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The “Chiliasm of Despair” Reconsidered: Revivalism and Working-Class Agitation in County Durham

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

J. A. Jaffe
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Extract

The role of evangelical religion in the social history of the English working class has been an area of both bewildering theories and un-founded generalizations. The problem, of course, was given a degree of notoriety by Elie Halévy who, according to the received interpretation, claimed that the revolutionary fervor characteristic of the Continental working class in the first half of the nineteenth century was drained from its British counterpart because of the latter's acceptance of Evangelicalism, namely, Methodism.

It was revived most notably by E. P. Thompson, who accepted the counterrevolutionary effect of Methodism but claimed that the evangelical message was really an agent of capitalist domination acting to subordinate the industrial working class to the dominion of factory time and work discipline. Furthermore, Thompson argued, the English working class only accepted Methodism reluctantly and in the aftermath of actual political defeats that marked their social and economic subordination to capital. This view has gained a wide acceptance among many of the most prominent labor historians, including E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rudé who believe that Evangelicalism was the working-class's “chiliasm of despair” that “offered the one-time labour militant … compensation for temporal defeats.”

There could hardly be a starker contrast between the interpretation of these labor historians and the views of those who have examined the social and political history of religion in early industrial Britain. Among the most important of these, W. R. Ward has claimed that Methodism was popular among the laboring classes of the early nineteenth century precisely because it complemented political radicalism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 28 , Issue 1 , January 1989 , pp. 23 - 42
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1989

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References

1 Halévy, Elie, A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, vol. 3 (London, 1961)Google Scholar, The Birth of Methodism in England, trans. Semmel, Bernard (Chicago, 1971)Google Scholar.

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5 Hempton, pp. 22–27, 77–80; Bernard Semmel has argued similarly that Methodism was a type of theological counterpart to the liberal ideology of the so-called Age of Democratic Revolutions. However, Semmel, like Halévy, claimed that Wesleyan ideology prevented revolution in England by offering a “new, democratic faith in its Arminian Christianity, and by mobilizing popular energies in pursuit of personal salvation, while strengthening the motives for obedience and subordination.” See Semmel, , The Methodist Revolution (New York, 1973), pp. 192–93Google Scholar.

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14 Colls, pp. 189–92.

15 Morton to Durham, May 22, 1832, Lambton Estate Archives Office, Lambton MSS.

16 Jaffe, J. A., “Economy and Community in Industrializing England: The Durham Mining Region before 1840” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1984), pp. 250–54Google Scholar.

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26 General Meetings of the Coal Owners of the Tyne and Wear, May 5, 1832, in The Times (June 29, 1832). Copy in the Northumberland County RO.

27 See Jaffe, “The State, Capital, and Workers' Control.”

28 North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers (N.E.I.M.M.E.), Bell Collection (Newcastle upon Tyne, n.d.), 11:543.

29 The following data come from Primitive Methodist Circuit Accounts, Durham, 1828–36, Durham County RO M/Du 34.

30 Durham County RO M/Du 34.

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33 Newcastle Chronicle (June 2, 1832).

34 Ibid. (August 20, 1831).

35 Ibid. (June 23, 1832).

36 Ibid. (March 10, 1832).

37 Ibid.

38 Newcastle Courant (April 21, 1832).

39 Buddle to Londonderry, June 21, 1832, Durham, Durham County RO, Londonderry Papers D/Lo/C 142 (851).

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42 Morris, R. J., Cholera 1832 (London, 1976), pp. 11, 60–64Google Scholar. See also the reports in the Newcastle Chronicle (November 5, 1831). Colls's interpretation of both Methodism and the events of the 1831–32 strike are seriously weakened by inconsistencies in his chronology of the cholera. See Colls (n. 10 above), pp. 97, 152, and 256, where the cholera is reported to have appeared in July 1832, October 1831, and August 1832, respectively.

43 Buddle to Londonderry, December 29, 1831, Durham County RO, Londonderry Papers D/Lo/C 142 (772).

44 Morton to Durham, January 30, 1832, Lambton MSS.

45 Morton to Durham, January 16, 1832, Lambton MSS.

46 Colls, pp. 151–54.

47 Werner (n. 31 above), p. 171.

48 The statistical evidence of Primitive Methodist membership is contrary to Morris's assertions that cholera revivals “did not take place in the big towns and cities” (Morris, p. 145).

49 Thompson (n. 2 above), p. 389.

50 Colls, p. 151.

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61 The story is related in Fynes, Richard, The Miners of Northumberland and Durham (Blyth, 1878)Google Scholar, and is repeated in Hammond, J. L. and Hammond, Barbara, The Skilled Labourer (reprint, New York, 1979), p. 35Google Scholar.

62 Gilbert (n. 7 above), pp. 397–98.

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64 Primitive Methodist Circuit Accounts, 1828–1836, Durham County RO M/Du 34.

65 Jaffe, , “Economy and Community” (n. 16 above), pp. 161–70Google Scholar; for the case of Hetton, the center of union agitation in 1831–32, see Sill, Michael, “Mid-Nineteenth Century Labour Mobility: The Case of the Coal-Miners of Hetton-le-Hole, Co. Durham,” Local Population Studies 22 (1979): 44–50Google Scholar.

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72 This argument is made in greater detail in Jaffe, “Economy and Community,” chap. 6.

73 Wilson, p. 146. In part, Wilson refused to become branch secretary of the union because “I have always held the view that in the selection of lodge officials something more than mere clerking ability or power to declaim are essential.” One may infer from this that literacy and expository skills were at times the basis for the selection of union representatives. Wilson relates a similar experience at Haswell Colliery in 1869 when he was put forward as the librarian of the workingmen's institute because “there was no one so well qualified as John Wilson” (p. 224).

74 Children's Employment (mines), Parliamentary Papers, 1842, 16:63Google Scholar.