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A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians by Timothy Larsen Oxford University Press, March 2011 336, pp., $43.45

The 400th anniversary of the King James Version has occasioned a slew of books on the impact of this translation and of the Bible more generally, with more still to come before the year is out. It's fitting, then, that 2011 should also mark the publication of Timothy Larsen's A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians (Oxford University Press), an exceptionally rich and nuanced account of how "the Bible loomed uniquely large in Victorian culture in fascinating and unexplored ways." In addition to deepening our understanding of the Victorians—and briskly deflating widely held misconceptions left and right—Larsen's chronicle implicitly prompts us to ask questions about the presence of the Bible in our own place and time.

In his previous book, Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England, Larsen gave us a series of case studies challenging the master-narrative of the Victorian era. This was a time, so we've been told, when it became virtually impossible for a thinking person to sustain any sort of orthodox Christian faith (with the understanding, of course, that this crisis of faith among the elite heralded the inevitable triumph of secular reason and the withering away of religion). But Larsen uncovered the stories of prominent freethinkers, atheists, and allied skeptics who began to lose confidence in the Gospel of Doubt and ultimately converted to or returned to faith.

What makes Crisis of Doubt particularly devastating is an unusual combination of massive erudition and serene good humor. Far from being a tub-thumping exercise in setting the historical record straight, it is loaded with wit, a pervasive sense of irony, and an appreciation for the mysterious twists and turns of individual human lives—all this with the warmth of an unobtrusive but equally unembarrassed faith.

Larsen employs the same strategy in A People of One Book, with the same result. Here the series of case studies highlights representative individuals from 10 traditions: Anglo-Catholics (E. B. Pusey); Roman Catholics (Nicholas Wiseman); Atheists (Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant); Methodist and Holiness (Catherine Booth and William Cooke); Liberal Anglicans (Florence Nightingale); Unitarians (Mary Carpenter); Quakers (Elizabeth Fry); Agnostics (T. H. Huxley); Evangelical Anglicans (Josephine Butler); and Old Orthodox Dissent (C. H. Spurgeon).

You might suppose that A People of One Book suffers in comparison with Crisis of Doubt by lacking the element of surprise. After all, even the most die-hard advocates of the secularization thesis would concede that the Bible retained a powerful influence in Victorian England. Aren't these case studies condemned to a weary predictability?

Not at all, and for two reasons. First, Larsen repeatedly upsets preconceptions. We are used to thinking of Catholics as negligent about the authority of Scripture in contrast to the claims of Tradition. Larsen shows how Cardinal Wiseman persistently made the case that Catholic teaching is more closely in accord with Scripture than rival Protestant doctrines are. (Whether Protestants would find his arguments persuasive is beside the point here.) Specialists may know that for much of the 19th century, Unitarianism in England was dominated by the biblicist strain of the denomination. For most readers, however, it will come as a surprise to learn how Carpenter and her father, Lant Carpenter, "gloried in Unitarian thought being even more thoroughly biblical than that of other Protestant bodies."

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King James and Queen Victoria, August 2011, Vol. 55, No. 8, Page 69