Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The Church of England: a great English consensus?
- 2 The Methodist revolution?
- 3 Evangelical enthusiasm and national identity in Scotland and Wales
- 4 The making of the Irish Catholic nation
- 5 Ulster Protestantism: the religious foundations of rebellious Loyalism
- 6 Religion and political culture in urban Britain
- 7 Religion and identity in the British Isles: integration and separation
- 8 Conclusions
- Select bibliography
- Index
6 - Religion and political culture in urban Britain
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The Church of England: a great English consensus?
- 2 The Methodist revolution?
- 3 Evangelical enthusiasm and national identity in Scotland and Wales
- 4 The making of the Irish Catholic nation
- 5 Ulster Protestantism: the religious foundations of rebellious Loyalism
- 6 Religion and political culture in urban Britain
- 7 Religion and identity in the British Isles: integration and separation
- 8 Conclusions
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
To understand the nature of Victorian civilization it is necessary to understand Victorian cities – visually, through their forms and formlessness; socially, through their structures and the chronology of their processes of change, planned and unplanned; symbolically, in literature and the arts, through their features and images; together for the light they throw on the process of urbanization; separately and comparatively in order to understand particularity and the sense of place. The world of Victorian cities was fragmented, intricate, eclectic and messy.
A city's religion accents and is accented by the interaction of its topography, its economy, its culture and its politics.
Such pleas for a variegated and conceptually flexible approach to the world of nineteenth-century cities are as relevant now as when they were first penned and need to be applied to religion in the city as much as to any other aspect of urban life. Indeed the sheer eclecticism of religious life in modern cities seems to defy analytical categories and broad generalisations. No sooner has one set of views established an ascendancy than they are challenged by fresh work based on different methodological frameworks and focusing often on different kinds of city. The nineteenth-century city seems to set up the kinds of problems for historians that post-modernists have identified for the entire historical enterprise. But, in the spirit of the introductory quotation from Asa Briggs, my limited ambition in this chapter is to open up a number of different ways of looking at religion and identity in nineteenth-century British cities.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Religion and Political Culture in Britain and IrelandFrom the Glorious Revolution to the Decline of Empire, pp. 117 - 142Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996