Robert M. Ryan's Charles Darwin and the Church of Wordsworth is a valuable contribution to the field of Wordsworth reception studies. Building upon Stephen Gill's Wordsworth and the Victorians (1998), particularly its first chapter, “England's Samuel: Wordsworth as Spiritual Power,” Ryan generously demonstrates Wordsworth's importance in the last eight decades of the nineteenth century as a spiritual guide, sage, priest, and prophet, praised alike by agnostics and Christian believers. Ryan's further goal is “to account for a phenomenon that Gill had trouble explaining—Wordsworth's increasing popularity in the decades after his death” in 1850 (10). Ryan argues that Wordsworth's poetic vision of nature as morally uplifting and spiritually infused “offered a readily available and intellectually respectable counterweight to Darwin's vision of a material universe evolving by fixed laws in which divinity played no discernible role” (11). Wordsworth allowed Victorian and early twentieth-century readers to see nature as a “church,” a metaphor Ryan borrows from Thomas Huxley's claim, in his essay “Wordsworth in the Tropics” (1929), that “For good Wordsworthians … a walk in the country is the equivalent of going to church, a tour through Westmoreland is as good as a pilgrimage to Jerusalem” (1). But nature, for Huxley, is actually “often hostile and sinister; sometimes even unimaginably, because inhumanly, evil” (1). A visit to a tropic jungle, Huxley concluded, would shatter Wordsworthian illusions about nature, and, implicitly, vindicate The Origin of Species (1859), with its views of the struggle for existence and natural selection.

Yet Darwin is the red herring of Ryan's book, which might have been titled, more simply, “The Church of Wordsworth.” Darwin's writings and influence receive relatively little attention, and apart from Huxley, Ryan mentions only only two Victorian commentators on Wordsworth (from 1878 and 1898, respectively) who pair the poet's vision of nature with Darwin's (4, 74–75). Wordsworth's initial surge in popularity dates to the 1820s and ’30s, and many of the lost voices that Ryan uncovers antedate Darwin's writings by decades. Indeed, when in his fourth chapter, “Love of Nature leading to Love of Man,” Ryan considers Wordsworth's social gospel—the dignity of the common person, and poverty's entitlement to relief—his counterpoint is rightly between Wordsworth and Thomas Malthus (whose Essay on Population appeared in 1798), not Wordsworth and Darwin. Thus we must take with a grain of salt Ryan's thesis that Wordsworth's increasing popularity is as due to Darwin and his followers. Certainly, Wordsworth's rise as a spiritual power figures into larger stories about the rise of the earth sciences, the differentiation of religious and secular spheres, and—to mention a once-standard narrative about the nineteenth century—the progressive secularization of western European culture. At best, “Darwin” serves as shorthand for these things.

Ryan's account of Wordsworth's cultural importance is on firm ground when, in chapters 1 and 2, he contrasts the watchmaker God of William Paley's Natural Theology (1802) with Wordsworth's immanent God or, to quote the title of chapter 2, “A Vast All-Pervading Life.” Ryan shows the extensive use authors made use of Wordsworth's central lines from “Tintern Abbey” about “A sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused” (39). Moreover, Ryan justifiably observes that Wordsworth comforted those made uneasy by evolutionary models of how the present natural order came about by stressing the permanence of nature: “He writes of ‘the eternal hills,’ ‘eternal snows,’ and of the sea's ‘eternal motion’” (64). Most impressive in Ryan's second chapter is the recovered range of Christian writers who championed Wordsworth, from the better known—John Keble in the 1820s and ’30s—to the (to me) completely unknown, such as the Reverend Richard St. John Tyrwhitt. In his survey of lost ecclesiastical voices, Ryan contributes signally to the extant literature on Wordsworth's Victorian reception, even if he does not display a full command of that literature (among omitted items is my own article, “Wordsworth, Henry Reed, and Bishop Doane: High-Church Romanticism on the Delaware,” in Wordsworth in American Literary Culture, ed. Joel Pace and Matthew Scott [2005], 101–20, and other relevant scholarship might be mentioned).

While advancing the scholarship on Wordsworth's Christian audiences, Ryan is less original in his discussion, in chapters 3 and 5, of Wordsworth's appeal to agnostics, including Leslie Stephen, Matthew Arnold, and John Stuart Mill. Because Wordsworth's vision of nature, Ryan argues, “was only analogous to the supernatural, it did not require any theological commitment from readers. It could survive the abandonment of belief in the supernatural by the skeptic, the agnostic, and the indifferent” (177). This is the argument of M. H. Abrams's monumental study Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (1971), which is strangely absent from Ryan's discussion. In an earlier book, The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature, 1789-1824 (1997), Ryan was critical of Abrams's story of progressive secularization; in Charles Darwin and the Church of Nature, two of Ryan's five chapters partially reproduce it.

Whatever its minor faults, Ryan's new book is, finally, a joy, because the Victorian response to Wordsworth is enlivening. Wordsworth's Victorian readers repeatedly testify to the power and the pleasure that poetry can impart, and that Wordsworth has imparted to so many of us. Ryan feels evident kinship with the responses of Church of England clergyman John Campbell Shairp, whom he quotes often and to whom he gives his book's last words. Among them are these, from 1868, on Wordsworth's stature: “To be a revealer of things hidden, the sanctifier of things common … in the moral world, to be the teacher of truths hitherto neglected or unobserved, the awakener of men's hearts to the solemnities that encompass them … this is the office which he will not cease to fulfill, as long as the English language lasts” (186).