A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain: Chapter 6

Religion mattered to the Victorians in a way that is incomprehensible to many people today.

Clergymen lived a rarified, Trollopian existence in cathedral closes and country vicarages, preaching soporific sermons and presiding over tea-parties while their curates fluttered the hearts of local young ladies.

What this meant was in effect a repudiation of the Reformation, a return to ornament and statuary, ritual and – most controversially – devotion to the Mother of God.

There are massive wooden gates, which still show signs of damage from the mob that tried to break them down during the Reform Bill riots in 1832, so completely was the Church identified with the landed gentry and the old, vested interests.

Respectable Christianity reached something of a high-water mark in the 1850s, and church congregations were greater from that decade until the end of the seventies than they were to be thereafter. The impetus could, it seemed, not be sustained.

As a historian has pointed out: ‘If some people had not taken a pride, even a pharisaical pride, in being better than their half-barbarous fellows or their morally lax forebears, life in Victorian England would have been worse than it was.’

The ethos of hard work, frugality, unselfishness in serving others – be they the poor, the community or the nation – drew on roots that went back to the Puritans of two hundred years earlier (and, like the Puritans, many Victorians believed that prosperity was a reward from God for their virtue).

Emerging from centuries of persecution, censure and disapproval, it began the building of cathedrals and parish churches throughout the British Isles to replace those that had been lost at the Reformation.

Within the Church of England itself there was a veritable explosion of church-building.

A well-known description of this is given in Dickens’ Little Dorrit, when Arthur Clennam returns to England after years abroad: Melancholy streets, in a penitential garb of soot . . . Everything was bolted and barred that could possibly furnish relief to an overworked people.

The same might well be true if the subject of a sermon were topical – for instance a recent disaster or a particularly interesting vice – for churchgoers would look forward to hearing the views of a trained and analytical mind.

There was no ritual whatsoever associated with singing and praying, and the intercessions were not recited according to a set formula as in the Anglican Church but extemporized.

It was on July 25th 1869 that I first ventured to suggest to the congregation that it would be decorous and might be helpful if on entering and leaving church they paused for a minute in silent prayer.

By the time the Queen died, the rigidity with which Sunday had been observed in the mid-century seemed more and more of an anachronism.

Such was the power of Christian revival that at Cambridge University in 1885 – amid a spate of conversions – Studd and six others volunteered to devote their lives to working for the China Inland Mission.