ABSTRACT
Dissent still carried a stigma, in the earlier part of the century and especially in the countryside. Elizabeth May was brought up at Appledore in Devon, where her father was a gentleman's steward and a strict Anglican. Samuel Budgett was a loyal Wesleyan Methodist and was presented in a classic 'how-to-succeed' biography of the 1850s as a model Christian businessman. Family prayer, often around the huge family Bible, was the essence of Evangelical household religion. Thomas Binney was the minister of the King's Weigh House Chapel, London, from 1829 to 1869. Twice chairman of the Congregational Union, he was probably the best known Congregational minister of his day. Philip Henry Gosse FRS was one of leading marine zoologists of the 1840s and 1850s while at the same time he exercised a ministry amongst the so-called Plymouth Brethren. The Methodist Bible and Prayer Union began its regular monthly circular letters in 1878.
