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The Churches and society in nineteenth-century England: a rural perspective1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
In recent years discussion of the relationship between the Churches and society in nineteenth-century England has concentrated on a topic that very much concerned contemporaries: the absence of the working classes from public worship. Much stress has been laid on the parlous position of the Churches in the towns, particularly the large towns where the proportion of the population attending church was lowest and where the working classes, however defined, were most numerous. Because on average church attendance was better in the countryside, and because it is known that the growth of urban population owed more to migration than natural increase before 1851, it has been suggested that the transition made by migrants from a rural to an urban society may explain the difficulties experienced by the urban churches in attracting worshippers. Modern research has shown that church attendance is one of the habits likely to be dropped by migrants; and thus it is suggested that migrants coming from the countryside where church attendance was normal dropped the habit as part of the ‘cultural shock’ of the move to the very different social life of the town.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1972
Footnotes
1
This paper is a revised version of one given at a meeting of the Cambridge Historical Society on 27 January 1970 where several helpful comments were made.
References
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