Religion, Gender, and Industry

Exploring Church and Methodism in a Local Setting

Hammond, Forsaith

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781621893424
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

What part did religion play in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain? How did the local situation differ from the national picture? What was the role of women in society and the church? And how did the emerging centers of industrial activity interact with the places in which they sprung up? These are wide questions, but they can be seen in microcosm in one small area of the English midlands: the parish of Madeley, Shropshire, in which was the birthplace of the industrial revolution, Coalbrookdale. Here, the evangelical Methodist clergyman John Fletcher ministered between 1760 and 1785, among a population including Catholics and Quakers as well people indifferent to religion. Then, for nearly sixty years after his death, two women, Fletcher's widow and later her protege, had virtual charge of the parish, which became one of the last examples of Methodism remaining within the Church of England.Through examining this specific locality, these essays engage particularly with areas of broader significance, including: Methodism's roots and growth in relation to the Church of England, religion and gender in eighteenth-century Britain, and religion and emerging industrial society. The last decade has seen substantial growth in studies of John and Mary Fletcher, early Methodism, and its relationship to the Church of England. Religion, Gender, and Industry offers a contribution to this developing area of research. The groundbreaking essays in this volume are written by an international group of scholars and present the latest research in this field. The contributions in this volume, originally presented at a conference in Shropshire in 2009, address these themes from multidisciplinary perspectives, including history, theology, gender studies, and industry. In addition to furthering knowledge of Madeley parish and its relation to larger themes in eighteenth-century Britain, the impact of the Fletchers in nineteenth-century American Methodism is examined.

1

Religion, Gender, and Industry in the Eighteenth Century

Models and Approaches

Jeremy Gregory

Taken individually, the three coordinates of this collection of essays—religion, gender, and industry in the eighteenth century—have been the subject of a great deal of research, although that research effort has not necessarily been split equally between the topics. Moreover, the bulk of this research has been carried out by historians working on one rather than two, let alone all three, of these themes, since they have most often been viewed not as a trinity of interconnected topics so much as three separate historical deities. By and large, these deities have only occasionally spoken to one another, although when they have done so, it has been with significant consequences. But in general, they have had their own tribes of votaries and acolytes, who have operated within their distinct intellectual and academic traditions, practices, and agendas, with scholars often working in completely different departments and faculties (such as theology, humanities, or social sciences), and publishing in different journals and meeting at different conferences.

Of the three, certainly until the early 1980s, the lion’s share of the research effort was devoted to the goddess Industry (of which more later).1 Until then, work on eighteenth-century religion tended to fall into some well-defined and predictable channels, and was generally pursued along denominational lines. In the shadow of Norman Sykes (a quondam Dean of Winchester Cathedral), who in a series of studies published between the 1920s and 1950s had offered a qualified rehabilitation of the Anglican Church against the then dominant view, shared by both Evangelicals and Tractarians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that the eighteenth-century Church had been corrupt and pastorally stagnant,2 there was what G. V. Bennett (a onetime chaplain of New College, Oxford, and himself a student of Sykes) referred to as “a minor industry”3 of biographies of bishops and leading Churchmen, often published by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) and usually written by Anglican clerics.4 There were also thematic studies of Anglican piety, liturgy, and worship, as well as some work on church parties.5 In similar fashion, there were a number of studies of the Wesleys and early Methodism, almost without exception written by scholars who were themselves Methodists,6 including of course that lapsed Methodist E. P. Thompson, whose provocative chapter eleven of his Making of the English Working Class, first published in 1963,7 ensured that for a time in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s, all social historians of the late eighteenth century had a take on Methodism, class, and industrialization without having to read any Wesleyan or Methodist primary documents. There were also studies of Quakers, Baptists, Presbyterians, and other religious denominations,8 again almost always from an “insider” point of view, or what social scientists call “emic” perspectives. But there was very little on popular religion (apart from an article by John Walsh on “Methodism and the mob”),9 and there was very little social history of religion (apart from R. F. Wearmouth’s older studies of Methodism’s contribution to working-class consciousness, and those whom he called, in a phrase which now seems to belong to a bygone era, “the common people”).10

