ABSTRACT
The biography of a Victorian bishop might seem an unlikely platform from which to launch a study of some of the interconnections between railways and religion in the nineteenth century. In fact it performs this function very well. The Lancashire Life of Bishop Fraser by the Rev. J.W. Diggle, published in London in 1889, documents the achievements of the second churchman to hold the diocese of Manchester. Gladstone’s offer of the bishopric in 1870 to James Fraser (1818-85) had made clear the challenge of the appointment: ‘Manchester is the centre of the modern life of the country. I cannot exaggerate the importance of the see, or the weight and force of the demands it will place on the energies of a Bishop, and on his spirit of self-sacrifice.’1
