Nineteenth-Century Anglican Theological Training: The Redbrick Challenge (review)

At the outset of the nineteenth century, episcopal ambitions for a wholly graduate clergy in the poorest regions of England and Wales remained unfulfilled. Reformist bishops determined that any non-graduates recruited should have at least sufficient education to make effective parochial clergy, and sponsored the creation of the first Anglican institutions specifically intended to train non-graduates for ordination. Later in the century, further initiatives responded to a combination of the human-resource implications of the church extension with which the established church responded to urbanization, a decline in the attractiveness of a clerical career to its traditional constituency, and a suspicion (in at least some minds) that a different kind of clergyman might be required to Christianize the urban masses.

The precarious world of the non-graduate clergy of Victorian England and their training institutions has only recently attracted serious scholarly interest, notably in the valuable discussion contained in Alan Haig’s The Victorian Clergy of 1984. Several subsequent unpublished studies are now joined by David Dowland’s book. Any account of non-graduate training in the nineteenth century is inevitably a story of at best qualified success: the early-twentieth century saw renewed commitment to the creation of a fully graduate clergy, while the church remained a largely graduate profession. Non-graduate clergy continued to be victims of a “glass ceiling,” few penetrating the upper reaches of the profession save in the context of the colonial church, while their parochial careers still generally led to the poorer rural areas or demanding but underfunded urban livings. Dowland sets himself the task of identifying the factors governing the fortunes of non-graduate colleges and determining whether their students deserved to be treated as the inferior relations of their university-educated peers. He addresses these issues through a consideration of a selection of colleges: St. David’s College, Lampeter, one of the earliest diocesan foundations; the Anglican response to the “godless” University of London, King’s College London; the evangelical colleges created at St. John’s, Highbury, and St. Aidan’s, Birkenhead; and the idiosyncratic high-church foundation of Kelham, established by Herbert Kelly at the end of the century.

Dowland’s account makes plain how the odds were stacked against some of these institutions. Inadequate finances not only threatened the survival of the colleges, but also encouraged the admission of inadequately prepared students who would serve to discredit their alma mater even assuming that they managed to complete the course. Impecunious students inevitably sought out the least demanding and cheapest courses, but raising fees would only have brought the colleges into direct and unequal competition with the universities. Before the creation of a centralized system of church examinations beginning in the 1870s, moreover, the minimal requirements demanded of ordinands by some bishops did little to assist efforts to impose higher standards. The marginal position of colleges combined with an absence of internal checks on the authority of the principals to create conditions in which a strong-willed and managerially incompetent appointment could swiftly bring an institution to ruin. This helps explain why bishops who had worked in the colleges could be as suspicious of their activities as those who had not. Dowland nevertheless argues that the colleges were victims of prejudice: their emphasis on pastoral training and concentration on theology could mean that their students received a better preparation for the ministry than those attending university, while there was no lack of ambition in the efforts of some colleges to match the width of the university curriculum. Rather than endorsing the contemporary claim that the colleges offered too “narrow” an education, Dowland suggests that scarce resources were sometimes squandered on misguided efforts to reproduce the Oxbridge experience in everything from curriculum to ceremonial and architecture.

Many of these points are uncontentious and confirm arguments advanced in Haig’s work and other, unpublished, scholarship. Dowland’s own book, however, provides in itself an inadequate basis for his bolder claims for the...