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More churches were built or restored and more yards of religious print were published in 19th-century Britain than in any other century of British history before or since. Similarly, various estimates of church attendance, whether based on the snapshot Religious Census of 1851 or on other data, are remarkably high by recent British standards, and are probably also high by 18th-century standards. In 19th-century Britain, religious voluntary associations were ubiquitous and religious issues often dominated social and political discourse. Unsurprisingly therefore, it was taken as axiomatic among scholars of George Kitson Clark's generation that to begin to understand Victorian civilization one had to understand its religion. That is the intellectual tradition I grew up in as a college student, and there was no shortage of superior literature upon which to draw, including Owen Chadwick's magisterial, if now rather dated and smugly Anglican, two-volume history of the Victorian Church. Although a combination of the Oxford Movement and Evangelicalism probably occasioned the most distinguished historiographies of Victorian religion, even new-fangled social historians like Hugh McLeod and James Obelkevich treated religion seriously back in the 1970s. Religion and Victorian culture, it seemed, were inextricably yoked.
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Timothy Larsen's book, on the other hand, has been provoked by a different discourse altogether, namely that of the Victorian crisis of faith. Larsen shows that beginning with some eminent Victorians themselves, and then continued by scholars such as Basil Wiley and A. N. Wilson, the loss of faith has become a dominant motif in 19th-century British studies that has seeped its way into textbooks, general histories, and encyclopedias as the chief characteristic of Victorian religion. As British intellectual life has become more secular, and as religion has diminished in social salience, the intelligentsia has looked increasingly to the Victorian period for the roots of its secularity. Larsen's aim is to attack that view of 19th-century England by showing that a "crisis of doubt" makes at least as much sense in characterizing the period as a "crisis of faith."
Larsen's angle of attack is to look at the plebeian leaders of 19th-century secularism who reconverted to Christianity after having made their mark as popular leaders of the Secular Movement. His book consists of seven biographical portraits topped and tailed by a helpful introduction and conclusion. His chosen figures are William Hone, Frederic Rowland Young, Thomas Cooper, John Henry Gordon, Joseph Barker, John Bagnall Bebbington, and George Sexton. These are scarcely household names outside the scholarly cognoscenti of Victorian experts, but they were all important leaders of Victorian secularism, and they all eventually reconverted to a more-or-less orthodox Christianity. Larsen is at pains to point out that their conversions to and from secularism were serious intellectual affairs and were not undertaken for mere pecuniary or positional advantage, and that all seven reconverted long before their deathbeds. The point of such an emphasis is to insist that these seven figures looked seriously into the gaping mouth of secularism yet returned to Christianity via a serious, honest, and careful evaluation of the respective merits and demerits of faith and infidelity.
Although each faith journey is obviously unique, the common pattern among Larsen's chosen subjects is that they were either brought up in Christian homes and/or embraced populist forms of evangelical Nonconformity early in their lives. Many were educated in Sunday Schools or became Sunday School teachers or preachers, often of the Methodist or Baptist variety, before falling by the wayside. The most common reasons for their apostasy included doubts about the inspiration and moral content of the Bible, the growth of a radical political consciousness, disillusionment with established forms of religion, and acquaintance with a wide range of English and French infidel literature such as Thomas Paine's Rights of Man and Baron d'Holbach's The System of Nature. They also had temperaments that did not easily bow the knee to any kind of secular or religious authority. According to George Sexton, "the so called Secular societies were made up of young men, for whom skeptical views have an attraction, as being calculated to allow a sort of reckless independence, freedom from control, and a kind of intellectual audacity which fascinate for a time."
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