Class and Religion in the Late Victorian City
Class and Religion in the Late Victorian City

Author: Hugh McLeod

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-07-01

Total Pages: 375

ISBN-13: 1317265920

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First published in 1974, this book describes the religion of the East End, the West End, and the suburbs of London, where each section of society – as well as a variety of immigrant groups – has its own quarters, its own institutions, its distinctive codes of behaviour. While the main focus is on ideas, or unconscious assumptions, rather than institutions, two chapters examine the part played by the churches in the life of Bethnal Green, a very poor district, and of Lewisham, a prosperous suburb, and a third provides a picture of the church-going habits of each part of the city. The years 1880-1914 mark one of the most important transitions in English religious history. The latter part of the book examines the causes and consequences of these changes. This book will be of interest to students of history, and particularly those interested in issues of religion and class.

British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes, 1870-1900
British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes, 1870-1900

Author: D. Maltz

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2005-11-22

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 0230504051

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This cultural study reveals the interdependence between British Aestheticism and late-Victorian social-reform movements. Following their mentor John Ruskin who believed in art's power to civilize the poor, cultural philanthropists promulgated a Religion of Beauty as they advocated practical schemes for tenement reform, university-settlement education, Sunday museum opening, and High Anglican revival. Although subject to novelist's ambivalent, even satirical, representations, missionary aesthetes nevertheless constituted an influential social network, imbuing fin-de-siecle artistic communities with political purpose and political lobbies with aesthetic sensibility.

Women, Gender and Religious Cultures in Britain, 1800-1940
Women, Gender and Religious Cultures in Britain, 1800-1940

Author: Sue Morgan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2010-06-10

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 1136972331

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This volume is the first comprehensive overview of women, gender and religious change in modern Britain spanning from the evangelical revival of the early 1800s to interwar debates over women’s roles and ministry. This collection of pieces by key scholars combines cross-disciplinary insights from history, gender studies, theology, literature, religious studies, sexuality and postcolonial studies. The book takes a thematic approach, providing students and scholars with a clear and comparative examination of ten significant areas of cultural activity that both shaped, and were shaped by women’s religious beliefs and practices: family life, literary and theological discourses, philanthropic networks, sisterhoods and deaconess institutions, revivals and preaching ministry, missionary organisations, national and transnational political reform networks, sexual ideas and practices, feminist communities, and alternative spiritual traditions. Together, the volume challenges widely-held truisms about the increasingly private and domesticated nature of faith, the feminisation of religion and the relationship between secularisation and modern life. Including case studies, further reading lists, and a survey of the existing scholarship, and with a British rather than Anglo-centric approach, this is an ideal book for anyone interested in women's religious experiences across the nineteeth and twentieth centuries.

Victorian Christianity at the Fin de Siècle
Victorian Christianity at the Fin de Siècle

Author: Frances Knight

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2015-10-23

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0857727893

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The period known as the fin de siecle - defined in this groundbreaking book as chiefly the period between1885 and 1901 - was a fluid and unsettling epoch of optimism and pessimism, endings and beginnings, aswell as of new forms of creativity and anxiety. The end of the century has attracted much interest from scholars of literary and cultural studies, who regard it as a critical moment in the history of their disciplines; but it has been relatively ignored by religious historians. Frances Knight here sets right that neglect. She shows how late Victorian society (often said to be one of the most intensely Christian cultures the world has ever seen) reacted to the bold agendas being set by the thinkers of the fin de siecle; and how prominent Church figures during the era first identified many of the concerns that have preoccupied Christians latterly. These include an active interest in social justice and the creation of new types of communities; increasingly open discussion of the sexual exploitation of children; debates about society's 'decadence'; new ideas about the role of women; and the belief in the redemptive powers of art, pioneered by figures as diverse as P.T. Forsyth, Percy Dearmer and Samuel and Henrietta Barnett.Examining in particular the Christian world of fin de siecle London, the author offers penetrating insights intoa society in which the ritual and culture of Christianity sometimes permeated the aesthetic movement andwhere devotees of the aesthetic movement - like Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and their disciples - often revealed a fascination with Christianity. She argues that the 'long 1890s' was a decisive decade in which various sections of Christian opinion, both on the progressive and the more conservative wings of the faith, began to express views which set the tone for attitudes which would become commonplace in the twentieth century. Victorian Christianity at the Fin de Siecle is the focussed treatment of religion and culture at the end of the nineteenth century that the field has long needed. It will be welcomed by scholars of church history, social and cultural history and the history of ideas.

