The Evangelical Age of Ingenuity in Industrial Britain by Joseph Stubenrauch (review)

Joseph Stubenrauch's study, The Evangelical Age of Ingenuity in Industrial Britain, focuses largely on the 1790s to the 1830s with a leap in the final chapter to the Great Exhibition of 1851. Scholars commonly think of this period of British history in terms of urbanization, industrialization, and Enlightenment thinking, and often associate it with an increasingly secular society. Though significant scholarship by historians of religion over the last thirty years has done much to challenge this view, arguments for the secularization of society have held sway for far longer among social and cultural historians of the period. It is for this reason that Stubenrauch seeks to make explicit what he sees as the false link between so-called modernity and religious decline in the late Georgian and early Victorian periods.

The spread of literacy and cheap print during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries may have encouraged some contemporary readers to question the ways in ways which these trends might have challenged religious belief: whether or not, for instance, a world full of consumer treats and fashion might have diverted attention from the strictures and demands of chapel and church, or if the teeming streets of growing towns allowed for new kinds of anonymity that might have led individuals to fall prey to the temptations of vice or the pleasures of the here and now, rather than fearing for the soul's fate in the afterlife. Stubenrauch, however, argues convincingly that modernity, far from being feared by evangelicals, was embraced by those who believed that true Christians should not remove themselves from the developments they witnessed around them. Instead, they should seize the opportunities presented by "material modernity," by which Stubenrauch means urbanization, mass production, literacy, mobility, and consumerism, all of which offered new opportunities for the dissemination of the gospel (12). In a changing world, Stubenrauch contends, evangelicalism offered its adherents a means of understanding and responding to social transformations, while also serving as a motor for many of the changes taking place.

Three aspects of late Georgian and early Victorian evangelical culture dominate Stubenrauch's account. First is the concept of means: those providential opportunities and resources, such as new technologies and infrastructure improvements, that evangelicals believed could help them to spread the gospel more efficiently. The second is the culture of sensibility and religious affections that provided "that connection between the outward world of means and the inward world of the heart" (17). The third involves evangelical optimism and belief in progress, coupled with the understanding that God's kingdom would be built in the present world. These different elements of Stubenrauch's study, as well as the flexible combination of means, agency, and sentiment that were adopted at different times, help to explain "the seemingly paradoxical growth and dominance of 'serious' Christianity in the midst of changes usually portrayed as secularizing" (57).

The Evangelical Age of Ingenuity aims to examine a range of means that evangelicals appropriated to spread the gospel, specifically focusing on consumer goods and ephemera in addition to more familiar primary materials for historians of religion. Though the focus on material modernity as a model to achieve this aim is innovative, more traditional sources still take center stage in such a way that this is largely a book based on printed texts and archives of religious organizations, the Religious Tract Society in particular. Stubenrauch uses these primary materials to good effect; they provide him with rich and detailed descriptions of the activities of a group of evangelicals with a particularly enthusiastic and successful approach to spreading the word. The Religious Tract Society alone produced nearly half a billion tracts, broadsheets, and handbills between 1799 and 1849, including Legh Richmond's Annals of the Poor (1814).

Though this book presents some fascinating insights into other forms of material culture—such as jigsaws and the many varieties of Sunderland Lustreware plaques emblazoned with the motto "prepare to meet thy...