Eric Tenbus's book is the most extensive discussion and analysis of the English Roman Catholic Church's activities with respect to primary (i.e., working-class) education. The work rests on research in appropriate archives: the Roman Catholic dioceses of Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, Nottingham, Salford, and Westminster; religious orders; the important politicians Richard Cross, W. E. Gladstone, and the Marquess of Ripon; and several primary school log books. The one major omission is that of the Education Department records (especially the school inspectors' reports) at the National Archives and in the printed annual reports. The author's bibliography of secondary accounts demonstrates his firm command of recent research on Roman Catholic history; however, he is not quite on top of research in the history of primary education and in the administrative history of the Education Department.

The book is organized chronologically. The first three chapters lay out the situation of English Roman Catholicism with respect to education at midcentury: the major divisions within the church (Old Catholics, Oxford converts, and working-class Irish), the official educational ideology (religious indoctrination as the chief goal of primary teaching), the realities of church education (lack of physical plant, textbooks, well-trained teachers, and parental commitment), and the obstacles faced by Roman Catholic educationists (the church's inability to support sectarian schools and teacher training and to offer competitive salaries, from internal funding alone, and the inability or unwillingness of parents to send their children to school and to pay school-pence). Chapters 4 through 7 discuss “Roman Catholics and the Politics of Education” during the twenty-three years after the church's first receipt of public funds, its position during the passage of the Education Act of 1870, its struggle for a larger share of public funding from 1870 to the inconclusive report of the Cross Commission, and the final run-up to the Balfour Education Act of 1902. The final chapter sums up the church's continued opposition to anything that threatened or seemed to threaten the independence of its schools, while simultaneously demanding what it considered to be its fair share of state funding.

Tenbus's foundational thesis is that education was the one issue that both brought together the Old Catholics, the Oxford converts, and the working-class Irish and pitted the church against the British state. Hence, he challenges the interpretation advanced by Mary Heimann, that the development of common devotional practices provided the point of unity within the Roman Catholic community. Instead, he asserts that it was “the increasingly assertive and self-confident, some might even say aggressive, position on education that dominated the writings and agendas of the hierarchy and the Catholic press in the last half of the century” (8) that was the prime mover in creating a unified Roman Catholic identity. A complementary thesis is that conflict between the church and the government was caused by their fundamentally different views on the nature of education. The former believed that education must mold character, inculcate obedience to authority, and teach sectarian doctrine, while secularism influenced the latter from midcentury. Tenbus thus frames the story as a conflict between the church's desire for equal treatment and the state's commitment to secularism.

Tenbus's first thesis is well argued; he makes a good case. However, it must be observed that, although the views of the hierarchy and the Roman Catholic press are well explicated, the question of the extent to which the majority of the laity imbibed those views is assumed, rather than demonstrated. A more intensive study of education from the bottom up might have contributed to this book, which is primarily an analysis of high politics. It also must be observed that the Roman Catholic philosophy of education is not as uniquely Roman Catholic as Tenbus asserts: “There was nothing that so identified a purely Catholic education as the teaching of the catechism and the performance of daily devotions…. These actions were uniquely Catholic” (28–29). These identifiers also describe the Anglican hierarchy's vision for Church of England schools. Further, Anglican educationists would have agreed with their Roman Catholic counterparts that the purposes of education were to build character, teach obedience to authority, and inculcate distinct religious doctrines. His complementary thesis is somewhat more problematical. He exaggerates the degree to which secularism influenced the state; rather, the state faced the dilemma of how to expand basic educational opportunities, teach obedience to authority, and ensure that public funds were spent wisely. He also overemphasizes the ideological elements and de-emphasizes the fiscal elements in the conflict between the Roman Catholic Church and the state.

Despite these caveats, I welcome Tenbus's book as a much-needed and well-executed comprehensive study of Roman Catholic primary education, both internally as a religious issue and externally as a political-administrative issue.