ABSTRACT
The religious census of 1851 made it abundantly clear that attendance at church or chapel was a practice much more associated with the middle than the working classes.1 As many historians of religion have pointed out, religious belief had become 'a character and function of class' rather than a basis for a wider social unity. Religious belonging gave distinctive identity to particular communities and classes in a society which was increasingly aware of its divisions and in which the established church was gradually losing its claim for national rather than sectarian status.2 Foremost among those distinctive identities was the association between the middle class and a Christian way of life so that by mid century adherence to evangelical protestant forms had become an accepted part of respectability if not gentility. Attendance at church or chapel was a social necessity even when it was not a religious imperative. Respectability was coming to include church going, family worship, the observance of the Sabbath, an interest in religious literature. As the Tory journalist T. W. Croker commented in 1843, there was a kind of 'Christian tint over the general aspect of society'.3
