Victorian Church and Society

  In 1811 the first meeting of the National Society for the Promotion of the Education of the Poor in the principles of the established Church took place. This body went onto ensure that education in England had Christian input for the rest of the century and still exists today. The first schools that had been set up for the poor were the Ragged schools. These originated in the Sunday School founded in 1780 by Robert Raikes in Gloucester, who taught children to read so that they could read the Bible. Then a Portsmouth cobbler, John Pounds, gathered groups of children to play with his disabled nephew, and by 1818 had a class of thirty or forty children who he was teaching to read from the Bible because it was the only book easily available. The idea spread to London. In 1844, 19 Ragged Schools joined to form a Ragged School Union, headed by Lord Shaftesbury. By 1861 they were teaching over forty thousand children in London, including the children of convicts, drunks and abusiv...

 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 ...

The Countess was an English religious leader who played a prominent part in the religious revival of the eighteent h century and the Methodist movement in England and Wales which grew during the nineteenth century. She founded a branch of this in England and Sierra Leone known as the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion. She helped finance and guide early Methodism and was the first principal of Trevecca College, (in Wales) established in 1768 to train Methodist ministers. With construction of sixty four chapels in England and Wales, plus mission work in colonial America, she is estimated to have spent over £100,000 on these activities, a huge sum at the time. A regular correspondent of George Whitfield and John Wesley she is also remembered for her adversarial relationships with other Methodists. Selina Shirley was born in June 1707, second daughter of the Earl of Ferrers. In 1728, she married Theophilus Hastings, ninth Earl of Huntingdon. In 1739, Lady Huntington joined the ...

The dispute that split John Wesley and George Whitfield was more acute and became more damaging than the one of the revivalists with the Moravians over “stillness”. The argument centred on the extent to which an individual was chosen by God for eternal salvation or eternal damnation. Did God choose people for salvation or damnation from the start of their lives or did they have the free will to respond to God? Whitfield held the first view, Wesley upheld the second. This leads to a further question that is key to the matter: if God chooses the people He wishes to save (the elect) than did Christ die only for them or for all humanity? If Christ died only for the elect then they may not need to lead a holy life, some might contend, leading others to make the allegation of antinomianism (becoming lawless). These considerations were not novel having originated at the time of the European Reformation among followers of John Calvin (1509-1564) and Jacob Arminius (1560-1609). Wesley...

  The influence of the John and Charles Wesley and George Whitfield on Church life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: A Review of “Reviving the Heart” -Richard Turnbull (Lion Hudson, publisher, 2012) Initial chapters focus on the early lives of John Wesley and George Whitfield. John was born in Epworth Rectory in 1703. His parents Samuel and Susannah Wesley were high church members of the established church. A fire destroyed their home and the rescue of the family was regarded as an act of divine providence.. John went to Charterhouse then to Christ Church Oxford in 1720. He struggled with inner conflict about his faith and became part of a group known as the “ Holy Club” in Oxford. George Whitfield grew up by contrast in a pub and due to the breakdown of his mother and step father’s marriage lack of money meant that initially he was unable to go to Oxford, so he began work in the pub. Eventually he went to Oxford as a servitor (caring for three or four oth...

  The Act that led to some level of Catholic Relief in England was not a licence for all Roman Catholic activity in this country. The Act still envisioned the suppression of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) and other religious orders and at the time there were only fifty four priests in the Jesuit order in England. In 1838 the Roman Catholic weekly periodical The Tablet was initiated with a Quaker, Frederick Lucas as its editor. This publication soon developed into an influential force within the Roman Catholic Church in England. Closely linked with this, an unknown Subscriber to the Tablet, writing from an address close to the Jesuit college, Stonyhurst sent a letter to the Jesuit Provincial who lived in Worcester with a donation of seven hundred pounds and a covering note which read: To a subscription towards building a church in London to be dedicated to the Ever Immaculate Blessed Virgin and to be called “The Immaculate Conception”. Offer up with heart and soul every S...