ABSTRACT
Shepherd and others like him must, of course, be listened to with some care. As labourers in the vineyard, they were serious witnesses as to the condition of the grapes. Indeed, Nonconformist spokesmen in Reading are invaluable guides to critical points in the changing context in which they had to work, even if their understanding had important limitations. As transmitters of wider culture to their chapels, ministers tried to break down what was happening into components. Trams, telephones, letters and newspapers multiplied, affecting both organisations and consciousness. When Edward VII succeeded to the throne in 1901 the Rev. H.H. Snell preached a sermon in front of the Mayor and Corporation trying to understand how ‘we are being fed day by day with the extraordinary’, the last reign has been one of unparalleled social change. Deliberate demands for positive State action were made in the late nineteenth-century context of the breakdown of negative or ‘freedom from’ notions of individualism.
