some scholarly input from graduates of Scottish universities. Professor Sell makes thepoint that these teachers carried Scottish influence South of the border to a muchsmaller degree than their counterparts in America, and ascribes this to independenceof mind; he may well be right, but there is the alternative possibility that theyencountered greater obtusenesss in the English system. Alan Sell offers all this andphilosophy too.

Petersfield W. R. Ward

Tractarians and the ‘Condition of England’: The Social and Political Thought of the OxfordMovement (Oxford Historical Monographs). By Simon A. Skinner. Pp. x, 330,Oxford University Press, 2004, d55.00.

This meticulously crafted monograph makes the case for a new assessment of thesocial thought of the Oxford Movement. It challenges previous readings oftractarianism that have been largely based upon biographies of Keble, Pusey andNewman, the leading figures of the movement whose inception is usually associatedwith Keble’s Assize Sermon of 1833 addressing the threat of ‘National Apostasy’posed by the suppression of Irish bishoprics.The innovative feature of Skinner’s study is his use of previously neglected sources,

most notably the periodical, the British Critic, and the work of the tractarian novelistsFrancis Paget and William Gresley. The British Critic was successfully manoeuvredinto the tractarian fold by Newman in 1838 and served as its house journal between1838 and 1843.Given the movement’s pre-occupation with ecclesial interests and ardent cultivation

of piety it is perhaps not surprising to see R. S. Edgecombe commenting that ‘in theirbattles against worldliness, the Tractarians forget the world’ (p. 4). In his review of thebibliography of the movement in his opening chapter Skinner is keen to contest suchjudgements. He is assisted in this task by his wish to balance the traditional focusupon Keble, Pusey and Newman, through bringing attention to some of themovement’s ‘hod-carriers’, and he assembles an impressive array of socialcommentary by tapping into a wide body of hitherto neglected literature.Skinner readily acknowledges the debt of much of this social commentary to

Romanticism’s robust critique of commercialism, Political Economy and the poorsocial conditions associated with the new industrialism.Tractarianism, echoing its earlier censure of the Erastian drift of government

policy, saw in the Poor Laws the spectre of a secular utilitarian state encroachingupon the social role of the Church at the organic parish level, and argued thatChristian charity was the preferable instrument for the relief of want. In the BritishCritic Samuel Bosanquet described as ‘unchristian’ the notion that ‘the legal pro-vision for the poor ought to be a substitute for private charity’. ‘It may be God’swill’, Pusey postulated in one of his sermons, ‘that the deserving poor are no longerto be adequately relieved by forced contributions, in order that the rich, withself-sacrificing liberality, may supply the really needy by a proportionate enlargementof voluntary charity’ (p. 230). The paternalist tone of such interventions wasconsistent with leaving the wealthy in their pews in no doubt as to the danger to theirimmortal souls of failing to accept their Christian obligations. To their credittractarian leaders and activists practised what they preached and their level of givingwas impressive, even if the notion that an appeal to private charity could beconsidered an adequate response to the burgeoning social ills of industrialism had lessto commend it.

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The pastoral engagement of tractarian clergy brought some of them into contactwith the grim plight of many agricultural workers and the harsh conditions andpractices in trades such as mining. In one of his novels, Francis Paget depicts thedegradation of men, women and children in one mine registering his dismay at the‘scrambling in mud and filth through passages less than a yard high’ (p. 271). In thisprotest it is possible to see the potential within tractarianism for a prophetic socialvoice if it had been effectively harnessed.The movement was undoubtedly handicapped by its rather backward looking

ecclesiology apparent in its intense interest in the early church and the wistfulness foran idealised mediaeval Church evident in schemes to revive pageant and ‘holydays’.The world was changing faster than such nostalgia and insularity would allow. RobertWilberforce, in his exposition of tractarian incarnationalism, was not untypical inseeing the union affected in Christ between God and humankind in terms of theChurch rather than a Kingdom that embraces all (pp. 260f).This contrasted with F. D. Maurice’s more expansive sense of the Kingdom of

Christ that emphasised the constitution of humanity in Christ and made possible anaffirmation of the secular that tractarianism could scarcely have countenanced. It wasMaurice who more successfully pressed the case for human equality beyond ecclesialconfines, and inspired later generations to transcend the more restricted perspective ofearly tractarianism. Significantly, Maurice tells us that he realised he was outside thetractarian fold when he read Pusey’s tract on Baptism, which for Maurice celebratedan already existing status as children of God.The same expansiveness that we find in Maurice is evident in the incarnational

theology found in Charles Gore’s edited collection Lux Mundi of 1889, which arguedthat if the divine Logos incarnate in Christ is universally present, then social,democratic and scientific advancement should be welcome as part of the work of thedivine Word.Skinner is right to insist that tractarianism did address social questions, it would be

surprising if a movement as popular as this did not at least in some quarters do this.We are indebted to him for his retrieval of a more comprehensive historical record.Whether this record shows evidence of a developed social theology as Skinnersuggests is more contestable. This had to await the line of transmission I have brieflyoutlined that owed more to F. D. Maurice than the Oxford movement.

Kildare, Ireland John Marsden

John StuartMill: A Biography. ByNicholas Capaldi. Pp. xx, 436, Cambridge UniversityPress, 2004, d27.50, $.40.00.

In the opening of his Autobiography John Stuart Mill called his own life ‘uneventful’,feeling it difficult to ‘imagine that any part of what I have to relate can be interestingto the public as a narrative’. Instead, he stated that the main reason behind writing hislife was ‘a desire to make acknowledgement of the debts which my intellectual andmoral development owes to other persons’. These premises also hold true for Mill ashe emerges from Nicholas Capaldi’s biography.In this fine intellectual biography much space is given to the influence of his father

James Mill, Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Carlyle, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. LoyolaUniversity business ethnicist Capaldi ably traces to what extent Mill followed thesethinkers, and how he came to rebel against their philosophies as his own thoughtmatured. The parts in which Mill reacts against his father’s and Bentham’s utilitarianradicalism and turns toWordsworth for a revaluation of the imagination, which led to

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