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The Dissenters, vol. 2, The Expansion of Evangelical Nonconformity. By MICHAEL R. WATTs. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. xxi + 911 pp.
The origins of English Nonconformity, from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, were traced by Michael Watts of the University of Nottingham in the first of this three-volume series. In this second work, Watts examines the nineteenth-century growth of the varied Dissenting bodies, including the Unitarians, Quakers, Methodists, Congregationalists, Baptists, and smaller groups. With the exception of the first two, the rest, all evangelicals, enjoyed enormous growth; in eighty years the number of Nonconformist chapels increased tenfold throughout England and Wales, and by 1851 nearly one person in five called himself or herself a Dissenter. It was a period of great vitality for religion which, Watts finds, "pervaded education, shaped morals, motivated philanthropy, controlled leisure, permeated literature, inspired poetry, stimulated music, reduced crime, inhibited class conflict, moderated industrial strife, decided political loyalties, and on occasion influenced foreign and imperial policy" (p. 1).
The book is a model of definitive and exhaustive scholarship, showing a mastery of the vast sources. While Watts admires the English Nonconformists for their many accomplishments, he is balanced in his assessments and frequently critical, not only of the Dissenters, but also of the culture of the time. One of the basic themes of the book is that the failure of the politicians of nineteenth-century England to set up...