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W. E. Heygate: Tractarian Clerical Novelist

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

George Herring
George Herring*
Affiliation:
York University
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Extract

In the 1830s a small group of Anglican clerics, mainly resident tutors and fellows of Oxford University, initiated a campaign for the revitalization of their Church, which they perceived to be threatened by secular forces. The inspiration for this was derived from the pre-Reformation roots of Anglicanism, specifically from a study of the fathers of the Early Church, supplemented by the post-Reformation Caroline divines of the seventeenth century. One of the main vehicles for propagating these ideas was the series known as the Tracts for the Times, which ran to ninety tides issued between 1833 and 1841, and from which this growing Oxford Movement derived its more popular title of’Tractarian’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 48: The Church and Literature , 2012 , pp. 259 - 270
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2012

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References

1 The only specific study, Baker, J. E., The Novel and the Oxford Movement (Princeton, NJ, 1932)Google Scholar, is now very dated. More general studies such as Drummond, Andrew, The Churches in English Fiction: A Literary and Historical Study from the Regency to the Present Time, of British and American Fiction (Leicester, 1950)Google Scholar, or Maison, M., Search Your Soul, Eustace: A Survey of the Religious Novel in the Victorian Age (London, 1969)Google Scholar, are either inaccurate or superficial. There is nothing for the Tractarians to compare in terms of scholarship with Jay, Elizabeth, The Religion of the Heart: Anglican Evangelicalism and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Oxford, 1979).Google Scholar

2 Skinner, S. A., Tractarians and the ‘Condition of England’: The Social and Political Thought of the Oxford Movement (Oxford, 2004).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Heygate, W. E., Godfrey Davenant: A Tale of School Life (London, 1847)Google Scholar; idem, William Blake; or, The English Farmer (London, 1848).Google Scholar

4 See Russell, Anthony, The Clerical Profession (London, 1980)Google Scholar; this is based on a study of about one hundred such handbooks published between 1750 and 1875.

5 Heygate, , William Blake, viii Google Scholar (italics mine).

6 See Heygate, W. E., Ember Hours (London, 1857), 50.Google Scholar

7 Ibid. 46–7.

8 Heygate, , Godfrey Davenant, 2, 72–3 Google Scholar; Heygate, W. E., Probatio Clerica, or, Aids in Self-Examination to Candidates for Holy Orders, or for those Clergy who may desire them (London, 1845), 21–2.Google Scholar

9 Heygate, , Ember Hours, 5.Google Scholar

10 Heygate, , William Blake, 60.Google Scholar

11 Heygate, , Ember Hours, 41–2.Google Scholar

12 Ibid. 42–4.

13 Heygate, , William Blake, 50.Google Scholar

14 Ibid. 134.

15 Ibid. 184.

16 Heygate, , Ember Hours, 25.Google Scholar

17 Ibid. 25.

18 Ibid. 27–8.

19 Ibid. 29.

20 Ibid. 36.

21 See Holderness, B. A., ‘The Victorian Farmer’, in Mingay, G. E., ed., The Victorian Countryside, 2 vols (London, 1981), 1: 227–43 Google Scholar. The statistics are derived from the 1851 census.

22 Herring, George, What Was the Oxford Movement? (London, 2002), 76.Google Scholar

23 Heygate, , William Blake, v, ix–x, 13.Google Scholar

24 Heygate, , Ember Hours, 37–8.Google Scholar

25 Heygate, , William Blake, 126.Google Scholar

26 Obelkevich, James, Religion and Rural Society: South Lindsey 1825–1875 (Oxford, 1976), 46.Google Scholar

27 See Knight, Frances, The Nineteenth-Century Church and English Society (Cambridge, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a discussion of the similarities between all clerical parties with regard to these issues, and also my forthcoming book on the Tractarian parochial revival, provisionally entitled Rebuilding the Ruined Shrines: The Tractarian Parochial Revival.

28 Gresley, William, Charles Lever: or, The Man of the Nineteenth Century (London, 1841), 86.Google Scholar

29 Gresley, William, Portrait of an English Churchman (London, 1838), 285.Google Scholar

30 Bennett, W. J. E., ‘Ascension Day - A Dialogue between a Farmer and a Tradesman’, The Old Church Porch 4/5 (1 May 1860), 74.Google Scholar

31 Reading, Berkshire County Record Office, MS Wantage Parish Diaries, Add. MSS D/P, 143, 28/1: 3 February 1850.

32 Ibid. 28/3: 12 May 1858; 28/2: 22 April 1855.

33 Ibid. 28/3: 12 April 1858.

34 Ibid. 28/2: 1 December 1855.