In praise of Victorian Anglicanism
.jpg)
The answer to all these questions is a hearty 'yes'. But, those of us who are 'New Georgians' (seeking to promote an appreciation of 18th century Anglicanism, Georgian churches, and the ordinary, stolid piety that characterised the Georgian Church of England) do live in an Anglican landscape defined by the Victorians. To simply reject this Victorian context or, worse, to seek to instigate some sort of revolution against would be, well, very un-Georgian: Georgians, after all, valued stability.
Two things have led me in recent days to reflect on my approach to Victorian Anglicanism. The first was a photograph on social media of a friend - a parson, in surplice and cloak, on a mid-November day - with the accompanying comment "I look Dickensian". Now, yes, I know it is not a historical depiction, but it did lead to me think about how my concern to respect the ordinary piety of Georgian Anglicans should also be extended to the ordinary piety of Victorian Anglicans.
The second matter was the parish's choice of Advent book this year. I confess it was my recommendation which has led to this being With Dickens at Christmas, a collection of extracts from Dickens relating to Christmas, with an accompanying verse from Scripture, a prayer, and words from a carol. The recommendation came chiefly from my own practice of reading A Christmas Carol each year in the days before Christmas, and was inspired by 'Dickensian Carols' from Saint Bartholomew the Great, London.
Perhaps, then, it was time to at least partially reconsider my previously harsh criticisms of Victorian Anglicanism.
What, however, do I mean by Victorian Anglicanism? This post will not be addressing the intense ecclesiastical debates and divisions of the Victorian era. My concern, rather, is what - to return to the phrase used above - the ordinary piety of Victorian Anglicanism, an ordinary piety which continues to shape Anglicanism.
Let us begin with the issue that provoked the ire of Thomas Hardy: the Victorian re-ordering of churches and Victorian church architecture. Let us listen to another Victorian voice, however, and that a solidly Old High voice, William Connor Magee, Bishop of Peterborough 1868–91 and Archbishop of York for a short period in 1891. In the charge given at his primary visitation in 1872, Magee addressed the matter of the re-ordering of churches:
the Church - not in a state of decay, but in a state of most solid and irreverent comfort, hideous with square pews, where selfish respectability ensconces itself and thrusts God's poor into remote and dark corners; the Church where the Holy Table, duly provided with lolling cushions for the elbows of the infrequent celebrant, is hidden from the eyes of the congregation by a towering pile of carpentry, which lifts into prominence the person of the Minister who preaches his part of the prayers to the people, and that of the Clerk who says their part instead of them - tells its tale of worshippers, whose highest idea of worship is that of their own edification, and for whom their place of worship is, therefore, not so much God's House, to be made beautiful in His honour, as Man's House, to be made respectable for his credit and comfortable for his convenience. But the Church - cleansed of these irreverent and selfish disfigurements; restored to the original beauty of a design conceived when men built Churches, not for man's convenience, but for God's glory; free, from porch to Holy Table, for rich and poor alike; adorned with the loving, nay, the lavish gifts of devout and loving hearts - tells its tale likewise. It tells us of worshippers who are being taught, were it only by the mute witness of the place where they assemble, what the true worship of the Sanctuary is; that it is something more than the hearing of prayers and sermons, something more even than real prayer and praise; that it is the assembling of Christ's people, to win by such gathering in His name His promised presence in their midst: a presence which makes the place where it is vouchsafed, the House of God, the Holy House which they who own that presence love to make beautiful, as the place wherein His honour dwells.
Judged by this test we have much to be thankful for. You know how largely and how rapidly the work of Church Restoration has progressed in this Diocese. Begun within the memory of many now living, it has spread all over a Diocese in which the number of large and beautiful Churches is so great as to make Church Restoration at once most extensive and most costly ; and in which, nevertheless, the greater number of our Churches have been admirably restored ...
The New Georgian would, of course, desire to respond to Magee's criticism of the ordering of Georgian churches, highlighting what was lost by Victorian fussiness. But such is not the purpose of this post. Magee's words - and, remember, he was an exemplar of the Old High tradition - highlight what the Victorians understood they were doing in re-ordering churches, aiding a more reverent approach to worship. And such re-ordering has survived - or, at least, did survive until nave altars became a tiresome and rather silly fashion. It remains the case, however, that most Anglican churches retain a Victorian shape. It is often seen, for example, in rural Church of Ireland parish churches: a chancel added to 17th and 18th century churches, central pulpits or triple deckers replaced by pulpits to the side, choir pews now a long established fixture.
Such is the shape of the ordinary Anglican parish church, a shape which has influenced Anglican piety and liturgy for over a century, and which has become part of what ordinary Anglicans value, love, and reverence in their parish churches.
Added to this is another significant feature of the Victorian re-ordering and design of churches: stained glass. While stained glass was usually protected by the Elizabethan Settlement, becoming a source of Parliamentarian iconoclastic violence in the 1640s, Georgian churches often (but certainly not always) had plain glass: it was, however, the Victorians who made stained glass almost ubiquitous in Anglican parish churches. In the words of John Betjeman, for Anglicans "This most tremendous tale of all, [is] Seen in a stained-glass window's hue".
