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This chapter discusses Victoria’s deeply fractious relationship with the Church of England. She came to the throne determined not just to maintain but also to reform the Church by promoting the liberal clergy who could make it a more charitable and representative institution. Resistance to the royal promotion of liberalism from Tractarians and Ritualists who loathed Protestantism and Erastianism—state meddling in spiritual matters—made her increasingly aggressive in her determination to broaden the Church, as she pressed for legislation to stamp out liturgical experiments which hinted at a hankering after the spiritual authority of the Church of Rome. Victoria’s feeling that she could defend the Church by making it more representative of the Protestant nation not only set her against high church people, but blinded her to the principled objections that many Protestant Dissenters nursed to its establishment. Her alarmed response to their talk of disestablishment, especially in Wales, further narrowed Victoria’s understanding of liberalism.

This chapter argues that Victoria’s marriage to Albert instilled in her a Protestant identification with the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha and with German Lutherans. Although Coburgers could be flexible about Protestantism when it came to making dynastic alliances, Victoria and Albert nonetheless regarded marriage as a medium through which they could build religious and political affinities between Britain and Protestant Germany, and especially with Hohenzollern Prussia. The chapter highlights the importance of her children Victoria and Alice’s marriages as attempts to bring about spiritual and political reform in Germany, before explaining why thesyts were ultimately unsuccessful.

This chapter sketches the development of Victoria’s liberal Protestant commitment to lived lay religion, which overlooked conventional distinctions between the sacred and the secular. Victoria and Albert regarded family and the home rather than the church as the locus of religious faith and practice, and sought to advance the identification of God with the laws of His creation. This chapter accordingly discusses Victoria’s relationship to the Christian sacraments, her creation and use of sacred space within royal homes, and her views of God and the natural world. It highlights the appeal of her and Albert’s godly domesticity to a broad Protestant public, while also indicating that Victoria’s hostility to Sabbatarianism and disdain for efforts to avert disease and war through prayer could set her at odds with religious, and particularly with evangelical, opinion.

This book evokes the pervasive importance of religion to Queen Victoria’s life but also that life’s centrality to the religion of Victorians around the globe. The first comprehensive exploration of Victoria’s religiosity, it shows how moments in her life—from her accession to her marriage and her successive bereavements—enlarged how she defined and lived her faith. It portrays a woman who had simple convictions but a complex identity that suited her multinational kingdom: a determined Anglican who preferred Presbyterian Scotland, an ardent Protestant who revered her husband’s Lutheran homeland but became sympathetic towards Roman Catholicism and Islam, a moralizing believer in the religion of the home who scorned Sabbatarianism. Drawing on a systematic reading of her journals and an extensive selection of manuscripts from British and German archives, it sheds new light not just on Victoria’s private beliefs but also on her activity as a monarch, who wielded her powers energetically in questions of church and state. Unlike a conventional biography, this book interweaves its account of Victoria’s life with a panoramic survey of what religious communities made of it. Drawing on sermons, newspapers, and other sources from around the British world, it shows how different churches and world religions expressed an emotional identification with their Queen and Empress, turning her into an embodiment of their different and often rival conceptions of what her Empire ought to be. The result is a biography of a Queen which also argues that monarchy and religion remained close allies in the nineteenth-century British world.

This chapter examines the global topography of religious emotion created by Victoria’s death and funeral, one which was thickly studded with church spires. It begins with the efforts to create a moving liturgy for Victoria after her death, showing that while her funeral was centred on London and Windsor Castle, it served as the template for memorial services around the world. It demonstrates that Christian clergy were impresarios of the emotions they unleashed, showing how they confidently used grief at Victoria’s death to celebrate national and imperial solidarities. The next section goes beyond the imperial rhetoric of the ‘Great White Mother’, supposedly universally mourned by natives, to argue that representatives of world religions voiced reverence for her as a tactical way of establishing their claims to greater consideration in her Christian but also cosmopolitan Empire. The chapter ends with a summary of the book’s key findings.

The introduction explains the central importance of Victoria’s religious life to Victorian religion and politics. Not only have existing biographies of Victoria given insufficient attention to her religion, but they have also failed to incorporate the modern historiography of the Victorian monarchy, which emphasizes the structural rather than the personal causes of Victoria’s power and influence. The introduction sets out how this biography portrays Victoria both as an individual and as a European and global sovereign, and discusses the manuscript and printed sources which serve as the basis for the project. It ends with an outline of the following chapters and describes how the book interweaves close attention to Victoria’s strong personal piety with analysis of what religious communities claimed to feel about it and why they did so.

