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Dissenters rose from about a quarter of a million in the mid-eighteenth century to
about a million in the 1820’s, and to perhaps a million and half attenders in
1851, which represented a larger number of regular members and adherents.
4
The Methodists grew from about twenty-six thousand communicants in 1770 and
about sixty thousand communicants at Wesley’s death in 1791, and perhaps three
times as many attenders at both dates, to nearly two million attenders, and a
larger number of regular chapel-goers, in the ten Methodist Connexions of 1851.
5
The Roman Catholics grew, less by conversion than by immigration of the Irish,
alienated from the Church of the English rulers before they arrived, from under
seventy thousand according to Returns of 1767 and 1780 to about a quarter of a
million attenders, and a larger number of communicants, in 1851.
1
Altogether,
the Non-Anglicans grew from a small minority, perhaps half a million out of the
seven million people in England and Wales, in 1770 to over half the church-
going population in 1851.
2
The ‘filling’ had become the larger part of the
‘sandwich’.
Nor was this the full extent of the alienation from the Church. What alarmed
the Census reporter, Horace Mann, and his contemporaries more than the scale
of dissent was the ‘alarming number of the non-attenders at any place of worship’.
According to Mann’s estimate, no less than half the population failed to attend a
religious service on Census Sunday, and, even on his favourable assumption that
only seventy per cent could attend even one service out of three, over a quarter
of the population were voluntary absentees.
3
By modern standards, of course,
this represents an astonishing scale of religious activity, but to contemporaries it
marked a severe decline in adherence and belief.
They were in no doubt about where the decline had occurred. While the
middle classes had increased their attendance and the upper classes had
maintained theirs as being ‘among the recognized proprieties of life’, Mann
remarked, the urban working classes were characterized not so much by
‘infidelity’ as by ‘negative, inert indifference’ to religion. ‘More especially in
cities and large towns it is observable how absolutely insignificant a portion of
1
On very large Wesleyan chapels, cf. T.P.Bunting, Life of Jabez Bunting (1887), p. 338,
and E.P.Thompson, op. cit., p. 351.
2
Rev. E.Wyatt-Edgell, ‘On the Statistics of Places of Worship in England and Wales’,
Stat.J., 1851, XIV. 343–4; percentage increases in numbers of buildings, 1831–51:
Church of England 18.4; Independents 39.8, Roman Catholics 59.2, Methodists (all
Connexions) 102.2. For later figures, 1851–73, see H.S.Skeats, ‘Statistics relating to
Religious Institutions in England and Wales’, ibid., 1876, XXXIX. 332–3.
3
5.6 as against 5.3 million.
4
E.D.Bebb, Nonconformity and Social and Economic Life, 1660–1800 (1935) p. 45;
B.L.Manning, The Protestant Dissenting Deputies (Cambridge, 1952), p. 235; Census of
England and Wales, 1851, Religious Worship, pp. xlvii, Ixi, clxxviii.
5
R.F.Wearmouth, Methodism and Working-Class Movements in England, 1800–50 (1937),
pp. 15–16; Census, 1851, Religious Worship, p. lxxviii.
THE BIRTH OF CLASS 163