Being there

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Pamela J. Walker

Those people in uniforms who ring bells and raise money for the poor during the holiday season belong to a religious movement that in 1865 combined early feminism, street preaching, holiness theology, and intentionally outrageous singing into what soon became the Salvation Army. In Pulling the devil's kingdom down, Pamela Walker emphasizes how thoroughly the Army entered into nineteenth-century urban life. She follows the movement from its Methodist roots and East London origins through its struggles with the established denominations of England, problems with the law and the media, and public manifestations that included street brawls with working-class toughs. The Salvation Army was a neighborhood religion, with a "battle plan" especially suited to urban working-class geography and cultural life. The ability to use popular leisure activities as inspiration was a major factor in the Army's success, since pubs, music halls, sports, and betting were regarded as its principal rivals. Salvationist women claimed the "right to preach" and enjoyed spiritual authority and public visibility more extensively than in virtually any other religious or secular organization. Opposition to the new movement was equally energetic and took many forms, but even as contemporary music hall performers ridiculed the "Hallelujah Lasses," the Salvation Army was spreading across Great Britain and the Continent, and on to North America. The Army offered a distinctive response to the dilemmas facing Victorian Christians, in particular the relationship between what Salvationists believed and the work they did. Walker fills in the social, cultural, and religious contexts that make that relationship come to life.

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Richard Reeves

In the first definitive biography of Britain's greatest public intellectual, Richard Reeves reveals John Stuart Mill as a passionate man of action: a philosopher, radical MP and reformer who profoundly shaped Victorian society and continues to illuminate our own. A young activist and highly-educated Cambridge Union debater, Mill would become in time the highest-ranked English thinker of the nineteenth-century, the author of the landmark essay On Liberty and one of the most passionate reformers and advocates of his revolutionary, opinionated age. As a journalist he fired off a weekly article on Irish land reform as the people of that nation starved, as an MP he introduced the first vote on women's suffrage, fought to preserve free speech and opposed slavery, and, in his private life, pursued for two decades a love affair with another man's wife. Mill also fearlessly tackled issues such as the regulation of gambling, prostitution and alcohol, as well as parliamentary reform and domestic violence. John Stuart Mill was the 'Saint of Rationalism' according to William Gladstone. But in this biography, Richard Reeves reveals Mill as a passionate man of action, a philosopher, radical MP and reformer who profoundly shaped Victorian society and continues to illuminate our own.

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Reiner Smolinski

No other American Puritan has fueled both the popular and academic imagination as has Cotton Mather (1663-1728). Colonial America's foremost theologian and historian, Mather was also one of its most powerful voices advocating millennialism. His lifelong preoccupation with this subject culminated in his definitive treatise, "Triparadisus" (1726/1727), left unpublished at his death. In it, Mather justified his ideological revisionism; his response to the philological, historical, and scientific challenges of the Bible as text by English and continental deists; and his hermeneutical break from the orthodox exegeses of his father, Increase Mather, and Joseph Mede. In his critical introduction to this edition of "Triparadisus," Reiner Smolinski demonstrates that Mather's hermeneutical defense of revealed religion seeks to negotiate between the orthodox literalist position of his New England forebears and the new philological challenges to the scriptures by Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, Isaac de La Peyrere, Benedict de Spinoza, Richard Simon, Henry Hammond, Thomas Burnet, William Whiston, Anthony Collins, and Isaac Newton. In "Triparadisus" Mather's hermeneutics undergoes a radical shift from a futurist interpretation of the prophecies to a preterite position as he joins the quasi-allegorical camp of Grotius, Hammond, John Lightfoot, and Richard Baxter. The Threefold Paradise of Cotton Mather also challenges a number of longstanding paradigms in the scholarship on American Puritanism, history, literature, and culture. Smolinski specifically calls into question the consensus among intellectual historians who have traced the Puritan origin of the American self to the Errand into the Wilderness and the idea of God's elect. He also challenges the commonplace argument that New England represented the culmination of prophetic history in an American New Jerusalem for the Mathers and their counterparts. As an important link between Mather's premillennialism in the late seventeenth century and Jonathan Edwards's postmillennialism in the Great Awakening, "Triparadisus" provides important biographical insight into Mather's last years, when, liberated from his father's interpretations, he put forward his own.

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Jude V. Nixon

"This collection of essays addresses the disparate personal, historical, and critical ways religion informs the literature and culture of nineteenth-century England. The volume presents Victorian religious discourse not as monologic but as dialogic. It makes available new understandings of nineteenth-century British literature, shows how prominent Victorians negotiated its impress, and elucidates the extent to which religious discourse is vested in Victorian cultural thought and practice."--BOOK JACKET.