Dickens and Early Victorian Christian Social Attitudes

Abstract

Though perhaps slightly surprising to the modern reader, the social views of Rev. Gisborne expressed here would by no means have struck his contemporaries in the 1820s as unusual, even for a clergyman. Prevailing religious social attitudes in the early part of the nineteenth century and continuing into Victoria’s reign have been summed up by Gerald Parsons:

Poverty was morally tolerable because it was the inevitable product of immutable economic laws which were themselves the product of a divinely ordained and ordered world … whilst charity might alleviate poverty, it would be impious, as well as fruitless, to contemplate reform … the practice of charity … was to be directed towards the deserving poor, whose poverty was identifiably not the result of their own improvidence, intemperance or indolence. Much poverty, it was confidently claimed, was in fact the result of precisely such personal failing, and hence a recompense for sin²

The late and present distress of the manufacturing population of Great Britain must be deemed, in the case of multitudes, in a very considerable degree, attributable to themselves … in prosperous times of trade, the habits of the operatives are very commonly deserving of the severest reprehension. They are marked by idleness, selfishness, extravagance, and brutish intemperance.

Rev. Thomas Gisborne¹