Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England
eBook - ePub

Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England

Kenneth Inglis

Share book
  1. 368 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England

Kenneth Inglis

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

First published in 2006. A listener to sermons, and even a reader of respectable history books, could easily think that during the nineteenth century the habit of attending religious worship was normal among the English working classes.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England by Kenneth Inglis in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Geschichte & Weltgeschichte. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2013
ISBN
9781134528943
Edition
1

1

The Church of England

Parish, Diocese and Nation
BETWEEN 1850 and 1900 there were people in the Church of England, including some of its leaders, who cared as little about the spiritual condition of the masses as the masses were supposed to care about religion. To them the first task was defending the establishment, meeting the intellectual challenge of secular thought, or taking a side in the struggle over ritual. Nevertheless, the Church’s relationship with the working classes was one of a few issues which Churchmen in general believed to be crucial. When clergymen addressed or talked about working-class people in this period, they normally sounded unlike those of their fathers who had scolded the poor for neglecting public worship, blamed them for their poverty, and ordered them to obey their spiritual masters.56 Clergymen were now more inclined to offer hand-shakes and smiles. Charles Kingsley and F. D. Maurice were men of influence who spoke in the new tone of voice; but it could be heard also in a sermon preached in 1858 by John Keble, the least socially-conscious of the Tractarians, on the subject: ‘The rich and the poor one in Christ.’ It was audible at a conference attended by Churchmen and Nonconformists on ‘Working Men and Religious Institutions’ in 1867, when the Dean of Westminster, A. P. Stanley, invited working men to suggest how services in the Abbey might be made ‘more available and more useful for them.’57 The friendly and diplomatic approach was expressed in the custom, begun in 1866, of holding at the annual Church Congress – an institution whose purpose was ‘to assist in forming and also in partially expressing the public opinion of the Church on the current Church questions of the day’58 – a special meeting for working men. The meetings were begun by the Archbishop of York, William Thomson, who admitted to having a skilful way with a working-class audience. In 1878, addressing the working-men’s meeting at the Church Congress in Sheffield, Thomson said expansively that at first the clergy had not hit quite the right note in these meetings.
We began by saying, You are a working man and I am a working man, and now we have come to you as one working man to another. But I am afraid the working man saw through that. He saw a distinction between the position of a bishop and the position of a man who works day by day for his daily wages. . . . We are not working men addressing working men. . . . We have a stronger bond yet than that of being working men together. We are immortal souls together. . . .
Thomson went on, amidst Hear-Hears, to say that the future of England lay with the working man.59 The archbishop agreed that this remark might sound like flattery. He was, however, in earnest. ‘I see very clearly,’ Thomson said once, ‘that the Church of England must either come into closer contact with the working classes of the country, or else her national position will suffer, and her leading position perhaps be ultimately lost.’60 This was one powerful reason for the changing tone of Churchmen towards the working classes, and it is significant that it can be seen at work in minds as different as those of this Archbishop of York and F. D. Maurice. It was a translation into ecclesiastical terms of the anxiety and the hope which led Disraeli to take his leap in the dark.
In the Church as in the nation, discussion of the working classes became more intense and more widespread during the last two decades of the century. In his opening address to the Church Congress of 1880 the Bishop of Peterborough, William Magee, described the religious condition of the masses as the ‘one great Church question of our time, before which all others fade into insignificance.’61 The Convocations of Canterbury and York each appointed a committee in 1883 ‘on the spiritual needs of the masses of the people’, one bishop calling the subject ‘perhaps the most pressing of the day.’62 Concern about the working classes was now expressed at all levels of the Church, from the Convocations down to a journal produced by discontented curates which observed in 1882: ‘there are large classes of the community which the Church does not attract or reach,’ the writer concluded that she must ‘untie her red-tape and unstarch her surplices.’63 It was expressed in all parties, from the Evangelicals of the Church Pastoral Aid Society to the ritualists in the slums. The Year-Book of the Church of England, a publication which could commit itself to opinions only when they were outside controversy, said in its first issue (1883):
