Victorian Nonconformity

David W. Bebbington

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781610973052, 9781498213776
• eBook ISBN: 9781621891390
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The Nonconformists of England and Wales, the Protestants outside the Church of England, were particularly numerous in the Victorian years. From being a small minority in the eighteenth century, they had increased to represent nearly half the worshipping nation by the middle years of the nineteenth century. These Methodists, Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers, Unitarians, and others helped shape society and made their mark in politics. This book explains the main characteristics of each denomination and examines the circumstances that enabled them to grow. It evaluates the main academic hypothesis about their role and points to signs of their subsequent decline in the twentieth century. Here is a succinct account of an important dimension of the Christian past in Britain.

Chapter 1

Identity and Division

Victorian Nonconformity has commonly received a bad press. Chapel-goers have been seen as narrow and cen­sorious, contemptuous of what makes life worth living and critical of those who want to live life to the full. In Culture and Anarchy (1869) Matthew Arnold depicted Nonconformists as addicted to a mixture of ‘disputes, tea-meetings, openings of chapels, sermons’.1 They knew nothing, he claimed, of the ‘sweetness and light’ of true culture. Likewise Charles Dickens poked fun at the vul­garity of the ministers who shaped their way of thinking. Stiggins in Pickwick Papers (1836–37) and Chadband in Bleak House (1852–53) are ignorant, pretentious and ut­terly hypocritical. The mainstream literary tradition treated Nonconformity with a remarkable lack of sympathy. Subsequent generations have been too much swayed by stereotypes created during Victoria’s reign. Wondering what once went on within the walls of a chapel now turned into a furniture store, they have too readily be­lieved what litterateurs of the age chose to describe without pausing to question their stance. Powerful religious convictions were distasteful to Arnold; Dickens was draw­ing on a long-established literary tradition that held up Dissenters to abuse. Both men were expressing disdain for those they regarded as social inferiors. Like many other Victorian writers, they betray a certain instinctive aversion to a community that was often suspicious of fiction.2 Consequently our image of Nonconformity has been distorted. The chapels, it is true, generated a way of life that was distinctive, but not one that was necessarily obscurantist or self-righteous. A delight in sermons may not be universal, yet neither is it a symptom of tasteless­ness or humbug. Chapel values were designed to differ from those of the public house or high society or even the Church of England. Victorian Nonconformity was an attempt to create a Christian counter-culture.

Who were the Nonconformists? They were those Protes­tants who dissociated themselves from the church recog­nised by the state. They did not conform but dissented—and so at the beginning of Victoria’s reign were nor­mally called ‘Dissenters’. By its end they were begin­ning to prefer the term ‘Free Churches’, a phrase that suggested positive principles rather than negative protest against the Church of England. During much of the Vic­torian period, however, the description most favoured by Congregationalists and Baptists was ‘Nonconformists’, and Methodists, Unitarians and the various other Protes­tant groups would often acquiesce in the term. Techni­cally Roman Catholics were also Nonconformists from the established church, but the faithful owing obedience to the see of Rome could not endure so parochial a label. In Scotland the word ‘Dissent’ was often similarly used in the early nineteenth century to describe Protestants—largely Presbyterians—outside the Church of Scotland, but the term ‘Nonconformity’ never entered common parlance north of the border. So Nonconformity consisted of the chapel-goers of England and Wales, with outposts in the Isle of Man and the Channel Isles. In 1901 they formed something like 15% of the popula­tion.3 That proportion, however, comprised both members and adherents, a crucial distinction. Only members took on rights and responsibilities in their congregations; adherents, often more numerous than members, simply attended services and activities. The hard core of a chapel was much smaller than its congregation. In principle and often in reality, membership implied a high level of commitment: an MP would hurry back from Westminster each weekend to teach in his provincial Sunday school. Nonconformist church members were commonly people of deep conviction.

Their principles, in most cases, derived from an Evan­gelical worldview. The Evangelical Revival of the eight­eenth century had fanned the embers of English-speak­ing Protestantism into a blazing fire. Preachers had carried the gospel up and down the land, planting Evangeli­cal religion in parish churches as well as in the chapels. Evangelicalism had permeated society by the opening of Victoria’s reign, reshaping attitudes to piety and philan­thropy, science and business.4 There were four main fea­tures of Evangelical religion. First there was conversion, the crisis associated with turning from sin to personal faith. Although not all Evangelicals could identify the time of their conversions, many went through acute psy­chological troubles before the moment of release. ‘Conviction, contrition, wrestling in prayer, and mighty strug­gling’, it was said of a Bible Christian from Devon con­verted in 1859, ‘—these were the prelude to the happy day when the peace of God first became his blest possession’.5 Secondly there was activism, a commitment to spreading the experience of conversion to others. In 1848, a typical year, a Primitive Methodist preacher travelled 3,484 miles, chiefly on foot, paid 1,790 family visits and preached about 400 times.6 Although evangelism was the priority, activism readily spilt over into care for the sick and the deprived. The two—gospel work and social concern—were rarely divorced in the Victorian era. There was, thirdly, a love for the Bible. The family Bible would be given the place of honour in the parlour, working men would save up to buy scriptural commentaries and pins might be stuck in the pages of a Bible to mark divine promises. ‘I likes the New Testament’, declared a female agricultural worker in Oxfordshire: ‘you see it is so plain. I can understand what Paul, and Peter, and John says.’7 And, fourthly, there was a concentration in doctrine on the atoning death of Christ on the cross. In 1837 the Baptist Union urged its churches to ‘keep the cross of Christ ever in view’.8 By his sacrificial death, Evangelicals believed, Christ had saved them from sin and, ultimately, from hell. The cross was therefore the fulcrum of their theological system. Conversion, activ­ism, Bible and cross—these were the leading compo­nents of Evangelical religion.

Not all Nonconformists, however, were Evangelical. Chief among the exceptions were the Unitarians, the elite of Nonconformity. Unitarians had parted with orthodox Christian teaching about the Trinity in order to insist that God was one and only one. Jesus was not God and his atonement was not the kernel of their theology. Wil­liam Gaskell, a leading Unitarian minister in Manchester and husband of the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, preached a sermon in 1847 against ‘Some evil tendencies of the popular theology’. Evangelicals, he contended, ‘want a Redeemer who will set them free from the power of guilt, while they look on without effort’.9 True religion, he held, called for perse­vering moral exertion in response to the Fatherhood of God. While appealing to the Bible, he criticised the no­tion of conversion. Gaskell and his denomination were far from the Evangelical position. So were some smaller groups. The New Church, or Swedenborgians, wer...

Table of contents

• Victorian Nonconformity
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Identity and Division
• Chapter 2: Diversity and Co-operation
• Chapter 3: Development and Expansion
• Chapter 4: The Helmstadter Thesis
• Chapter 5: Challenge and Decline
• Chapter 6: Conclusion
• Further Reading