Robert Lee's excellent new book provides both a broad overview of Church policy and politics in the Durham coalfield and a detailed analysis of its practical effects during the long nineteenth century. While historians and sociologists have not unwisely spent a great deal of time and effort uncovering the emergence and proliferation of Nonconformity in the north-east, comparatively less energy has been expended on the history of the Church of England, especially at the parochial level. In many ways, therefore, this book fills an important gap in our understanding of the social and religious history of the northern coalfield. The book is chronologically framed by two important coalfield-wide strikes, but the author makes it clear that the critical turning-point in the history of the Church lay mid-way between the two. In 1860 a diocesan conference acknowledged the Church's glaring failures, including the gross inadequacy of churches, a drastic mismatch between the boundaries of traditional parishes and the new centres of population and a dire shortage of resident clergy. The result of the conference was a massive long-term effort to bring the Church to the people. Lee offers a cogent analysis of the nature of this reform movement and an admirable assessment of its successes and failures. Based upon extensive research into parish and diocesan records, the author divides his study into three thematic sections. The first focuses on a discussion of the background and recruitment of the new generation of clergy ordained after mid-century. Without doubt, the Church made significant strides in many areas of reform, including the building of new churches and the creation of new parishes. Most important, however, the Church actively sought to train and ordain more clergymen, many of whom possessed a social and economic background that was significantly more akin to that of their parishioners than it was to their clerical predecessors. Despite the apparent success of these major institutional reforms, the Church none the less failed to capture the hearts and minds of the Durham populace. The second section of this book argues that the explanation for this failure lay in part in the long-standing connection between the Church and the northern coal-owners. Indeed in several significant ways, such as the expansion of Church schools, the success of reform required even closer cooperation between these two powers than had previously been the case. As a result, the gap between the Church and the people in Durham unintentionally became wider rather than narrower. In the third section, Lee tries to assess the effect of these reforms on the Church's relation with the people. Once again, he finds a significant gap between effort and result. For example, the diocese monitored a wide array of social problems, including poverty, unemployment and substandard housing. Yet into the 1920s Lee's analysis of visitation returns reveals that a palpable sense of failure remained among Durham clerics. For many, their efforts appeared to be both too little and too late. In 1842 one northern coal-owner testified before parliament that ‘the Church should have done her duty better towards [the miners]’. In this fine book, Lee has unquestionably shown that despite answering this call to duty after 1860, the Church's efforts were both ill-fated and often ill-suited to the changing social, economic and political landscape.