the Church of England has but one plain and solemn duty which God seems to set so clearly before her now as the Church of the nation – namely, to multiply every force at her command, and by methods and with teaching of the simplest possible kind to go in and out among the masses lifting up the Cross of Christ as God’s message of mercy to the world.64
This notion that it was the peculiar responsibility of the Church of England, as ‘the Church of the Nation’, to bring the masses to worship, had long been a popular one in sermons and pamphlets. Horace Mann expressed it in his report on the religious census of 1851. ‘Without doubt’, he wrote:
the destitute condition of this vast proportion of our countrymen appeals to the benevolence of Christians indiscriminately; but the claim for sympathy is preferred with special force upon the Church of England, to whose care the spiritual welfare of these myriads is peculiarly entrusted, and whose labours for their benefit need not be limited by any courteous fear of trespassing on ground already occupied by other Christian agents.65
It was often said that this responsibility was formally expressed in the parochial principle, for the vicar was held to be charged with the care not only of his worshipping congregation, but of everybody in the parish. The Church, said one of George Eliot’s clergymen, ‘ought to represent the feeling of the community, so that every parish should be a family knit together by Christian brotherhood under a spiritual father.’66 Most clergymen, of course, had to share their territory with other aspirants to spiritual fatherhood; many resented the competition, and some (especially in villages) let it divert them from the task of seeking those people who worshipped nowhere. The fiction that no rival pastor existed nevertheless had a high symbolic importance in the Church of England. The parochial principle was dear to Churchmen both because it gave the clergy a special position in relation to other ministers, and because it represented the Church as a living part of the whole community, having a mission at once spiritual and social.
The ideal community of parochial theory belonged to a rural, pre-industrial England. The urban Englishman today still dreams of the country; and three generations ago, when millions were alive who had known a time when most people lived outside large towns, memory as well as imagination fed this nostalgia. Nowhere was it stronger in the Church, and nowhere indulged with better reason. For in a stable, hierarchical, rural community, the parish church had an importance which it seldom gained in towns. The Church Pastoral Aid Society, which described its task as ‘the maintenance of Curates and Lay-Agents in populous districts,’ had on the front page of its monthly journal, Church and People, a sketch of a medieval church in a tiny village. Its unspoken aim was to reproduce in an urban environment the relationship between church and society which its members believed to have been characteristic of an earlier and happier England.
The difficulty of accommodating the parochial machinery o the Church to the new society was enormous. The parish had evolved in communities which were small and socially heterogeneous. It had now to be adapted to areas in which not only was the population dense, and getting denser, but – as one Churchman put it – all who made jam lived in one place, and all who ate jam lived in another. ‘The parochial system’, observed Lord Shaftesbury in 1855, ‘is, no doubt, a beautiful thing in theory, and is of great value in small rural districts; but in the large towns it is a mere shadow and a name.’67 The Bishop of Manchester, James Fraser, whose office forced him to reflect as seriously as anybody about the problem of organizing the Church in a great city, said to his clergy in 1872:
The parochial system, as ordinarily conceived, admirably efficient in rural parishes and among limited populations, where the pastor knows and is known by every one committed to his charge, breaks down in face of that huge mass of ignorance, poverty, and wretchedness by which it is so often confronted in the thickly peopled areas of our manufacturing towns.68
It was Fraser’s generation which first used the word ‘parochial’ as a pejorative term. Yet few concluded that in an industrial society the Church should set aside the parochial structure, however nobly it had served in different circumstances, and should find more appropriate methods of organizing its energies. To those who loved her, a church without the parochial system would be no Church of England. They were proud that, unlike the Nonconformist chapel, the parish church belonged to its community at large. A greatly respected clergyman remarked at the Church Congress in 1881 that if the parochial system were destroyed in large towns, ‘we at once become Congregationalists.’69 In urban areas where churches of every denomination appeared to serve their own regular worshippers rather than the surrounding population, the difference between the two systems was already small enough; ‘by sensible stages,’ said another clergyman, ‘there has been in many towns a substitution of the congregational system for the parochial system.’70 But the instinct of every good Churchman was to resist this tendency. ‘Congregationalism is of foreign growth,’ said the Church Reformer in 1882, ‘and quite out of harmony with the mind of our Church.’71 It was often asserted in the Church that a congregational system could never reach the masses. But could the parochial system reach them either?
