On the day of the ‘May’ or ‘Cow Fair’ in 1784 the main streets of Irvine, one of the principal towns in Ayrshire, were crowded to excess with those who had come to take part in the fair. It was not unusual for the streets of this busy seaport to be filled with noise and activity. Whilst Irvine was not a prominent manufacturing town it was, as a royal burgh, a major port for local and foreign trade. Consequently its streets often reverberated with noise from the many carts which transported coal and other merchandise to and from the docks. The town was also a busy commercial centre with banks, a town house, merchant houses, shops, and street markets. Home to some fifty vessels, over three hundred sailors, and thirty-eight taverns, it was a ‘town of crowds – meal mobs, redcoats, pressgangs, smugglers, fairs, and the Buchanites’.

When, in 1904–5, Max Weber published his famous essay on The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism’, he set out to explore the reasons for an affinity, the existence of which was a commonplace in large parts of Europe and North America. Whilst the literature on the strengths and weaknesses of Weber’s thesis is vast, much less attention has been paid to the contours of the mid to late nineteenth-century debate out of which his interest developed. Yet the neglect of that context has continued to foster over-simplified views of the world with which Weber’s argument originally engaged. His essay forms part of a much more extensive discourse on the role of religious belief in economic life. This paper discusses one particular nexus of that debate: the way in which British Protestants shaped their economic ethic by reference both to their ideas of Catholicism and to perceived oversimplifications of Protestant virtue; and the way in which Catholics in Italy responded to the promotion by secular liberals of what was seen by them as ‘puritan’ economics – that is, the maxims of British classical political economy. To compare the British and Italian contemporary literatures on this theme helps to draw out and to clarify some significant complexities in nineteenth-century thinking about the relationship between economics and morality. Underpinning each religious critique in Britain and in Italy was an emphasis on the necessary closeness of the relationship between attitudes to work and attitudes to the rest of life. In each case this implied an assertion at the philosophical level that economics had a metaphysical dimension which needed to be justified, and at a practical level that time spent both working and not working was devotional. Because each was engaging with a popularized model of political economy there were in fact methodological affinities between their respective positions in this context, little though each would often have liked to acknowledge it. These have been obscured by obvious distinctions of cultural and political development which have in turn produced different historiographical traditions. Moreover, the predominance, since the early twentieth century, of a supposedly ‘objective’ model of economics which tacitly denies its metaphysical dimension has meant that nineteenth-century Christian economic thought has been discussed rather as part of the multiple stories of denominational social action than as what it more crucially set out to be: that is, a radical intellectual challenge to the premises of mainstream economic assumptions.

Sir Henry Lunn (1859-1939), former Wesleyan minister and missionary turned journalist, ecumenical pioneer, and successful entrepreneur, wrote several volumes of autobiography in the first third of the twentieth century. Reflecting some fifty years later on the strengths and weaknesses of the Methodism of his youth in Chapters from My Life (1918), he wrote:

The ‘much-revered President’ was William Arthur (1819-1901), President of the Conference in 1866, and his ‘two widely different books’ were Tlie Tongue of Fire (1856) and The Successful Merchant: Sketches of the Life of Mr Samuel Budgett, late ofKingswoodHill (1852). The Tongue of Fire, hailed as a spiritual classic in the nineteenth century and much reprinted then and thereafter, examined the role and importance of the Holy Spirit in Christian life and work. The Successful Merchant, written four years earlier and equally successful in publishing terms, was more controversial in subject-matter and message. As will be seen, it attracted mixed reviews, and some contemporaries shared Henry Lunn’s disquiet at the portrayal of the central character. Arthur himself dedicated the book ‘to the young men of commerce’, and claimed that his purpose was to meet the need for a Christian ‘Commercial Biography’, thereby encouraging informed reflection on the relationship between faith and work. This paper seeks to place The Successful Merchant, described by its author as ‘a friendly, familiar book for the busy, in context in the genre of Methodist biographical literature, in the social and ecclesiastical setting of mid-nineteenth-century Wesleyanism, and in the debate on work and wealth which has been a strand in Methodist identity, history, and historiography since the days of the Wesleys. First, however, some attention must be given to the book itself, its author, and its hero.

Charles Kingsley in 1855 gave the following dedication to his novel, Westward Ho!:

Brooke, the adventurer, soldier, and colonial administrator, and Selwyn, the missionary colonial bishop, appealed to Kingsley as exemplars of what he called ‘Christian manliness’. One of Kingsley’s reviewers, T. C. Sandars, described Kingsley as ‘spreading the knowledge and fostering the love of a muscular Christianity’. The defining characteristics of this ‘muscular Christianity’, a term with which Kingsley was uneasy, were ‘an association between physical strength, religious certainty, and an ability to shape and control the world around oneself’.

Often the timing and manner of revivals have been significantly influenced by the working and leisure patterns of the contexts within which they have occurred. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Scottish awakenings appeared most regularly within agrarian towns and villages during their summer communion seasons. Often they took place around the times of planting and harvest, with the result that the period between May and October was often considered the ‘holy season’. The appearance of these movements was appreciably affected by the annual agricultural cycles of work and rest. At the start of the nineteenth century the ability of these popular communion festivals to engender religious enthusiasm began to decline when, under the influence of an increasingly enlightened culture, they became more respectable and organized. In addition, new measures emerged which sought to attract the urban masses and they gradually undermined the old models of revivalism. Many of these ‘modern’ techniques were designed to compete against other social attractions for the attention and time of the city dweller. The 1859 revival hence presents an opportunity to examine how religious movements had changed and become related to the use of time by the middle of the nineteenth century.

