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From Parish to Palace: Working-Class Influences on Anglican Temperance Movements, 1835–1914

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2011

Gerald Wayne Olsen
Gerald Wayne Olsen
Affiliation:
Nipissing University College, Box 5002, Gormanvillc Road, North Bay, Ontario, P1B 8L7 Canada
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Extract

The history of Anglican temperance movements before the First World War reveals working-class influences on English vicarages (not yet recognised by historians) and a corresponding influence of the lower clergy on the Anglican establishment. A study of Anglican initiatives against drink may help provide missing links between the Biblethumping evangelicalism of wine-drinking William Wilberforce's time and the social gospel era of his grandsons, the clerical teetotallers, Basil and Ernest. After 1855, a significant minority of Anglican clergymen, obsessed with the estrangement of the lower orders from organised religion, accepted teetotalism, often at the urging of labourers. In so doing, they reversed somewhat the proposition enshrined in the evangelical tradition that true moral reform depended on the leadership of the privileged classes and the compliance of their social inferiors. Working-class teetotallers continued to exercise influence in parochial temperance organisations; more ambitiously, low-placed teetotal clergymen attempted, through the Church's teetotal society, to convert the highest Anglican dignitaries to total abstinence.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 40 , Issue 2 , April 1989 , pp. 239 - 252
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

CETC = Church of England Temperance Chronicle; CETM = Church of England Temperance Magazine; LPL = Lambet h Palace Library; CCL = Canterbury Cathedral Library; Gazelle = Blue Ribbon Official Gazette and Gospel Temperance Herald

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3 The official names of the organisation referred to here as the Church's teetotal society were, from 1862 to 1864, the Church of England Total Abstinence Society and, from 1864 to 1873, the Church of England and Ireland Temperance Reformation Society.

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31 See ‘Appendix C, Distribution of teetotal clerics in 1864 as compared with strength of Anglican Church in proportion to other denominations and to total population, as well as with rate of population increase’, in Olsen, Pub and Parish, 427–42. The statistics are from government census records and those of the Church's teetotal society. The general problem of church membership and decline is discussed in Currie, Robert, Gilbert, Alan and Horsley, Lee, Churches and Churchgoers. Patterns of church growth in the British Isles since 1700 Oxford 1977Google Scholar; and Cox, Jeffrey, The English Churches in a Secular Society, Oxford 1982Google Scholar.

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47 CETM ii (Aug. 1863), 152. Th e clergyman was from the Isle of Man.

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59 CETC 1 (Dec. 1873), 193–4.

60 See Robert Maguire, CETM, NS V (Sept. 1868), 284.

61 Ibid. 3rd ser. ii (June, Sept. Dec. 1870), 102, 164, 222.

62 See LPL, Papers of A. C. Tail, 187a, no. 79.

63 Ibid. no. 145.

64 The Times, 12 Aug. 1872, 9.

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79 Ibid.

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89 CETS, Forty-seventh Annual Report, 1908, 29–35.

89 CETS, Forty-sixth Annual Report, 1907, 22–3 ; CETS, Executive Minutes, Apr., Oct. 1906, 120, 129. 90 CETCiv (1 Nov. 1876), 185.