ABSTRACT
Rarely has a secular State been so ostentatiously dutiful in its religious observances as was early and mid-Victorian Britain. Church attendance was taken seriously in bourgeois and respectable circles. Church building was the natural accompaniment of urban and suburban expansion. The Church of England built nearly 1,750 new churches between 1840 and 1876, virtually all paid for by private donation (368). Chapel building by the nonconformist sects was similarly rapid with increasingly ornate architectural styles denoting not only the declining fashion for simple services in spartan assembly halls but the increasing prosperity of those middle-class dissenters who footed the bill. To the horror of old-style Protestants the Roman Catholic Church was responding to the challenges and opportunities afforded by mass emigration from Ireland in the late 1840s. The Protestant Magazine reported that the number of Catholic places of worship had increased by 35 per cent and the number of priests by an appalling 48 per cent in the single decade 1846-56 (366, 253). Moreover, the priests seemed to exert a greater influence in their communities than Protestant clerics did in theirs.
