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W.M. Jacob
Oxford: University Press,
2021 Hardback. viii + 348
p. ISBN 978-0192897404. £75
Reviewed by Richard Hughes Gibson The
Victorian Web At first glance, the title
of the pastoral theologian W.M. Jacob’s new historical study, Religious
Vitality in Victorian London, might not seem at all provocative. But the
phrase “religious vitality” is a loaded one, as it has been a watchword for the
last thirty-odd years among scholars, particularly sociologists of religion, who
have sought to challenge the so-called “secularisation thesis”. In the middle
of the twentieth century, secularisation theorists saw unmistakable signs that
religious belief and practice were in terminal decline in the West due to the
combined forces of urbanisation, industrialisation, and modernisation. Shifting
populations and new ideas appeared to have dealt the old verities a fatal blow.
However, subsequent studies—and many hard-to-miss public displays of religious
fervor in recent decades—have clarified that the secularisation theorists spoke
too soon, as even Peter Berger, the most prominent such theorist, has admitted. Jacob’s book contributes to
this reassessment by calling into question twentieth-century analyses of the
Victorian period that fell in line with the assumptions of secularisation
theorists. Jacob cites, for example, the writings of such noted historians of
Kenneth Inglis, Owen Chadwick, Alan Gilbert, Basil Wiley, A.J. Cockshut, and
Hugh McLeod, all of whom in one way or another portrayed the period as one of
declining religiosity (the era of the “crisis of faith”) and many of whom
pointed to the capital as the epicentre of heterodoxy, doubt, and irreligion. As
Jacob shows, these historians were in fact following the Victorians’ own lead.
Exactly because they were so concerned to promote the religious life of the
whole population (a sign of vitality), some of the period’s foremost clerics,
government officials, and philanthropists worried publicly about rising
“infidelity”, particularly among the swelling ranks of the lower classes in the
nation’s “world city”. Victorian commentators and later
historians seemed to have solid proof that religion was on the wane in the
period, especially in the capital. They could point, for example, to the first
and only national census of religious attendance—conducted on March 30, 1851—, which
suggested that less than a quarter of London’s population went to church that
Sunday. That figure was half of the national attendance rate (that, too, a
worrying number to some), and seemed to offer a strong rebuttal to those who
spoke easily of England as a “Christian nation”. High rates of attendance among
Nonconformists in London, particularly Congregationalists, also struck a blow
to the established church’s self-presentation as England’s representative
religious body. Subsequent censuses of Londoners’ religious habits were made by
the newspapers the British Weekly in 1886 and the Daily News
in 1902-1903, and both recorded further declines in attendance. The latter, for
example, found that although London’s total population had continued to grow,
the actual number of church attendees had diminished (by about 150,000) since
1886. Victorian writers debated
how reliable the statistics were on all three occasions, and a number of
subsequent studies have further assayed their usefulness (including claims that
they overstated English church attendance). Jacob has his doubts about
the accuracy of these numbers too, but his qualms relate less to the methods of
data-gathering (the chief Victorian-era concern) than the tacit assumption that
Sunday church attendance is the proper way to gauge the religious character of
a nation or its largest city. “Religiosity,” Jacob argues, cannot be whittled
down to head counts of the people in the pews on any given Sunday. It must
encompass “people’s religious feelings, in the widest sense, the ways they were
expressed, and the practices and activities which they inspired, among a
diverse range of people, male and female, ordained and lay” [7]. Such a
definition may seem overbroad, I admit, but Jacob rightly observes that a wider,
more “diffusive” framework for thinking about religious feeling and its
expression is required in this case because of the myriad ways that the
Victorians interacted with religious traditions and institutions. The
overwhelming majority of the population, in the capital and the countryside
alike, still went to church to marry, baptise their children, and bury their
dead, despite secular alternatives to the first and last being available in the
period. The Victorians also bequeathed to us extensive records of “informal
expressions of religiosity”—including mid-week mothers’ meetings, Sunday school
participation, religiously-themed concerts, charitable organisations, and even
(Jacob suggests) spiritualist séances. The popularity of these activities suggest
that many adults and children were receiving religious care and instruction and
having powerful spiritual experiences even if they were not regularly in attendance
on the sabbath. This more “informal”
connection to the churches was especially true of working class Londoners. As
Jacob points out, Horace Mann, the designer of the 1851 religious census, had
assumed that “all ‘respectable’ people attended church, probably twice, on
Sundays”; that the absentees consisted of “minor shopkeepers”, “Sunday traders”,
and “the miserable denisens of courts and crowded alleys”; and “that absence
from a place of worship on Census Sunday was evidence of a lack of religious
belief” [40]. The census thus appeared to Mann and others at the time to
demonstrate a religious crisis that was especially acute among the urban poor. That
perspective, Jacob emphasises, shows a gross misunderstanding of working-class
life in the city. Some jobs did not regularly provide for time off to attend
hours-long church services. (Those in domestic service, for example, might be
expected to put the house in order while their middle- and upper-classes
employers went to church.) Sunday, moreover, was for many labourers the lone
day off each week, making it the sole day in which to rest and to tend to
household chores such as cleaning up and mending shoes and other articles of
clothing. Even if they had the energy to make it to church, the physical space
of the sanctuary could be forbidding. Most churches relied on pew-rents for
income, sometimes leaving only a small area remaining for “non-renting”
attendees. And in an age that venerated “respectability,” lacking suitable