While a crescendo of bereavements later in life undoubtedly turned Victoria into a gloomy and retrospective person and sovereign, this chapter suggests that they also bolstered her spiritual credentials with her people. The chapter concentrates on the lavish way in which she buried and commemorated a series of male relatives—her son Leopold, the Duke of Albany; her grandsons Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence and Christian Victor; and her son-in-law Henry of Battenberg—suggesting that this made her the Empire’s mourner in chief. The martial flourishes of their funerals aligned a feminine monarchy with the increasingly militaristic and imperial character of male elite culture. Changes in Christian eschatology meant that concern with death in late Victorian culture focused on the feelings of the living rather than the postmortem fate of the dead, and as such there was much discussion of and identification with Victoria’s feelings. In this way, royal deaths secured Victoria’s position as the head of what historians have termed an ‘empire of sentiment’, whose Christian advocates claimed it was based on sacrifice rather than power.

This chapter assesses Victoria’s efforts to cope with the religious diversity of the United Kingdom. Although Victoria’s admiration for the Church of Scotland, which was centred on the Highlands and a small circle of eloquent preachers, made her a biased participant in disputes over its established status, impressions of Victoria’s Presbyterian sympathies sank deep in Scotland and around the Empire. Victoria had hoped to commend herself to the Irish as she had to the Scots, by paying respect to their different kind of national faith, but the chapter shows that her estrangement from Irish Roman Catholics mounted with her reluctance to cross the Irish Sea. Though increasingly appreciative of Roman Catholicism as she encountered it during travel or in the lives of friends and relatives, and friendly towards popes, who she hoped might bring the Irish hierarchy to heel, Victoria could not translate these affinities into a constructive relationship with Catholic Ireland.

Although historians have long recognized the importance of Victoria’s Golden and Diamond Jubilees as occasions that strengthened articulations of imperial ideology, they have not always been understood as distinctively religious events. This chapter begins by tracing the growing expectation that Victoria should become the centre of national religious occasions, which ran against her wishes but proved impossible to deny. It then moves on to discuss the ways in which, with the telling exception of Irish Roman Catholics, different Christian denominations celebrated enthusiastically but distinctively during the Jubilees. It shows how Jubilee sermons constructed Victoria as a godly sovereign and called for a restoration of the British Empire’s Christian ideals. The chapter also argues, though, that the meaning of the Jubilees cannot be reduced to Christian chauvinism. The homages of Jews, Hindus, and Muslims were not merely sycophantic acts of imitation, but attempts to align Victoria with their distinctive religious positions and the hopes they held of Empire.

This chapter focuses on the importance of “European work” in the thinking of later nineteenth-century British Nonconformists. It uses the writings produced by and about McAll’s Mission from its creation to its founder’s death in 1893 to evoke the deep hold that the Continent exerted over the missionary imagination of British Protestants. When compared with the Calvinists of the early nineteenth century, Robert Whitaker McAll was coy about the doctrinal content of the Christianity to which he was seeking to convert the French. The history of the Mission shows that while British missionaries undoubtedly contributed to this “imperial culture,” they remained no less preoccupied with nearby societies that resembled or perhaps exceeded their own in worldly accomplishment. The eschatological stress on faith alone helps explain the mounting Americanisation of the Mission. The primary cause of the shift to American financing and organisation was its failure to implant itself in French society.

Run by the Rev. Augustus Cant, the Rev. Nasal Whine and Soapy Bareface, Esq., the Society for the Distribution of Moral Pocket Handkerchiefs propagated evangelical Protestantism by selling cheap go...

Since the autumn of 2015, visitors to the Virginia Woolf Building at King’s College London have been confronted with a life-sized effigy of the writer in the foyer, squeezed into a glassed cabinet ...

There is generally throughout the article a want of soundness and coherency, and a puerile and almost girlish affection of tinsel ornament, which, coming from a man of nearly forty, convince me tha...

