Victorian Religious Revivals dwells on stories of piety in small places. David Bebbington situates this study of revivals not in the booming, bustling New Yorks and Manchesters of the Victorian era but instead in its frontier outposts and country towns, its fishing villages and mining camps, scattered throughout England, Scotland, Canada, the United States, and Australia. Even the largest of his seven revival settings did not number more than 10,000 souls, a size that nurtured close-knit communities built on face-to-face relationships. The traditional, local awakenings of the early modern era continued deep into the nineteenth century in such spots on the map. It would take a long time before their religious ways fell under the influence of the revival practices emerging in Victorian cities, strategically orchestrated affairs—so restrained and respectable, so theologically lax and blandly interdenominational—tailored to suit the preferences of local businessmen who sponsored them.

Bebbington finds that the enduring, small-place revival culture exhibited common features throughout the anglophone world. Awakenings everywhere evoked a staunch evangelicalism, a reliance on the Bible, a summons to conversion, and a call to activism. What differentiated them was, in the main, denominational legacy. Like their coreligionists in earlier centuries, Presbyterians preferred their revivals orderly, their congregants composed, their conversions gradual, their theology Calvinist, and their ministers firmly in charge. By contrast, Victorian Methodists, following the preferences of their forerunners, liked them hot: assisted by their Arminian bent, uninhibited self-expression and sudden conversions were encouraged, often by a leadership of lay men and women. Economic circumstances played little role in precipitating any seasons of awakening, but demographic, social, and ritual factors figured prominently in the patterns of many. Intimacies enhanced by shared occupations—especially among groups at high risk for sudden death such as fishermen and miners—made communities revival-prone. Sacramental events such as baptisms and communion services as well as sudden excitement about foreign missions also might heighten spiritual engagement. As in eighteenth century, revival conversions ran strongest among young people and within the families of church members.

But what unifies these revivals is not what really interests Bebbington. In fact, he all but puts a pox on those who have bent their shoulders to turning out “religion and society interpretations.” Whether propounding a frontier thesis, a social control thesis, or a democratization thesis, all “religion and society” scholars are “driven by a desire to make the study of revival relate to mainstream social history.” In pursuit of this unholy lust, they have neglected “the lived events” of revivals and thus ensured that we “barely know what actually took place in awakenings” (35). Bebbington much prefers what he calls a “culture and piety” model—culture being both high and popular, piety being the devotional expression of lived religion. He particularly admires those scholars who have focused on the world-views of revival promoters and participants, on the specificities of religious practice, on the explanatory power of piety moving revivals, and on their representations by observers. Since he believes that all those phenomena are best studied at the local level to reveal the “true dynamics” of revivals, Bebbington devotes most of his book to “a celebration of the particular” with seven case studies (43–44, 52).

This mining of the particular yields some choice nuggets. A mid-nineteenth-century Primitive Methodist revival in the north of England becomes an opportunity for Bebbington to raise the question of whether—and if so, how—participants could credit dreams and visions but also seek to cultivate their intellects through reading and education. A close inspection of his local cast of characters sheds light on how “the same people inhabited both worlds with no sense of disjunction,” and even “put revivalism and learning in the same bracket.” (129, 270) Another revival, this one in late 1850s Scotland, Bebbington skillfully renders as a microcosm for the diverse worldviews at play in Victorian Britain, as rough fisherfolk steeped in popular culture demanded a deeply felt and bodily manifested conversion, radicals expressed a rising Romantic spirit in their call for instant conversion, and moderates stuck up for an enlightened Calvinism. Both awakenings buttress one of Bebbington's key themes: that by bringing fundamental assumptions and beliefs into collision, revivals often prompted both leaders and participants to do serious thinking.

His digging into other case studies produces more in the way of vivid, textured narratives, but less in the ore of insight. In some small places revivals were spontaneous, in others, the result of careful planning; some revivals incorporated new elements into more traditional patterns; both long-term developments and specific events could play an important role in triggering revivals. That's one risk in Bebbington's approach: not every local instance points beyond itself, and some that do only confirm what we already know. Another and even greater risk is that focusing on the irreducible particularity of revivals encourages specialists in our field to abandon efforts to relate religion to “the mainstream” of historical development generally.