This comprehensive study of religious life in Northern England from the mid-eighteenth to the early-nineteenth centuries represents a significant achievement for its four authors. Drawing on an impressive amount of archival work, they convincingly show that industrialization, urbanization, and a rich religious culture were not mutually exclusive, and, indeed, that faith and lay piety helped forge the Northern urban economy in the long eighteenth century. Focusing particularly on urban centres that underwent significant change over this period – Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Sheffield – it touches upon the religious lives of over four hundred individuals adhering to a range of Christian denominations and considers extant evidence of Jewish religious life too.

The book is divided into three sections, each with three chapters. The first section, “Faith in the Urban Context,” begins with an exploration of how religious life was shaped by the built environment and outdoor urban spaces. An examination of printed maps and views of expanding townscapes, including the cover image, James Howe Carse’s “Oldham, Lancashire, from Glodwick Fields, 1831,” explores the visual trope of the juxtaposition of church spires and looming factory chimneys. We survey the religious marketplace that densely populated urban centers created, and the visible denominational identities of the thousands who walked through the streets to attend different churches and chapels on a Sunday. This section unpicks the life of faith from many different levels, from the vast forces and monuments of urban transformation, the overarching rhythms of the liturgical and calendrical year, down to the minutiae of daily prayer routines, and an individual believer’s personal reflections and hopes for the future.

The second section, “Faith, Social Organization, and Economic Life” showcases one of the book’s most important interventions – its nuanced and careful consideration of the intersection between faith and social class. An important and well-argued point throughout the book revolves around unequal access to religious meetings or individual devotional practice for those who did not have control over their own time, such as those with long working hours, or women with extensive caring responsibilities. While many lay people had to balance faith and work, these two central aspects of life were not always in conflict, as evidenced by one Sheffield shopkeeper who had hoped that his soul would be “Center’d in God…when Engaged in Business” (p. 220). It is in the discussion of faith and business that we also see references to intolerance as well as coexistence, namely in the form of evidence of antisemitism and a distrust of commercial partnerships with Jewish people.

The third section, “Faith in the Home,” contributes to a growing recent scholarship which has sought to explore the vitality of religious life outside of meetings for public worship, and to focus attention on household-family devotion and daily routines of prayer. It convincingly shows the continued significance of the home as a site of family prayer and religious sociability into the nineteenth century. A particular strength is the beautifully illustrated chapter on material culture, surveying the wealth of inscribed family bibles and embroidered samplers that we might expect to find along with some more intriguing artefacts such as a John Wesley teapot. Throughout this chapter, these objects, in a similar manner to how they were used in the eighteenth century, are not just decoration, but used to good effect to provide meaningful insights into lay religious culture, such as the suggestion that a child’s drawing of a ship at the end of the Book of Jonah is evidence that all members of the household could have access to the family bible.

There are findings here which are new and will be of interest even to those very familiar with lay religious culture in this period. The chapter on “Religious Sociability” contains an insightful discussion of the hospitality offered to visiting clergy and missionaries, nuancing a tendency in existing scholarship to view lay or household religion as occupying a distinct sphere from that of ministers or pastors. The book’s use of an extremely broad range of archival sources, comprising family papers and institutional records, and not limited to those with explicit religious associations, facilitates some fascinating discoveries, such as the presence of bibles and religious books, and indeed “1 small picture of a Nun” in Pawnbrokers’ Accounts (p. 299).

In a study of this length and ambition, that seeks to survey religious life across the North of England over the space of nearly a century, there are inevitably some elements of repetition here: a detailed discussion of the Sabbath appears in several chapters, and although the sources used draw on the lives of over 400 individuals, the same characters reappear frequently. It is possible that some of this repetition has emerged from the process of researching and writing a book with input from four authors, but nonetheless this book stands as a blueprint for this form of collaborative work and co-authorship that the historical profession is moving towards. Faith in the Town deserves to be the definitive study of the religious life of a vitally important but until now overlooked place and time. Crucially, its findings by their very nature extend beyond religious history, complicating the story of industrialization and urbanization, and encouraging us to see faith at the very heart of many of the economic, social, and cultural transformations of the long eighteenth century.