The nineteenth century was a very good century for Congregationalism in England and Wales. This chapter documents the significant numerical growth it achieved during this period, and its energetic efforts in the area of missions, both foreign and domestic. Congregationalists provided the lifeblood of the large, well-funded London Missionary Society, and the most celebrated missionary of the age, David Livingstone, was a Scottish Congregationalist. Throughout this chapter the question of whether generalizations about Congregationalism in England were also true of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland is kept in view. This chapter explores the denomination’s raison d’être in its distinctive view of church polity as local and the way that it was increasingly in tension with the strong trend towards greater union among the churches. Founded in 1831, the Congregational Union of England and Wales waxed stronger and stronger as the century progressed, and Congregational activities became progressively more centralized. Although women were excluded from almost all official positions in the churches and the Congregational Unions and generally were erased from denominational histories, they were nevertheless often members with full voting rights at a time when this was not true in civic elections. Women were also the force behind the social life of the congregations, including the popular institutions of the church bazaar and tea meeting. They were the main energizing power behind works of service and innumerable charitable and outreach efforts and organizations, as well as playing a significant part in fundraising. The self-image of Victorian Congregationalism as representing the middle classes is explored, including the move towards Gothic architecture and the ideal of the learned ministry. A mark of their social aspirations, the Congregational Mansfield College, founded in 1886, was the first Protestant Dissenting Oxbridge college. Congregationalists also gave leadership to the movement towards a more liberal theological vision, to an emphasis on ‘Life’ over dogma. English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish Congregationalists all participated in a move away from the Calvinist verities of their forebears. Increasingly, many Congregational theologians and ministers were unwilling to defend traditional doctrines in regards to substitutionary atonement; biblical inspiration, historicity, authorship, dating, and composition; and eternal punishment. A particularly important theme is Congregationalism’s prominent place of leadership in Dissenting politics. The Liberation Society, which led the campaign for the disestablishment of the Church of England, was founded by the Congregational minister Edward Miall in 1844, and Dissenting Members of Parliament were disproportionately Congregationalists. Many Christians emphatically and passionately knew themselves to be Dissenters who were relatively indifferent about which Nonconformist denomination they made their spiritual home. In such an environment, Congregationalism reaped considerable, tangible benefits for being widely recognized as the quintessential Dissenting denomination.

Protestant Dissent was assailed by Anglo-Catholics in England and by the Mercersburg Theologians in the United States for its fissiparous tendencies, sectarian nature, and privileging of emotional conversionism over apostolic order and objective, sacramental religion. Yet this chapter argues that personal conversion was essential to the faith of Dissent and the key to its spirituality, worship, and congregational life. Whether conversion was gradual or instantaneous, it remained the point of entry into the Christian life and the full privileges of church membership. Spurred by the preaching of the gospel and sometimes, but not always, accompanied by the application of the divine law, the earlier underpinning of conversionism in Calvinism gave way to an emphasis on human response. Popular in both the United States and Great Britain, the ‘new measures’ of the Presbyterian evangelist Charles Finney, in which burdened souls were called forward to ‘the anxious bench’ and prayerfully incited to undergo the new birth, brought thousands into the churches. However, in more liberal circles especially, conversion had by the end of the century become less of a crisis of guilt and redemption than a smooth progression towards spiritual fullness. Although preaching was often linked, especially in the first part of the century, with revivalist exuberance, it remained a mainstay of congregational life. Mainly expository and practical with a view of building up congregants in the faith, it was accompanied by hymn singing, scriptural readings, public prayers, and the two sacraments or ‘ordinances’ of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Sermons tended to become shorter as the century progressed, from an hour or so to thirty or forty minutes, while the ‘long prayer’, invariably offered by the minister, tended to be didactic in tone. From mid-century onwards, there was a move towards more rounded worship, though congregations would sit (or sometimes stand) for prayer, but not kneel. The liturgical use of the church year with congregational recitation of the Lord’s Prayer became slowly more acceptable. Communion, either monthly or quarterly, was usually a Zwinglian memorial of Christ’s atoning sacrifice. The impact of the temperance movement during the latter part of the century dictated the use of non-alcoholic rather than fermented wine in the Lord’s Supper, while in a reaction to Anglican sacerdotalism, baptism too, whether believers’ baptism or paedo-baptism, progressively lost its sacramental character. Throughout the century, Dissenters sang. In the absence of an externally imposed prayer book or a standardized liturgy, hymns provided them with both devotional aids and a collective identity. Unaccompanied at first, hymn singing, inspired mostly by the muse of Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, and, in Wales, William Williams, became more disciplined, eventually with organ accompaniment. Even while moving towards a more sophisticated, indeed bourgeois mode, Dissent maintained a vibrant congregational life which prized a simple, biblically based spirituality.

