Religious Changes in Liverpool in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

The study of local history can contribute much to the understanding of religious changes in the nineteenth century, for, as Professor Asa Briggs has shown, each provincial city of Victorian England had its own distinguishing class structure and manner of life. Nonconformity was strong in Birmingham and Sheffield, towns of the steel and iron industry which was largely in the hands of small masters; Manchester with its cotton mills, its large proletariat and Irish immigrants, its wealthy employers and cosmopolitan merchants, was a very different society, marked not only by a dominant Dissent but also by a strong Roman Catholicism. Although Liverpool resembled Manchester in its wide class differences and its large number of Irish poor, it was a commercial rather than an industrial city. Moreover, unlike Manchester, it was an ancient incorporated borough and the activity of the town council in building churches in the eighteenth century during a period of great population growth (from about 10,000 in 1700 to 77,000 in 1801) appears to have been one factor in stemming the tide of Dissent, which was noticeably weaker in Liverpool than in the other three cities referred to above. In the nineteenth century the main religious issue at Liverpool was not Dissent versus the Establishment, but conflict between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. Chartism, so powerful in other cities, appears to have taken second place to the sectarian conflict at Liverpool.