The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century household was a significant space for the practice of religion. It was the site of individual prayer, family worship, and the quotidian rituals that expressed and reaffirmed personal piety.Footnote 1 Although historians acknowledge the ‘fluidity of the boundary between the private household and the public world’, the practice of domestic religious sociability – religious conversation and rituals performed between members of different households within domestic space – has not been fully explored.Footnote 2 A number of historians have argued that religious friendship and ‘sociable piety’ could provide comfort and sustenance for the faithful, particularly women, and that many aspects of religious practice, such as praying or reading, were enjoyed in company.Footnote 3 However, existing research into religious domestic sociability tends to focus on the experience of religious groups cut off either by nonconformity or by distance from ecclesiastical structures. It is therefore primarily seen as particular to dissenters: as a strategy of resistance, a practical reaction to prohibitions on nonconformist meeting houses prior to the 1689 Toleration Act, or a means of maintaining a strong religious identity through persecution and worldly contact.Footnote 4 Meanwhile, among Anglicans, it is seen as a vital lifeline to those facing clergy shortages or rural isolation.Footnote 5 The study of sociability as a means to measure toleration between denominations, by historians such as W. J. Sheils, has similarly focused on nonconformist experience.Footnote 6
This article builds on this research into nonconformist practice to argue that domestic sociability was employed and enjoyed by individuals of all branches of Protestant Christianity in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, as a means to further or express their faith. This was as true for conforming Anglicans as it was for nonconformists, or for the middling or labouring inhabitants of a bustling English northern town as it was for a geographically isolated group of genteel American Anglicans. I suggest that religious sociability was not practised out of necessity or a desire to maintain denominational exclusivity, but was integrated into the everyday patterns of supposedly secular sociability: of visiting, drinking tea, and attending dinner parties. As such, this article is part of a growing historiographical trend to integrate the history of religion with social and cultural history more widely, and to investigate the meaning of religion in the everyday lives of ordinary people.Footnote 7
Domestic religion has not generally been integrated into the practice of domestic visiting and the wider patterns of eighteenth-century sociability documented more generally by social historians, particularly in urban areas. Religious sociability in towns did take place in non-domestic venues, such as concerts held in churches, or the large dinners and teas organized by charities or Sunday schools outdoors, in taverns or civic or guild spaces.Footnote 8 When domestic space is considered, the picture is of formal, structured meetings surrounding nonconformist church membership, such as class meetings or band meetings, rather than of sociable piety as part of the everyday rhythms of informal visiting.Footnote 9 We know, therefore, that there were contexts in which urban sociability was considered entirely consistent with the public demonstration of piety, but as yet this has not filtered into discussions of what Amanda Vickery has called the ‘emergence of the urban culture of visiting’ in this period.Footnote 10 Studies of domestic sociability have emphasized its significance in facilitating courtship, business, or political networking, and in the demonstration of status and gentility through the conspicuous consumption of commodities such as tea or furniture, but without considering its role in the practice of religion.Footnote 11 Several historians have noted that aspects of domestic sociability, like card play, tea-drinking, hospitality, and indeed the concept of politeness, were saturated with questions of morality and virtue, but without connecting them to the many religious activities which were taking place in households at this time.Footnote 12 Religion could even be considered anathema to politeness, as the literary scholar Jon Mee argues, owing to the polite emphasis on avoiding contentious topics (such as religion) and on maintaining an appearance of affability which the pious considered to be immoral in its insincerity.Footnote 13 Nevertheless, I suggest that the two rich historiographies of religion and urban domestic sociability can be productively united. Urban domestic sociability could be performed in the service of religious improvement, and this religious sociability, like other forms of domestic sociability, could be a significant means of demonstrating status.
