Religion and the working classes in mid-nineteenth century England

Abstract

The central piece of evidence regarding the religious character of the population in the mid-Nineteenth Century is the Religious Census of 1851, which provides adequate if not always precise, information on the religious habits of the people for every parish in England and Wales. Returns are available for every religious building, of all denominations and these give general information on the size and type of church and the number of seats available, together with the number of attendants at each service on Census Sunday, 30th March 1851. Broadly speaking its findings were that a considerable proportion of the population could not be classed as regular church-goers and that those who were absent from worship came predominantly from the working-classes. Having established this working-class alienation the task is then to discover how this differed between areas, particularly between urban and rural populations, and to what specific influences it can be attributed. Geographical distribution is an important factor, especially in the light of Nineteenth Century demographic history, the phenomenal growth in population and, more significantly, the emergence of massive urban conurbations where class divisions were on a physical as well as cultural, basis. Census statistics taken at county level and in more detail from a study of seven parishes in different parts of the country will show that devotion to religious worship, or lack of it, was by no means uniform or universal. The parish studies have been chosen so as to represent various types of working-class communities according to the predominant work situation of the area, to see how far this was a relevant factor in determining the propensity to religious worship of otherwise. Thus, there are two agricultural parishes, taken from separate counties, representing the old established way of life, little affected by the Industrial Revolution; two mining parishes, one in the North and one in the extreme South; two urban working-class parishes which were distinctly products of industrialisation and a further urban parish, dealing with those people involved in the old and decaying domestic industries. From these studies broad patterns emerge, which show that the proportion of church attenders among populations in the new industrial centres was very much lower than that in rural or semi-rural areas. In the large towns, the average worshipping population was approximately 25% of the total e.g. in Manchester, Sheffield and the St. Giles Parish of London, although in Shoreditch the proportion was only 12% and in Bethnal Green only 6% On the other hand, in rural parishes the proportion was generally above 50% and often well above 60%, particularly in the agricultural counties of the South. Reasons for working-class alienation from the church must inevitably be pointed towards the mere fact of industrialisation and the problem is thus one of determining what factors were influential in bringing about this comparative alienation of the urban working-classes, while at the same time what factors contributed towards the greater religiosity of their counterparts in the countryside. The evidence however, that there were pockets of irreligion even among rural communities means that the answer is not simply to be found in industrialisations, the rise in the scale of communities and the resulting impersonality of the system, though these were undoubtedly of major importance. Other influences which must he considered include, the increasing facilities for education in the Nineteenth Century which led to a reading public brought up, not on the Bible alone, but with easy access to all kinds of literature, some of it radical, some of it infidel; the rise of the free-thought movement and how great its appeal was to the working-classes; and also the move towards increasing leisure time and the question of how far the working-classes were being drawn away from the church by the prospect of more attractive leisure-time activities. Allied to these considerations are the basic questions regarding religious faith itself together with the state of the actual churches! The strength of the various denominations in each particular parish and especially the strength of non-conformity in working-class areas; what, for example, were the reasons for the appeal of early Methodism. One needs to look at the attitudes of the churches and their response towards a rapidly expanding and changing society. How far for example were they willing, or able to adapt themselves to meet the needs of an urban civilisation. This involves not only their ideals and the relevancy of their message but also the actual provision of accommodation, its distribution and its rate of growth, as compared with the rise in population. Obviously the degree of religious observance among any population is not likely to be explained in terms of any one phenomenon, but the need is to examine those factors which may be thought to be influential and to isolate those which prove to be of most significant importance.