When they discussed the place of parochial organization in large towns, Churchmen usually expressed both respect for the system and dissatisfaction with it. Walsham How, who was trying to bring the Church to life in East London, told a meeting at the Mansion House in 1880 that Churchmen ‘could not set the parochial system aside if they would, and they would not do so if they could. (Hear, hear.) Their plan was to supplement it.’72 This view was expressed plainly by a committee of the Canterbury Convocation on reaching classes of non-worshippers. The committee said in 1889:
while the Parochial System offers a priceless organization for the work of the Church Pastoral and the Church Beneficent, it is inadequate for the purposes of the Church Militant and Evangelistic, among populations comprising multitudes who are but little accessible to ordinary agencies, and are constantly sinking into more complete indifference to their religious privileges.73
If and when the Church subdued these multitudes, agencies designed for her emergency could be allowed to wither away, leaving only the normal, parochial structure. In the meantime, the parish was to be merely a loose framework within which abnormal enterprises were conducted on behalf of the Church Militant. Which enterprises would best supplement the parochial system, and what their relation to the system should be, were among the main preoccupations of people in the Church who wanted to reach the millions who attended no place of worship.
Nobody imagined that parochial organization was proving inadequate in all urban areas. There were parishes in the poor parts of large towns where churches had hundreds of communicants, schools and clubs thrived, voluntary district visitors canvassed the neighbourhood, and dependent mission churches were maintained. It is likely that in the cities the Church of England attracted to worship, more than Nonconformity ever did, some of the very lowest class, ‘the indiscriminate poor.’74 There are scattered reports like that of A. Osborne Jay, a clergyman who provided for bodies and souls in Shoreditch and who believed that he was vicar of ‘the only consecrated Parish Church in England upstairs.’ On the ground floor, he wrote, ‘is practised the feeding of the hungry, the clothing of the naked, the housing of the homeless. Here above continually ascends the glad incense of the people’s praise, though their attendance is neither bought nor forced.’ A hell on earth, he declared, had been transformed simply by his operating ‘the common, worn-out, old fashioned Parochial System.’75
Many clergymen at first welcomed the division of large parishes into smaller ones, which was undertaken under church building Acts after 1850 and which was intended to make the urban population more accessible to parochial care. The fruits were disappointing, however. In the most crowded areas, mere division could achieve little. ‘It is impossible,’ said the vicar of St Pancras in 1858, ‘so to divide the parish as to give each district that mixture of rich and poor which it is desirable there should be as an essential element in every parish. . . .’76 The practice steadily lost support. Between 1868 and 188.0, some seventy new parishes were constituted each year, usually in the most crowded dioceses. From 1880 to 1900 the average annual number of new parishes was only thirty-five. A clergyman told the Church Congress in 1889 that the division of new parishes was now ‘in many eyes a lost cause, an exploded method.’77 Committees of the Canterbury and York Convocations, reporting in 1889 and 1892, found that most of the clergy whom they asked about dividing parishes were opposed to it. The York committee reported a general opinion among the clergy that it was better to have resident curates in various parts of a large parish under the guidance of its incumbent, than to reproduce the entire parochial machinery several times over.
The Ecclesiastical Commissioners helped to sustain old and new churches in working-class parishes. After 1850 their revenues began to increase as cathedral offices scheduled for abolition by an Act of 1840 became vacant and were not filled; and by 1856 they had paid off the loan raised to form the Peel districts in 1843. Between 1857 and 1861 the Commissioners made grants of almost £400,000 to supplement poor livings. The distribution of these grants was criticized, however, by a select committee of the House of Commons which noticed that almost as much money was given to small, mainly rural, parishes as to crowde...

Table of contents