Nonconformity in the Nineteenth Century

David M. Thompson, David M. Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781317242994
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du 19ème siècle

First published in 1972, this volume shows the potency, and the limitations of Nonconformity in shaping the beginning of modern Britain. It draws upon a wide range of sources including the writings and discussions of Nonconformists themselves, their critics, and contemporary commentators.

The extracts and the extensive introduction set Nonconformity in the broader context of social and political history, and address the 'life' of the free Churches: their conflicts, internal and externals, their organization and spread, and their theology. The collection demonstrates the variety and diversity of Nonconformity as well as the controversies and debates of the period.

This book will be an excellent reference for students of History, English and Theology, and will provide a starting point for those who wish to explore Nonconformist history.

Three Starts and Stops

From the formation of the Anti-State Church Association to the bicentenary of the Great Ejectment, 1844–62.

The period sees the emergence of the disestablishment movement from the position of a suspected minority to one of increasing strength. The Disruption of the Church of Scotland and the Dissenters’ victory over factory education encouraged the extremists to press for disestablishment right away. In December 1843 a conference of delegates from various parts of the country met in Leicester and decided that the time was ripe to launch a wider movement. It should be remembered also that this was a time when the rights of the Church of England in Canada and Australia were also being warmly debated. The Anti-State Church Association was formed in April 1844 (46) as a result of this movement.¹ It met a mixed reaction (47), again showing that not all Nonconformists, even among the Old Dissent, were behind it. In fact, it was rather overshadowed by the activities of the Anti-Corn Law League (on which in many respects it was modelled) and the Chartists, and the early years of its history are quiet. It was born just as the divisions between Trinitarian and Unitarian dissenters were at their worst over the Dissenters’ Chapels Bill,² and although it was stimulated by the agitation over Peel’s decision to make a government grant to the Roman Catholic seminary at Maynooth (where again Wesleyans felt strongly (50)), that was soon forgotten in the political turmoil over the repeal of the Corn Laws. In 1854 the A.S.C.A. changed its name to the Society for the Liberation of the Church from State Patronage and Control, or the Liberation Society. But its fortunes were not thereby substantially changed. The Church Rates battle died down after the House of Lords’ decision in the Braintree case in 1852 (58), and this had been the issue at local level which had most mobilised opinion in favour of disestablishment.³ Nevertheless, there is some evidence that the movement fed the growth of a new popular Liberalism in the constituencies.⁴

The 1840s do, however, demonstrate the extent to which Wesleyans, Congregationalists and Baptists have moved into the centre of the Nonconformist stage. The Unitarian troubles were cleared up by the Dissenters’ Chapels Act, but it left a sour taste in the mouth. From 1845 the Unitarians were engaged in a valuable new enterprise in the industrial towns—the Domestic Missions, which concentrated on house to house visitation in slum areas (103). But they were a declining denomination in numerical terms. So were the Quakers, who had not been particularly concerned in the movements to redress Dissenting grievances because they had secured exemption from them for themselves in the previous century. To a large extent their decline was the result of their own policy (63). They remained influential in particular ways, through their philanthropy, through the Peace Society, and in education, for example, but they had little share in the general movement of Nonconformity.⁵ Their views on peace could, however, expose them to attack at times of national bellicosity, such as the Crimean War (59).

The Wesleyans’ internal troubles entered a new phase with the Fly Sheets controversy, and this virtually paralysed the denomination for a decade in the later ’forties and early ’fifties. The Fly Sheets were anonymous pamphlets circulated to all Wesleyan ministers and some laymen between 1844 and 1849. They attacked what they considered to be abuses in Wesleyanism, in particular the central administration in London and the powers exercised by a few leading ministers over the life of the whole Connexion. In brief, they attacked Jabez Bunting. The Wesleyan leaders responded by circulating a declaration, which all ministers were invited to sign, saying that they were not the authors of the Fly Sheets, and knew nothing about the authors. A majority of ministers signed, but a number of liberal’ ministers refused to do so on principle. In 1849 the man most suspected of being the author, James Everett, was expelled from the Connexion for refusing to answer the question whether he was the author (52). With him were expelled two other ministers, Samuel Dunn and William Griffiths, for their association with ‘opposition’ Wesleyan newspapers, the Wesley Banner and the Wesleyan Times, which had also been critical of the leadership. The expelled ministers were supported by other Nonconformists, and even by The Times. Mass expulsions of ordinary members in the circuits followed if there was any hint of support for the expelled ministers, and the Wesleyans lost 100,000 members in the next five years. In many places they never recovered their former position relative to population.⁶

