In Scotland, where the Church of Scotland had been fashioned by the people against the crown, there was a revival of Presbyterianism in the 1820s and ’30s. A complex and protracted controversy, centring on the right of congregations to exclude candidates for the ministry whom they thought unsuitable, ended in schism. In 1843, 474 ministers left the Church of Scotland and established the Free Church of Scotland. Within four years they had raised more than £1.25 million and built 654 churches. This was a remarkable effort, even in a great age of church and chapel building. It left Scotland with a religious pattern even more different from that of England than it had been in 1815. Yet many of the most influential voices in mid-Victorian Britain, including Carlyle and Samuel Smiles (Self-Help; 1859), were Scottish, and the conception of the gospel of work, in particular, owed much in content and tone, even if often indirectly, to Scottish Calvinism. In Wales there was a particularly vigorous upsurge of Nonconformity, and the Welsh chapel was to influence late 19th-century and 20th-century British politics. Leisure
Leisure emerged as a distinct concept and activity, at least on a mass scale, only when the hours of labour diminished and became more regular. Before then, work and nonwork activities had been closely related to each other—for example, in the popular observance of the weekly “Saint Monday,” when furious bouts of working were followed by equally furious bouts of enjoyment on a day supposedly given over to work. In the 1850s, in textiles, the leading sector of the economy, there was a more regular working day and week, and a half-day of leisure, Saturday, also eventually emerged. Hours of labour began to approximate nine per day in the 1870s and eight per day after World War I. The Bank Holiday Act of 1871 further regularized leisure time. Yet, obviously, for the majority of people, work was the dominant activity.
For the privileged minority, however, leisure defined a good deal of their existence, the model of aristocratic “society” being redeployed in the early 19th century. Even in the 18th century the “middling sort” well-to-do of the towns, the urban gentry, had adopted the assembly room (where the elite had gathered to dance and socialize), the theatre, and the promenade as a means of regulating and enjoying urban life. This growth of a provincial urban culture had a serious side too, in the literary and philosophical societies of the late 18th century. In the first three decades of the new century this more serious aspect became increasingly apparent through the impact of the growth of Evangelical religion and of political events both at home and in Europe, so that there was a shift from the older sociability of propertied urban culture to a new emphasis on the deployment of leisure and culture as means of negotiating social and political difficulties, especially in the new and growing towns and cities.
The idea of “recreation” began to emerge; that is, that nonwork time should be a time of re-creating the body and mind for the chief purpose of work. The idea grew too that this recreation should be “rational.” The characteristic institutions of these new initiatives were the Mechanics Institutes for labourers and the Atheneaums for the sons—though not the daughters—of the more wealthy. Beyond these institutions there was the remarkable growth of those concerned with bringing culture to propertied urbanites, notably art galleries. However, it was not until mid-century that such initiatives began to develop rapidly, as in Manchester in the 1850s, where the Halle Orchestra was established on a professional basis and its concerts opened to anyone who could pay admission, unlike earlier, purely subscription-based music organizations. In the same decade, Owens College, the forerunner of the University of Manchester, was founded. The development of these institutions marked the emergence a more self-consciously public middle-class culture, one remodelled around a more open and inclusive notion of what public life involved.
In terms of popular culture, a more regularized and less demanding working day and week became part of a new kind of working year, so that old calendrical observances and rituals were lost. At the same time, a number were retained, being transformed to serve new purposes in the changed circumstances of increasing urbanization and industrialization. For instance, the old, established local “feast” and “wake” days of the industrial districts in the north of England were retained, serving many of the old communal functions yet also changing character and obtaining new functions in light of the spread of the railway and the advent of the modern vacation. Communal identities might now be formed by leaving the towns en masse, either for the railway excursion or on holiday, when large sections of the workers from particular towns took their leisure together at the new seaside resorts such as Blackpool. In urban Britain, restrictions upon space as well as upon time shaped the new culture, with old places of congregation, such as common lands on which fairs had been held, now being built over as towns grew. In the process, leisure often moved indoors, becoming more regular and more commercial in its organization. Commercial pressures in fact were most responsible for reshaping what had at least from the late 18th century been identified as popular culture, as opposed to forms of high culture. (Institutions such as the new urban concert halls of the mid-19th century were important in fostering a notion of the sublime and sacral nature of classical music, in contrast to the “low” music of the other sort of urban concert hall, namely the music hall.)
Commercialization of public culture was evident in the music hall from the 1850s, though more so in the late 19th century, with the construction of large purpose-built halls and the development of a nationwide chain of venues and a national “star” system. Before then, even if commercial, organizations were smaller-scale, less commercial, and more locally rooted. Commercial pressures were accompanied by political and moral pressures from above. The civic provision of culture was intended not only for the well-to-do but also for the mass of the population. For example, the public park, from its introduction in the 1840s, was an attempt to reproduce rational recreation among the lower classes through the design of the park as a place where civilized and rational behaviour and deportment could be encouraged. Of course, in practice, parks served other purposes, but their place in what was a widespread and marked reshaping of popular manners should not be underestimated. This reshaping owed a great deal to the beneficiaries of reform themselves, in that some of the most vocal supporters of the reform of the old order of “superstition and brutality” were radical workingmen whose conception of reason pitted them against the old culture. They were joined by Dissenter workingmen who were equally uncomfortable with traditional culture. Commercial and reform interests combined in the proliferation of reading matter for the “popular classes.” Indeed, the creation of a literate population was one of the most striking achievements of the century, but, while journals and books advocating self-improvement reached a surprisingly wide audience, this readership was not as wide as that of the sensational popular literature of the 1830s and ’40s. About this time a mass popular press also developed, though at this stage a Sunday press only, in the form of Lloyd’s News and Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper. The explosion of the provincial press in the 1850s reached a somewhat different social constituency but was tremendously important in constituting the sense of identity of the towns that it served. Late Victorian Britain State and society
From the 1880s a mounting sense of the limits of the liberal, regulative state became apparent. One reflection of this awareness was the increasing perception of national decline, relative to the increasing strength of other European countries and the United States. This awareness was reinforced by British military failures in the South African War (Boer War) of 1899–1902, a “free enterprise war” in which free enterprise was found wanting. One consequence of this and other developments was the growth of movements aimed at “national efficiency” as a means of establishing a more effective state machine. The recognition of social problems at home—such as the “discovery” of urban poverty in 1880s in the assumed presence of plenty and increasing anxiety about the “labour question”—also raised questions about the adequacy of the state in dealing with the mounting problems of an increasingly populous and complex society. Toward the end of the century, the possibility of a violent outcome in the increasingly intractable problem of Ireland brought existing constitutional methods into question. Behind much of this anxiety was a sense that the Third Reform Act of 1884 (see Reform Bill) and changes in local government were precipitating a much more democratic polity, for which the classical liberal state had no easy answers. The example of what was called at the time municipal socialism, especially as it existed in Birmingham under the direction of its mayor, Joseph Chamberlain (1873–76), indicated what the local state could accomplish. Instead of the old “natural order” religion that had underpinned the state previously, different currents of thought emerged that saw the state and community as necessary for individual self-realization. German idealism, socialism, and new liberalism (see libertarianism) all encompassed different ways of rethinking the state.