Religion and Irreligion in Victorian Society

Essays in Honor of R.K. Webb

R. W. Davis, R. J. Helmstadter, R. W. Davis, R. J. Helmstadter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135087555
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1992.This volume of eleven specially commissioned essays celebrates the work of Robert K. Webb, one of the foremost historians of modern Britain. The contributors, established scholars from Britain, Canada, Australia and the United States, address some of the central themes in the history of nineteenth-century religion, including evangelicalism and the culture of the market economy, religious issues in the liberal politics of the 1830s, the radical atheist Robert Taylor, Charles Darwin, the Victorian ideal of `manliness', nineteenth century images of Mary Magdalene, the Jews in Victorian society, colonialism, the role of women missionaries as models of female achievement, and spiritualism during the Great War. Together these essays make a significant contribution to the study of the role of religion in Victorian society.

Chapter 1

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The Reverend Andrew Reed (1787–1862): evangelical pastor as entrepreneur

R. J. Helmstadter

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With England at war with Napoleonic France and the Industrial Revolution transforming society at home, James Sedgwick, the Tory barrister, thought that changes in the religious world partook of revolution as well. The evangelical revival, he wrote in 1808, was weakening the bonds of civil order. Religious Dissent was undermining respect for the social hierarchy. Dissenting ministers were “blockheads, tainted with the mania of preaching, [who] turn religion into a trade.”¹ Sedgwick’s opinion has ambiguous validity, but his language is suggestive.

In every historical period, the great dominating events of the time give rise to a descriptive and analytical language. The international democratic movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries encouraged the creation of a vocabulary and a set of ideas through which political aspirations and changes of unprecedented structure and form could be discussed and understood. With time, the leading metaphors within the discourse of democracy and revolution have been used by students of the period whose focus is on areas of life that are not overtly political. Economic historians have drawn on the language of politics in their effort to comprehend those interrelated social and technological changes that we now call the Industrial Revolution. Over the last one hundred years, the Industrial Revolution itself has come to be considered by historians as a phenomenon of primary influence and importance. Analyses of economic growth have stimulated productive intellectual debate, and the central metaphors and leading concepts of economic history have become familiar to all students of industrial society. The boundaries between economic life, politics, religion, and other forms of social behavior have become blurred, as Harold Perkin has demonstrated in The Origins of Modern English Society (London, 1969), where he makes a compelling case for considering the English Industrial Revolution as the product of a wide variety of elements in eighteenth-century English society. Perkin, however, in common with other scholars since the days of Max Weber, has conceived the connection between religion and the rise of capitalism in terms of the influence of religion on economic ideas and activity. This is also the case even with the most recent scholarship. Drawing on assumptions about cultural unity quite similar to Perkin’s, Boyd Hilton has elaborated in The Age of Atonement (London, 1988) a considerable structure of connections between evangelical religious ideas and the ideas of economists and politicians who made economic policy in the first half of the nineteenth century. Hilton, like his predecessors, assumes that religion is prior to economics and more fundamental. For him the direction of influence is from religion to economics.

In this essay I wish to suggest that it might be productive to revise the scholarly pattern and use some of the metaphors and idea clusters that have arisen through investigation of the Industrial Revolution in order to further our understanding of the great evangelical revival of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. More specifically and in more detail, I will try to show that the revival, like the industrial expansion of the same time, created opportunities for ambitious young men and that the successful ecclesiastical career of the Reverend Andrew Reed can fruitfully be seen as a case study in entrepreneurship. The argument is not that business methods influenced religious attitudes, though such might indeed be the case, but, rather, that the evangelical revival and the Industrial Revolution developed within the same cultural context and that their shared characteristics can be studied in similar terms. Andrew Reed is not approached so much as a businessman in the Congregational ministry, though he sometimes fits that picture, but, rather, as an ambitious nonconformist clergyman whose assumptions, goals and habits of mind are similar in many ways to those we have come to recognize in the entrepreneurs of the business world of the same period.

The revival of religion, roughly coterminous with the era of constitutional and industrial revolutions, is another element in the history of the period that is a contender for overarching importance. Thus far, however, very few studies of the revival have gone far toward integrating our understanding of evangelicalism into the mainstream history of the period. Elie Halévy, whose genius and insight seem to glow more brightly with the passage of time, made a serious effort at integration in part III of England in 1815 (London, 1924; published first in French: Paris, 1913). In what has come to be called the Halévy thesis, he argued that the evangelical revival, particularly the growth of Methodism, was the most important explanation for why there was no violent political revolution in England akin to that experienced in France. In a splenetic variation on this theme, Edward Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963), pours vitriol on the spiritual terrorism and sexual repressiveness of a Methodism that, he contends, helped make wage slaves of freeborn Englishmen. Bernard Semmel makes a full-scale attempt to show that the religious revival shared many of the aspirations of the democratic movement, and that it was part of the same general cultural current, in his important study of The Methodist Revolution (New York, 1973). Semmel’s work, which draws heavily on the rich pamphlet literature of the revival in the late eighteenth century, reveals a Methodism abounding in ideas of liberty and equality despite the conservatism of its official face. W. R. Ward’s Religion and Society in England 1790–1850 (London, 1973) comes closer to a view of the revival as an integral part of the general history of its time. Ward locates the revival in its social and political context, and he proceeds to argue that the expansive, unified evangelicalism of the end of the eighteenth century was fractured into defensive denominational factions by the pressure of the politics of social class.

