ABSTRACT
In the early nineteenth century the Church of England had ranged itself unhesitatingly; if not unthinkingly; against reform. The vote among the bishops of twenty-one to two against the passage of the reform bill in October 1831 (Ch. 23) was only the climax of a policy of reaction which made it a natural target for attack. Radical writers like Richard Carlile, William Sherwin and the ex-Anglican London clergyman Robert Taylor characterized the Established Church as the corrupt and bloated lackey of the unreformed system. Statistical flesh had been put on the skeleton of anti-Anglican vituperation when John Wade's Black Book: or Corruption Unmasked appeared in 1820. His remarkably complete catalogue of church plural livings, absenteeism and gross disparities of income was reprinted during the reform crisis.
