Abstract
In 1900 A. L. Baxter, one of the researchers for Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London, interviewed the Reverend Alfred Love, who had been vicar of St Paul’s, Greenwich, in south-east London, for twenty-two years. He reported as follows:
As usual the general attitude of the people was described as ‘indifferent’ and the indifference and slackness is extending to those who are to some extent church-goers: they all take their religion much more lightly: there is much more tendency to believe that it will all come right in the end. In this regard Mr L. noticed:
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Notes to Chapter 4: The Religious Crisis
Hugh McLeod, Class and Religion in the Late Victorian City (1974), p. 233.
Jeffrey Cox, English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth 1870–1930 (Oxford, 1982 ), p. 224.
Robin Gill, The Myth of the Empty Church (1993), p. 313.
Hugh McLeod, ‘White Collar Values and the Role of Religion’, in Geoffrey Crossick (ed.), The Lower Middle Class in Britain, 1870–1914 (1977), pp. 87–8.
Gill, op. cit; Robert Currie, Methodism Divided (1968);
A. D. Gilbert, Religion and Society in Industrial England (1976).
E. N. Bennett, Problems of Village Life (1913), p. 122.
W. K. Lowther-Clarke, Facing the Facts, or An Englishman’s Religion (1912), pp. 154, 161.
See Robert Currie, Alan Gilbert and Lee Horsley, Churches and Churchgoers: Patterns of Church Growth in the British Isles since 1700 (Oxford, 1977 ).
James Obelkevich, Religion in Rural Society: South Lindsey 1825–1875 (Oxford, 1976 ), p. 139;
Roy Jenkins, Sir Charles Dilke (1958), p. 24.
J. Wigley, The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Sunday (Manchester, 1980 ) pp. 83–4.
John Lowerson, ‘Sport and the Victorian Sunday: The Beginnings of Middle Class Apostasy’, British Journal of Sports History, 1 (1984), pp. 202–20.
W. L. Courtney (ed.), Do we Believe? (1905), pp. 1–4.
A useful guide to current thinking in this much disputed area is Steve Bruce (ed.), Religion and Modernization: Historians and Sociologists debate the Secularization Thesis (Oxford, 1992 ).
Frank M. Turner, ‘The Victorian Crisis of Faith and the Faith that was Lost’, in Richard J. Helmstadter and Bernard Lightman (eds), Victorian Faith in Crisis (Basingstoke, 1990 ), pp. 9–39.
Susan Budd, Varieties of Unbelief (1977), ch. 5.
For an overview, see John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion (Cambridge, 1991 ).
For the impact of Comte, see T. R. Wright, The Religion of Humanity (Cambridge, 1986 ).
Geoffrey Rowell, Hell and the Victorians (1974).
See Hugh McLeod, Piety and Poverty: Working Class Religion in Berlin, London and New York, 1870–1914 (New York, 1995), ch. 6.
Edward Royle, Radicals, Secularists and Republicans: Popular Freethought in Britain, 1866–1915 (Manchester, 1980), ch. 9.
Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1975), ch. 7.
E. E. Kellett, As I Remember (1936), pp. 105–6.
I. Ellis, Seven against Christ (Leiden, 1980 ).
J. Carpenter, Charles Gore: A Study in Liberal Catholicism (1960).
Clyde Binfield, ‘Chapels in Crisis’, Transactions of the Congregational Historical Society, 20 (1968), p. 246.
Clyde Binfield, ‘“We claim our part in the great inheritance”: The Message of Four Congregational Buildings’, in Keith Robbins (ed.), Protestant Evangelicalism: Britain, Ireland, Germany and America c.1750-c.1950 (Oxford, 1990 ), pp. 201–24.
Patricia Stallings Kruppa, Charles Haddon Spurgeon: A Preacher’s Progress (New York, 1982 ), pp. 429–44.
D. W. Bebbington, ‘The Persecution of George Jackson: A British Fundamentalist Controversy’, in W. J. Sheils (ed.), Persecution and Tolerance, Studies in Church History, 21 (Oxford, 1984 ), pp. 421–33.
John Kent, William Temple (Cambridge, 1992 ), p. 13.
Alan Haig, ‘The Church, the Universities and Learning in Later Victorian England’, Historical Journal, 29 (1986), pp. 187–201.
J. N. Morris, Religion and Urban Change: Croydon 1840–1914 (Woodbridge, 1992 ), p. 183.
Stephen Yeo, Religion and Voluntary Organisations in Crisis (1976), p. 149.
James Walvin, Leisure and Society, 1830–1950 (1978), pp. 109–11.
J. A. Mangan, Athleticism and the Victorian and Edwardian Public School (Cambridge, 1981 ).
See G. Kitson Clark, Churchmen and the Condition of England, 1832–85 (1973).
Pamela Horn, ‘The Labourers’ Union in Oxfordshire’, in J. P. Dunbabin, Rural Discontent in Nineteenth-Century Britain (1974), p. 97.
Robert Moore, Pit-men, Politics and Preachers (1974), pp. 155–68.
Stephen Yeo, ‘The Religion of Socialism in Britain 1883–96’, History Workshop Journal, 4 (1977), pp. 5–56.
E. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels (2nd edn, Manchester, 1970 ), pp. 142–5.
Summers, op. cit., p. 468; S. J. D. Green, ‘Religion and the Rise of the Common Man’, in Derek Fraser (ed.), Cities, Class and Communication (Hemel Hempstead, 1990 ), pp. 38–9.
Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society (Cambridge, 1980 ) p. 85.
R. J. Morris, Cholera 1832 (1976);
John Wolffe, God and Greater Britain: Religion and National Life in Britain and Ireland, 1843–1945 (1994), p. 120.
Cf. Kenneth D. Brown, ‘Nonconformity and the British Labour Movement’, Journal of Social History, 8 (1975), pp. 116–18.
G. I. T. Machin, Politics and the Churches in Great Britain, 1869 to 1921 (Oxford, 1987 ), pp. 2–3.
Stephen Koss, Nonconformity in Modern British Politics (1975), p. 184 and passim.
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McLeod, H. (1996). The Religious Crisis. In: Religion and Society in England, 1850–1914. Social History in Perspective. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24477-5_5
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