Marjorie Wheeler-Barclay’s The Science of Religion in Britain, 1860–1915 is a welcome and thoughtful study of an emerging field variously identified as the “science of religion,” “comparative religion,” or the “history of religions.” During the period from the origins of this discipline around 1860 to the Great War the boundaries between popular and academic discussions, amateur and professional voices, and literary and scientific approaches were continuously blurred. In this fluid context, Britons used the study of the beliefs and practices of “savages” to shed light on themselves and modern Christianity. The heart of the book is a series of chapter-length studies of six influential writers in the field: Friedrich Max Müller, Edward B. Tylor, Andrew Lang, William Robertson Smith, James G. Frazer, and Jane Ellen Harrison. These are invariably solid, and some are particularly insightful even about figures that have had a good deal of scholarly attention already. There were only a few rare occasions when I discovered I did not trust the presentation being offered. The worst of these was an inaccurate and misguided discussion of how evangelicalism was allegedly incompatible with Quaker theology. Tellingly, David Bebbington’s classic study, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London, 1989), does not even appear in the bibliography, and one suspects that the author has attempted to comment without having read any scholarly sources about the evangelical movement. Likewise, a discussion of reactions to David Hume did not ring entirely true in the light of the unpublished page proofs of the book project arising from Tylor’s Gifford lectures—a manuscript source that Wheeler-Barclay also does not cite.

Especially valuable is the chapter on Andrew Lang—a figure who has been too long and too thoroughly eclipsed. Most of the other figures have been lauded as patriarchs. Max Müller is “the founder of the comparative study of religion” (65), Tylor is “the founding father” of “British social anthropology” (71), and Robertson Smith “the founder” of “modern sociology of religion” (141), while Lang has had to make do with the honorary title of “the divine amateur” (110). Lang’s anthropological thought remained stimulating and sometimes even prescient even after the work of more celebrated contemporaries had been thoroughly discredited. Moreover, Lang had a genius for the puncturing thrust, caricaturing the solar mythology theory of the Max Müller school, for example, as reducing “most of old romance into a series of remarks about the weather” (118).

Wheeler-Barclay does a fine job teasing out the various literary personas of the author of The Golden Bough, notably “Frazer as enlightened iconoclast” and “Frazer as nostalgic Romantic” (191). The chapter on Robertson Smith is satisfying and sure-footed. Although his is not a well-known name today, it is salient to recall the profound impact that he made on some of the most celebrated minds of the early twentieth century. Frazer was a complete disciple personally and emotionally, even though he could not fully absorb Robertson Smith’s pioneering moves intellectually. Durkheim referred to his work as “a revelation,” and Freud remarked that “he had hardly ever been so pleased with any book” (quoted on 176–77) as Robertson Smith’s The Religion of the Semites (London, 1889).

In The Science of Religion in Britain, 1860–1915 Wheeler-Barclay argues convincingly that, while contemporary issues in Britain were often prompting these discussions of primitive peoples, it is wrong to assume that this work can be viewed as simply an attack on Christianity in the warfare-of-faith-and-science mold. She observes: “Far from promoting an antireligious or material agenda, the science of religion provided an opportunity for traditional Christians, radical scientists, and everyone in between to talk about religion without becoming immediately bogged down in fractious polemics. Discussions of religion without reference to truth claims did not simply amount to a dismissal of its relevance” (14). This reality of all points on the map being in play comes across clearly as The Science of Religion unfolds. Conservative Christians varied in whether they decided that Max Müller was a friend or foe. Andrew Lang gravitated from the anti-Christian polemics of Tylor to doing work that seemed to be in the service of the cause of Christian apologetics during the course of his career. Robertson Smith was undoubtedly the most conservative Christian of all the figures in this study even though he was famous for being a daring heretic and apostate. Jane Ellen Harrison provides a fascinating example of an atheist who was nevertheless persistently religious by temperament. (Her story seems to have interesting parallels with that of Annie Besant.)

The conclusion quotes E. E. Evans-Pritchard observing from the perspective of the middle of the twentieth century that the theories of the figures in this book such as Tylor and Frazer often strike one as “inadequate, even ludicrous” (243), and therefore it is hard to imagine how or why anyone ever seriously believed them. Ironically, Tylor, Frazer, and company felt the same way about the beliefs of “savages” and dedicated their working lives to trying to make these seemingly bizarre thought patterns explicable. In a far more responsible and successful way, Wheeler-Barclay has helped to do the same for these very theorists.