 |
| 'The Doubt: Can These Dry Bones Live"' Henry Alexander Bowler (1855) Tate Britain. Image released under Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported) |
See here for a very comprehensive site.
‘Contemporaries agonized over those who did not float upon the flood of faith. We marvel at the number who did.’ Theodore Hoppen, The Mid Victorian Generation (Oxford, 1998), p. 425.
A crisis of faith?
The Victorian period saw some well-publicised crises of faith, often caused by the new scientific discoveries. Two of the most prominent intellectuals to lose their Christian faith were Charles Darwin and George Eliot. In 1869 Thomas Henry Huxley coined the term 'agnostic'. |
| Alfred Lord Tennyson Carbon print by Julia Margaret Cameron The Art Institute of Chicago Public domain |
Alfred Tennyson's In Memoriam arose out of his grief at the death of his friend, Arthur Hallam, but also engaged with the problem of the cruelty of nature. It was inspired by Robert Chambers' Vestiges of Creation (1844) and is the first poem in English to mention the dinosaurs. Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach lamented the decline of Christianity.
Modern scholarship, however, is more inclined to stress the strength and resilience of Victorian religion. The nineteenth century was an age of doubt but it was also an age of faith, with a high level of biblical literacy. Preachers like the Baptist, Charles Haddon Spurgeon and the American evangelists, Moody and Sankey, drew large crowds. It was the age of hymn-writing, church-building and overseas missions, and the well-publicised doubts of the intellectuals were not typical of the mass of the population.
Varieties of Victorian religion
There were deep divisions within Victorian Christianity. Within the British Isles there were two established churches (the Church of England in England, Wales and Ireland and the Church of Scotland in Scotland) although there were a large number of other denominations. In Wales Protestant Dissenters were a clear majority and In Ireland three quarters of the population were Catholic and half the remainder Presbyterian. The Church of Ireland was controversially disestablished in 1869. The dominance of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland was challenged after 1843, when the Free Church of Scotland (the 'Wee Frees') split from the main body.The Tractarians
By the beginning of the Victorian period the Church of England was challenged by a new movement, sometimes known as the Oxford Movement. It is sometimes thought to have begin in a sermon delivered by John Keble, ‘National Apostasy Considered’ at the Oxford Assizes on 14 July 1833. The 'apostasy' was what he saw as the surrender of the Whig government to the forces of secularism. The sermon was a plea for the Church of England to recover its historic roots and return to the time of the apostles. He saw these roots as 'Catholic', though not Roman Catholic; the Church of England was one of the three branches of the historic Church, the others being Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy. This position set the Tractarians apart from the Evangelical movement in the Church of England. Where the Evangelicals emphasised the bible and the importance of conversation, the Tractarians put their stress on the historic traditions of the Church.At the end of August the first of a series of Tracts for the Times was issued.
 |
| John Keble in 1832 From the Catholic Encyclopaedia Public domain |
 |
| John Henry Newman Public domain |
The Tractarians soon became notorious. They became associated with 'popish' rituals in the Church, reintroducing vestments, candles on the altar and saints' feast days. They often faced fierce opposition. In 1845 there were ‘surplice riots’ in Exeter during which clergy who wore white surplices rather than black gowns for preaching were pelted with rotten eggs. In 1874 the Archbishop of Canterbury, Archibald Campbell Tait, attempted unsuccessfully to control them through the Public Worship Regulation Bill.
Another controversial Tractarian innovation was their reintroduction of orders of nuns, known as 'sisterhoods'. To many this seemed to be striking at the heart of the Victorian ideology that asserted that women belonged in the domestic sphere. However, many Anglican sisters accompanied Florence Nightingale to the Crimea.
 |
| Priscilla Lydia Sellon founder of an Anglican sisterhood |
The Tractarians were always accused of being Catholics in disguise and it was a major embarrassment when two prominent of their most prominent members converted to Rome, Newman in 1845 and Henry Edward Manning, the archdeacon of Chichester in 1851. (Unlike Newman who never married, Manning was a widower.) Both men later became cardinals, and Manning became Archbishop of Westminster.
