3 - Renegotiating the Secular: The Coming of Recreation to the Mid-Victorian Religious World

Summary

… the future historian of the church of Christ will place this movement for carrying the gospel of the body as one of the most epoch-making. (Stanley Hall of Clark University, Massachusetts, at the 1901 YMCA Convention)

As a rule, Victorian churches did not face violent revolts from their members. They were not ‘turbulent communities’ in desperate need of brokerage between masters and pupils. But as we have seen, their abrasive social ethic had become untenable. The Great Exhibition, and the Sabbatarian controversy surrounding it, was a turning point. An evangelical movement that had prided itself on the appeal to conscience and common sense was on the outer reaches of credibility; the broad churchmen had stolen a march. The Sunday problem would not evaporate overnight, but conditions contrived to create opportunities for leisure at other times of the week. The nettle had to be grasped.

The social mood was changing rapidly in the 1850s. The ‘hungry forties’ and the terrors of Chartism were past and Britain entered her age of prosperity and ‘equipoise’. As G.M. Young wrote:

The difference…between the England of the last Chartist demonstration in 1848 and the Great Exhibition of 1851, is like the difference in one’s own feelings at the beginning and end of a voyage in wartime … or like the opening of the city gates after a long wintry siege … It was in that Maytime of youth recaptured that Gladstonian Liberalism was conceived. It was the only atmosphere in which it could have been conceived, an atmosphere composed in equal measure of progress, confidence and social union.

Suddenly industrialism seemed more blessing than curse. The repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, a most impolitic tax on foreign corn, signalled the end of agricultural hegemony and, with it, the notion that Britain would ever return to the imagined rhythms of a rural past. The 1851 census revealed that for the first time more Britons were living in towns than in the countryside. Recreation – breathing space in the rush of industrialism – would have to be invented in the towns rather than simply revived like the rural ‘Veasts’ of Tom Brown's Schooldays. Hughes wrote of the unifying merriment of the parish Veast in the knowledge that it would have to serve as a metaphor and an inspiration rather than a practical template for modern leisure. Recreation would be a product of the cities.