Patterns of Religious Belonging

Abstract

Most people in Victorian and Edwardian England would have seen themselves as belonging either to ‘church’ or to ‘chapel’. Church people were Anglicans — those belonging to the Church of England, the established church, with Queen Victoria, or later King Edward VII, at its head. ‘The Church’, as it was often called, had a nationwide system of parishes and counted the whole population as its parishioners. The national religious census held on 30 March 1851 showed that 51 per cent of those attending church on the day of the census went to an Anglican service. There were no censuses of religious affiliation in nineteenth-century England, as distinct from those measuring congregations, but probably about 60 per cent of the population would have regarded themselves as Anglicans. Chapel people, also known as Dissenters, as Nonconformists, or (by the late nineteenth century) as free church people, were Protestants belonging to one of the numerous free churches. Most of these were relatively small, but when all of them were added together they attracted almost as many worshippers as the established church.