Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Preface and acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part 1 Religious geographies: the districts of England and Wales
- Part 2 Religion and locality: parish-level explorations
- 7 A prospect of fifteen counties
- 8 From Henry Compton to Horace Mann: stability or relocation in Catholicism and Nonconformity, and the growth of religious pluralism
- 9 The Sunday school movement: child labour, denominational control and working-class culture
- 10 Free or appropriated sittings: the Anglican Church in perspective
- 11 Conformity, dissent and the influence of landownership
- 12 Urbanisation and regional secularisation
- Technical appendices
- Bibliography
- Index
9 - The Sunday school movement: child labour, denominational control and working-class culture
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Preface and acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part 1 Religious geographies: the districts of England and Wales
- Part 2 Religion and locality: parish-level explorations
- 7 A prospect of fifteen counties
- 8 From Henry Compton to Horace Mann: stability or relocation in Catholicism and Nonconformity, and the growth of religious pluralism
- 9 The Sunday school movement: child labour, denominational control and working-class culture
- 10 Free or appropriated sittings: the Anglican Church in perspective
- 11 Conformity, dissent and the influence of landownership
- 12 Urbanisation and regional secularisation
- Technical appendices
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
‘Train up a child in the way he should go:
and when he is old, he will not depart from it.’
(Proverbs, xxii.6)Introduction
Sunday schools were perhaps the most important, but are now among the most neglected, of nineteenth-century religious and educational subjects. Often humble institutions, neither charismatic nor stirring to modern minds as a field of study, they are easily brushed aside by historians. Nor did they usually leave impressive architectural reminders of what they once were. Yet contemporaries like John Wesley, Adam Smith or Thomas Malthus, and many earlier generations of historians, were in little doubt about their outstanding significance. ‘One of the noblest institutions which has been seen in Europe for some centuries’, wrote Wesley. Their functions seem all the greater when we remember that they served a society in which almost half the population were children. ‘The Sunday Schools of the industrial North form not only a vast moral and educational engine, but a curious and characteristic social fact’, reported Angus Bethune Reach, writing as the investigator for the Morning Chronicle in 1849–50. And he summarised a view he had frequently heard expressed: ‘Were it not for the Sunday Schools … Lancashire would have been a hell upon earth.’
Strongly worded judgements like this were shared by many educational historians.
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- Rival JerusalemsThe Geography of Victorian Religion, pp. 274 - 320Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000
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