In this compelling, archive-driven work, Philip Lockley challenges the dominant interpretations of Southcottian millenarianism. He takes particular aim at E. P. Thompson's dismissal of the movement's followers as “deluded” (vii). The book argues that paying attention to Southcottians' religious experiences and theology between 1815 and 1840 overturns many of historians' assumptions about the relationship between popular religion, radical politics, and agency.

Lockley reveals that the two main strands of Southcottianism separately developed a theology of engagement with the political and social realms. Both sought to transform the world. The supposed despair of millenarian religion did not sabotage personal agency and politics. Rather, Southcottian theology came to encourage believers to use human action to improve the world and to participate in social radicalism. Lockley rejects the notion that there was a transition from religious to secular attitudes in politics. Instead, Southcottians' engagement with the world stemmed from their theology. Their actions and motivations are comprehensible only in terms of their own lived religious experience.

Lockley builds on Phyllis Mack's Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008) to understand how divine and human agency could be understood as inter-relating rather than mutually exclusive concepts. In turn, this prompts him to propose a new heuristic framework for categorizing millennial beliefs. Instead of a simplistic divide between passive premillennialism and active postmillennialism, Lockley emphasizes how believers expected the millennium to come about (evolutionary vs. disruptive) and how they believed that they gained this knowledge about future events (interpretative vs. revelatory). A believer's position on the spectrums between these points shaped their attitude toward human or divine agency. Thus, premillennialists who anticipated an evolutionary chronology might embrace human agency instead of passivity.

In addition to Southcottian archives, including an until now inaccessible collection of manuscript and rare printed materials, the book makes use of a creative range of sources such as Home Office spy reports, radical journals, and private correspondence. These sources lead Lockley to assert that the most influential interpretations of Southcottianism by E. P. Thompson, Barbara Taylor, and Iain McCalman are not supported by the evidence of Southcottians themselves. Thoroughly revisionist, the book “challenges components of every other study of Southcottianism” (15).

These corrections include insights about the divisions within the movement after Joanna Southcott's death and the geographical spread of its adherents. Through a careful reexamination of membership rolls and the discovery of a major error in their previous interpretation, Lockley also suggests that the movement did not appeal to women in any distinctive way. Outside of a few southern communities, the gender ratio in Southcottianism mirrored that found among Methodists, Congregationalists, and Baptists.

The book also argues that Southcottians were not necessarily poverty-stricken victims of the industrial revolution. The movement certainly included poor textile workers, but also attracted aristocrats, merchants, and families with capital and employees. Southcottianism survived in communities across decades and among families of means, countering the notion that millenarian beliefs flourished only temporarily during economic crises. While nineteenth-century authorities and modern historians have suspected that millenarian excitement somehow blended into radical sympathies, Lockley demonstrates that Southcottians, unlike Spenceans, remained apolitical until the 1830s due to their theological emphasis on God's agency.

The book then follows the careers and changing theologies of the competing Southcottian leaders John Wroe and John “Zion” Ward. In both cases, Lockley asserts that alterations within believers' theological understanding of the expected millennium led to a reconceptualization of the role of human agency in the divine plan. Followers of both men believed that their communal life or their assistance to their leader's cause brought the millennium closer.

Building on these theological changes, Ward and the book's final central Southcottian figure, James Smith, both moved into closer alliance with radicals in the 1830s. This cooperation was grounded in shared rhetoric and an analogical interpretation of the Bible. Ward collaborated with radicals such as Richard Carlile because he believed that even infidels could be agents of God's redemptive plans. Similarly, though from a different theological basis, Smith also believed that infidels were the “unconscious agents” of God's providence. Both men later separated from radicalism and socialism over theological and spiritual priorities.

This book impressively engages with major debates in social history while remaining at its core a religious history. The book serves as an antidote to analyses that claim to study everyday people in terms of their own experience while simultaneously denying the validity of the very form of experience that these people claimed to value most. For Lockley, theology was not merely an epiphenomenon of other more important factors such as class and gender. Developments within religious belief were a motor for historical change. The book also usefully places Southcottianism onto a continuum with the rest of Christian culture. The overlap between the Southcottian language of agency and instrumentality and similar language among more respectable evangelicals, including Anglicans, would repay further study.

Lockley's dismissal of gendered experience, however, seems hasty. The book's convincing arguments regarding Southcottianism's gender ratio require serious attention. Yet, Lockley does not extend to gender the same analysis that he provides for religion and radicalism. For example, the reader is left to wonder about the theology behind James Smith's feminism. Yes, others have written on this topic, but one suspects that Lockley could offer fresh insights. Likewise, his key evidence regarding gender ratios is a list of women who underwent a ritual to become the brides of Christ, yet this ritual and its relationship to theology and personal agency are not investigated.

As it progresses, the book's arguments become increasingly focused, shifting from the Southcottian movement to the lives and theology of three men in particular. This is not a weakness, per se, but it remains unclear how representative Wroe, Ward, and Smith are of the average Southcottian, though Wroe and Ward certainly had many followers. Smith in particular appears to be his own phenomenon. While his theology undercuts many historians' assumptions about religion and radicalism, he seems to be an almost unique figure. Yet, these caveats do not detract from what is an important, well-researched, and convincing reappraisal of visionary religion and politics that deserves consideration by all historians of industrial England.