Methodism was originally a loosely connected network of religious clubs, each devoted to promoting holy living among its members. It was part of the Evangelical Revival, a movement of religious ideas which swept across the North Atlantic world in the eighteenth century. This chapter charts the growth and development, character and nature, and consolidation and decline of British Methodism in the nineteenth century from five distinct perspectives. First, Methodism grew rapidly in the early nineteenth century but struggled to channel that enthusiasm in an effective way. As a result, it was beset by repeated secessions, and the emergence of rival Methodist groups, each with their own distinctive characteristics, of which Wesleyan Methodism was the largest and most influential. Second, while Methodism grew rapidly in England, it struggled to find a successful footing in the Celtic fringes of Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. Here, local preoccupations, sectarian tensions, and linguistic differences required a degree of flexibility which the Methodist leadership was often not prepared to concede. Third, the composition of the Methodist membership is considered. While it is acknowledged that most Methodists came from working-class backgrounds, it is also suggested that Methodists became more middle class as the century progressed. People were attracted to Methodism because of its potential to transform lives and support people in the process. It encouraged the laity to take leadership roles, including women. It provided a whole network of support services which, taken together, created a self-sufficient religious culture. Fourth, Methodism had a distinctive position within the British polity. In the early nineteenth century the Wesleyan leadership was deeply conservative, and even aligned itself with the Tory interest. Wesleyan members and almost all of Free Methodism were reformist in their politics and aligned themselves with the Whig, later Liberal interest. This early conservatism was the result of Methodism’s origins within the Church of England. As the nineteenth century progressed, this relationship came under strain. By the end of the century, Methodists had distanced themselves from Anglicans and were becoming vocal supporters of Dissenting campaigns for political equality. Fifth, in the late nineteenth century, Methodism’s spectacular growth of earlier decades had slowed and decline began to set in. From the 1880s, Methodism sought to tackle this challenge in a number of ways. It sought to broaden its evangelical message, and one of its core theological precepts, that of holiness. It embarked on an ambitious programme of social reform. And it attempted to modernize its denominational practices. In an attempt to strengthen its presence in the face of growing apathy, several branches of Methodism reunited, forming, in 1932, the Methodist Church in Britain. However, this institutional reorganization could not stop the steady decline of British members into the twentieth century. Instead, Methodism expanded globally, into previously non-Christian areas. It is now a denomination with a significant world presence. British Methodism, however, continues to struggle, increasingly of interest only as a heritage site for the origins of a much wider and increasingly diverse movement.

This review essay discusses two recent monographs on nineteenth-century German theology and its transnational reception. The books under review assess attempts by German theologians to present their discipline as a science, which required them to present its subject matter as at once purely historical and of absolute significance for humanity. The result was an attractive but inherently unstable discipline, which oscillated between idealist and critical objectives and historical and systematic modes of argument. Its reception in the United States demonstrates both its multifaceted character, which appealed to theologians from a range of traditions, and also the way in which engagement with Germany offered theologians a means of modernizing and sometimes challenging the doctrinal assumptions and scholarly methods of those traditions.

Early in the 1930s, the travel writer H. V. Morton found himself being questioned by Turkish police as he waited to change trains in the small town of Adana: ‘They want to know what you are doing here,’ [my interpreter] said. ‘I have come to see Tarsus.’ ‘They want to know why.’ ‘Because I am writing a book about St Paul.’ I could see that this shattered the morale of the police force.1

Recent research on secularization in later Victorian Britain has emphasized the proliferation of substitute religions as a compensation for the decline in the Church of England's – and by extension Christianity's – intellectual and ethical authority. This article complicates that picture by drawing attention to a group of predominantly Unitarian liberal Protestants who attempted to moderate the privatization of religious belief and the consequent decay of a theistic consensus by creating a new kind of non-dogmatic church, the Free Christian Union (1867–70), which Protestants and theists of every disposition could join without sacrifice of conscience. This article analyses the Union's history, arguing that its rapid collapse both illustrated the appeal and exposed the contradictions involved in the liberal Protestant attempt to reconcile fidelity to individual conscience with the agreement on theological principles that an effective Christian church required.