Politicians in the Pulpit: Christian Radicalism in Britain from the Fall of the Bastille to the Disintegration of Chartism, and: Search for a New Eden: James Pierrepont Greaves (1777-1842): The Sacred Socialist and His Followers (review)

Politicians in the Pulpit: Christian Radicalism in Britain from the Fall of the Bastille to the Disintegration of Chartism, by Eileen Groth Lyon; pp. x + 280. Aldershot and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1999, £47.50, $84.95.

Search for a New Eden: James Pierrepont Greaves (1777-1842): The Sacred Socialist and His Followers, by J. E. M. Latham; pp. 292. Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999, $47.50, £35.00.

That two books on apparently related topics should be so different in their subject matter confirms the pervasive but diverse nature of religious influences in nineteenth-century British history. Eileen Groth Lyon is concerned with those radicals whose criticism of British politics and society was primarily derived from their grounding in varieties of mainstream Christianity--what she terms "Christian radicalism." J. E. M. Latham is interested in the unorthodox whose mystical beliefs at the fringes of British--and to some extent American--society led them into interesting but ultimately fruitless radical communitarianism. The two worlds described in these books barely meet.

Lyon's subject matter proves elusive. Beginning in the 1790s, she concedes that Christianity was overwhelmingly on the side of conservatism and the maintenance of social order. Dissenting radicals, such as Richard Price and Joseph Priestley, get a mention but their minority status is clearly affirmed, and neither the millenarian prophet Richard Brothers nor the seething mystical radical underworld which accommodated William Blake earn consideration. Nevertheless we are assured that "the nascent form of Christian radicalism which had been forged in the 1790s was to re-emerge in the later 1820s as a clear political force" (46). However, this is not the case. The conservatives still seem to have had the bulk of Christian support, with infidels, anti-clericals, and unorthodoxly marginal Christians snapping at their heels. By page 95 we are assured that "Christian radicalism was moving clearly in favour of some measure of reform" in the early 1830s. Possibly so, but it is hard to see how this amounted to serious radicalism: the conservative Christians were still winning hands down and the heavyweight Christian radicals had yet to put in an appearance.

In Chapter Three they finally arrive: Humphrey Price, perpetual curate of Christ Church in Needwood, Staffordshire, who took up the cause of the Kidderminster weavers and became a Chartist; Arthur Savage Wade, absentee Vicar of St. Nicholas's, Warwick, a prominent supporter of parliamentary reform and the Charter; Hugh Hutton, Unitarian minister of the Old Meeting, Edgbaston, Birmingham, another supporter of parliamentary reform in 1832 but thereafter tepid in the cause; Thomas McDonnell, Roman Catholic priest in Birmingham, a political and social champion of the poor who was marginalised by his Church for his pains; and William Johnson Fox, Unitarian and philosophic radical whose chapel in South Place, London, became the fashionable place for worship by those intellectuals who had ceased to believe. All these used the Bible to justify their radicalism but Lyon seems too honest in her analysis to be entirely convincing that her case has been made for a historical concept, Christian radicalism.

Finally, with the factory reformers, George Stringer Bull, Michael Thomas Sadler, and Richard Oastler, true Christian radicals appear--that is, if they are not merely Tory Radicals. Appreciating that the latter is a weak and misleading concept (a charge that could also be applied to her own Christian radicalism), the author attempts to distinguish between the two: Tories emphasised the duties of the poor as well as the rich; Christians emphasised the rights of the poor. This latter description would certainly fit Joseph Rayner Stephens, who is studied as the great champion of the anti...