In the opening pages of Modern Spiritualism and the Church of England, 1850–1939, Georgina Byrne posits that the Church of England in the late nineteenth century was ‘essentially syncretistic’, in that ‘it engaged with ideas and language beyond itself in order to refresh and re-present what it taught as Christian belief’ (p. 3). Locating her study as part of the wider challenge to classic accounts of secularization, Byrne sees the Church's reaction to spiritualism during this period as exemplifying the subtle ways it absorbed elements of English ‘common culture’ without consciously yielding to them. At the same time, she defines the historical range of her study according to specific texts that serve to demonstrate the evolution of discourse about the afterlife: F.D. Maurice's Theological Essays (1853) on the front end, and at the other, both Doctrine in the Church of England (1938) and the Report of the Archbishop of Canterbury's Committee on Spiritualism (1939). Maurice famously challenged traditional Church teachings about hell and the meaning of eternity, and for his pains lost his professorial chair at King's College London, for fear he would lead students astray with his unorthodox ideas. Yet by the late 1930s, the Doctrine Commission led by the then Archbishop of York, William Temple, could affirm such concepts as spiritual progress and universal salvation as lying within an acceptable diversity of views about the Christian afterlife. Trying to explain how the theological consensus within the Church of England could shift from one point to the other in the course of a short century is Byrne's concern, and in spiritualism she locates the catalyst for this considerable change.

But what exactly is ‘spiritualism’? Byrne defines it as ‘a phenomenon whose central tenet was that the living and the dead could converse with one another and that people could indeed “know” what happened to the departed’ (p. 2). This exchange between the living and the dead was discernible in various ways, among them trance states, levitation, automatic writing, ‘materialisations’, ‘spirit photographs’ and so on. In its modern form it emerged in the USA in 1848, and by 1852 the first spiritualist medium had crossed the Atlantic to offer seances. Whatever the American spark, though, Byrne is quick to insist that spiritualism resonated with long-established tropes within English ‘common culture’, and that this explains its immediate popularity at all levels of English society. Not least, it overlapped with a quasi-scientific fascination with paranormal activity, as exemplified by the founding of the Cambridge Ghost Club (1851) and the London Ghost Club (1862), both precursors to what became the Society of Psychical Research (1882). Membership of these organizations drew on the great and good: among the founders of the Cambridge Ghost Club, for example, were the future scholar and bishop Brooke Fosse Westcott, the future archbishop Edward White Benson, and the future prime minister Arthur Balfour. Perhaps not surprisingly, spiritualism likewise attracted a roll-call of celebrity devotees – precursors to today's Hollywood disciples of Scientology and Kabbalah – for whom it became the newest fashion to embrace. Yet Byrne also points to evidence of spiritualist practice in the crowded urban areas of northern England, where not a few working-class people also found their mediumistic voices.

Drawing on a range of periodicals, Byrne seeks to demonstrate that even as spiritualism was becoming a feature of everyday English life, its committed adherents were busy trying to invest it with the characteristics of a structured movement. Journals began to pop up with names such as Two Worlds, Spiritualist, Medium and Daybreak, and Light (the last of these still exists), all of which were devoted to lending spiritualism a kind of religious and intellectual respectability. Byrne explores the question of whether spiritualism possessed anything approximating a coherent theology and concludes that in focusing upon the experience of the individual soul, it tended to challenge exclusivist views of Christ and to emphasize his exemplary behaviour over his divine status. In this respect, spiritualism's claims about the subjective nature of the afterlife necessarily challenged creedal claims here on earth, asserting the need for a more generous conception of death and its possibilities. So long as the Church of England continued to strike many as pastorally unsympathetic and liturgically unimaginative in its handling of such matters, spiritualism remained an attractive alternative in making sense of the relationship between this life and the next.

Of course, the need to make sense of this relationship was never more urgent than during the First World War, when so many young Englishmen were killed before their time. More than anything else, it was the war that pushed the Church of England to soften its inherited teachings and practices, and the account of how army chaplains and others lobbied for changes in liturgical provision during this period is one of the best sections of the book. Matters of longstanding theological scruple, such as whether to pray for the dead, largely yielded to the pressing need to address widespread grief, and this shift is discernible in the prayer book revision process that continued throughout the 1920s. Furthermore, in the church reports of the late 1930s, Church of England leaders accepted the need not so much to adopt novel aspects of spiritualist thinking and practice as to reaffirm parts of the Christian heritage that had been downplayed or neglected in the recent past.

Byrne's work has much to recommend it as a contribution to the social history of the Church of England. She makes a convincing case that interest in spiritualism was more widespread at all levels of English life than might be commonly supposed and certainly more pervasive among clergy than the Church itself seems to have realized. At the same time, her definition of ‘common culture’ remains tantalizingly inexact, and there are moments in the book when it would have been helpful to have a clearer idea of how she herself understands the term. She also does much to reveal the way in which spiritualism's appeal dovetailed with the broader movement toward subjective individualism in modern England, but this is a correlation she does not really explore. Nonetheless, Modern Spiritualism and the Church of England is well researched and clearly structured, and it will intrigue anyone concerned with the often elusive boundary between English church and society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.