ABSTRACT

One way of studying the religion of nineteenth-century London is through statistics. Church attendances on a single Sunday were counted in the national census of 1851 and in two newspaper censuses, those organised by the British Weekly in 1886-7, and the Daily News in 1902-3.1 Throughout the century the various branches of Methodism published in their minutes of conference extensive statistics of membership.2 From the 1860s such statistics were also published by the Baptists, and they were joined by the Anglicans - who had no such category as ‘membership’ but provided numbers of baptisms, confirmations and communicants in each diocese — in the 1880s, and by the Congregationalists in 1899. There are also unpublished sources of such information: for instance, bishops of Anglican dioceses frequently asked incumbents at Visitation time how many people attended their services, and ‘If the numbers do not bear a fair proportion to the population to what do you attribute the deficiency?’ Catholic bishops were only concerned with the ‘Catholic population’, but they were not interested in a ‘fair proportion’: at Visitation time priests might be asked to give numbers not only of those attending Mass, but of those ‘neglecting Mass’, ‘out of the Church’ or apostasising.3 Marriage and burial registers indicate the occupational composition of the population associated with the various denominations. Many churches include in their records lists of the addresses, sometimes with occupations, of their members.