Miriam Elizabeth Burstein's Victorian Reformations is that rare and splendid thing: a book in the fields of British studies and Victorian studies that is a genuinely valuable contribution for both literary scholars and historians.

The heart of this book is three chapters on now generally forgotten polemical works of historical fiction written by crusading evangelical Protestants, followed by one on similar efforts by Anglo-Catholics and Roman Catholics. These four chapters are bookended by mediations on the novels of Walter Scott and Charles Dickens. This cleverly and fruitfully arranged discussion, which blends together canonical and noncanonical authors, deserves to become a model for aspiring literary scholars.

Burstein is a professor of English, and historians will be particularly grateful for her thorough and careful attention to secondary sources in their discipline. Indeed, the notes are replete with references to meticulous scholars of whom researchers in literary studies generally remain cheerfully unaware: David Bebbington, Michael Ledger-Lomas, Peter Nockles, Doreen Rosman, Marion Ann Taylor, John Wolffe, and many more.

Admittedly, on occasion one notices errors or infelicitous constructions that betray Burstein as a newcomer to the field of church history: it does not quite make sense to describe someone as “Church of Ireland-turned-Anglican” (116); D. L. Moody, not D. W. Moody, was the American evangelist (217); the point of distancing language on the title “Saint” was not to question whether these particular Roman Catholic examples might be of “dubious origin” (135) but rather to signal the low church Protestant conviction that all of the redeemed are saints and that therefore the implied distinction is bad theology; the doctrine of the perspicuity of scripture should not be conflated with sola scriptura; and so on. Nevertheless, while finding such minor slips gave me an insider's sense of self-satisfaction, it is highly unlikely that they will do the unwary reader any harm.

The vastly more important point is that Burstein's analysis makes the mind race with connections to other primary sources and thus truly serves to illuminate and further our historical understanding of nineteenth-century Britain. Historians of religion who read Victorian Reformations will find their time well repaid with new and profitable insights and connections.

In light of later sections, it becomes clear that the book's introductory chapter works by contrast. Rather than plunge directly into the book's major (Victorian-period) arguments, it presents “Walter Scott's messier, more skeptical reading of Reformation history” (72) as a foil. Scott deserves primacy of place, naturally, as the century's dominant force in historical fiction. It makes sense, too, that his most popular successor, Dickens, should shore up the study's ending. The final chapter—on Barnaby Rudge—is a delicious dessert that we are allowed to savor as newly trained gourmets: Hugh's “No property!” (rather than “No popery!”) slip; Sir John's question to his son Edward, “In a religious point of view alone, how could you ever think of uniting yourself to a Catholic, unless she was amazingly rich?”; and other tidbits demonstrate that Reformation debates animate the full range of popular nineteenth-century fictions.

In between, readers become acquainted with several less famous but no less interesting historical novels. Chapter 2, especially satisfying, surveys fictional treatments of Wyclif (“John de Wycliffe”), who is depicted in some Victorian writings as a kind of “scriptural Robin Hood” (60). Part of his appeal was that a partisan telling of his story made the Protestant Reformation seem originally and organically English (not a later German import). Catholic authors responded by underlining that English history is Catholic history: “As even the ruins testify, Protestants cannot erase the truth, merely vandalize it” (175–76).

One particularly helpful observation grounded in chapter 3, “Reading the Reformation Bible in the Nineteenth Century,” is that Britons were desperately trying to find ways to prevent the Bible's ubiquity and familiarity from resulting in its being devalued. Historical novels allowed Victorian readers to become re-sensitized to scripture as potentially shocking, costly, and precious. People were once burned for translating it, so how dare readers be bored by it? This discussion brought to mind another now-neglected text not mentioned here: “The Blank Bible,” a chapter in The Eclipse of Faith (1852) by Henry Rogers—a supernatural tale in which people awake one morning to find that all physical Bibles and scriptural quotations have vanished, so that only the Word that they have hidden in their hearts remains. Indeed, the Bible figures in more historical novels than scholars typically realize, so Burstein's study opens promising avenues for further research in this area. The material presented in chapter 3 also invites future work that would explore the tension between the evangelical Dissenting stress on scriptural repetition and that same community's condemnation of liturgies and written prayers as draining meaning through overfamiliarity. It leaves to future scholars the task of incorporating the views of Unitarians, freethinkers, and agnostics into this discussion, as such figures also often had strong views about the meaning and importance of the Protestant Reformation.

Burstein rightly notices how often children, women, and members of the lower classes are portrayed positively in these novels as perceptive readers of scripture. This theme could have been explored further both in terms of Reformation theology (the priesthood of all believers, etc.) and in terms of the contents of the Bible itself, for example: “I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent and hast revealed them unto babes” (Luke 10:21). Such words often inform these stories, even when they are not explicitly quoted. Of course, they suggest not only the writers' religious orientations, but also broadening faith in readers, a generic proclivity for sentimental moral appeals, and a democratic political slant—all arguably (barely) secularized manifestations of Protestant culture. How religious controversy and its echoes shape the larger project of Victorian realism is a rich topic well worth the attention afforded it here.

Aside from valuable historical work, there is much delightful writing in Victorian Reformations to cheer the reader along on his or her way. For example, an 1822 novel written by Thomas Gaspey is assessed thus: “An awkwardly plotted and awkwardly written farrago of historical facts, gothic horror, and romance, The Lollards' willingness to engage in homoerotic titillation when one of its female protagonists dresses as a page no doubt sent shudders down the spine of any evangelical who picked it up” (62). Indeed.

Victorian Reformations amply reveals that historical novels are rich primary sources that expose nineteenth-century fault lines, fears, and mentalities in fresh and compelling ways.