Introduction

1 Introduction Victorian England was religious. Its churches thrived and multiplied, its best minds brooded over divine metaphysic and argued about moral principle, its authors and painters and architects and poets seldom forgot that art and literature shadowed eternal truth or beauty, its legislators professed outward and often accepted inward allegiance to divine law, and its men of empire ascribed national greatness to the providence of God and Protestant faith. The Victorians changed the face of the world because they were assured. Untroubled by doubt whether Europe’s civilization and politics were suited to Africa or Asia, they saw vast opportunities open to energy and enterprise, and identified progress with the spread of English intelligence and English industry. They confidently used the word English to describe Scots and Welsh and Irish. Part of their confidence was money, a people of increasing wealth and prosperity, an ocean of retreating horizons. And part was of the soul. God is; and we are his servants, and under his care, we will do our duty. Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church. Volume 1, p. 1. 2 wen Chadwick’s monumental work, The Victorian Church, is ‘a story of the recovery of the Church of England from the low level allegedly reached O in the eighteenth century’.1 As an historian, Chadwick certainly did his duty; no-one since has attempted such an undertaking.2 His study stands both at the end of one era and at the beginning of another. The triumphalism of his vision provides an overwhelmingly positive construction of the Victorian period. Perhaps it was the history Britain needed to read with the Second World War not too far behind them. This kind of perspective has changed, as John Kent has noted, and with it the study of Victorian religion has radically changed.3 The modern reader of Chadwick’s study is struck by what is not there. This is not necessarily a criticism of his work, but the questions that are raised by modern society of the past are different. For example, there is no sustained reference to the empire; Chadwick writes as if the empire did not exist. The only reference to Bishop William Colenso is to his alleged heresy, rather than to his part in the legal processes that determined that the Church of England was not Established4 in colonies with responsible government, and the impetus that gave to the development of synodical government of the colonial church and the development of the Anglican Communion.5 Nor is there any mention of the missionary efforts of the church within and without the empire, which in 1 John Kent, ‘Victorian Religion and the Decline of Britain’, Victorian Studies, 41(1), Autumn, 1997, p. 108. 2 The quotation at the head of the chapter is from Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, 2nd edition, 2 volumes, London, Adam & Charles Black, 1970, [London, 1966] volume 1, p.1. 3 Kent, p. 108. 4 Throughout, the word Establishment, with an initial capital, will refer to the constitutional relationship of the church of England to the State. 5 The crisis these events precipitated for the Church gave rise to the first Lambeth Conference in 1867. 3 response to the postcolonial moment has given birth to an extensive area of historical research.6 Chadwick’s study is ecclesiastical history or institutional history of the most thorough kind, a way of writing history that is considered by some as ‘outmoded’, especially for its tendency to be ‘top-down’ history.7 Other valuable examples of the genre are Geoffrey Best’s Temporal Pillars, M.A. Crowther’s Church Embattled, W.R. Ward’s Religion and Society in England 1790-1850, and G. Kitson Clark’s Churchmen and the Condition of England.8 Arthur Burns defends the place of institutional history because his study is just that – institutional history – claiming that it remains ‘vital to a proper understanding of religious influences in society’.9 Burns sees the importance of the institutional church as a ‘means of delivery’ of the tasks expected of it, and specifically mentions, for example, sermons and pastoral work.10 However, Burns does not see his subject, diocesan reform and renewal, simply in terms of episcopal ‘fiat’, but as a process in which the rank and file clergy and laity also had a part. In this sense it diverges somewhat from ‘top-down’ history. With this approach to institutional history I agree, as I hope to show, as the institutional Church was also charged with the responsibility of 6 For an historiographical overview see the introduction to Andrew Porter’s, Religion versus Empire; British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700-1914. Manchester and New York, Manchester University Press, 2004. There is an exhaustive bibliography of thirty pages of fine print. 