The Civilising Mission and the English Middle Class, 1792-1850: The 'Heathen' at Home and Overseas

Abstract

The concept of a civilising mission, which was so central to the religious discourse of the English middle class in the early nineteenth century, had a dual reference. It was applied interchangeably to two tasks: that of bringing the Christian gospel to the ‘heathen’ overseas; and the parallel enterprise of reaching those sections of the working classes closer to home whose irreligion and lack of civilisation appeared no less marked than those which characterised the Hottentot or South Sea Islander. Surprisingly few historians have taken this duality seriously by attempting to produce integrated studies of the interrelationship of overseas and domestic Christian philanthropy, although Frank Prochaska, Susan Thorne, and Catherine Hall are at least partial exceptions. Alison Twells's book stands out by the consistency with which it pursues the evidence (ignored by most imperial historians) that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the language of savagery and civilisation was, at least in principle, racially neutral. Hannah and Patty More in the 1790s were shocked to find the poor of the Mendips no less savage than they imagined the aboriginal inhabitants of Botany Bay or Sierra Leone to be, and in 1804 the Methodist missionary advocate, Thomas Coke, described the Scottish highlanders and islanders as ‘little better than the rudest barbarians’.