The Church Census and the Brontës

Abstract

On 30 March 1851, a census was meant to be held in every place of worship in England and Wales in order to establish the number of people going to church or chapel.1 Some parishes refused to cooperate, but there was no backsliding in Haworth and thanks to the labours of Robin Greenwood the figures for Haworth can be given in the Appendix. Total figures supplied in Chadwick’s History of the Victorian Church (1966) indicate that the Church of England had 5,292,551 adherents, the Roman Catholic Church 383,630 and the main Protestant dissenting churches (Presbyterian, Methodist, Congregational and Baptist) 4,536,264. The national picture took over two years to calculate, and Chadwick explains the difficulty of the compiler, Horace Mann, in trying to work out what proportion of the population went to church. Some people went to church more than once, some were too old or too young to attend. It was generally thought that Dissenters were more likely to attend more than once. In Haworth, people might travel in from outlying places like Stanbury and Oxenhope, although in 1851 both villages had their own Anglican church. The total population of Haworth was 2,800, the total population of England 18,000,000, and it is immediately obvious that in Haworth the Methodists and Baptists had very large congregations both in comparison with the Church of England and in comparison with the total population, although the latter proportion is hard to calculate. It is now generally accepted that the Church of England lost ground in the Industrial Revolution both to the Free Churches and to total neglect of any form of worship. In Leeds and Bradford we find Dissenters outnumbering Anglicans by two to one with only four in ten going to either church or chapel. The great strength of the Church of England lay in the South. Nevertheless I find Greenwood’s figures surprising. Somehow when we climb up the hill to Haworth Church and Parsonage, set in the centre of the village and in the centre of our minds, we expect the Church of England to have been at the centre of Haworth’s religious life, and clearly it was not. I suppose it is some consolation that the preponderance of Dissenters over Anglicans was more the result of the former’s success than the latter’s failure. It is also a kind of consolation to know that the proportion of people attending church or chapel in 1851 is very different from what it is now. In Shipston on Stour, where I live, about 100 people attend the three services in the Church of England,