There was also very little of what might be termed “the history of religion in a local setting.” In 1980, apart from editions of visitation returns which would provide the raw source material for future studies of this kind,11 there were only a handful of articles,12 a number of unpublished theses, and really no more than a couple of published monographs on the Church in a particular locality, namely those by Arthur Warne on Devon and Diana McClatchey on Oxfordshire,13 most typically represented by a diocese, and for the purpose of this volume the most obviously relevant of these was William Marshall’s 1978 PhD thesis,14 half of which was devoted to the diocese of Hereford in which the parish of Madeley lay. In this, eighteenth-century Church historians lagged behind their colleagues working on the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, who had for the previous two decades and more been producing seminal case studies of the impact of the Reformation in particular localities and regions, and also behind colleagues working on the nineteenth century who had published on the churches in various localities, towns, and cities (in particular London).15 And the research into religion in eighteenth-century localities which did exist was overwhelmingly focused on the study of the clergy, the services and functions they provided, and institutional and organizational structures, without giving us much sense of lay religion and lay piety, although in part this was because of the nature of the surviving source material where, in particular for the Church of England, institutional records predominated, and were bound to give a clergy’s eye perspective.

Even more tellingly, perhaps, in 1980 religious concerns were seldom incorporated into the wider political and social studies of the period, which makes Thompson’s inclusion of religion in his seminal work of social history stand out, although it was a rather backhanded compliment since his view of Methodism was that it went against the progressive story he was wanting to tell, and was, for him, a chillingly repressive force. Instead, religion was seen by political, social, economic, and intellectual historians as a discrete entity, viewed almost as of antiquarian interest only, with no real purchase on the wider history of the age, and so could be safely left to denominational insiders. Moreover, in overviews of the period, religion was either hardly mentioned, or was relegated to a separate chapter, often tagged on to the end of the volume almost as an afterthought which readers and students could study as an add-on, if they so wished, but only after they had covered the really important topics of mainstream political and social history.16

This neglect in 1980 by mainstream historians of religious topics could be explained by two separate but interrelated factors. First, the overarching model of the century was one of secularization (and even historians of religion tended to subscribe to this),17 where religion and the churches played an increasingly marginal role in political, social, cultural, economic, and intellectual life, and thus those who studied religion were studying a topic which was apparently losing force—hardly a shrewd thing when entering the job market. Second, the Church of England (by far and away the dominant religious body, to which even in the 1790s perhaps over 90 percent of the population at least nominally belonged) was, despite the efforts of Norman Sykes, still often seen as lethargic, if not corrupt, and distanced from the bulk of its parishioners, or at best just worldly and lacking any “real” sense of religion.18 Here, in most of the overviews of the period, Parson Woodforde’s “Diary” was usually cited as evidence of the model of the this-worldly cleric, and reference was frequently made to the fact that the only matter that Woodforde seemed to be interested in recording was what he had to eat (which is in fact a gross misrepresentation of the unabridged source, and misjudges the nature of the text).19 As late as 1982, a final examination paper in the School of Modern History at the University of Oxford asked candidates whether they agreed that the eighteenth-century Church was “a servile appendage of a semi-pagan aristocracy,”20 a slight variant of R. H. Tawney’s view (first articulated in 1926 in his Religion and the Rise of Capitalism). I answered that question and have in some ways been trying to respond to it ever since.

The eighteenth century was, after all, “the Age of Reason,...

Table of contents

• Religion, Gender, and Industry
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Religion, Gender, and Industry in the Eighteenth Century
• 2 John Fletcher’s Parishioners
• 3 John Fletcher’s Silent Bishop
• 4 Church and Chapel
• 5 John Fletcher’s Links with Mystical Methodists and Swedenborgians
• 6 “Adoring the Holy Trinity in Unity”
• 7 Women, Work, and Worship in the Trefeca Family 1752–17731
• 8 Mothers in Christ
• 9 Support Groups for Methodist Women Preachers 1803–1851
• 10 “Oh That the Mantle May Rest on Me!”
• 11 Holding Tightly to the “Promise of the Father”
• 12 John Fletcher as the Theologian of Early American Methodism
• 13The Long Fletcher Incumbency
• Contributors