No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Urban Church Attendance and the use of Statistical Evidence, 1850–1900
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
Over the last two decades historians of the Victorian church have been paying an increasing amount of attention to the various forms of statistical evidence which are available for the period. There are in fact three major categories of such evidence. Firstly there are the membership figures and other statistics published by churches and meant for external consumption; many of these have now been brought together in a useful compendium. Then there are the returns of the first (and last) national religious census, held in 1851, and of various local censuses, especially those taken for several large and medium-sized towns in 1881; these were also made public either in summary or detail depending on the nature of the census. Finally there are the statistics compiled by churches at various levels purely for their own use, but now open to public inspection in record offices: Anglican visitation returns and service registers, those records of nonconformist churches that yield such valuable information about membership and communicant figures and the numbers of Sunday scholars. Not all of these statistics have been used with an equal degree of enthusiasm, and very few studies have made effective use of all three. The aim of this paper is to look in some detail at the uses to which they have been put so far and to indicate some other uses to which they might be put in the future.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1979
References
1 Currie, [R.], Gilbert, [A.] and Horsley, [L.], [Churches and Churchgoers] (Oxford 1977)Google Scholar.
2 Gilbert, A. D., Religion and Society in Industrial England (London 1976) esp pp 23–48, 125-43Google Scholar. Parts of Gilbert’s thesis have been constructively criticised in a review by Macleod, H., ‘Recent Studies in Victorian Religious History’, Victorian Studies 21 (London 1978) pp 245-55Google Scholar.
3 Inglis, [K. S.], [‘Patterns of Religious Worship in 1851’], JEH 11 (1960) pp 74–86 Google Scholar, substantially modified and usefully reorientated by Thompson, D. M., ‘The 1851 Religious Census: Problems and Possibilities’, Victorian Studies 11 (1967) pp 87–97 Google Scholar.
4 An exception is Macleod, [H.], [‘Class, Community and Region: The Religious Geography of Nineteenth-Century England’], Sociological Year Book of Religion in Britain 6, ed Hill, M. (London 1973) pp 29–72 Google Scholar.
5 There is a rather superficial analysis of the 1851 and 1881 returns for Sheffield in Wickham, [E. R.], [Church and People in an Industrial Society] (London 1957) pp 108-10Google Scholar,147-50, 275-80, and an exceptionally confusing one of the 1851 returns with an interesting series of three local censuses for 1881, 1891 and 1902 in Walker, [R.B.], [‘Religious Changes in Liverpool in the Nineteenth Century’], JEH 19 (1968) pp 195–211 Google Scholar.
6 PRO, HO 129/501.
7 See the appendix to this paper for a summary of the evidence. In the case of Sheffield this is based on the figures published by Wickham. For Hull there is an accurate summary of the 1851 returns in VCH Yorkshire: East Riding 1 p 316, and of those of the local census in Eastern Counties Herald, 8 December 1881. For Southampton I used the summary of the 1851 returns and the details of the local census published in Hampshire Independent, 10 December 1881. The figures for Portsmouth have been calculated from the original returns for 1851 in PRO, HO 129/96 and those of the local census published in Portsmouth Times, 21 December 1881.
8 For example Waterlooville, PRO, HO 129/111.
9 Chadwick, [W. O.], [The Victorian Church] (London 1966-70) 2 p 229 Google Scholar.
10 Compare the indices of attendance for these and some other towns published for 1851 392 by Inglis pp 80-5, and for 1881 by Macleod pp 46-7; the lowest drop (0.9 percentage points) was at Coventry, the highest (27.8 percentage points) at Warrington.
11 This and other comparisons below are based on the figures published by Inglis and Macleod, see above.
12 For Bristol see Chadwick 2 p 229. There is some useful material on Bristol churchgoing in Kent, J.H. S., ‘The Role of Religion in the Cultural Structure of the Later Victorian City’, TRHS 5 series 23 (1973) pp 153-73Google Scholar.
13 Walker, R. B., ‘The Growth of Wesleyan Methodism in Victorian England and Wales’, JEH 24 (1973) pp 267-84Google Scholar.
14 1851 : Church of England 40.7 Nonconformist 26.8 Roman Catholic 32.5. 1881: Church of England 29.5 Nonconformist 36.5 Roman Catholic 34.0. Figures calculated from Inglis and Macleod, see above, with adaptation of the latter to the criteria of the former. But see also Walker p 211, who demonstrates that the 1881 census seriously underestimated the number of Roman catholic attendances; this would make the Anglican collapse look worse, the nonconformist improvement smaller and the Roman catholic improvement larger.
15 Walker, R. B., ‘Religious Changes in Cheshire 1750-1850’, JEH 17 (1966) pp 77–94 Google Scholar.
16 Currie, Gilbert and Horsley pp 22-3.
17 P[ortsmouth] C[ity] R[ecord] O[ffice], CHU 38/2A/1.
18 PCRO, CHU 3/1F/1-3, CHU 16/1D/1-3, CHU 25/1C/1-4, CHU 50/1D/1-5, CHU 52/1E/1-3; Southampton City Record Office, PR 5/2/1/1-2, PR 7/1/19-21 and 29, PR 10/2/1-3, PR 23/2/1-3.