Victorian Christianity and Emigrant Voyages to British Colonies c.1840 - c.1914

Author(s):  
Rowan Strong

This volume looks at the religious dimensions of the nineteenth-century British and Irish emigration experience, examining the varieties of Christianity adhered to by most British and Irish emigrants in the nineteenth century and consequently taken to their new homes in British settler colonies. It examines a significant aspect of this emigration history that has been overlooked by scholars—the development of an international emigrants’ chaplaincy by the Church of England that ministered to Anglicans, Nonconformists, and others, including Scandinavians, Germans, Jews, and freethinkers. The volume uses the records of this emigrants’ chaplaincy, as well as the shipboard diaries kept by emigrants themselves to give them a voice in this history. Concentrating on the experiences of the emigrant voyages, an analysis is provided of the Christianity of these British and Irish emigrants as they travelled by ship to British colonies. Their ships were ‘floating villages’ that necessitated and facilitated religious encounters across denominational and even religious boundaries. The volume argues that the Church of England provided an emigrants’ ministry that had the greatest longevity, breadth, and international structure of any Church in the nineteenth century. It also explores the principal varieties of Christianity espoused by most British emigrants, and argues their religion was more central to their identity and, consequently, more significant in settler colonies than historians have hitherto accepted. In this way, emigrant Christianity and the Church of England’s emigrants’ chaplaincy made a major contribution to the development of a British world in settler colonies of the British Empire.

2018 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 314-327
Author(s):  
Rowan Strong

In the 1840s the Church of England, through the agency of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), established an official chaplaincy to emigrants leaving from British ports. The chaplaincy lasted throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. It was revitalized in the 1880s under the direction of the SPCK in response to a surge in emigration from Britain to the colonies. This article examines the imperial attitudes of Anglicans involved in this chaplaincy network, focusing on those of the 1880s and 1890s, the period of high imperialism in Britain. It compares these late nineteenth-century outlooks with those of Anglicans in the emigrant chaplaincy of the 1840s, in order to discern changes and continuities in Anglican imperialism in nineteenth-century Britain. It finds that, in contrast to the imperialist attitudes prevalent in Britain during the late nineteenth century, Anglicans in this chaplaincy network focused more on the ecclesiastical and pastoral dimensions of their work. Indeed, pro-imperial attitudes, though present, were remarkably scarce. It was the Church much more than the empire which mattered to these Anglicans, notwithstanding their direct involvement with the British empire.


Author(s):  
Douglas A. Foster

By the end of the nineteenth century, Dissent had gained a global presence, with churches from the Dissenting traditions scattered across the British Empire and beyond. This chapter traces the spread of Dissenting denominations during this period, through the establishment of both settler churches and indigenous Christian communities. In the settler colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and the Cape Colony, colonists formed churches that identified with and often kept formal ties with the British Dissenting denominations. The particular conditions of colonial society, especially the relatively weak place of the Church of England, meant that many of the Dissenting denominations thrived. At the same time, these conditions forced Dissenting churches to adapt and take on new characteristics unique to their colonial context. Settler churches in the Dissenting tradition were part of a society that dispossessed indigenous peoples and some members of these churches engaged in humanitarian and missionary work among indigenous communities. By the end of the century, many colonial Dissenting churches had also begun their own missionary ventures overseas. Beyond the settler colonies, Dissenting traditions spread during the nineteenth century through the efforts of missionaries, both indigenous and non-indigenous. Examples from Dissenting churches in the Pacific and southern and western Africa show how indigenous Christian communities developed their own identities, sometimes in tension with or opposition to the traditions from which they had emerged, such as Ethiopianism. Around the world, the nineteenth century saw the formation of new churches within the Dissenting traditions that would give rise, in the twentieth century, to the truly global expansion of Dissent.


1999 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 384-395
Author(s):  
R. W. Ambler

In February 1889 Edward King, Bishop of Lincoln, appeared before the court of the Archbishop of Canterbury charged with illegal practices in worship. The immediate occasion for these proceedings was the manner in which he celebrated Holy Communion at the Lincoln parish church of St Peter at Gowts on Sunday 4 December 1887. He was cited on six specific charges: the use of lighted candles on the altar; mixing water with the communion wine; adopting an eastward-facing position with his back to the congregation during the consecration; permitting the Agnus Dei to be sung after the consecration; making the sign of the cross at the absolution and benediction, and taking part in ablution by pouring water and wine into the chalice and paten after communion. Two Sundays later King had repeated some of these acts during a service at Lincoln Cathedral. As well as its intrinsic importance in defining the legality of the acts with which he was charged, the Bishop’s trial raised issues of considerable importance relating to the nature and exercise of authority within the Church of England and its relationship with the state. The acts for which King was tried had a further significance since the ways in which these and other innovations in worship were perceived, as well as the spirit in which they were ventured, also reflected the fundamental shifts which were taking place in the role of the Church of England at parish level in the second half of the nineteenth century. Their study in a local context such as Lincolnshire, part of King’s diocese, provides the opportunity to examine the relationship between changes in worship and developments in parish life in the period.


