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Between Town and Countryside: Contrasting Patterns of Churchgoing in the Early Victorian Black Country
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
Disraeli’s romantic novel Sybil deliberately and vividly contrasts the two nations of its subtitle. Only Egremont, the aristocratic hero, attempts to cross the impassible gulf between them when, in the guise of Mr Franklin, he lives for a while in Mowe-dale alongside the catholic Gerards. Ironically he has only two contacts with the poor. He visits an honest handloom weaver in the company of Mr St Lys, the saintly tractarian vicar of Mowbray, and a model factory set in a garden village, the creation of a paternalistic aristocrat. It is left to the Owenite Stephen Morley, rather than the admirer of the ancient catholic faith, to penetrate the hideous mining area from which the hell-cats eventually emerge to burn Mowbray castle. Here the absence of religion is made explicit in the description of Wodgate where ‘no church . . . has yet raised its spire . . . and even the conventicle scarcely dares show its humble front in some obscure corner.’ So, unrestrained by established religion and hardly touched by dissent, the brutalised colliers and ironworkers are suited to the violent, plundering role they fulfil in the final chapters of the book. They form a dark contrast to the noble and restrained workforce of aristocratic Mowbray a little further north.
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1979
References
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