Religion

Abstract

Given that even the crudest renderings of nineteenth-century Britain recognise the inherence of religion in ‘Victorian values’, and that caricatures of the age — starting famously with Lytton Strachey’s — fasten onto the piety and prudery of its manners and morals, it may seem odd to assert the need to rehabilitate religion in any aspect of the historiography of nineteenth-century Britain. But the dialogue particularly between its political and religious historians has, until fairly recently, lacked intimacy. Much deeper into the century than is typically appreciated, religion and politics — though often separable analytical categories for the historian — were for many coterminous: if the repeal of the Test Acts and Catholic emancipation were central to the passing of an ancien régime, successive issues, such as Irish Church reform, the Ecclesiastical Commission, the Maynooth grant, Jewish relief, the universities, church rates, disestablishment, burials, education and in some senses ultimately Bradlaugh, were the pith and marrow of political debate. For much of the century, the language of politics was freighted with commonplace, dog-whistle associations between church, state, property and hierarchy — a Burkean ‘wisdom of ancestors’¹ — on the one side, and dissent, emancipation, pluralism, and progress — the ‘march of intellect’² — on the other.