Feed My Lambs: The Reverend Thomas Drew and Protestant Children in Early Victorian Belfast

Abstract

Feed My Lambs:The Reverend Thomas Drew and Protestant Children in Early Victorian Belfast Sean Farrell On Easter Monday, 1844, an estimated eight hundred children gathered at Christ Church in Belfast for the church’s annual children’s day festivities. Divided into girls and boys divisions, the children marched behind a church official bearing the school’s white silk flag, marked with a Bible and a crown and the school’s motto: “Feed my lambs.” The children moved from Christ Church to the Botanic Gardens and then marched on to the Twelve-Acre Field in Stranmillis. They remained there for the afternoon, enjoying “the most extensive views” of the city while listening to hymns and psalms performed by the church’s singing class. The Belfast Commercial Chronicle later reveled in the scene: “The free bounding air of the hills as it breathed upon these children of the loom and the factory, was welcomed with delight; and many a one exclaimed—’Ah how healthful it must be here?’” After a few hours, the party returned home via Sandy Row, where the children met their parents before heading back to Christ Church in College Square. The Reverend Thomas Drew, the minister of the church, brought the day to a close, pronouncing that “he never had enjoyed a day of such unalloyed happiness. The order, kindness, self-denial and patience of all were deserving of great praise. He felt it a duty to call upon then, one and all, to give thanks to God, through Christ, for such a happy privilege as they had enjoyed that day.” After Drew concluded his remarks, children from the outlying parts of the district were given supper and the rest were dismissed to go home with their families.1 Children occupied a central place in both the social world and cultural imaginaries of the Rev. Thomas Drew and his large and important congregation at Christ Church. This should be no surprise. Scholars have long understood that children lay at the heart of the social and spiritual plans of Victorian evangelicals, [End Page 43] who often saw them both as particularly capable of receiving God’s grace and as a vehicle for the moral rehabilitation of their parents. Recruitment was another factor, as most supporters saw Sunday and day schools as key attractions for potential congregants, an increasingly important issue in an era of deepening denominational competition. This practical consideration was certainly at work at Christ Church, where the focus on children reflected both Drew’s defensive determination to strengthen the Church of Ireland in this largely Presbyterian city and his fervent desire to protect its members from the threat of Roman Catholicism (an ever-present danger in the Rev. Drew’s mind). Numbers mattered, and Drew’s outreach initiatives seemed to work quite well. Opened in 1833, Christ Church quickly became the largest Church of Ireland congregation in Ulster. More Anglican boys and girls received their education in its extensive network of Sunday and day schools than at any other institution in mid nineteenth-century Belfast. The vast majority of these children were the sons and daughters of textile workers, the primary engineers of industrialization in the Victorian city. But this was not simply a matter of providing religious education for Protestant working-class boys and girls. Christ Church’s commitment to poor children sharpened the church’s appeal to both middle- and working-class congregants, strengthening the cross-class ties in this sizeable Protestant community in central Belfast. Irish historians long have noted the social complexity of the Christ Church congregation, which featured a significant core of professional and middle-class members to go with its plebeian majority. Although 1852 church census highlights the rather banal truth that a majority (56 percent) of the men and women worked in jobs connected to the textile industry, the data also underlines the congregation’s remarkable social diversity, listing men and women with 158 different occupations ranging from millworkers to lawyers and a professor of music.2 Christ Church was one of the first sites of substantial Protestant cross-class interaction in the city, a reflection of the Rev. Thomas Drew’s pastoral and preaching talents as well as...