United Kingdom

The Evangelicals, in many ways the most influential as well as the most distinctively English religious group, were suspicious both of ritual and of appeals to any authority other than the Bible. Their concern with individual conduct was a force for social conformity during the middle years of the century rather than for that depth of individual religious experience that the first advocates of “vital religion” had preached in the 18th century. Yet leaders such as Lord Ashley were prepared to probe some Evangelical social issues (e.g., housing) and to stir men’s consciences, and, even if their preoccupation was with saving souls, their missionary zeal influenced developments overseas as well as domestic legislation. There were other members of the church who urged the cause of Christian socialism. Their intellectual guide was the outstanding Anglican theologian Frederick Denison Maurice. The Evangelicals in particular were drawn into substantial missionary activity in the empire and other parts of the world, frequently clashing with settlers and administrators and sometimes with soldiers. They regarded it as their sacred duty to spread the gospel from, in the words of one of the period’s best-known missionary hymns, “Greenland’s icy mountains” to “India’s coral strand.”

Beyond the influence of both church and chapel, there were thousands of people in mid-Victorian England who were ignorant of, or indifferent toward, the message of Christianity, a fact demonstrated by England’s one religious census in 1851. Although movements such as the Salvation Army, founded by William Booth in 1865, attempted to rally the poor of the great cities, there were many signs of apathy or even hostility. There was also a small but active secularist agitation; particularly in London, forces making for what came to be described as “secularism” (more goods, more leisure, more travel) could undermine spiritual concerns. The great religious controversies of mid-Victorian England were not so much to be settled as to be shelved.

In Scotland, where the Church of Scotland had been fashioned by the people against the crown, there was a revival of Presbyterianism in the 1820s and ’30s. A complex and protracted controversy, centring on the right of congregations to exclude candidates for the ministry whom they thought unsuitable, ended in schism. In 1843, 474 ministers left the Church of Scotland and established the Free Church of Scotland. Within four years they had raised more than £1.25 million and built 654 churches. This was a remarkable effort, even in a great age of church and chapel building. It left Scotland with a religious pattern even more different from that of England than it had been in 1815. Yet many of the most influential voices in mid-Victorian Britain, including Carlyle and Samuel Smiles (Self-Help; 1859), were Scottish, and the conception of the gospel of work, in particular, owed much in content and tone, even if often indirectly, to Scottish Calvinism. In Wales there was a particularly vigorous upsurge of Nonconformity, and the Welsh chapel was to influence late 19th-century and 20th-century British politics.

Leisure

Leisure emerged as a distinct concept and activity, at least on a mass scale, only when the hours of labour diminished and became more regular. Before then, work and nonwork activities had been closely related to each other—for example, in the popular observance of the weekly “Saint Monday,” when furious bouts of working were followed by equally furious bouts of enjoyment on a day supposedly given over to work. In the 1850s, in textiles, the leading sector of the economy, there was a more regular working day and week, and a half-day of leisure, Saturday, also eventually emerged. Hours of labour began to approximate nine per day in the 1870s and eight per day after World War I. The Bank Holiday Act of 1871 further regularized leisure time. Yet, obviously, for the majority of people, work was the dominant activity.