The question of the observance of the Sabbath as a day of rest arose most notably in Scotland during the Victorian period over the running of Sunday passenger trains. In the 1840s Sabbatarians were successful in stopping a passenger service between Edinburgh and Glasgow, but failed to prevent the introduction of a similar service in 1865. The controversy which was aroused over this issue in the 1860s has been called the ‘Sabbath War’ and it centred round Norman MacLeod, the celebrated minister of the Barony Church in Glasgow and one of Queen Victoria’s favourite preachers.

Discussion of the use of time in industrial Britain hardened in the nineteenth century into debates about the morality of work and its rewards, about the ethics of labour and the exploitation of the labourer, issues neglected in a Methodism dominated by the prevailing social thought of evangelicalism which persisted throughout most of the century. While much valuable work has been done recently on a re-assessment of the place of Wesleyan Methodist businessmen’s influence in politics, commerce, and industry in the heyday of Victorian and Edwardian Britain, not so much has been done on the attitudes to poverty and wealth, work, and wages from within the Church establishment, or investigation of how ministers were shaping or reflecting social and political attitudes. This paper seeks to identify the particular contribution of one pivotal figure, Samuel Keeble (1853-1947) whose work deserves a more detailed biography than the Wesley Historical Society lecture published in 1977. His mentor, Hugh Price Hughes, a Wesleyan revivalist but less clearly a Christian socialist, created the environment in which the Wesleyan Methodist Union of Social Service (WMUSS) emerged, through which Keeble was able to channel much of his energies in the promotion of social issues, including those concerning work and labour. It is their contribution that this essay seeks to highlight.

In 1907, aged seventy and nearing the end of her long life as a journalist and writer, Marianne Farningham published her autobiography. She gave it the forthright title A Working Woman’s Life, thus indicating that in her old age she constructed her identity as that of both ‘woman’ and ‘worker’, closely bound up with her gender as well as with the type of life she had lived. Looking back from the perspective of the early twentieth century, although with a view of life largely shaped in the 1840s and 1850s, she recounted, amongst other things, the joys of her work, the perils of overwork, and the pleasures of relaxation. Her writing accordingly included several passages addressing matters relating to the use and abuse of time.

The Labour Church held its first service in Charlton Hall, Manchester, in October 1891. The well-attended event was led by Revd Harold Rylett, a Unitarian minister from Hyde, and John Trevor, a former Unitarian and the driving force behind the idea. Counting the experiment a success, Trevor organized a follow-up meeting the next Sunday, at which the congregation overflowed from the hall into the surrounding streets. A new religious movement had begun. In the decade that followed, over fifty Labour Churches formed, mainly in Northern England, around the textile districts of the West Riding of Yorkshire and East Lancashire. Their impetus lay both in the development and spread of what has been called a socialist culture in Britain in the final decades of the nineteenth century, and in the increased awareness of class attendant on this. Much of the enthusiasm for socialism was indivisible from the lifestyle and culture which surrounded it. This was a movement dedicated as much to what Chris Waters has described as ‘the politics of everyday life …. [and] of popular culture’ as to rigid economistic doctrine. This tendency has been described as ‘ethical socialism’, although a more common expression at the time was ‘the religion of socialism’.

Ever since Leo XIII promulgated his encyclical Rerum novarum, ‘On the Conditions of the Working Classes’, in 1891, successive popes have added to the corpus of Catholic teaching on social/ labour questions. Pius X, for example, published an encyclical specifically addressing the vexed question of ‘interconfessional’ Christian trade unions in Germany, and Pius XI published no fewer than three encyclicals on social questions in the space of twelve months – Quadragesimo anno of May 1931, Nova impendet of October 1931, and Cantate Christi compulsi of May 1932. Recent popes, John XXIII, Paul VI, and John Paul II, have been equally prolific in their commentaries on the labour question.

If Jose Harris was right when she asserted that ‘there was no such thing as a homogeneous Victorian work ethic’ and that a history of work, especially between 1870 and 1914, can only be written on the basis of the reported observations of, and reflections on, the work of individual farms, factories, homes, offices, and workshops, she would find few better sources than the astonishing variety of personal experiences and insights of Randall Davidson (1846-1930), England’s longest-serving Archbishop of Canterbury. Davidson’s early career touched a range of contacts from middle-class urban Edinburgh, to the Lowland small country estate, English public school, and Oxford college; as well as the doctor-dominated private sickroom, smart shooting parties on grouse moors, the staid Lambeth Palace bureaucracy, the tradition-infested Court at Windsor, the arcane Board of the British Museum, and the privileged confines of the House of Lords and West End clubs with their opportunities for strategic socializing and quiet persuasion. At the same time there was a coming to terms with the new consumer society as manifested in the new shopocracy of retail stores like Debenhams. These different worlds imposed their own power-structures, work expectations, and demands on both providers and purchasers. They produced their own stresses and strains which called for mitigation. The huge range of what constituted work was part of the concerns of the socially-alert clergyman in late Victorian Britain, none more so than Randall Davidson, who can be profitably considered as an exponent of, participant in, and observer of the place of work and use of time in his society.