This is another contribution to the growing literature on the history of the Sunday school movement; apart from some discussion about Wales, it is entirely on England. Nine chapters and an introduction offer a variety of perspectives across the two hundred years of the movement, though concentrating on the golden era of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some chapters retain something of the imprint of the conference papers from which they arose, though others seem to have been enlarged and improved for publication. Stephen Orchard starts with an interesting consideration of precursors, mostly in the eighteenth century, but reaffirms the distinctive ‘school on Sunday’ (rather than the catechising) origins that were seized upon by evangelicals. G. M. Ditchfield and John H. Y. Briggs consider the roles of Unitarians and Baptists respectively, tracing denominational contributions and organisational development in the nineteenth century. Faith Bowers offers a fascinating case study of how one individual, Augustus Benham, contributed significantly to the Sunday School Union from a base in Bloomsbury in the mid-Victorian decades. Theologian P. T. Forsyth, ‘a Scotsman, seaside-up’ (p. 92), is the subject of Clyde Binfield's longish study of how the concept of childhood shines through in an influential book of the 1880s. Hugh McLeod provides a glimpse of his awaited bigger study of sport and religion in a chapter that looks at the particular role of the Sunday schools in the sporting life of the nation; along with Binfield's, it is the meatiest research piece, exploring the sporting disputes and identities that came from football, cricket and rounders, and finds much to say despite the shortage of surviving minute books of Sunday school teams. In McLeod, you get a strong idea of the way in which Christian culture permeated all the activities of life, led by ‘born-again sportsmen’ (p. 122) who embedded sport in society in ways that kept the religion to the fore of identity and moral consciousness. Jack Priestley's study recounts how chocolate king George Cadbury became patron of George Hamilton Archibald and founded Westhill College, whilst Geoff Robson looks at Sir Joshua Fitch's contribution. It is only in Doreen Rosman's final chapter that there is some assessment of how Sunday schools coped with social change in the twentieth century, using samples of memory and recollection published in various accounts. As she comments, few would have predicted in 1945 that Sunday schools were on the verge of collapse. Hers is perhaps the best concise account there is of this later period, and one that could prove the most useful in teaching. A useful and eclectic collection for a revered institution.