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The Church and the Slums The Church and the Slums The Church and the Slums: The Victorian Anglican Church and its Mission to Liverpool’s Poor By Alastair Wilcox The Church and the Slums: The Victorian Anglican Church and its Mission to Liverpool’s Poor, by Alastair Wilcox This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Alastair Wilcox All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5421-2, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5421-4 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Chapter One ................................................................................................. 4 The Context of Liverpool Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 27 Existing Studies of Victorian Urban Religion Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 40 Church Attendance Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 78 The Meaning of Baptism Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 107 The Ideal Clergyman Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 129 House-To-House Visitation Chapter Seven .......................................................................................... 164 Working the ‘Ideal’ Parish Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 214 Conclusion Appendix One: Anglican Religious Census Figures 1881-1902 ............. 219 Appendix Two: Professions of Faith 1881 .............................................. 234 Appendix Three: Anglican Worshippers in the Different Liverpool Districts. .................................................................................................. 245 Appendix Four: Chart Showing Morning and Evening Attendance at Selected Slum Churches 1881-1902. ................................................... 247 Index ........................................................................................................ 250 INTRODUCTION If we struggle to understand Victorian society without some understanding of religion then it would be impossible to understand the workings of nineteenth century Liverpool society without realising the importance of religion. Religious practice differed from region to region although few areas offer a more singular glimpse at Victorian society and religion than Liverpool. Commercially-orientated ‘Cosmopolitan Liverpool’, with its swirling pattern of migrants in transit from a host of nationalities, contributing to its outward gaze, was unlike any other city in Britain. Self- contained, turning its back to its hinterland to look across, not only the Irish Sea, but the Atlantic, this world city was, as The Times in 1875 observed, ‘a very peculiar place’. Yet it was self-contained only in certain respects. One aspect of its peculiarity was that its population was drawn not only from Lancashire but, disproportionately, from Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Liverpool, as a gateway to the Irish trade, had acquired a significant Irish population even pre-famine. In 1842 one detailed survey of the northern dockside area of Vauxhall found 2,243 Irish-born families as against 1,326 Liverpool-born ones. Prior to this, this dockside area had been a focus for Welsh settlement. In 1871, out of Liverpool’s population of just less than half a million, 15.5 per cent had been born in Ireland, and even this did not represent the peak for Irish born migrants. Significantly, its Irish population also included a number of Ulster Protestants. Although it is hard to be certain, contemporary estimates put the number of Ulster Protestants in Liverpool at the same as the indigenous Catholic population, and what these Protestants added to Liverpool’s mix was a contribution to sectarian tensions. The Welsh had a presence in the city during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The earliest Welsh speaking school in Liverpool, the Calvinist Pall Mall, dated from 1798 with the Cambrian Society to provide aid to Welshmen in Liverpool being set up three years later. The Welsh migrants brought with them strong Nonconformist adherence. In 1881 there were around thirty Welsh- speaking chapels in Liverpool and the Calvinist Methodists, a bastion of Welshness, numbered their active members in Liverpool at over 11,000 in 1874. The Welsh community estimated its own numbers around this date 2 Introduction as being 70-80,000. One Anglican cleric residing in Everton bemoaned the fact that, on a Sunday morning, he was so close to five Nonconformist congregations he could hear their singing. Liverpool’s Anglicans whilst secure within the political framework of the town, found their religious position as the leading denomination under challenge, and faced the problems of ministering to a town representing urban migration at its nineteenth century extremes. But this book is not primarily about the migrant groups, Irish Catholics or sectarian tensions, although these must feature in this story. It is a book about that somewhat neglected religious group, the Liverpool Anglicans. The Anglican Church indeed had contributions from incomers linked to the Welsh and Irish Established churches. There were services in Welsh at St Paul‘s as far back as 1794, whilst St David’s Church had always been exclusively Welsh-speaking to the annoyance of some English speakers in the Brownlow Hill area. As late as 1894 a new Welsh-speaking Anglican church, St Deiniol’s, was consecrated in Upper Parliament Street. These other kingdoms also famously populated the city’s Nonconformist ranks (especially the Welsh of course) as did the Scottish population. Anglicans have been considered by other writers, but usually within a political context. What this book is primarily concerned with is how effectively the Anglican Church functioned in ministering spiritually to Liverpool’s poor. It is peopled by clerics who employed differing tactics to deal with their parishes, such as the combative vicar of St Bartholomew who chased unruly Catholics down the street brandishing a penny cane, or the highbrow academic vicar of All Souls who regularly visited his slum parishioners whilst studiously avoiding the ‘Catholic, Mormons and the grossly immoral’. It is not simply a roll call of individual evangelical heroes who were able to record their battles for Christ. Hidden in the slums are clerics such as the vicar of St Anne’s whose response to the alarming downward socio-economic shift of his parish was, to all intents and purposes, to lock up shop. Individual parochial operations and clerical attributes will be set against what the Victorians considered their ‘ideal’— and the Victorian Anglican cleric had plenty of advice about the ‘ideal’. Anglican writers from the mid-nineteenth century onwards began laying down guidelines about how an Anglican cleric should act and how a well- regulated parish should be conducted. So this book examines the operation of Anglicanism in a very specific context. How can we measure the effectiveness of the Anglican mission to the labouring classes? Is it possible to measure the number of worshippers and identify the proportion from the working classes? What meaning The Church and the Slums 3 might be placed on working class rites of passage? How effectively did Anglican clerics discharge their duties, and how did they run their parishes? CHAPTER ONE THE CONTEXT OF LIVERPOOL One journalist at the end of the nineteenth century recorded what must have been the first glimpse common to many visitors to the city: Lime Street seems to be more haunted than any other terminus in this island by loafers, large and small, pestering people to carry their bags and the splendid site with its noble buildings on which it opens, and the streets which run from them have far more than their fair share of bare headed- women and barefoot boys and girls... the port necessarily receives not only crowds of sailors and foreigners that add so largely to its death rate, but the needy from the sister island and elsewhere, too poor to move further inland and satisfied to live the precarious life which a large shipping centre invariably offers. Hence no one can be surprised that the largest of its public buildings are the workhouse and industrial schools.1 Thus neatly delineated were some of the singular characteristics of this town: an ever-shifting population and its relation to an abnormally high death rate; and civic pride juxtaposed with endemic poverty. To the Anglican clergy the constantly changing pattern of migrants meant that it was difficult to minister to a set population: one of Liverpool’s most prominent slum clerics likened his task to writing in water. The above extract also pinpoints another feature of Liverpool life—the influx of Irish migrants, with the suspicion that the most able of the migrants moved on, all seemingly contributing to the town’s intractable
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