This article uses the letters and diaries of individuals living in urban areas in the north of England from the 1760s to the 1830s, a time and place of rapid urbanization and the growth of the middling sort of professionals and business owners who have been the focus of the vast majority of work on sociability. This evidence base contains considerable material from these urban middling sorts, alongside the skilled and unskilled labouring poor, including factory workers, bricklayers, and razor-makers. The individuals studied here were Protestant, including Anglicans and members of denominations from across the nonconformist spectrum. I examine first the ‘nuts and bolts’ of religious sociability – communal reading, conversation, or sharing food and drink – to demonstrate the co-dependence of sociability and religious practice. I then use sociability on Sundays as a means to investigate the temporal and spatial associations between worship and sociability, and conclude with an exploration of religious hospitality as beneficial to both lay piety and ecclesiastical networks. Urban domestic sociability between members of different households was seen by the laity as a central part of their religious practice, and as an opportunity to practise a public, sociable faith that supplemented church attendance. This religious sociability was fostered by the urban environment, where there was a critical mass of coreligionists, high migration rates, and greater opportunities to socialize. Piety was, therefore, facilitated by the greater opportunities for sociability in urban areas in this period.
I
Participating in activities such as reading, prayer, or singing within a group was widely considered to improve an individual's engagement with faith.Footnote 14 Nonconformist and Anglican urban dwellers alike saw sociable piety as a comfort, as well as a tool to deepen and demonstrate their faith. The Sunday school teacher Elizabeth Prince (b. 1805), who went between Presbyterian and Anglican churches in Liverpool, stated in an 1830 diary: ‘Had some Christian friends called upon me and held much social converse with them upon spiritual things – truly it may be said that where the love of the Redeemer is shed abroad upon the heart it will, it must, “flow to the tongue”.’Footnote 15 Elizabeth's inability to keep her faith out of conversation demonstrated her piety, reflecting the biblical injunction that the faithful keep God constantly on their mind and on the tips of their tongues (Proverbs 22:18). In 1823, the fifteen-year-old evangelical Anglican Margaret Gray deliberately sought out company in order to combat her ‘backwardness…coldness and deadness…in prayer’. She and her friend ‘M.’ ‘established a periodical meeting to read the Scriptures or some religious book…We conclude with a prayer. O may God bless us – and make our intimacy profitable. May we be of one spirit.’Footnote 16 Sociability increased the fervour of piety and helped those who were struggling, particularly if one could rely on a close and mutually supportive spiritual friendship.Footnote 17 The Sheffield razor-maker and lay Methodist preacher Henry Longden considered that a company of coreligionists was vital for ‘sympathizing in suffering, and bearing one another's burdens’. He supported this view with direct biblical guidance, quoting Psalm 133 ‘that “it is good for brethren thus to dwell in unity”’.Footnote 18
Sociable piety was one of the significant components of what Michael Smith has called the ‘devotional economy’, which supported and refreshed the pious between opportunities for churchgoing and family worship.Footnote 19 Margaret Gray credited a combination of ‘conversations of Christian friends, the sermons of different Ministers, and…the ordinances of religion, &c.’ as ‘the means, under God, of rousing me, for a time, from my deadly slumber’.Footnote 20 The evidence here suggests that the sociable piety uncovered by scholars of an earlier period persisted well into the nineteenth century and was valued by individuals from across the Protestant spectrum.Footnote 21 Here, it performed the same function of supplying ‘additional doses of piety and social affirmation’ as that observed by Cambers and Wolfe in their study of the late seventeenth-century rural clergyman John Rastrick.Footnote 22 However, in these cases, it was not a function of geographical isolation from coreligionists or a scarcity of public worship, as it was for Rastrick, but was chosen on its own merits by laity living in bustling towns full of opportunities for public worship and voluntary associations of any denomination.
