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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
‘Their annual increase is counted by thousands; and they form a distinct people in the empire, having their peculiar laws and manners, a hierarchy, a costume, and even a physiognomy of their own’, wrote Robert Southey for the Quarterly Review in 1810, opening a balanced critique of what he called ‘the Evangelical Sects’. Leaders of the Evangelical Revival had taught in pulpit, pamphlet and periodical that to be truly Christian meant radical difference from others in society, even others professing faith; or, as Charles Simeon, the model and mentor for hundreds of Cambridge-educated evangelical ministers, stated it, ‘Christians are either nominal or real’. Following William Wilberforce’s urging in his Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians… Contrasted with Real Christianity, Evangelicals strove in their separate spheres to accomplish a social revolution by which the mores, values and social practices received from the eighteenth century would be overturned by normalizing evangelical values in society. While working in their individual vocations, Evangelicals were also cooperating, ‘linked in a single, if multiform, social and religious phenomenon’. As Southey’s comments indicate, even by 1810 their revolution was proving noticeably effective.
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4 Thorne, Susan, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in 19th-Century England (Stanford, CA, 1999)Google Scholar, and Johnston, Anna, Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860 (Cambridge, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, explore the role of missionaries at the far outposts of the empire. Drawing on the recent work of anthropologists and historians, most notably Jean and John Comaroff, Catharine Hall, Brian Stanley and Andrew Porter, they turn attention to the texts produced by missionaries and to the rhetorical constructs of imperialist attitudes. Herbert, Christopher, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, IL, 1991)Google Scholar, also considers ‘missionary literature’ as foundational for the development of ethnography.
5 See Bebbington, David, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jay, Elisabeth, The Religion of the Heart: Anglican Evangelicalism and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Oxford, 1979)Google Scholar; Hilton, Boyd, The Age of Atonement: the Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785–1865 (Oxford, 1988), 7–32 Google Scholar; Bradley, Ian, ‘The Politics of Godliness: Evangelicals in Parliament, 1784–1832’ (D.Phil, thesis, Oxford University, 1974)Google Scholar; Rosman, Doreen, Evangelicals and Culture (London, 1984)Google Scholar, among others.
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