About The Prospective Review

The Prospective Review

The Prospective Review was a British quarterly journal of theology and literature, published in London by John Chapman from 1845. Its full title was The Prospective Review: A Quarterly Journal of Theology and Literature. It was a Unitarian review, edited by a circle that included John James Tayler, Charles Wicksteed and James Martineau, and it provided a platform for advanced theological discussion outside the established church. Bibliographic listings date its run from 1845 to 1855, while the Dictionary of National Biography dates Tayler's editorship from 1845 to 1854, a difference that reflects the journal's final phase rather than a disagreement about its identity. It is best remembered for James Martineau's 1851 review of his sister Harriet Martineau's book on human development, one of the most notorious family disputes of the Victorian crisis of faith.

A New Name for the Christian Teacher

The Prospective Review did not begin from nothing. Bibliographic descriptions of its first volume note that Prospective Review was the new name for the Christian Teacher, an earlier Unitarian periodical. The continuity was visible in the journal's own numbering: when Tayler published a long article in the issue of July 1848, it appeared in volume 4 of the Prospective Review, which was also counted as volume 10 in the Christian Teacher sequence. The quarterly therefore inherited a readership, a set of contributors and a denominational position from its predecessor, while presenting itself, under its new title and its London publisher, as a fresh and more ambitious quarterly of theology and literature.

Its publisher was John Chapman of London, who issued the first volume in 1845: that volume alone ran to 652 pages. Chapman was the publisher of much of the advanced thought of the period, and his list in the same years included Tayler's own book A Retrospect of the Religious Life of England, published by Chapman in 1845. Chapman later acquired the Westminster Review and employed Mary Ann Evans, the future George Eliot, as its assistant editor. In 1851 he published the book at the centre of the Prospective Review's most famous controversy, the Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature and Development by Henry George Atkinson and Harriet Martineau. The Prospective Review stood, in other words, at the centre of the radical London publishing network of the 1840s and 1850s.

The Unitarian Quarterly and Its Purpose

The journal's subtitle announced its territory: theology and literature. In the 1840s theology was not a specialist sideline but a central public question, debated in quarterly reviews read by clergy, politicians and educated laypeople across the denominations. The great quarterlies, the Edinburgh Review, the Quarterly Review and their rivals, mixed politics, literature and religion in long unsigned articles, and denominational groups maintained their own organs to argue their case. The Prospective Review was the vehicle of a particular circle within English Unitarianism: scholarly, historically minded and open to the new German biblical criticism that was reshaping theology on the Continent.

English Unitarians were heirs of rational dissent. They rejected the doctrine of the Trinity, placed weight on reason and historical inquiry in religion, and sustained a network of chapels, academies and periodicals out of proportion to their numbers. Their earlier journals included the Monthly Repository, in which Harriet Martineau had begun her writing career in 1821. The Prospective Review continued that tradition at quarterly length, giving its contributors room for essays of thirty or forty pages in which a book could be examined in depth and a theological position argued at leisure.

The Editors: Tayler, Wicksteed and Martineau

The Dictionary of National Biography records that John James Tayler was one of the editors of the Prospective Review from 1845 to 1854, and that some of his best work was contributed to it. Tayler was a Unitarian minister and scholar who became principal of Manchester New College, the Unitarian theological college, when it transferred to London in 1853, having taken its chair of ecclesiastical history and a theological professorship before that. James Martineau, his colleague, described him as the English Schleiermacher, with less speculative skill and a less fanciful critical judgement, and praised the beauty and gentleness of his spirit. Tayler's editorship gave the quarterly the character of the new Unitarian scholarship: devout, learned and historically critical.

James Martineau himself served the journal as both editor and contributor. His biographical record lists the periodicals he addressed the public through in these years: the Monthly Repository, the Christian Reformer, the Prospective Review, the Westminster Review and later the National Review. Martineau became the leading Unitarian thinker of the Victorian age, a philosopher of religion whose work on ethics and the philosophy of religion filled his later books. In the Prospective Review of the 1840s and 1850s he was already a formidable reviewer, engaging with German philosophy and criticism, including the work of Ferdinand Christian Baur and the Tübingen school, which affected his own construction of Christian history. The third name in the editorial circle given in standard descriptions of the journal, Charles Wicksteed, was a Unitarian minister of the same scholarly generation. Together the editors made the quarterly the organ of what might be called the new Unitarianism: critical of inherited dogma, but insistent on the religious life.

Contents: Theology, Literature and Social Theory

The journal's articles ranged across its stated fields. An early example, cited in modern scholarship on Unitarian philanthropy, is the article Religion in the Age of Great Cities, published in the first volume of the Prospective Review in 1845, which addressed the religious condition of the growing industrial cities. The subject connected theology to the social mission of the Unitarian chapels, including the domestic missions to the urban poor in cities such as Manchester, whose reports had appeared in the Christian Teacher, the journal's predecessor.