Between God and Gold
Between God and Gold

Author: Robert A. Wauzzinski

Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 9780838634813

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The heart of Between God and Gold can be located in the survey of three representative nineteenth-century Evangelical figures: evangelist Charles Finney, scholar Francis Wayland, and philanthropist/clergyman Russell Conwell. The lives and thought of these notables are unfolded concretely, thereby showing how the Evangelical-Industrial synthesis occurred. Wauzzinski concludes the book by suggesting theological and economic alternatives, hoping to show in these examples that a third way between capitalism and socialism can be found. These possibilities are drawn from theoretical and practical sources and thus provide opportunities for greater social revitalization. An interdisciplinary methodology is employed throughout this work. The author works from the assumption that various fields of study, while analytically separated, do manifest a fundamental coherence.

The Politics of the Poor
The Politics of the Poor

Author: Marc Brodie

Publisher: Clarendon Press

Published: 2004-03-04

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 0191556521

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This book is about the political views of the 'classic' poor of London's East End in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. The residents of this area have been historically characterized as abjectly poor, casually employed, slum dwellers with a poverty-induced apathy toward political solutions interspersed with occasional violent displays of support for populist calls for protectionism, imperialism, or anti-alien agitation. These factors, in combination, have been thought to have allowed the Conservative Party to politically dominate the East End in this period. This study demonstrates that many of these images are wrong. Economic conditions in the East End were not as uniformly bleak as often portrayed. The workings of the franchise laws also meant that those who possessed the vote in the East End were generally the most prosperous and regularly employed of their occupational group. Conservative electoral victories in the East End were not the result of poverty. Political attitudes in the East End were determined to a far greater extent by issues concerning the 'personal' in a number of senses. The importance given to individual character in the political judgements of the East End working class was greatly increased by a number specific local factors. These included the prevalence of particular forms of workplace structure, and the generally somewhat shorter length of time on the electoral register of voters in the area. Also important was a continuing attachment to the Church of England amongst a number of the more prosperous working class. In the place of many 'myths' about the people of the East End and their politics, this study provides a model that does not seek to explain the politics of the area in full, but suggests the point strongly that we can understand politics, and the formation of political attitudes, in the East End or any other area, only through a detailed examination of very specific localized community and workplace structures. This book challenges the idea that a 'Conservatism of the slums' existed in London's East End in the Victorian and Edwardian period. It argues that images of abjectly poor residents who supported Conservative appeals about protectionism, imperialism, and anti-immigration are largely wrong. Instead, it was the support of better-off workers, combined with a general importance in the area of the 'personal' in politics emphasized by local social and workplace structures, which delivered the limited successes that the Conservatives did enjoy.

Religion of the People
Religion of the People

Author: David Hempton

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-31

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 1136131566

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Taking account of broader patterns of growth, the focus of this book is Methodism in the British Isles. Hempton discusses why Methodism, the most important religious movement in the English-speaking world in the 18th and 19th centuries, grew when and where it did and what was the nature of the Methodist experience for those who embraced it. He also explores the themes of law, politics and gender which lie at the heart of Methodist influence on individuals, communities and social structures.

Democracy and Religion
Democracy and Religion

Author: J. P. Parry

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1989-03-02

Total Pages: 524

ISBN-13: 9780521367837

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An account of how the various religious and educational issues tackled by politicians led to the fall of Gladstone's first liberal party government in 1874 and to an identity crisis for British Liberalism.