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Religion in Nineteenth-Century Britain - The Dissenters. Vol. 2: The Expansion of Evangelical Nonconformity, 1791–1859. By Michael R. Watts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Pp. xxi + 911. $120.00. - Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland: From the Glorious Revolution to the Decline of Empire. By David Hempton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xii + 191. $54.95 (cloth); $17.95 (paper). - The Religion of the People: Methodism and Popular Religion, c.1750–1900. By David Hempton. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Pp. xiii + 239. $80.00. - The Nineteenth-Century Church and English Society. By Frances Knight. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xiii + 230. $54.95. - Catholic Devotion in Victorian England. By Mary Heimann. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Pp. viii + 253. $49.95.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Hugh McLeod*
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham

Abstract

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Type
Reviews
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1999

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References

1 For example, McLaren, A. A., Religion and Social Class (London, 1974)Google Scholar; McLeod, H., Piety and Poverty: Working-Class Religion in Berlin, London and New York, 1870–1914 (New York, 1996)Google Scholar.

2 For example, Davidoff, L. and Hall, C., Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London, 1987)Google Scholar; Wolffe, J., God and Greater Britain, 1843–1945 (London, 1994)Google Scholar; Swift, R. and Gilley, S., eds., The Irish in the Victorian City (London, 1985)Google Scholar. It is significant that, while volumes 1–4 of the excellent Open University series edited by Parsons, G., Religion in Victorian Britain (Manchester, 1988)Google Scholar, gave considerable attention to class and debates about social control, volume 5, edited by J. Wolffe (Manchester, 1997), focused on gender, church music, overseas missions, and relations between Christianity and other religions.

3 For example, Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963)Google Scholar; Moore, R., Pit-Men, Preachers and Politics (Cambridge, 1974)Google Scholar; Laqueur, T. W., Religion and Respectability: The Rise of the Sunday School Movement (New Haven, Conn., 1976)Google Scholar.

4 For example, Currie, R., Gilbert, A. D., and Horsley, L., Churches and Churchgoers (Oxford, 1977)Google Scholar; Brown, C. G., “Did Urbanization Secularize Britain?Urban History Yearbook (1988): 114Google Scholar; Gill, R., The Myth of the Empty Church (London, 1993)Google Scholar.

5 See Gilbert, A. D., Religion and Society in Industrial England (London, 1976), pp. 7275Google Scholar.

6 Using the Spearman coefficient of rank correlation, there is a slight positive correlation between Nonconconformist church attendance and illiteracy in Hampshire (R = 0.14) and Suffolk (R = 0.28) and a slight negative correlation in Shropshire and Herefordshire (R = −0.11) and in Cumberland, Westmorland, and Northumberland (R = −0.14). These calculations are based on my own calculations using Watts's data.

7 See the chapters by C. G. Brown on “The Mechanism of Religious Growth in Urban Societies,” and by Williams, S. on “Urban Popular Religion and the Rites of Passage,” both in McLeod, H., ed., European Religion in the Age of Great Cities (London, 1995)Google Scholar.

8 Hempton is strongly influenced by the work of Ward, W. R., See esp. Ward, W. R., The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 See Hennock, E. P., Fit and Proper Persons (London, 1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cox, J., English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth, 1870–1930 (Oxford, 1982)Google Scholar.

10 See Hastings, A., A History of English Christianity, 1920–1985 (London, 1986)Google Scholar.

11 Yeo, S., Religion and Voluntary Organisations in Crisis (London, 1976)Google Scholar; Green, S. J. D., Religion in the Age of Decline (Cambridge, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.