Joanna Dales's short book expands our understanding of the transformation of British Quakerism in the early years of the twentieth century. For two decades, the seminal work on this subject has been Thomas C. Kennedy's British Quakerism, 1860–1920: The Transformation of a Religious Community (Oxford University Press, 2001). While not a major revision of Kennedy's work, Dales does expand on it in useful ways.

Based on her dissertation at the University of Birmingham, “John William Graham: Quaker Apostle of Progress” (2016), Dales offers a not uncritical examination of the development of a liberal vision of Quakerism among British Quakers. For most of the nineteenth century, deeply evangelical leaders dominated the London Yearly Meeting of Friends, the highest authority in British Quakerism. After 1860, a growing number of British Friends were influenced by liberal scholars and theologians such as J. W. Colenso, F. D. Maurice, and Ernst Renan. By the 1880s, such Friends argued that evangelicals had replaced Christ's “religion of love” with one of fear, with their emphases on the atonement and eternal damnation. Turning points came in 1888, when the London Yearly Meeting refused to endorse the deeply evangelical Richmond Declaration of Faith prepared by a conference of American Friends in which British evangelical Friends had participated, and a conference in Manchester in 1895, where liberals openly set forth their views.

All of this is familiar to historians of Quakerism. Dales's contribution comes in two ways. The first is her highlighting the theme of “reality.” For liberal Friends, this meant two things. First, it meant reclaiming what they saw as the original Quaker vision: inward experience based on the guidance of the Inner Light and continuing revelation as opposed to Biblical authority. Second, it entailed an acceptance of the findings of modern science and critical biblical scholarship. Her second contribution comes in highlighting how liberal Friends often differed with each other and with early Friends, highlighting, for example, a contentious dispute between Graham and Edward Grubb over the personhood of God. Broad agreement on the nature of Quakerism did not preclude theological debate.

This is not a game changer. But it is useful.