Papists, Protestants and the Irish in London, 1835–70
The increasing interest in nineteenth-century popular religion must serve as the excuse for this summary of my study of one aspect of two great nineteenth-century religious revivals: the ‘second spring’ of the Church of Rome in the 1840s, and that older evangelical rediscovery of the Gospel which in the same decade bore such abounding fruit in the parochial ministry of the Church of England. I have sought to chronicle the institutional development of both these movements in their impact upon the proletarian Irish migrants into mid-victorian London: the least infidel portion of that huge, half-heedless multitude of the destitute against which the best religious impulses of the period lashed themselves so devotedly, and too often in vain.