Mind the Gap by Ferdinand Mount

Author:Ferdinand Mount [Ferdinand Mount]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780721224
Publisher: Short Books
Published: 2012-09-22T04:00:00+00:00

(ii) Heathen hordes?

For if the new industrial towns were not predominantly amoral, they certainly were not godless either. Indeed, the strong religious ethos of every industrial community from the South Wales valleys to the cotton towns of the North was profoundly interlinked with and underpinned by that intense morality.

The history of the Nonconformist churches is one of the least fashionable subjects you can imagine. All that most people remember about the history of religion amongst the lower classes in the nineteenth century is that the Church of England never made much headway and soon turned its back on the working classes, leaving the immigrant Irish priests as the only suppliers of salvation in the poorer districts.

Now it is true that the Church of England always found it difficult to reach into the new industrial districts and, as the nineteenth century went on, became increasingly conscious of and anxious about that failure. But what made the Established Church so uneasy was its awareness that the Nonconformist churches were making such huge advances in those districts and elsewhere too. They filled in the gaps where the ministers of the Church of England were too snobbish or slothful or simply absent: Methodists in the Midlands and Yorkshire, Baptists in the Home Counties and Wessex and Wales, Congregationalists in much the same areas, Plymouth and other more or less ‘exclusive’ Brethren in the West Country. Above all, Dissenters were concentrated in the North and in Wales. The 1851 census revealed that Dissenters actually formed the majority of worshippers in Halifax, Huddersfield, Manchester, Bolton, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Hull, Birmingham, Bradford, Leeds and the whole of Wales. In the late 1850s it is reckoned that one chapel a week was being opened in Wales.

This remarkable census formed part of the general census of that year and was organised by Horace Mann. His enumerators drew up lists of every church and chapel in the country and asked their ministers to return the numbers attending divine service on Sunday March 30, 1851. The results were startling and acted as an alarm to the Church of England. First, the census revealed the overall level of attendance as 52 per cent of the population — to us today a hugely impressive statistic but by the expectations of the Victorians themselves a deeply worrying indication of popular apathy. But more worrying still to the Anglican authorities was the fact that half of those attending church did not belong to their own flocks.

On that March Sunday, 5,292,551 people attended 14,077 Anglican places of worship (the figures are not wholly reliable, because they do not take account of those who attended church more than once on that day, but for comparative purposes they are serviceable enough). By comparison, 1,214,059 Congregationalists attended 3,244 of their chapels; 939,190 Baptists went to 3,890 of theirs; no less than 2,416,153 Wesleyan Methodists of various types attended 11,007 Methodist fanes; the smaller, more austere Calvinistic Methodists mustered 308,754 at their 937 chapels. If you include Quakers, Unitarians and an assortment

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