Tayler's own most substantial known contribution shows the journal's intellectual reach. His article Socialist and Communist Theories, published in July 1848, ran from page 351 to page 390 of the fourth volume. It reviewed works by the German and French theorists Lorenz von Stein, Karl Grün, Victor Prosper Considerant, Charles Fourier, Hippolyte Renaud and Louis Blanc, together with the English Redemption Society. In the year of revolutions across Europe, the Prospective Review was introducing its theological readership to the systematic socialist thought of the Continent and assessing it in a long, serious review article. The piece illustrates the quarterly form at its most characteristic: part book review, part essay, and a channel through which Continental ideas entered British debate.

Mesmeric Atheism: The Martineau Family Quarrel of 1851

The journal's most famous article appeared in 1851. In that year John Chapman published the Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature and Development, the correspondence between Henry George Atkinson and Harriet Martineau on mesmerism, phrenology and the philosophy of human development. The book caused immediate incomprehension and blame among many of Harriet Martineau's close connections, because its argument appeared to dissolve religious belief into natural necessity. James Martineau answered it in the Prospective Review, in volume 26, in a review running from page 224 to page 262, under the unmistakable title Mesmeric Atheism.

The review was a severe public rebuke of his own sister's book, charging its arguments with self-contradiction and illogic. It was published anonymously, as quarterly articles then were, but Harriet eventually learned who its author was. The result was a celebrated family feud, spoken of as one of the most dramatic episodes of the Victorian crisis of faith. The secularist George Holyoake criticised the brutality of the review's terms, and Matthew Arnold spoke privately of the hatreds between James and Harriet. Harriet responded by preparing her self-defence in autobiographical writings intended for posthumous publication. The episode fixed the Prospective Review in literary history: a denominational quarterly had become the arena in which the most famous brother and sister in English Unitarianism publicly divided over the foundations of belief.

The Journal Among the Quarterlies

The Prospective Review belonged to a crowded field. Standard lists of nineteenth-century British periodicals place its first appearance in 1845 alongside another new quarterly founded in the same year, The British Quarterly Review, the organ of leading Nonconformists. The comparison is instructive. The older dissenting denominations and the Unitarians alike used the quarterly review to claim intellectual standing in national culture, reviewing theology, philosophy, history and literature on equal terms with the Anglican and secular quarterlies. The Prospective Review's contributors, drawn from the Manchester and London Unitarian colleges and chapels, wrote for that national audience, not merely for their own congregations.

Its articles were unsigned in the quarterly tradition, and many have been attributed to their authors only through later biographical work, such as the list of Tayler's periodical writings published with his letters and life in 1872, which recorded 102 publications. That anonymity, and the journal's small circulation by modern standards, mean that its influence is traced through the careers of its circle: through Martineau's later eminence, through Tayler's college and his books, and through the controversies, above all that of 1851, in which its pages played a part.

The Final Years: 1854 or 1855?

The journal's ending is dated differently in different records, and the discrepancy should be reported rather than concealed. The Dictionary of National Biography, in its life of Tayler, dates his editorship of the Prospective Review from 1845 to 1854. Standard periodical lists, by contrast, give the journal's run as 1845 to 1855. The two statements are compatible with a journal whose last volume was completed or dated in 1855 after the editorial arrangement recorded by the Dictionary had ended in 1854. For a directory entry, the run is best given as 1845 to 1855, with the understanding that its principal editor's tenure ended the year before.

In 1855 a new quarterly, the National Review, was founded, edited jointly by Walter Bagehot and Richard Holt Hutton. It became one of the most prestigious quarterlies of the mid-century and later published an early review of Darwin's Origin of Species. James Martineau became a contributor to it, as he had been to the Prospective. The founding of the National Review in the year the Prospective Review ended marks the passing of serious theological and literary reviewing from a denominational organ to a broader platform, and the Prospective Review is accordingly described as succeeded by it in 1855.

Legacy and Survival

The Prospective Review survives in the bound volumes held by research libraries and in the digital collections, such as HathiTrust, that preserve nineteenth-century British periodicals, and its volumes have been reprinted in modern facsimile editions for the antiquarian and library market. Its historical importance is out of proportion to its ten-year life. It documented the moment when English Unitarianism, under editors such as Tayler and Martineau, engaged seriously with German criticism, French social theory and the new sciences of mind, and it tested the limits of that engagement in the painful public quarrel of 1851.

For the history of the periodical press, it is a representative denominational quarterly of the 1840s: anonymous, learned, published by a radical London bookseller, and sustained by a small circle of minister-scholars who wrote some of their best work for it. For the history of Victorian religion, it is one of the places where the crisis of faith was actually fought out, in long reviews and careful arguments, before the better-known controversies over evolution and biblical criticism later in the century. That dual significance earns this short-lived journal its place in any directory of British magazines.