ABSTRACT
The West End boroughs were in fact those with the highest proportions of Catholic worshippers next to the small borough of Holborn, with its large Irish and Italian population and such notable Catholic centres as Westminster cathedral, the Brompton Oratory, and the Jesuit church in Mayfair a church for the rich. In nineteenth-century England it was usually held that the middle class was the religious class par excellence. If Anglicanism was an integral part of the life of the upper class this was primarily because most members of the class still saw the Established Church as an essential part of the social order within which they held privileged positions, and which they felt a duty to uphold. One aristocratic convert to Catholicism was the Liberal politician, George Russell though he was converted to the Anglican variety, and his Evangelical parents had been as devout as himself. Support for the Church of England was general in West London.
