A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain (24 page)

People attended on Sundays – and in many places would do so at least twice in the course of the day – for several reasons. It might be through genuine conviction, or because it was expected, if not demanded, of them, or because there was simply nothing else to do. In many households the servants would be obliged to go there with their employers – though they would of course sit on benches in the gallery, or in other ‘free seats’, with fellow members of their class and not in the pews below; church membership, or at least frequent attendance, would have been seen as evidence of good character. For the well-off employers of servants, membership, under the right circumstances, gave an opportunity to flaunt one’s respectability, wealth – and dress. The rental of a private pew (obligatory if one wished to impress) would be expensive in a fashionable congregation, and competition for them would be stiff. Since they were prominently situated, other worshippers could not help but see the occupants as they processed down the aisle, or the deference with which the pew-opener – usually an elderly woman – would show them to their seats.

Others were driven by sheer boredom because so little else was open, or by a desire for a warm and dry place to sit on days of inclement weather. Many lodgers were expected to stay out of their homes on Sundays to allow their landlords peace, and this was very commonly the case in cities among the employees of shops and department stores, who lived in barrack-like accommodation on the premises. They were forbidden to stay in their rooms on Sundays, and had little alternative to sitting through services but tramping the streets. In spite of this, church attendance was not as universal a habit
as we might imagine. The only census ever taken in Britain of the population’s worshipping habits was carried out on Sunday 30 March 1851. Though its findings were not as clear as might be supposed – for no exact and reliable figure was arrived at – it showed that between 47 and 54 per cent of the populace attended a place of worship (the census included all such places, and about half of those worshipping had attended a Nonconformist of Roman Catholic service), though there was no indication whether any of these people were a regular or an occasional worshipper. It was not an encouraging statistic. As one author has said: ‘By the standards Victorians set for themselves, it was humiliating.’
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The Sunday School – an invention of the previous century – was, until the advent of state education, a place in which children were not only taught about the Gospel but learned to read and write. Even when this task was taken over by local authorities, Sunday Schools remained an important part of national life. All denominations had them, and their popularity with parents was due at least in part to the opportunities it gave for privacy while their children attended. Sunday Schools gave children the exciting feeling of belonging to something worthwhile, for they offered prizes for knowledge and regular attendance, they hosted picnics and outings, and they enabled them to learn about the wider world by saving, or collecting, or making things for missions overseas. Their growth was so dramatic that by the final decades of the century almost three-quarters of British children attended them.

Children not only went to Sunday School but attended adult services too, and could expect to be quizzed on their contents afterwards. In the chapter on ‘Our Parish’ in
Sketches by Boz
, Dickens describes an elderly widow who, after the service: ‘Walks home with the family next door but
one, and talks about the sermon all the way, invariably opening the conversation by asking the youngest boy where the text was.’
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Discoursing on these matters was often a struggle for the young. Molly Hughes (or Molly Thomas, as she was at the time), whose family lived in London and attended St Paul’s cathedral rather than some mere parish church, would often talk with her brothers as they walked back to Canonbury:

The sermons were usually stiff with learning and far over our heads. After one on Solomon’s vision, I asked Barnholt on the way home whether
he
would have chosen wisdom if he had been Solomon. ‘Oh no,’ said he, ‘I’ve got enough of that. I should have asked for a new cricket bat.’ The rest of the walk home was spent in enlarging on the things we might have got from such a golden opportunity.
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These addresses were not necessarily given and forgotten. The notion of the ‘popular preacher’ is largely unfamiliar today, because the doings of churchmen no longer excite the same degree of interest in the public. For Victorians, a visiting preacher known to be particularly gifted could draw considerable crowds, and members of the congregation would have to go early to be sure of seats – perhaps arriving an hour or two before the service began. The same might well be true if the subject of a sermon were topical – for instance a recent disaster or a particularly interesting vice – for churchgoers would look forward to hearing the views of a trained and analytical mind. Before the arrival of television to provide mass education, the church sermon could fulfil something of this function, by
providing a concise and reasoned examination of a current question, just as a documentary does today.

If a clergyman were known to be young and handsome, it could be guaranteed that the front pews would be occupied by ladies. Should his sermon prove especially memorable it might well be published, perhaps as part of a collection of his own addresses, or in a volume with those of others. The sermons of a man like Dean Stanley of Westminster sold widely and were not only read at home but even ‘recycled’ by other preachers. The celebrity achieved by a popular preacher, Anglican or otherwise, is clear in the case of the young and fiery Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the Baptist pastor whose services at his south London church attracted huge crowds. When he married in 1856, the occasion had something of the atmosphere associated in our day with media personalities, as the local newspaper demonstrated:

In point of numbers and enthusiasm it far outstripped any display which the West End is in the habit of witnessing. Shortly after eight o’clock, although the morning was damp, dark and cold, as many as five hundred ladies, in light and gay attire, besieged the doors of the chapel, accompanied by many gentlemen, members of the congregation and personal friends. From that hour, the crowd increased so rapidly that the thoroughfare was blocked up by vehicles and pedestrians and a body of the M Division of the Police had to be sent for to prevent accidents. When the chapel doors were opened, there was a terrific rush, and in less than half an hour the doors were closed upon many eager visitors.
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The pastor with personal charisma was likely to attract a host of disciples, almost in the way that a popular musician might today have ‘fans’. A book of advice for young women published in 1845 warned against the dangers of taking such an attitude to extremes:

The most objectionable feature which this tendency assumes is an extravagant and enthusiastic attachment to ministers of religion. I am aware that there is in the character and office of a faithful minister, justly calculated to call forth the respectful admiration both of young and old; that there is also much in his pastoral care of the individual members of his flock equally calculated to awaken feelings of deep and strong attachment; and when such feelings are tempered with reverence it is unquestionably right that they should be cherished . . . but there are other young women, chiefly of enthusiastic [evangelical] temperament, who, under the impression that it is right to love and admire to the utmost of their power, give way to a style of expression, when speaking of their favourite ministers, and a mode of behaviour towards them, which is not only peculiarly adapted to expose them, as religious professors, to the ridicule of the world; but which too plainly betrays their want of reverence and right feeling on the subject of religion in general.
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A preacher with the eloquence and magnetism of Spurgeon was, of course, the exception rather than the rule, but even with those of lesser ability surviving the sermon need not be the ordeal one might suppose for, especially in illustrious surroundings, the imagination could drift and curiosity might attach to a visiting preacher. Molly Hughes recalled:

Sermons were on the endurance side, but had some alleviations. I had a nice long sit down, and as I was always seated close to the pulpit I enjoyed the colours of the marble pillars, and could weave fancies. If the preacher grew fierce I looked at the statue of Samveli Johnson, whom I vaguely connected with Sam Weller, and if he were gentle I looked at the one of Howard with his keys, a satisfying face and figure. It is curious
that during all those years I never inquired who these people were. The sermons were seldom less than three-quarters of an hour. To the preacher it was the chance of a lifetime. He would never again ‘address London’. We got to be a bit sorry for him as he went up the steps, conducted by the melancholy-looking verger who certainly must have given him a gloomy foreboding of his reception by ‘London’. He did not know how his voice would carry under the dome, and we took joy in seeing whether he would bawl or roar.
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Whatever the merits, or otherwise, of the preaching, one might be carried away by other aspects of the experience. Mrs Hughes wondered later:

why we endured those long services. Not from pious or educative motives. It must have been simply for the inspiring music that burst from that organ and that choir. It was worth all the endurance, even of the Litany. No footling sentimental hymns, but Te Deums, Psalms, Creeds, Introits, and Kyries that intoxicated us. During one boy’s solo my father was so excited that his fist came thump down on his neighbour’s shoulder. We children knew all the chants.
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North of the Border, the Presbyterian Church was by far the most numerous and influential, but this suffered fragmentation when in 1843 a large segment of it broke off to form the Free Church. In Scotland the Church had an even greater influence on everyday life and attitudes than in England, and the Sabbath was more rigidly kept. Though the strictness of Calvinist influence had softened somewhat since the previous century, a Scottish Sunday – like one in Nonconformist Wales
– was still something that visitors found remarkable for an uncompromising severity enforced by social consensus.

For Nonconformists, or the Presbyterian members of the Church of Scotland, there were few distractions from the strict observance of Sunday. Dr A. K. H. Boyd was minister of the town church in St Andrews, though he had a second career as a bestselling writer whose works sold in the hundreds of thousands. When he took over the parish in 1865 there were three services every Sunday, and a building with seating for two and a half thousand was often well filled during all of them. This was in spite of the fact that here was no organ, or indeed any other accompaniment during the hymns. There was no ritual whatsoever associated with singing and praying, and the intercessions were not recited according to a set formula as in the Anglican Church but extemporized. A sermon was expected to last at least an hour, and an hour and a half would not be thought unusual – something of a burden on the man who had to write them. Boyd was once intrigued to hear his congregation discussing a visiting preacher’s style and complaining that he had not moved his hands or body as much during the sermon as they would have liked. That the contents of a sermon would be debated afterwards was natural, but that the accompanying
gestures
, or lack of them, should have been included in the appraisal was a measure of how seriously the matter of a minister’s style was taken – or how much it contributed to the entertainment of the populace in a place with few other distractions.

Boyd did not favour the plainness of these services, and gradually he began to alter them, introducing small innovations that his congregation seemed to accept without demur.
He wrote that: ‘The
Saturday Review
was wrong when it spoke of the worship of the Church of Scotland as “the most dismal service ever devised by man.” Those who had grown up under it liked it, and found it uplifting.’
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This is a point worth noting. From a modern perspective, nineteenth-century services may seem unimaginably dull and lengthy, but to those who were accustomed to them and knew nothing else, and whose entire culture had led them to regard these as normal, there was interest and even beauty amid the hard benches and interminable addresses. Changes that we might regard as improvement – such as rehearsed singing by a specialist group within the congregation – could well be seen by traditionalists as a threat to the purity of their beliefs, an attitude shown when a Scottish pastor was taken to a fashionable Edinburgh church: ‘An Aberdeen professor went one Sunday to St Stephen’s with a worthy Highland parson. The Highland parson listened to the choir in horror, and when the service ended his words were: “If this is to go on, the Church will go down.” ’
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And there were worse offences. The Reverend Boyd received an impassioned letter one day in 1878 following a sermon he had preached at another church. The resulting exchange of letters was subsequently published under the headline: ‘
DR BOYD OF ST ANDREWS DEFYING THE ALMIGHTY WITH A BOX OF WHISTLES
’.

His crime had been to tolerate, and encourage, organ music. His correspondent, a Presbyterian clergyman and the secretary of the Anti-Papal League, thundered that:

In what you did and said about the box of whistles in Brechin Cathedral on the Lord’s Day, the 28th ultimo, I charge you with having acted the part of ‘the blind leading the blind’ because you in reality lifted up your voice against the Almighty while you were pretending to lead worshippers of Him. I charge you in the sight of God with having impiously set at
defiance and rebelled against His specification of what praise to Him should be in New Testament times.
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