“Sunday best” clothing could be a deterrent to even stepping in the door. “For
many of London’s poorest, in irregular employment”, Jacob concludes, “regular
or frequent church attendance at worship was probably an unattainable goal” [310]. At the same time, Jacob
shows that the plight of the poor was among the utmost concerns of wealthy
Victorians of all religious stripes—Anglican, Nonconformist, Roman Catholic, and
Jewish. Religious convictions led the rich to give enormous sums to
London-based philanthropic projects, funding manifold building campaigns,
Sunday schools (among other kinds of educational institutions), hospitals, city
missions, and various kinds of temporary and longer-term financial help for
those in need. Jacob stresses that these initiatives were often financed and
directed by women, some of whom became national figures as result of their
efforts. Octavia Hill, for example, was a leading figure in The Society for
Organising Charitable Relief and Repressing Mendacity (later the “Charity Organisation
Society” or “COS”). Believing that “Christian duty […] required an effort to
know those needing help and extending sympathy to them”, Hill argued that
charity workers needed to enter into the experience of the poor by making
personal visits to the recipients of aid and that “the key to changing poor
people’s behaviour lay in changing habits.” Her methods, Jacob explains,
“provided the origins of professional social casework”. On Jacob’s telling, there
was a religious crisis in Victorian London, but it was not rapidly declining
“religiosity” among the poor (or the rich for that matter). The crisis was the
urban environment itself. Across the chapters of the book, the reader observes
one eminent Victorian after another—bishops and preachers, lords and prime
ministers, scholars and proto-social workers like Hill—confronting the problem
of maintaining communal religious life on such a vast scale. The
question that everyone was asking was this: how could churches, clergy, and the
laity fulfill their religious responsibilities—to worship together, to pass the
faith on to the young, to care for the poor and the sick—amidst such an
enormous and constantly shifting population? Traditionally, those duties had
been fulfilled by the local parish, presided over by a clergyman who had been
enjoined to the care of all of the souls within the parish limits. London was
simply too big and too religiously diverse to be served by such a system; it
required, and inspired, new ways of addressing religious obligations and callings,
and Jacob rightly argues that the new and often well-financed schemes—in
education, housing, preaching, medicine, etc.—constitute
so many signs of religious vitality. Jacob would turn us away from the census
reports in order to recognise that no place or period in English history can
rival Victorian London for its industry in building and expanding churches,
setting up soup kitchens, and attempting to spread the Word. It was a world in
which even bishops hit the streets. At midcentury, Archibald Tait, Anglican
Bishop of London, to cite an especially notable example, preached “to emigrants
at the docks, gypsies at Kensington Potteries, omnibusmen at night in their
depot at Islington, railwaymen from a locomotive, and costermongers at Covent
Garden” [84]. The denominations, moreover, quickly learned from each other’s
tactics. In the latter half of the century, the Church of England responded to
declining state support by “adopting and adapting the Nonconformist’s associational
model of financing”, becoming in the process “London’s most successful
fundraising organisation” [96]. Anglican churches, moreover, gradually began to
reflect the multiplicity of parties within the Church of England (Tractarian
and evangelical, in particular), with the result that by the century’s end many
Anglicans chose which church to attend by consulting not the parish map but
their “theological, liturgical, and aesthetic tastes”—just as their
Nonconformist neighbours did [99]. Expanded public transport, Jacob notes, was
a vehicle for this change, as it allowed worshippers to join with the
“likeminded” on Sundays. In the 1850s, Roman Catholics, meanwhile, began to
“emulate Protestant methods” in their response to Catholic slums, introducing
“ragged schools, self-help societies, and bread and soup charities, to
withstand ‘leakage’ from the Irish Catholic community” [153]. Victorian London, Jacob
would show us, was a unique religious space, requiring experimentation,
imitation, competition, and collaboration (especially for social reform). No
denomination emerged from the period unchanged. By pulling so many pieces
together in a fresh manner, Jacob earns the right to conclude that there was no
vast crisis of faith among Victorian Londoners due to urbanisation, industrialisation,
or “intellectual doubt prompted by historical or literary scholarship, or the
‘rise of science.’ […] The great majority of people had a broadly Christian
approach to life” [310]. Yet the book is, ultimately, more than just a
challenge to the old declinist account of religion’s hold on Victorian London.
Jacob endeavours to show that Victorian Londoners’ religiosity was active and
beneficent, and he lays a strong emphasis on the way in which religious organisation
and activities created a space for women to hold positions of authority and to
make meaningful social contributions. Religiosity raised awareness about “how
the other half lived” (to borrow the Victorian-era New Yorker Jacob Riis’
phrase), thereby promoting reform in fields such as education, housing, medical
care, and poor relief. In attempting to understand and to organise collective
efforts to ameliorate the plight of the poor, Victorian religious organisations
prepared the way for several major initiatives of the twentieth-century state,
including “universal free education, subsidised housing for the very poor, old
age pensions, and health insurance” [312]. In the preface, Jacob notes that the
“evidence of church and chapel buildings” first alerted him to the “immense
initiative and energy” of religious communities in Victorian London [vii].
Those words are a good reminder that Victorian religious trends are not simply
a matter of interest to specialists. For those religious energies have left innumerable
traces, subtle and conspicuous, in the built environment that millions of
people continue to inhabit. London, the city that appeared to some leading
Victorians the hotbed of “infidelity”, now stands as a principal witness to the
vitality of Victorian religious life.
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