While it is not a theme that he pursues with any insistence, Ward’s treatment of the revival suggests at times that it shared some features with industrialization. Just as new industrial centers were developed to escape the conservatism of the old, Ward points out that the revival had its greatest successes in those areas where the church was weakest in what he calls “plant and manpower.” He is keenly sensitive, moreover, to the fundamental importance of the growth of population as a stimulus to evangelical activity. There is a clear parallel here with the growth of the domestic market that helped fire the ambitions of the industrial entrepreneurs. The foreign market, too, played a major role in the development of evangelicalism, just as it did for the cotton magnates, and almost at precisely the same time. The great missionary societies established in the 1790s had visions of converting the world, with a concentration on Africa and Asia. Manchester had visions of clothing the world, and its marketing campaign looked toward the apparently limitless populations of Africa and Asia. One might suggest that the revival is similar to the Industrial Revolution in that mass marketing was an essential feature. In each case, moreover, supplying the mass market required new methods that broke to some extent with the traditions of the past. The technological innovations of the textile industry have a parallel in the two fundamental innovations of the revival, field preaching and itinerancy. Preaching outside established churches or chapels, often in the open air, enabled John Wesley and George Whitefield and the other early innovators to reach a new and expanding market. So did itinerancy, a technique adopted and systematized by a number of evangelizing organizations in order to save more souls with less cost. Most itinerant preachers were in effect low paid traveling salesmen who could reach some areas of the market more efficiently than did their stationary brethren in their relatively expensive establishments. Improved means of transportation, so important to the material economy, helped move along the spiritual economy as well. The utilitarian pattern of thought embodied in these innovations and in countless others — one thinks for example of the monitorial system that made mass education cheap and therefore possible — is a pattern that marked the progressive areas of British life during this modernizing period. That is why “useful” became a term of commendation applicable to many different sorts of efforts and achievements. In the first half of the nineteenth century “useful” was one of the key words of praise in the evangelical movement. For evangelicals, “useful” always related, at the bottom line, to “usefulness” in saving souls.

The major organizations of the evangelical movement, the great national nondenominational societies — the London Missionary Society, the Religious Tract Society, the British and Foreign Bible Society, — the multitude of local and county evangelizing societies, as well as many denominational organizations, were created primarily to be useful; only secondarily did they embody theological ideals. They were conceived as pragmatically as was the Manchester Chamber of Commerce. All of these organizations operated in ways their members thought utilitarian, and some of them operated very much like business firms. It is not surprising that the production techniques and marketing strategies of contemporary businessmen were sometimes useful to evangelicals in furthering their spiritual cause. The British and Foreign Bible Society, for example, whose mission was to distribute Bibles “without note or comment” as widely and as cheaply as possible, attempted at times to calm its own internal denominational factionalism by the argument that it was more a business institution than a religious organization. One of the directors, John Owen, claimed that

The line of business is, with few exceptions, as direct at the Bible Committee as it is at Lloyds; and there is little reason to expect the peculiar tenets of Calvin or Socinus to enter into a debate for dispersing an edition of the Scripture, as there would be if the same men met to underwrite a policy of insurance.²

Like the Bible Society, the Religious Tract Society mass-marketed spiritually improving literature to an enormous audience. Now the Lutterworth Press, the Religious Tract Society had become by the middle of the nineteenth century a great publishing house with a list of 4,363 titles, some with massive circulations.³

Andrew Reed was not a clergyman in business, like the Reverend Legh Richmond, author of The Dairyman’s Daughter, who became in 1812 secretary of the Religious Tract Society. Nor was he a businessman in religion, like his son, Sir Charles, who earned his living through his printing and type-founding businesses and spent his time lavishly on the Sunday School Union, the London Missionary Society, and other religious causes. When Mr Alderman Abbiss remarked, toward the end of Reed’s life, “I have been associated with many men, and have sat on many committees; but, I say it honestly, I have never met a man of such business capacity as Dr Reed,” he referred to qualities of mind and temperament that might have made for success in any of a variety of callings.⁴ His sons write that

though specially trained to the work of the ministry, Dr Reed has been said to have been the model of a business-man. Decisive in all his acts, punctual to all engagements, and methodical in the conduct of his many great enterprises, he performed with comparative ease, as those who knew him best are well aware, a daily pressure of work wonderful to contemplate.⁵

Andrew Reed’s calling was emphatically the nonconformist ministry, and his career centered on his own chapel in east London and on the five important philanthropies he created. And yet, in some ways, the results of his career for himself and his family were very similar to the results of a successful career in business. Samuel Courtauld in silk, Samuel Greg in cotton, Edward Baines in newspapers, George Stephenson in railways, Daniel Macmillan in publishing — the list could be extended to great length — each laid the base of fortune that enabled his family to leap ahead in prestige and status and move up onto a social plane that offered an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Reverend Andrew Reed (1787–1862): evangelical pastor as entrepreneur
• 2 The Whigs and religious issues, 1830–5
• 3 Popular irreligion in early Victorian England: infidel preachers and radical theatricality in 1830s London
• 4 Between Genesis and geology: Darwin and some contemporaries in the 1820s and 1830s
• 5 Cultural pluralism and the Board of Deputies of British Jews
• 6 The manliness of Christ
• 7 “More sweet and liquid than any other“: Victorian images of Mary Magdalene
• 8 History and religion: J. R. Seeley and the burden of the past
• 9 Christianity and the state in Victorian India: confrontation and collaboration
• 10 Independent English women in Delhi and Lahore, 1860–1947
• 11 Spiritualism and the First World War
• Index