Church, Chapel, and Party: Religious Dissent and Political Modernization in Nineteenth-Century England (review)

Floyd’s objective is to bring precision to the Nonconformist role in early Victorian politics and to eliminate “unsubstantiated conjectures” (p. 3). He argues that Dissenters strongly voted Liberal and Anglicans slightly less strongly voted Tory, and that Wesleyans and Old Dissent behaved alike. This is not new, but Floyd offers precision through quantification. He contends that religion was more important than other issues (e.g., poor law, distress, education) and hence set the bounds of debate. He asserts that Dissenters’ aggressive pressure for liberal policies contributed to the two-party system. Religion thus “drove English politics throughout the nineteenth century” (p. 10).

Floyd uses “conventional” (newspapers) and “innovative” (quantitative) ways (p. 9) of examining all general elections and by-elections between 1832 and 1847 in five boroughs. The selection criteria are vague (“unique . . . economic interests . . . local industries . . . varieties of dissent” [p. 8]) and could apply anywhere. Chapter 2 surveys politico-religious indicators including Roman Catholic Emancipation, slavery, English and Irish disestablishment, and the Maynooth grant. Chapters 3–7 recount each election. (Newspapers alone do not fully explain election results. Archives reveal that sometimes local economic issues mattered as much as national religious ones.) Chapters 8 and 9 are statistical analyses of parliamentary and electoral behavior. There are some questionable points. Floyd asserts that as Dissent became more evangelical, “not much was left to divide” them (p. 167); denominational polity and paedobaptism, however, continued to be divisive. He never confronts the irony that Whig/Liberal leaders and supporters chiefly were Anglican in religion.

More seriously, Floyd chose to identify Nonconformist voters alone, thereby limiting the comparative power of his quantitative analysis. He relied primarily on linking names in pollbooks with names in baptismal registers, but that procedure works only for paedobaptists. (He made some use of membership lists, but admits that that source is spotty and hard to use.) Thus he compares known Nonconformists against populations of unknown religious identity. (Even some of these known Nonconformists could have conformed to the Church of England at some later date.) It perhaps is churlish to ask him for more research, but it would have been better had he tried to identify Anglicans as well as Nonconformists so that two precisely defined groups could be compared. Identifying voters in town directories and the 1841 and 1851 censuses would have provided economic variables to refine the analysis. His case would have been strengthened had he been able to eliminate economic factors in voting behavior. It also must be said that, although some evidence lends itself to quantification, neither evidence nor method is inherently more valid and more reliable than the analysis of literary evidence.

How does Roman Catholicism fit into the picture? Were there any Roman Catholic electors in the five boroughs? It is a truism that the English Roman hierarchy (like the Wesleyan Methodist leader Jabez Bunting) was sympathetic to the Conservative Party; but did Roman Catholic electors ignore their leadership (as did the Wesleyan electors)? We do not know. Roman Catholicism here is a passive Other, to be granted meager toleration, but subject to gross anti-Catholic attacks when it came to Maynooth. Indeed, judging from the rhetoric, Dissenters grounded their objections to Maynooth and to Roman Catholic participation in state-aided education schemes on theological and political opposition to popery, not on principled Liberal opposition to state aid for religion. Anti-Catholicism remains an ever-present yet never-explained counterpoint to the Dissenters’ espousal of religious equality and freedom.

Floyd deserves credit for following up and refining the work on pollbooks by John Vincent and T. J. Nossiter. There is quite a way to go, however, before Floyd’s arguments can be taken as proven.