In just about every sense of the term, David Bebbington's Victorian Religious Revivals is a good history book. It is well-researched, clearly written, and consistently to the point. It makes an important contribution to its field by offering new insights built on a thorough grasp of "the literature" in that field. This is solid journey-men's history, which demonstrates how the craft should be done. Admittedly, not everyone is going to pick up this specialist's work, but then it is not written for everyone. It is written for those who have an interest in subjects and fields related to nineteenth-century Protestant revivalism in the English-speaking world. For those who do have such an interest, it is a fun and informative read.
Bebbington pursues a number of themes and topics built around the premise that nineteenth-century revivals in Britain, North America, and Australia reflected both local and global elements. Each was its own event built on local conditions and factors. By that same token, however, each revival drew on a common international pool of forms, techniques, and ideas. As the book's subtitle puts it, all of these revivals drew on local and global cultures and pieties. Bebbington proves his point by describing and analyzing seven specific revivals spanning the years 1841 to 1880 and taking place in the Republic of Texas, England, North Carolina, Scotland, South Australia, and Nova Scotia.
Victorian Religious Revivals begins with two general chapters before it moves on to its seven local portraits. In Chapter 1, Bebbington provides an introductory overview of nineteenth-century revivals in the English-speaking world, which includes a description of the various patterns of revivals in that era. The particular patterns he identifies include Presbyterian, Congregational, Methodist, combined, and "modern" approaches to revivalism. It should be noted that Bebbington begins Chapter 1 precisely where he should with an overview review of definitions of the terms "revival" and "awakening." Chapter 2 follows with a review of the literature, which concludes with the author's own perspective. He writes of revivals that revivals, "...ought to be considered in a global framework and as local events. When a revival is investigated in its locality, its specific characteristics are open to discovery. The most important features fall into the categories of culture and piety." (p. 52)
From this base, Bebbington marches through his seven investigations of Victorian revivals beginning in Texas in 1841 and concluding in South Australia in 1880. Each chapter is a well-written description of the events of the particular revival it recounts followed by detailed analysis, which is sensitive to local factors and concerns but also teases out the larger and more global themes embedded in the particular awakening. I read this book because one of his seven studies involves a Presbyterian revival that took place in Union Church, Moore County, North Carolina, in 1857, which was led by the Rev. Daniel McGilvary, a recent graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary. I know McGilvary from my research on the history of the church in Thailand. He served as a Presbyterian missionary in Siam and then in the northern state of Chiang Mai for over fifty years down to 1911. In the course of my research, I became familiar with the events in Moore County. Bebbington's treatment of those events is impressive. He describes the background to the 1857 revival, the personalities involved, and its particular nature as a classic example of an emotionally restrained, Calvinistic Presbyterian revival. The McGilvary he describes is recognizably the same Daniel McGilvary who so capably pursued his long missionary career in Southeast Asia. Bebbington's chapter on the Moore County revival and McGilvary (Chapter 6), in fact, makes a contribution to the study of Thai church history because it provides important background material locating McGilvary in his own home cultural context. This is good stuff.
One of the things that is especially helpful in Victorian Religious Revivals is the way in which Bebbington organizes his analyses so that one can actually enumerate factors involved. In Chapter 8 on an 1875 revival in South Australia, for example, he describes at least seven (by my count) factors in the "spiritual culture of Methodism" (pp. 205-212) that contributed to the revival and then, later on, six (again by my count) elements in the style of that revival (pp. 216-227). (Bebbington doesn't do the "first, second, third, etc." routine very often, but his clear writing style facilitates identifying elements that can be enumerated). Through all of his analysis and attention to details, Bebbington never loses sight of his main interpretive framework, which is the interplay of local and global, cultural and religious (generally denominational) forces and factors. Thus Chapter 9 is even entitled, "The General and the Particular: Baptist Revival in Nova Scotia, 1880."
The book ends, as it must, with a summary chapter that describes the dozen or so (by my count) "reasons for revival" (pp. 263-269) and the roughly six "characteristics of revival" (pp. 269-274). Bebbington's conclusion (pp. 274-275) to his last chapter could serve as an overview of the book for a review of it. The final sentence of the book—"Local revivals illustrate global developments."—is itself a good summary of the whole book.
It should also be noted that Victorian Religious Revivals is an academic work and all of the paraphernalia that goes along with such work are present. There is a very good bibliography, and I was esp. pleased to see real and actual footnotes (rather than endnotes or no notes), something rarely seen anymore.
I do have a couple of minor quibbles. The maps are not particularly helpful. They are too narrowly focused on the locality of each revival and very barebones. For my money, Bebbington dismisses too quickly the leadership role of the clergy in the revivals he describes. For him, the revivals were marked by a prominent role for the laity (p. 271), which is true but does not necessarily mean as he seems to assume that the clergy did not also play a prominent role. He himself points to the important role clergy played in the revival(s) in Nova Scotia in 1880 (see pp. 250, 253, 255) without picking up on it as a key theme in his analysis of those events.
Frequently in the reviews I've done for this website, I have observed that the reader of a particular books has to want to read it in order to get through it. That is most certainly not the case with Bebbington's Victorian Religious Revivals. It is a specialist's academic work, and the reader will surely want to read it before buying it (esp. because it is pricey), but having begun the reader will not find it a hardship to continue. Like all good history, it is a specialist work that does not indulge in the gibberish and jargon that makes so much academic writing unnecessarily difficult to read for a general audience. Good history clears away all of that so that general audiences can participate fully in the joy of discovering the past. This book is good history. Its prose is not flashy but it is well-written, easy to follow, and facilitates the stories Bebbington tells. If you have even a passing interest in its subject, I highly recommend Victorian Religious Revivals to you.
