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

The age of modern party politics began just before Victoria's reign. The expansion of the electorate by the 1832 Reform Act forced politicians to rebuild their authority on a wider, more popular basis, craft party manifestoes, and assemble party machinery to register and motivate voters. The change in party labels—Conservative instead of Tory and Liberal instead of Whig—indicated that this new politics was based on commitment to contrasting principles rather than differing alliances to patronage. The essential contention of Richard D. Floyd's new work is that historians have underestimated the role that religious controversy played in this early formation of party alignments. By carefully analyzing poll books of five diverse boroughs and by evaluating the parliamentary voting patterns of the MPs from those boroughs over the course of the 1830s and 1840s, Floyd demonstrates a consistently strong pattern of nonconformist support for Liberal party candidates, and a reciprocal commitment of Liberal MPs to dissenters' interests. His analysis also reveals a nearly equal and opposite connection between defenders of the Established Church and the Conservative party. This firm pattern, Floyd argues, was the bedrock of popular party politics in the age of its birth.

In assembling these data, Floyd affirms and extends existing evidence that religious issues played a central role in establishing Victorian party loyalties, and his analysis stands as a corrective to the tendency among historians to relegate religion to the periphery of political history. More work remains to be done, however, because Floyd does not develop the full implications of his research by comparing his results either with other studies of local politics or with contemporary political analyses. Indeed, there are several ways in which Floyd's argument might have been strengthened by such correlations. He might, for example, have compared his figures for Wesleyan Methodist votes in the 1837 election with data gathered in that year from twenty-nine cities by a Methodist newspaper, which showed overwhelming Wesleyan Methodist backing for Liberal candidates. Such a comparison confirms his results in one of his selected boroughs (Durham) and, just as importantly, corroborates the newspaper's more extensive findings, about which at least one historian, David Hempton, has expressed doubt. In general, one wishes that Floyd had offered a more thoroughgoing account of the ways in which his research ought to amend or correct other evaluations of Victorian politics.

By and large, Floyd is careful in evaluating the reliability of his data. There are some assertions, however, that need further qualification. First among them is his claim that his five selected boroughs are representative of the nation as a whole. Though there is no particular reason to doubt it, one would like more assurance on this point. It would be helpful to know, for example, why the largest cities, including metropolitan London, are excluded. It would also be helpful to know more about the criteria Floyd uses to determine whether a particular parliamentary vote is categorized as favorable to dissenters or not. In the case of the Maynooth grant, for example, there were reasons for nonconformists to support either side of that issue.

A key finding of Church, Chapel and Party is that, politically speaking, Methodists were almost indistinguishable from other nonconformist groups. This is an important result because historians have often assumed that members of the largest Methodist body, the Wesleyans, were swayed in the 1830s and 1840s by the fervent conservatism of their leadership. Unfortunately, the small size of his samples and the difficulties in establishing the denominational affiliations of many voters prevent Floyd from making a definitive assessment of Wesleyan Methodist politics in contrast to Methodists more generally. Intriguingly, his figures suggest that, in some places at least, Wesleyans were indeed more conservative than other groups, though not to the extent of rendering a majority of their votes for Conservative candidates. In spite of their senior pastors, most Wesleyan...