Like many of my generation I grew up knowing the Victorian era to be one of supreme hypocrisy. ‘Victorian values’ meant parading piety, enforcing hierarchy and beating discipline into your children during daylight hours, and then stepping over street beggars as you prowled the streets for prostitutes at night.

A little education disabused me of this caricature but something of it remains, both in my mind and in the popular one. Frank Prochaska’s short, readable but expensive book is no apologia for the Victorian world but does help rebalance the scales.

His basic argument, for which he provides much evidence, is three-fold. Firstly, Victorian Britain enjoyed a level of civic engagement that puts us today to shame. Second, most of that engagement was fundamentally and explicitly Christian (much of it evangelical). And third, it was the state’s slow assimilation of these activities that was responsible for Christianity’s decline in the 20^th century. ‘What was the point of worshipping in Westminster Abbey,’ he asks, ‘when Jesus, now a socialist, had departed for Whitehall?’

Prochaska focuses on four key areas – schooling, visiting, mothering and nursing – and shows how much Christians did to alleviate the pain of industrialisation and how biblical their motivations were. Ultimately their efforts proved insufficient and the state took on the responsibilities, initially in a haphazard and piecemeal way, and then, after the Second World War, comprehensively. The effect was to disestablish the church ‘in practice’.

Prochaska is alert to the modern resonance his book has, although he doesn’t pursue it. As we witness the long, slow, withdrawal of state welfare provision, we are increasingly aware of our need for and lack of civic engagement. Few suggest that the Victorian model provides the answer: if it couldn’t deliver the goods then, it won’t today. However, if, as seems likely, social service provision in Britain in the 21^st century will have more in common with that of the 19^th than the 20^th we would do well to study and imitate the example of our Christian forbears.

Christianity and Social Service in Modern Britain: The Disinherited Spirit by Frank Prochaska is published by Oxford University Press (2006)

This review first appeared in Third Way.