1984 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard Elliott

At the Reformation, three possibilities faced English Catholics. They could continue to be Catholics and so suffer the penalties of the penal laws; they could conform to the Church of England; or they could adopt a middle course and become Church Papists. The Nevills of Nevill Holt, near Market Harborough in Leicestershire, went through all three phases. In the reign of Edward VI, Thomas Nevill I became a Protestant. His grandson, Thomas Nevill II, became a Church Papist under James I; and Thomas II’s son, Henry Nevill I, continued to be one at the time of the Civil War. But Henry l’s son William was definitely a Catholic and went into exile with King James II, while William’s son, Henry Nevill II, was an open Catholic under Charles II. Henry Nevill II’s descendants continued to be Catholics throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries until they left Nevill Holt in the late nineteenth century.


Author(s):  
Andrew O. Winckles

This chapter lays out some of the shifts in Methodist discourse culture that occurred during the early nineteenth century and suggests that, in response to these changes, Methodist women found new ways to reach their audiences and work around the Methodist hierarchy. In particular, it focuses on the lives and writings of Sarah Crosby, Mary Bosanquet Fletcher, Mary Tooth, and other members of their circle in order to illustrate how they adapted earlier Methodist discourse practices for new and potentially subversive purposes. It then turns to the work of evangelical Anglican Hannah More in the 1790’s and early 1800’s to consider how a very well-known female evangelical within the Church of England negotiated a shifting discursive terrain, especially in her Cheap Repository Tracts and her work with the Mendip Hills Sunday Schools which led to the Blagdon Controversy.


2015 ◽  
Vol 58 ◽  
pp. 197-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Turner

The Gothic Revival occupies a central place in the architectural development of the Church of England in the nineteenth century, both at home and abroad. Within the expanding British colonial world, in particular, the neo-Gothic church became a centrally important expression of both faith and identity throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. From a symbolic and communicative perspective, the style represented not only a visual link to Britain, but also the fundamental expression of the Church of England as an institution and of the culture of Englishness. As such, it carried with it a wide range of cultural implications that suited the needs of settler communities wishing to re-established their identity abroad. Expansion during this period, however, was not only limited to the growth of settler communities but was also reflected in growing Anglican missions to the non-Christian peoples of annexed territories. The two primary organs of the Church of England in the field, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) and the Church Missionary Society (CMS), actively employed the revived medieval style throughout the Empire as missions were solidified through infrastructure development. As a popular style with direct connotations to the Christian faith, revived medieval design became increasingly popular with Anglican missionaries abroad in the period between the early 1840s and the end of the century. Not only did its origins in ecclesiastical buildings make it attractive, but it was also stylistically distinctive, and set apart as a sacred style from both secular and ‘heathen’ structures.


2008 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
SUSAN MUMM

This paper reflects on the uncomfortable relationship between gender, religion, authority and influence in the Victorian Church of England, using the example of the ecclesiastical response to the rise of Anglican religious communities for women in the second half of the nineteenth century. Anglican sisterhoods occupied equivocal and disputed space within the Victorian Church of England, proclaiming their loyalty to the Church but unfettered by any ecclesiastical legislation or tradition that would have compelled them to obey the bishops. In a society that assumed that obedience to lawful authority was a natural attribute of godly women, their ambiguous and improvised relationship with the church hierarchy created enormous tension as well as considerable hostility.


2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-152
Author(s):  
Diarmaid MacCulloch

This study traces the way in which a typical Elizabethan Reformed Protestant became something slightly different during a ministerial career prematurely terminated by death in his forties, and what he became in the centuries that followed. It explains the background of divided theologies in the national Church of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, the emergence of ‘avant-garde conformism’, and the way in which Hooker was used by opposing sides to justify their positions, particularly after the Restoration of 1660, when the term ‘Anglicanism’ first becomes fully appropriate for the life and thought of the Church of England. As the Church moved from national monopoly to established status, Hooker became of use in different ways to both Tories and Whigs, though in the nineteenth century the Oxford Movement largely monopolised his memory. His views on the construction of authority may still help Anglicanism find its theological way forward.


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