The Primitive Methodists were entering a period of consolidation. In 1842 both Hugh Bourne and William Clowes were superannuated: the effective leadership was passing from the pioneers to a new generation; and increasingly the denomination was ‘coming inside’. The 1840s and 1850s began a great age of chapel-building. In 1847 the number of rented rooms outnumbered the chapels by two to one: by 1868 the chapels outnumbered the rented rooms.⁷ The picture one gets of Primitive Methodist life is of steady advance (48).

The Primitive Methodists, of course, were strong among the working classes. Another denomination with great strength there was the New Connexion of General Baptists, in which John Clifford was brought up (49). Both denominations were affected by the economic difficulties of the time. They seem to be in a completely different world from the more prosperous Nonconformists (66), though all met with social discrimination. The appeal of Nonconformity to the middling ranks of society was beginning to be widely noticed (61, 57) and Anglican clergymen were probably right to attribute this to the failure of the Church of England to offer responsibility to these classes. The closed social world of many Nonconformist chapels may have been partly responsible for the rather trivial internal disputes that periodically arose (69).

The census of religious worship of 1851 provides a useful picture of the state of Nonconformity at mid-century (57). This count of the numbers attending worship at each service on 30 March 1851, the day of the decennial census, is uniquely complete. Subsequent proposals for a government census foundered because the Church of England, horrified by the numbers of Nonconformists the census revealed, would only accept a census of religious profession, whilst the Nonconformists, realising that this would give a very different view, insisted on a census of attendance. The report contains an analysis of the reasons for non-attendance as well as an account of the statistics. The census figures showed that the strength of the various denominations varied regionally, with Wesleyans stronger in the north than the south, and Baptists and Congregationalists stronger in Wales, the Midlands and East Anglia than either north or south. It also seemed that the rate of increase was dropping after 1841, quite apart from the Wesleyan troubles. All the main denominations were stronger in the countryside than the towns. The census confirmed that the largest Nonconformist denomination was the Wesleyans, followed by the Congregationalists, Baptists and Primitive Methodists: the significance of this, however, is off-set by the fact that locally the balance could be very different. Even Nonconformists were surprised by their strength as revealed by the census, but the Liberation Society claimed that they were even stronger. There followed a number of attempts to make the census show things it was incapable of showing, the main effect of which was to cast doubt on the figures altogether.

The 1840s and 1850s were a period of new movements within and new problems for Nonconformity. One of the new denominations which the census revealed was the Mormons. They spread quite rapidly in the late ‘forties, and the main reason for their decline seems to have been the effect of polygamy and the stress placed on the trip to Salt Lake City. Eleven thousand Mormons emigrated between 1848 and 1854. The atmosphere of Mormon worship seems to have been very like that of the more orthodox revival movements (55), and their appeal may have been very similar to that of the Primitive Methodists (56). At a different level the 1850s saw the appearance in London of C. H. Spurgeon, a young Baptist preacher who consistently had to hire larger halls to accommodate the crowds who flocked to hear him. The climax came at a meeting in 1856 in the Surrey Gardens music hall which held 10,000 people: someone screamed ‘Fire!’ and in the panic seven people were killed and twenty-eight injured (60). The story provoked considerable public controversy about Spurgeon’s methods, but he continued to attract congregations of 4,000 to 5,000 people by his evangelical preaching. Spurgeon was brought up in a small country chapel, and this was the milieu of the other new movement of the period. The 1850s saw the strengthening of a number of smaller groups which attempted to return to a primitive, New Testament Christianity. The Brethren are the largest and best known; another was the Churches of Christ; other congregations were not formally attached to any denomination and had a purely local existence. All had in common a deep attachment to the Bible, which they studied closely. Nor is it without interest that all the new movements just described practised believer’s baptism (64), though Spurgeon believed in open communion (i.e....