However, the Victorian middle-class family should not be confused with the small nuclear family of the 20th century. Families were large and intermarried so that the boundaries between the categories of relative, dependent, and friend were indistinct, recalling an older notion of family as the circle of dependents. The relationship between public and private was therefore similarly complicated. Because the domestic interior could be the site of all sorts of familial and extra-familial interactions and obligations, the nexus of private life might also be distinctly public. Of course, privacy was accelerated by means other than family and domestic arrangements. The spread of reading on one’s own and of letter writing, the latter of which increased massively with the development of the cheap Penny Post, were both conducive to privacy.
Moreover, privacy in life led to privacy in death, as what may be called social burial in the old churchyard gave way to the new privacy of the cemetery. An invention of this time (Kensal Green, the first specialist London cemetery, opened in 1831), the cemetery was a new sort of public space, which in theory welcomed all comers, though in practice it was open only to the better-off, at least at first. Communal, spatially particular parish rights of burial were replaced by absolute, abstract property rights, and the hugger-mugger of the old churchyard was replaced by the possibility of the individuation of the dead person, by means of the memorial and the deployment of the clearly demarcated burial site. One could really have eternal rest, instead of being dug up every few decades. The individual had his or her space in death as in life. Religion
Victorian doubt about inherited biblical religion was as much an acknowledged theme of the period as was Victorian belief. Discoveries in geology and biology continued to challenge all accepted views of religious chronology handed down from the past. Perhaps the most profound challenge to religion came with Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859). Yet the challenge was neither unprecedented nor unique. In 1860 Essays and Reviews was published; a lively appraisal of fundamental religious questions by a number of liberal-minded religious thinkers, it provoked the sharpest religious controversy of the century.
Behind such controversies there were many signs of a confident belief on all sides that inquiry itself, if freely and honestly pursued, would do nothing to dissolve shared ideals of conduct. Even writers who were “agnostic” talked of the “religion of humanity” or tried to be good “for good’s sake, not God’s.” Standards were felt to count in institutional as well as in private life.
Emphasis on conduct was, of course, related to religion. The British religious spectrum was of many colours. The Church of England was flanked on one side by Rome and on the other by religious dissent. Both were active forces to be reckoned with. The Roman Catholic Church was growing in importance not only in the Irish sections of the industrial cities but also among university students and teachers. Dissent had a grip on the whole culture of large sections of the middle classes, dismissed abruptly by Matthew Arnold as classes of “mutilated and incomplete men.” Sometimes the local battle between the Church of England and dissent was bitterly contested, with Nonconformists opposing church rates (taxes), challenging closed foundations, and preaching educational reform and total abstinence from intoxicating beverages. A whole network of local voluntary bodies, led either by Anglicans or Nonconformists, usually in rivalry, came into existence, representing a tribute to the energies of the age and to its fear of state intervention.
The Church of England itself was a divided family, with different groups contending for positions of influence. The High Church movement (which emphasized the “Catholic” side of Anglicanism) was given a distinctive character, first by the Oxford movement, or Tractarianism, which had grown up in the 1830s as a reaction against the new liberal theology, and then by the often provocative and always controversial ritualist agitation of the 1850s and ’60s. The fact that prominent members of the Church of England flirted with “Romanism” and even crossed the Rubicon often raised the popular Protestant cry of “church in danger.” Peel’s conversion to free trade in 1846 scarcely created any more excitement than John Henry Newman’s conversion to Roman Catholicism the previous year, while in 1850 Lord Russell, the prime minister, tried to capitalize politically on violent antipapal feelings stimulated by the pope’s decision to create Roman Catholic dioceses in England.
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.