grew as “a middle-class movement for national and global reform which saw the carving-out of a new sphere for social action and intervention” (6).

Missionary domesticity at this juncture was a class and culture-specific phenomena that Twells investigates primarily through a case study of Sheffield and the interconnected evangelical, philanthropic, and family networks that were at the heart of its new middle class. Detailing the ways that the families within this network constructed a global civilizing mission, Twells provides a fresh look at the particular powers of women to define a domestic mission with dimensions that expanded beyond family, not only to poor relief and domestic philanthropy but also to international humanitarian causes and overseas civilizing projects in the form of foreign missions. Inspired by Hannah More and the Clapham Sect’s assault on plebeian culture, women such as the Read sisters—Mary-Anne, Eliza, Catherine, Sarah, and Emily—built a missionary culture across generations from mothers and aunts to daughters and nieces. Examining their domestic and public lives, recorded in diaries, family educational projects, and correspondence, Twells paints a detailed and evocative picture of a world of private connections and public commitments in which the domestic sphere was anything but limited and confined. This expansive realm of national and international concerns, which some women like the minister's wife and mother of eight children, Ann Gilbert, sought to escape because of the overwhelming nature of its public expectations, suggests the problematic nature of too rigidly applying a notion of separate spheres to the lives and activities of British women in this age of rapid class, gender, and racial construction.

Central to the missionary domesticity of the age, which crossed denominational lines uniting nonconformists and Anglican evangelicals, was a simple and specific reading of the Bible. This legitimized a transcultural mandate to eradicate a set of behaviors and lifestyles deemed sinful and at odds with a class-specific vision of domestic order. Religious faith in this reading did not substitute for some more elemental category of difference but rather formed the foundation upon which class and gender-based identities were constructed. In the early phases of missionary theorizing, Twells emphasizes, the relatively fluid possibilities for racial construction provided a range of options for the understanding of “peoples,” “nations,” “classes,” and “races” that tended strongly toward a homogenizing humanistic universalism that was only challenged with the race thinking of the 1840s and after. Within missionary communities, uneveness in race thinking was characteristic in the decades that followed as competing models of social reform emerged, yet the “inclusive and family-based” (15) missionary assumptions of human cultural universalism forged in the earliest years of the movement remained central, and it was upon this legitimizing rationale that a new middle-class missionary vision of England as a chosen nation was built.

The missionary philanthropic project rested on deeply gendered notions of respectability and duty. Male and female roles were differentiated but also provided quite vigorously expansive opportunities to women actively to shape and define the civic culture of improvement that was foundational to later Victorian philanthropic ideals. The connections of Sheffield missionary coteries demonstrate the intertwined cultures of support and voluntarism that bound together abolitionism, temperance, the monitorial system of primary education, foreign missions, and domestic philanthropic work among the working classes and in the slums of Britain. In an age of revolutionary changes ranging from the derangement of markets caused by the loss of the American colonies to the existential threat that French revolutionary violence presented both internally in the form of social revolt and externally in the form of national defeat, Twells sees cultural innovation in a rising, propertied middle class, relatively privileged but intent on actively reforming the world it inhabited. At the heart of its program was faith that progressive social change driven by individual conversion would construct a new era of salvatory reform.

High levels of uniformity characterized the early movement, but this began to break down with the emergence in the 1820s of critics who targeted the primacy of overseas missions. Missionary domesticity split into domestic and foreign steams by the 1840s, as some evangelicals increasingly prioritized British forms of industrial “slavery” (most notably focusing on the plight of chimney-sweeping climbing boys) and as Unitarians and urban professionals, such as doctors, pressed for educational initiatives that emphasized environmental rather than moral causes of poverty. But while missionaries often traveled comfortably with emerging environmental strategies, they seldom failed to challenge vigorously new biological theories of racial fixity. Thus, Twells cautions that the extent to which new, hardening forms of racism eroded universalist missionary assumptions within the movement, both in the 1850s and later, warrants further study.

Alison Twells's rich and detailed study—which ranges from domestic pietistic practices to the conventions of display and presentation of foreign populations in lecture and museum in the Sheffield of the early nineteenth century—raises fascinating questions and comparisons in the study of nineteenth-century middle-class missionary culture. Questions about the role that religion, gender, and race played in the formation of class and national identity have been fruitfully reexamined here, but Twells has left a series of questions unanswered, which detailed studies of the transitional period from 1840 to 1870 might help clarify. What, for example, characterized the later phases in the evolution of missionary domesticity under the impact of hierarchical race thinking? What were the repercussions of increasingly vigorous advocacy of imperial expansion in the later Victorian world? It is to Twells's credit that studies that tackle these related, consequential topics will necessarily draw on the thoughtful, balanced, provocative arguments that she makes in this important book.