The joy in and attachment to stained glass, together with the belief that it is quite simply a fixed characteristic of the parish church, is now an engrained part of the Anglican experience. It provides the most common and widespread Anglican iconography, a reminder that, in the words of James VI/I, we "quarrel not the making of Images", for the purposes of edification, beautifying, and expressing reverence for the parish church as a place of prayer and worship.
If the Victorian ordering of the parish church and stained glass have been fixed and significant features of Anglican piety, so too have Victorian approaches to music in parish worship. From the acceptance in 1819 of the singing of hymns in Church of England divine service, to the subsequent proliferation of hymns throughout the Victorian era, to the publication of Hymns Ancient and Modern in 1861, to the introduction of organs and robed choirs, to parish churches adopting the cathedral and collegiate practice of choral services - Victorian Anglicanism has defined what is now a fundamental aspect of Anglican worship and piety.
I have in my small collection of Prayer Books, a Church of England BCP 1662, bought in a secondhand bookshop in Cambridge, inscribed on the inside page with "AJH Harries 17.12.50". It is well-worn, indicating good and regular use at one time: the pages of Morning Prayer particularly show signs of frequent use. And it is bound with 'Hymns Ancient and Modern'. This, of course, was a very common practice. In the Church of Ireland, it was routine well into the 1990s for our BCP to be bound with the Church Hymnal.
As the late Sir Roger Scruton said, "hymns have shaped the service of the Anglican Church, and made the congregation part of it", while also importantly contributing to a shared popular, Christian culture, "the unity-in-diversity" of the various Christian traditions singing the same hymns. Anglican piety, devotion, and popular theology have been profoundly shaped and given expression by the hymns that are an established part of our worship, a gift of the Victorians.
.jpg)
The Victorian innovation of the robed parish choir leading the congregation's singing remains, in many places, another standard feature of Anglican worship. This innovation also directly contributed to that most Anglican form of liturgy, Choral Evensong, being known in parish churches. I recently attended Choral Evensong in a dear friend's parish, celebrating a significant parish anniversary. It was a Friday evening, and the small church was packed: the congregation was certainly more than one hundred. We had two great congregational hymns - 'bangers'. And the robed parish choir beautifully sang the service. This was a goodly inheritance given to us by Victorian Anglicanism.
Finally, let us consider an Early Communion on a Sunday morning. This service itself, of course, is a Victorian practice. Let us assume that the parish we are attending is not Anglo-catholic. The celebrant is vested in surplice and stole: entirely conventional amongst many Anglicans for over a century, but the use of the stole was certainly unknown to the Georgian Church of England. The Holy Table is covered with an altar frontal in seasonal colours, also unknown to the Georgians. And candles are lit on the Holy Table - in contrast to the practice in Barchester, for its clergy "had no candles on their altars, either lighted or unlighted". While Trollope published his novel in 1857, when the Old High Christopher Wordsworth, then Bishop of Lincoln, released a survey of attitudes to ritual practices in his diocese in 1874, he noted that "candlesticks on the Communion Table" were "now accepted without scruple by all persons in the Church (even by those who cannot be suspected of any lack of zeal for Protestantism)".
We might also add to this that the 1874 Lincoln survey revealed that a large minority of the clergy in the diocese - over 40% - approved of the wearing of eucharistic vestments. Here too, then, we find a Victorian inheritance in contemporary Anglicanism: a range of ritual and ceremonial practices that are now an established part of the Anglican experience, contributing to Anglican piety in an unexceptional and quite ordinary fashion.
There is a very real sense, therefore, in which we are all Victorian Anglicans. How should those of us who are New Georgians (yes, there are dozens of us) interpret this state of affairs? As already indicated, I think we must begin with the same reverence for ordinary Anglican experience and piety that drives our appreciation of 18th century Anglicanism. We should not show to the piety of Victorian Anglicans the disdain and condescension routinely shown to Georgian Anglicanism. A joyful recognition of the good in Victorian Anglicanism - and of the Anglican piety it has sustained for over a century - should be how we begin our approach. A dismissive attitude towards Victorian Anglicanism is, after all, a dismissive attitude towards 20th and, in many ways, 21st century ordinary Anglican piety.
Secondly, there should be an understanding that various Victorian cultural experiences and movements contributed to significant changes to aspects of Anglicanism in the areas considered above - church architecture, music, and ritual - almost inevitable. As I have previously suggested in my counterfactual 'What if there had been no Movement of 1833':
the ordinary parish church at the end of the Georgian era would still, without the Oxford Movement, become the ordinary parish church at the end of the Victorian era, with its candles on the altar, decorative reredos, priest wearing a stole (or perhaps a chasuble), assuming the eastward position without controversy, weekly early celebrations of the Eucharist, modest ceremonial, stained glass, Choral Matins, and hymnody.
In other words, we should not exaggerate the role of Tractarianism in shaping Victorian Anglicanism and its subsequent influence. Indeed, I think a good case can be made that Tractarian influence on the shape of Victorian Anglicanism was much less than is often claimed. Key here is the term Victorian, not Tractarian. The Victorian era had a much greater influence on Anglicanism than the Tractarians.
Victorian Anglicanism, therefore, is to be praised. Anglicanism cannot be appreciated and gratefully experienced without such praise. For we are all - yes, even those of us who are New Georgians - Victorian Anglicans.
Comments
Post a Comment