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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 February 2009
Historians of religion and society are often confronted with the difficult task of defining the distinctive characteristics of the various adherents of Church and chapel. Certainly, one of the most useful as well as the most frequently employed analytical tools in this endeavour has been the correlation of occupation to religious preference.1 While this approach can be, and has been, enormously revealing, it still has several distinct drawbacks. First, of course, there is the common problem of appropriately identifying and grouping the enormous variety and gradations of skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled occupations. While the grouping of occupations itself presents several inherent difficulties, its use as an analytical tool is further restricted by the fact that while occupational identification may provide a rough guide to status levels in society, it can in no way compensate for our lack of knowledge of, for example, the range of earnings within a specific occupational group at any particular time.
1 See, for example, the important work of Gilbert, A. D., Religion and society in industrial England: Church, chapel and social change, 1740–1914, London 1976Google Scholar; Snell, K. D. M., Church and chapel in the north Midlands: religious observance in the nineteenth century, Leicester 1991Google Scholar; McLeod, Hugh, Class and religion in the late Victorian city, London 1974Google Scholar, Religion and the working class in nineteenth-century Britain, London 1984Google ScholarPubMed, and Piety and poverty: working-class religion in Berlin, London and New York, 1870–1914, New York, 1996Google Scholar.
2 This point is also made with specific reference to the analysis of Anglicanism in Knight, Frances, The nineteenth-century Church and English society, Cambridge 1995, 21–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Durham Diocesan Records, Register of Curate Licences, 1832–1860, xv, iA.
4 Parliamentary Papers, Comparative account of the population of Great Britain in 1801, 1811, 1821, 1831 xviii (1833), 91Google Scholar.
5 Durham County Record Office (hereinafter cited as DCRO), Ep/Whm 39. Unless otherwise indicated, data used in this article is from this source.
6 These are my recalculations. Both the population and household totals differ slightly from Gould's own totals which indicated a total of 3,512 inhabitants and 787 households.
7 Levine, David and Wrightson, Keith, The making of an industrial society: Whickham, 1560–1765, Oxford 1991, 80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Ibid. 218–20.
9 Ibid.
10 Flinn, Michael W., The history of the British coal industry II: 1700–1830: the Industrial Revolution, Oxford1 1984, 166–71Google Scholar.
11 Ibid. 2201.
12 DCRO, Q/R/RM 2–15, Returns of Nonconformist Meeting Houses, 1829.
13 Such working-class Anglicanism has recently been addressed by Knight, Nineteenth-century Church passim.
14 Fewster, J. M., ‘The keelmen of Tyneside in the eighteenth century’, Durham University Journal xix (1957–1958), pt I, 27–9Google Scholar; Mitcalfe, W. Stanley, ‘The history of the keelmen and their strike in 1822,’ Archaeologia Aeliana 4th ser. xiv (1937), 2–3Google Scholar.
15 Gilbert, , Religion and society 59–67Google Scholar.
16 Snell, , Church and chapel in the north Midlands 11–12Google Scholar; Knight, , Nineteenth-century Church 24–32Google Scholar.
17 There remains, however, a problem of interpretation. While attendance at more than one denominational service was noted in the diaries, it is not absolutely certain whether this designation indicates that the household attended more than one service or whether different members of the same family, husband and wife, for example, attended different services, i.e. one church and the other chapel. I have assumed the former.
18 Knight, , Nineteenth-century Church 24Google Scholar.
19 Ibid. 31.
20 Ibid. 30–1.
21 Hempton, David, Methodism and politics in British society, 1750–1850, London 1984, chs iii–ivGoogle Scholar.
22 Currie, Robert, ‘A micro-theory of Methodist growth,’ Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society xxxvi (1967), 68Google Scholar.
23 Knight, , Nineteenth-century Church 23–4Google Scholar, expresses a similar sentiment.
24 McLeod, , Religion and the working class 24Google Scholar, and Class and religion.
25 Knight, , Nineteenth-century Church 37Google Scholar, reveals a similarly widesprea d possession of Bibles and prayer books along with relatively low attendance patterns for Newark (Lines) in 1839.
26 Ibid. 37; Jame s Obelkevich, Religion and rural society: South Lindsey, 1825–1875, Oxford 1976, 139–41.
27 Knight, , Nineteenth-century Church 36Google Scholar.
28 Obelkevich, , Religion and rural society 134–5, 192–3Google Scholar; Knight, , Nineteenth-century Church 53–7Google Scholar.
29 Obelkevich, , Religion and rural society 142–4Google Scholar.
30 Ibid. 228.
31 Knight, , Nineteenth-century Church, 37–9Google Scholar.
32 The difference betwee n th e 2 1 % of all families wh o said they were Methodis t an d the 28% of the families who said they regularly attended chapel services can be accounted for by the fact that a much larger proportion of those who admitted double allegiances regularly attended chapel rather than church services. Only nine of these households regularly attended church, but sixty-one said they regularly attended chapel.
33 Slightly fewer observations contain information on both occupation and attendance than noted for attendance alone.
34 David, Leonore off and Catherine Hall, Family fortunes: men and women of the English middle class, 1780–1850, Chicag1987, 273Google Scholar.
35 On religion and gender in a comparative context see McLeod, , Piety and poverty ch viiGoogle Scholar.
36 Jaffe, Jame s A., The struggle for market power: industrial relations in the British coal industry, 1800–1840, Cambridge 1991, 135–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hempton, , Methodism and politics 13Google Scholar; Malmgreen, Gail, Silk town: industry and culture in Macclesfield, 1750–1835, Hull 1985, 165–7Google Scholar; Valenze, Deborah, Prophetic sons and daughters: female preaching and popular religion in industrial England, Princeton 1985, 112Google Scholar.
37 James Jaffe, ‘Who were the Methodists?: a sociological profile of Methodists on Tyneside, 1815–1830’, unpubl. paper presented to the Western Conference on British Studies, 1989; Tyne and Wear County Archives, 1041/3, Brunswick Methodist Chapel, Newcastle, Register and Minute Book, 1825–35.
38 McLeod, , Poverty and piety 173Google Scholar.
39 Malmgreen, , Silk town 162–5Google Scholar, offers some fine anecdotal evidence of this from Macclesfield.
40 The ambiguity here stems in part from the fact that one person, Rachel Moss, listed her occupation as teacher, which was quite uncommon.
41 Laqueur, T. W., Religion and respectability: Sunday schools and working-class culture, 1780–1850, New Haven, Conn. 1976Google Scholar; Sutherland, Gillian, ‘Education’, in Thompson, F. M. L. (ed.), The Cambridge social history of Britain, 1750–1950, Cambridge 1990, iii. 126–7Google Scholar.
43 Fewster, , ‘Keelmen of Tyneside’, pt 1, 24–6Google Scholar.
43 Ibid, pt in, 117–18.
44 see the balanced assessment in McLeod, , Religion and the working class 40–1Google Scholar.
45 On ‘th e legitimacy of “improvement”’, see Gilbert, , Religion and society 85–93Google Scholar, although he does not specifically include education among the attributes of early evangelical communities.
46 Inglis, K. S., ‘Patterns of religious worship in 1851’, this JOURNAL xi (1960), 74–861Google Scholar; Thompson, D.M., ‘The 1851 Religious Census – problems and possibilities’, Victorian Studies xi (1967–1968), 87–97Google Scholar.
47 Levine and Wrightson, Making of an industrial society, 373
