Were Victorian Nonconformists the Worst Imperialists of All?

As the Victorian age recedes into history, with an entire century now separating us from it, there is a danger of forgetting the social importance of English Nonconformity—that is, religious Nonconformity. The church/chapel distinction was a fundamental social dividing line almost everywhere in England throughout the nineteenth century, and into the early twentieth century. One of the reasons why there is a danger of forgetting that distinction is easy to understand: the disappearance of any distinctive Nonconformist social or religious identity in the twentieth century. The collapse of Nonconformist social identity, and the migration of unknown numbers of young Nonconformists into social milieus with secular or Anglican points of view, constitute one of the great untold stories of twentieth-century English history. To most people in England (if not Wales¹), the word Nonconformist means the same thing as it does in the United States: an oddball, or perhaps a heroic political or intellectual dissenter.

As Nonconformity was dwindling away, Roman Catholicism was growing until, in the late twentieth century, it attracted more churchgoers than Nonconformity or the Church of England. I mention Catholicism because of a tendency in some recent scholarship to identify the Protestant-Catholic division as the fundamental religious distinction in Victorian England, ignoring the broad social division between church and chapel (Veer; Viswanathan). It is true that Protestantism remained a fundamental category of British as well as English national identity throughout the nineteenth century, leading to outbursts of serious public debate over a variety of issues including the Maynooth grant, the restoration of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, and papal infallibility. There was also anxiety over the growth of Roman Catholicism, an exaggerated anxiety given the small number of converts, however distinguished, from Anglicanism and given the demographic realities of the Catholic presence even in the wake of expanded Irish immigration from the 1840s. Catholicism was highly concentrated geographically in some of the major cities of England and in some rural areas of Lancashire and Cheshire. In the mid-nineteenth century, in many parts of England, it was possible to go through your entire life without seeing a Roman Catholic. Catholics constituted, as near as we can tell, something like 2-3% of the churchgoing population at the time of the 1851 census of church attendance (Snell and Ell; Gay).

Nonconformity was unlike Roman Catholicism in the geographical breadth of its presence. There were few communities in Victorian England without the presence of a chapel or meeting house—Baptist, Congregationalist, Methodist, Unitarian, Quaker, Bible Christian, Plymouth Brethren, Peculiar People, and many others—and those buildings provided an explicit challenge, visible in bricks and mortar, to the claims of the established Church of England to be the church of the nation. Of those places without a chapel, few were without families of Nonconformists. As a feature of the social history of England and, as I will argue in this paper, of the imperial history of England, I believe it is fair to say that the church/chapel divide was more significant in the nineteenth century than the Protestant/ Catholic divide.

What then was the social reach and social significance of "chapel" in the nineteenth century, and how did it relate to "imperialism"? The influence of Nonconformity extended well beyond the number of enrolled members in the Nonconformist denominations. Alan Gilbert and Robert Currie have documented thoroughly the very rapid growth in Nonconformist membership in the first half of the nineteenth century, but even at its peak at, roughly, mid-century, Nonconformist church membership never exceeded 10% of the total population (Currie, Gilbert, and Horsley; Gilbert). In the 1851 census of church attendance, Nonconformists account for roughly half the churchgoing population, although it is not easy to specify the size of the churchgoing population. The census takers, who counted the actual number of people in every church and chapel in England (an extraordinary undertaking, never repeated), were thwarted by the "twicers," that is those people who attended more than once on the same day. The census officials put out some garbled figures that were treated as reliable in public debate. The results of...