‘The glory of the age we live in’: Christian Education and Philanthropy in Eighteenth-Century London Charity Schools

2019 ◽  
Vol 55 ◽  
pp. 241-255
Author(s):  
W. M. Jacob
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Elementary Schools ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Christian Education ◽  
National Society ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Church ◽  
Established Church

This article discusses the Church of England's initiative in providing education for the children of the poor during the long eighteenth century with particular reference to London. Briefly it considers the religious, economic and social context and motives for this largely lay-led and lay-supported initiative in the 1690s and early 1700s to establish catechetical day elementary schools, which also taught reading and writing, for poor boys and girls. It focuses particularly on the extensive evidence available from schools in the growing suburbs of Westminster and Holborn and discusses the personnel involved with charity schools, as trustees, benefactors and teachers; how funds were raised and schools managed; and how children were managed, including the arrangement and oversight of apprenticeships. It demonstrates that the schools continued to be well supported, including financially, throughout the changing, economic, social, religious and political circumstances of the century, until most of them became associated with the National Society for the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church, founded in 1811.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Gregory
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Anglican Church ◽  
Factors Affecting ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church ◽  
Significant Factors ◽  
Established Church

This introductory chapter discusses the two ‘E-word’ coordinates of the volume—‘Establishment’ and ‘Empire’—which were arguably the most significant factors affecting the Anglican Church between 1662 and 1829 and asks what the consequences were for the Church of its establishment status and how it was affected by being the established Church of an emerging global power. The chapter surveys the historiography and argues that the Church was far more vital to the period than is often maintained. The chapter also explores the relationship between Anglicanism and two other ‘E-words’—‘Enlightenment’ and ‘Evangelicalism’—which have often been seen as critical reactions against the Church. While the themes of ‘Establishment’, ‘Empire’, ‘Enlightenment’, and ‘Evangelicalism’ had separate, and sometimes competing, trajectories, as this volume indicates, Anglicanism during the long eighteenth century could also hold them together in distinctive ways.

Mechanisms for Unity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Black Death ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Church

This chapter investigates changes in mentalities after the Black Death, comparing practices never before analysed in this context—funerary and labour laws and processions to calm God’s anger. While processions were rare or conflictual as in Catania and Messina in 1348, these rituals during later plagues bound communities together in the face of disaster. The chapter then turns to another trend yet to be noticed by historians. Among the multitude of saints and blessed ones canonized from 1348 to the eighteenth century, the Church was deeply reluctant to honour, even name, any of the thousands who sacrificed their lives to succour plague victims, physically or spiritually, especially in 1348: the Church recognized no Black Death martyrs. By the sixteenth century, however, city-wide processions and other communal rituals bound communities together with charity for the poor, works of art, and charitable displays of thanksgiving to long-dead holy men and women.

Parliament and Church Reform: Off and On the Agenda

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Innes
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Church Reform ◽  
Religious Sects ◽  
The Church ◽  
Established Church

This chapter examines the interactions between politics inside and outside of the British Parliament as well as the issue of Church reform. Attempts by Parliament to improve the Church of England's performance of its pastoral functions ceased following the Hanoverian accession, but resumed in the later eighteenth century. During the intervening period, Parliament passed increasing numbers of acts relating to individual parishes or churches along with various acts adjusting or revising rules relating to merely tolerated religious sects, but by contrast left the established church in charge of its own pastoral operations. In the opening years of the eighteenth century, Convocation provided a forum for clerics to promote their own ideas about how to improve pastoral efficacy. The chapter establishes the complex route by which challenges to and changes within the Church of England translated into a concern to act among parliamentary elites.

Church Building and Architecture

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis P. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Church Building ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Church

Contrary to popular perceptions, the long eighteenth century was a period of significant church building and the architecture of the Church of England in this era played a critical role in religious vitality and theological formation. While certainly not to the expansive scale of Victorian church construction, the period was an era of significant building, in London, but also across the whole of the British Empire. Anglican churches in this era were marked not so much by stylistic questions as by programmatic concerns. The era produced the auditory church, designed to accommodate better the hearing of the sermon and the increasing importance of music in worship. There were also changes to communion practice that implicated the design of architecture. Finally, some few Anglicans considered the theological implications of historical inspiration but many more considered the role of sensibility and emotion in worship and in architecture as one of worship’s agents.

‘A Just and Sufficient Maintenance’: Some Defences of the Clerical Establishment in the Eighteenth Century

1987 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 321-332
Author(s):  
Jeremy Gregory
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Black Book ◽  
Pastoral Leaders ◽  
The Church ◽  
Established Church ◽  
Church Historians

Arguments in justification of the Church’s wealth can be illuminating in any age. The wealth of the Church of England in the eighteenth century has had a particularly bad press. Nineteenth-century reformers portrayed the Established Church of the previous century as a money-grabbing institution; clergy being too concerned with lining their own pockets to be effective pastoral leaders. John Wade in his Extraordinary Black Book wanted to expose the rapaciousness of clergy who, ‘with the accents and exterior of angels … perpetuate the work of demons’. He concluded that true Christianity was ‘meek, charitable, unobtrusive and above all cheap’. Clergy were castigated for holding a materialistic outlook which seemed to hinder their religious role and which has been taken by both subsequent Church historians and historians of the left as a sign of the clergy’s involvement with secularizing trends in society. Even the work of Norman Sykes leaves the impression that the clergy’s defence of their wealth went no further than jobbery and place-seeking. Like Namier he played down the ideological nature of such arguments, relegating them to the realm of cant and hypocrisy.

Revival

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. McClymond
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Spiritual Experience ◽  
British Isles ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Conversion Narratives ◽  
Personal Interaction ◽  
Institutional Boundaries ◽  
The Church ◽  
Established Church

Just as definitions of Dissent can be complicated, ‘revival’ was a multifaceted phenomenon in the eighteenth century. It crossed geographic and institutional boundaries and rounded histories of the phenomenon need to look at the connections between what was happening in Europe, the British Isles, and the American colonies, as well as considering groups both within and outside the Established Church. Some groups, notably Methodists, began within the Church of England, although many eventually left it. Others, like the Moravians, did not fit comfortably into the category of either Establishment or Dissent. Revivals and revivalism relied on shared and intensified spiritual experience but also networks of interconnection of people and ideas. Revivals frequently witnessed extensive outdoor preaching and leaders who were prepared to travel extensively to spread the Word. While there was some soteriological disagreement, many of the awakened sought to spread their experiences through personal interaction and conversion narratives.

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