7 See for example, the excellent historiographical reviews of Arthur Burns, The Diocesan Revival of the Church of England, 1800-1870, Oxford, OUP, 1999, pp.1-22; John Wolffe, ‘Anglicanism’, in D.G. La Paz, ed., Nineteenth Century English Religious Traditions; Retrospect and Prospect, Westport, Conn., and London, Greenwood, 1995, pp. 1-31. See also, J. Walsh and S. Taylor, ‘Introduction: The Church and Anglicanism in the “Long” Eighteenth Century’, in J. Walsh, C. Haydon, and S. Taylor, eds., The Church of England c. 1689-c.1833: from Toleration to Tractarianism, Cambridge, CUP, 1993, pp. 12-13; 8 Geoffrey Best, Temporal Pillars, Cambridge, CUP, 1964; M.A. Crowther, Church Embattled; Religious Controversy in Mid-Victorian England, Newton Abbot, David and Charles, 1970; W.R. Ward, Religion and Society in England 1790-1850, London, Batsford, 1972; G. Kitson Clark, Churchmen and the Condition of England, London, Methuen, 1973. 9 Burns, p. 4. 10 Philip Barrett, Barchester: English Cathedral Life in the Nineteenth Century, London, SPCK, 1993. 4 transmitting to colonial settlers the culture of Englishness and the culture of Anglicanism as part of the imperial project.11 In this context, the episcopate and the clergy had an important role, both in their institutional roles and pastoral roles. Bishops and senior clergy were important connections in the national political process, especially as bishops sat in the House of Lords, where they could influence government policy.12 Throughout the nineteenth century bishops were expected to be increasingly involved in the affairs of their dioceses, and to be much more intimately involved in both the temporal and spiritual aspects of church life. For example, the significant part played by Bishop Blomfield as one of the Church Commissioners cannot be underestimated, as is very clear from the studies of Solway, Best and Burns; it was a period that saw the professionalisation of the episcopate.13 Both Knight and Burns have emphasised the importance of the parish clergy as the actual deliverers of the services the institution offered to meet the expanding needs of the people to whom the church was called on to minister.14 The Victorian clergy have attracted the interest of historians, dating back to (and beyond) Diana McClatchey’s insightful 1960 study of Oxfordshire clergy.15 Through the nineteenth century two processes can be seen to be taking place. John Wolffe has claimed that ‘the clerical order became more conscious of its own distinctiveness from the laity, a process stimulated, in part, by the Catholic conception of the priesthood, and, in part, by the general trend to 11 Burns, p.4; also, Rowan Strong, ‘A Vision of Anglican Imperialism: The Annual Sermons of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1701-1714’, Journal of Religious History,30(2), June 2006, pp. 175-198. 12 Best, op. cit.; Solway, Prelates and People, Ecclesiastical Social Thought in England, 1783-1852, London, Rutledge and Kegan Paul, 1969. For the senior clergy, see Burns, pp. 65-74. 13 Gibson, William T., ‘The Professionalisation of an Elite; the Nineteenth Century Episcopate’, Albion, 23, 3 (Fall 1991), pp. 459-482; — , ‘The social origins of an elite: the nineteenth century episcopate’; History of Education, 20(2), 1991, pp. 95-105. See also, Burns, passim; and Knight, chapter 5, especially pp. 153-167. 14 Knight, pp. 106-150,176; Burns, pp. 102-104 15 Diana McClatchey, Oxfordshire Clergy 1777-1869, Oxford, Clarendon, 1960 5 professionalization in Victorian society’.16 The complementary studies of Brian Heeney and Alan Haig respectively, have built up pictures of the nature of clerical work and the background and career structure of the clergy.17 These studies are important for the way they provide the social and ecclesiastical context of emigrant clergy who were heading for the colonies. This cultural and ecclesiastical baggage was part of their contribution to an emerging colonial Anglican identity. What is lost in institutional history is any sense of the church as a community of people. The growth of social history as a way of exploring the human face of the church has seen a distinct change in Anglican historiography, especially at the local level, and although rarely acknowledged, there seems to be an influence from the social histories like those of R.S. Neal’s study of Bath and Theodore Koditschek’s study of Bradford.18 These newer histories have explored religion in both the countryside and the urban environment, and have demonstrated the great diversity of religious experience in and outside the Victorian church, and the continuing importance of religion in the lives of the working- class.19 This is especially true of Frances Knight’s book, The Nineteenth-Century Church and English Society, which in John Kent’s words ‘does more than glance at the concept of “popular religion”’.20 It opens for us some of the cultural values of the kinds of people who migrated to Australia in such huge numbers in the nineteenth century; skilled and 16 Wolffe, p.

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