Other Anglicans, such as William Ewart Gladstone, were attracted to the High Church movement but never became Roman Catholics. Manning's brother-in-law, Samuel Wilberforce, became bishop of Oxford. To his great grief, his three brothers became Catholics, but he remained firmly within the Church of England.
'Papal aggression'
The number of Catholics was rising rapidly - some thought alarmingly. From the 1840s Irish immigration was adding a new Catholic population to the existing older Catholic families. From being a religion of rural country gentry, Catholicism was rapidly becoming a religion of the urban poor in centres like London and Liverpool.In October 1850 Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman issued a triumphalist pastoral letter announcing the reintroduction of the Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales. He himself was to be Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster and new Catholic dioceses, such as Liverpool, Leeds and Clifton, were to be created. The press and the public reacted with outrage to what was dubbed 'papal aggression' and the government of Lord John Russell introduced a bill to make Catholic ecclesiastical titles illegal. From February to July 1851 a vast amount of parliamentary time was taken up with the bill, in the course of which it was much modified. It received the royal assent from on 30 July 1851, but no-one was prosecuted under the law and it was repealed by Gladstone in 1871. In retrospect the whole affair was a storm in a teacup, but it highlighted religious anxieties and religious bigotry.
 |
| From Punch, November 1850 The Pope as Guy Fawkes Public Domain |
The census
On Sunday 30 March 1851 a religious census was undertaken in England and Wales, quite separately from the normal census, which attempted to count the number of ‘attendants’ (not 'attendances') at places of worship and the extent of the seating accommodation provided. The report generated great excitement at the time (21,000 copies were sold) and has provided great confusion ever since. In 1854 the statistician in charge, Horace Mann, published his tabulation of the results, which tried to make sense of the raw data and yet are agreed to have been unsatisfactory.However, whatever its statistical limitations, the census dealt two shocks to the mid-Victorian psyche:
- half the population (18 million) had stayed at home
- just under a quarter of the population worshipped with the Church of England
There were distinct regional and denominational differences.
The Primitive Methodists had a large working-class following; the Congregationalists and Baptists mainly middle-class. But only the Roman Catholics attracted solid working-class support. The census showed (predictably) that they were strongest in Lancashire.
Many clergy viewed the census as a wake-up call and redoubled their efforts in working-class areas. Already the Tractarian, Walter Hook, was working among the poor in Leeds. In 1865 the Salvation Army was founded as the East London Christian Mission.
Changing churches and ceremonies
In the early 19th century there was very little symbolism or ceremony in Anglican churches. Candles were used solely to provide light. Clergy normally wore white surplices for reading the liturgy and for celebrating communion, and they put on black gowns to preach. Even at the end of the century clerical vestments had been introduced in only 10 per cent of churches, and candles on altars in only 25 per cent.Both the architect and Catholic convert A. W. N. Pugin and the Ecclesiological Society followed the Tractarians in favouring the Gothic style. They aimed to recreate the atmosphere of medieval churches by copying their designs. Many chancels were rebuilt (with much destruction of medieval structures). Ecclesiologists recommended that the altar should be raised above the level of the nave by the introduction of chancel steps. They also favoured the separation of the chancel and the nave by laced screens. There was no place now for the old three-decker pulpit and this was generally replaced by a pulpit and lectern on either side of the altar. Churches were also cleaner and more decorous and were unlocked on weekdays. Sermons were more frequent but shorter; clergy increasingly preached their own sermons rather than using those of other people.
Conclusion
- Christianity remained important in the Victorian period. Most people considered themselves Christians and if anything, churchgoing increased during the century. Most children were baptised and most people married in church.
- Christians were however, deeply divided and religious controversy was often very acrimonious.
- All the churches, except the Catholic church, worried about their failure to attract working-class men. The Salvation Army was the most successful attempt to gain their support, but a solid mass of men seem to have remained untouched by religion.
‘
