Victorian Church and Society

 Two Christian European countries with monarchies and parliaments would seem to be similar when contrasted with places that had no governments or obvious boundaries, but Spain and England were markedly different throughout the nineteenth century and this blog post explores some of the distinctions between them. At the start of the century England was protestant, largely Church of England with some Roman Catholics and Methodists, whereas Spain was Roman Catholic with few other denominations represented among its people. From 1837 England had Queen Victoria as its Sovereign and retained its status as a democratic nation. This was not true of Spain which suffered instability in the monarchy and the proclamation of the First Republic. In 1814 the Spanish War against Napoleon ended and King Ferdinand VII returned to Spain being restored as the absolute monarch following a French invasion in 1823. When he died in 1833, his widow Maria Cristina became the Regent for his daughter, (l...

 As education permitted the working classes and those on restricted incomes to access literature, some authors grew in popularity: Defoe and Bunyan were popular but probably the most frequently read author in these groups was Charles Dickens. This blog post will explore why this is the case and how he grew so greatly in popularity. In 1888 Belfast Public Library found that “The Pickwick Papers” and “David Copperfield” were among its most often requested books and this observation was mirrored elsewhere. The impact of Dickens on the working classes can be illustrated by looking at the memoirs of working class people, from the extensive study of Jonathan Rose in “The Intellectual life of the British working classes” (2010, Yale University Press). A boy called George Acorn who grew up in poverty in the East End of London managed to find sufficient money to purchase a used copy of David Copperfield. Having done this he was chided by his parents for the waste of money but he goes ...