Victorian Church and Society

 Josephine Grey was born in 1828. She was the daughter of an old Northumberland Family. In 1852 she married the Revd George Butler an educationalist and Canon at Winchester. After the birth of five children the family moved to Liverpool in 1866 when George became the head of Liverpool college. In this city Josephine encountered the problem of prostitution. She refused to ignore it and opened her home as a refuge for prostitutes and began to campaign on their behalf. In the society of the time it was regarded as unseemly for a woman to be aware of issues like prostitution and to express views about the matter in public. She thus encountered a lot of opposition to her work. Her faith underpinned her work, she even found time to write a biography of Catherine of Siena. One particular issue was the Contagious Diseases Act passed by Parliament in the 1860s to protect military and naval personnel from sexually transmitted diseases. This Act was characterised by its inclination...

 On May 23 rd 1822 Thomas Meynell was taken from his home at the Friarage in Yarm by his railway workers, numbering about three hundred men. He went to lay the first track for the Stockton and Darlington Railway. Afterwards the workers went back to a local hostelry where they were supplied with free bread, cheese and beer in honour of the occasion whilst local dignitaries proceeded to a celebratory banquet. This was a foretaste of how the railways would go on to change transport and the fabric of society throughout the world. By the time Charles Dickens became a journalist for the Morning Chronicle, the age of the railway had begun. He joked about this in 1835 as he travelled on newspaper business by train “I have a presentiment that I shall run over an only child before I reach Chelmsford”. Although road traffic accidents were common even before the arrival of the internal combustion engine the railway brought with it the fear that people were literally being ground and mo...

 In 1983 every member of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet received a copy of a book by Martin Wiener: English culture and the decline of the industrial spirit. In the book Wiener argued that early Victorian England had been an industrial powerhouse, but that this was short lived because traditional forces including public schools, the Church and a resurgent aristocracy fostered an anti-progressive environment. For example the Arts and Crafts movement championed by William Morris and John Ruskin was one where some people sneered at mass production and economic growth. For Wiener the late Victorians became villains in national decline in England, founding such heritage organisations as the National Trust and magazines like Country Life. A lot of businesses received no investment and the wealth on industrial capital was submerged into the passive wealth of land and property. Cycling, recreational walking and camping became popular as the countryside became a place of tradition, recupe...

In 1842 Charles Dickens was writing Martin Chuzzlewit. It was published in serial form but had not been well received. He also wrote “A Christmas Carol”. In contrast this sold six thousand copies before Christmas 1843. The book was beautifully produced and well received but production costs meant that Dickens did not make a lot of money from it. At the time the book was written Dickens was expecting his fifth child and money was tight. The character Scrooge was an unhappy miser. The story is written in staves, mirroring the format of many Carols that are sung at Christmas time. As the miser Scrooge works late and forces Cratchit to do so, his nephew asks him to go out and the door is ajar enabling Scrooge to catch a glimpse of the world outside, a world of celebration that he will not take part in. Marley’s ghost (whom the reader does not see) shows Scrooge his past, present and future. Slowly he begins to accept his past and then he changes and undergoes a conversion, like a ...

  In July 1851 it was reported that young ladies in Harrogate had been seen in Bloomer costume. Later that summer a lady and her daughter were spotted in London dressed in baggy trousers and waistcoats. They were surrounded by a mob and when they could stand the derision of the mob no longer they escaped in a cab. Such attire began to appear in several cities in the United Kingdom. In each instance the women wore variations on an outfit consisting of a belted knee length tunic and pantaloons gathered at the ankle known as “Bloomer” costume. The name was derived from the American journalist named Amelia Bloomer although it would be several more years before the words would be applied to the clothing itself. The outfits were welcomed by some as a more practical alternative to full skirts that could trip the wearer up or be dragged along in the mud and the whalebone corsets that were tight and frequently uncomfortable. For all its pragmatism the style of dress provoked outrage ...

  Robert Reid Kalley (1809-1888) was an evangelical Scottish Presbyterian minister, who became a doctor on the island of Madeira. He preached in the open air and tried to win the souls of his patients for Christ, thus attracting interest from the Roman Catholic authorities who suspected him of Protestant Proselytism. Eventually in August 1846 a mob attacked his house and burned many of his possessions, but Kalley had fled the night before. Some of his supporters, known as “Calvinistas” were attacked too, causing a problem for the British Consul, George Stoddart. Problems for the Consul were also generated by the island’s Anglican Chaplain, Richard Thomas Lowe (1802-1874). He was a Tractarian and his services were not to the taste of the Anglican congregation. A meeting of church subscribers voted to stop funding his salary, whilst temporary visitors wanted the restoration of the money. Finally in 1847 the British Government terminated Lowe’s contract, but he would not leave ...