When modern spiritualism arrived in England with Maria Hayden in 1852, it quickly became popular among people from all levels of society. So much so that by 1857 The Times noted that its ‘forms, nomenclature and rules’ had been absorbed into the common culture and it was ‘all around’. It provided fascination for society ladies, servants and Yorkshire radicals alike. In 1919 George Bernard Shaw wrote of the second half of the nineteenth century as being a time when the leisured classes were

Through séances and spiritualist lectures, the ideas and images of spiritualism were absorbed into the common culture and a new landscape of the afterlife was imagined. The ‘spirits’ and spiritualists told people that the afterlife was a place where spiritual progress was not only possible but expected; where individuals were assisted in their progress by helpful higher spirits; and where there was no hell or eternal torment. These communications were wrapped in a language of sunshine, flowers and play, and they appealed to many.

One year after Maria Hayden's arrival, in 1853, F. D. Maurice published his Theological Essays. Maurice's theology of post-mortem progress and his denial of everlasting torment for the wicked met with criticism from the Church hierarchy and widespread public disapproval. Maurice's Theological Essays were welcomed by others, however, and fostered a development in Church of England teaching about the afterlife that would lead in 1915 to Hastings Rashdall comfortably describing Jesus’ own teaching as ‘latent Universalism’. The 1938 report Doctrine in the Church of England suggested that post-mortem development was possible, and even that there were hints of universal salvation in the Bible. The official nature of this report, and the fact that its production represented a deliberate attempt to find theological coherence among diverse theological opinions in the Church, suggest that such ideas about the afterlife were, by 1938, part of the mainstream of Church teaching.