It is clear that sociability was an important part of religious practice for the pious, but the slippage between faith and sociability in both time and space, as well as its largely informal nature, indicates the omnipresence of faith in urban daily life more generally. Religious activities occurred spontaneously within visits. The Tyneside Methodist Jane Smith, the daughter of a cabinet-maker, recalled in her 1827 diary that ‘religious discourse’ resulted when her aunt and uncle arrived for ‘tea with Mother’. Three days before, she had called at her aunt's home to find her ‘entertaining the children’. This informal family party ended with ‘singing & prayer. We returned home…I hope perfected by the spiritual priviledges we had enjoyed together’.Footnote 23 The evangelical Anglican Grays of York moved seamlessly between social visits and religious practice. In October 1795, Jonathan Gray recorded that their family friend ‘Mr. Plummer called & staid Supper last night of his own Accord…He stayed Prayers & said that he was edified.’Footnote 24 Family prayers were not restricted to permanent or even temporary residents of the household, but were also open to those visiting for only a meal.Footnote 25 Musical parties easily blurred the line between sociability and religious practice. In 1834 the Gray children attended ‘a Musical party at Uncle Jonathan's’ where ‘Several very beautiful anthems &c were performed.’ The religious significance of the occasion was underlined by the fact that it was the minster organist John Camidge playing on the Grays’ household instrument, and that several guests were singers in the minster choir.Footnote 26 The practice and individuals involved in formal public worship were here transplanted to a lay musical party that produced pleasure, as well as demonstrating both the Grays’ religious commitment and their close social and patronage connections to York Minster.
Religious practice was not restricted to specific occasions, and was also considered as a suitable subject of conversation in a variety of social situations. Religious conversation was informal, spontaneous, and could involve strangers as well as kin or friends, and indeed was employed as a means of judging character on first acquaintance. Jonathan Gray's mother, Faith, the daughter of a York hatter and wife of a solicitor, developed a friendship with a Mrs Scotts in 1773 after talking to her on a leisurely walk, which was the ‘first time of knowing they loved the Gospel’.Footnote 27 Rebecca Hey, the daughter of an Anglican surgeon from Leeds, on a visit to Derbyshire in 1828, related her new acquaintance with the Hensman family: ‘We had a large party on one day…some to dinner, all to Tea. A good deal of Music. The Hensmans have much to recommend them, being in the first place very pious, and also well-informed & adorned with polished manners.’Footnote 28 A party that at first appears one of secular pleasure – of tea and music – clearly involved some religious conversation. This was also the case for individuals whose commitment to religion was perfunctory. Thomas Giordani Wright, apprentice to a Newcastle physician, was an infrequent churchgoer who rarely discussed religion in his diary, admitting to attending the Unitarian chapel ‘merely on account of knowing [its preacher] Mr Turner personally and being partial to his discourses’. Turner was president of the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society, through which the young and ambitious Wright, a new member, was keen to make connections with Newcastle's scientific elite. Nonetheless, in October 1827, he was prompted into a discussion of the doctrine of the Trinity by his master's visiting sister, who ‘upon learning that I had been at the Unitarian Chapel wished very much at dinner to enter into a theological conversation upon the impropriety of the tenets of this sect’.Footnote 29 Religion was considered an appropriate topic of conversation on all sorts of occasions, which could easily spill over into religious debate or the discovery of religious affinity.
Sociable piety was significant in the lives of individuals from across the Protestant spectrum, but there was some variation in its form and function according to denomination. Sociability has been considered as integral to the solidarity and discipline of nonconformist sects, particularly Quakers. Nancy Tomes's and Naomi Pullin's research into American and British Quakerism has shown that visiting was significant, but primarily in reference to the formal sociability surrounding monthly meetings, such as that following a birth, or to inspect or discipline a fellow Friend's household, rather than impromptu visits. Both scholars suggest that English Quakers were more reluctant to socialize than their Pennsylvania counterparts. Pullin in particular argues that ‘English Quaker women were…not…so heavily invested in informal visits solely for the purpose of sociability’, owing to their status as ‘a small minority within their local communities’ and therefore lacking the ‘opportunity’ to visit fellow Quakers.Footnote 30 Evidence from the large, industrializing towns of northern England suggests, in contrast, that Quakers there engaged in significant informal sociability, more similar to the practice of those living in the large Quaker communities of Pennsylvania. This indicates that it was a lack of coreligionists in smaller towns and rural areas that limited Quakers’ sociability, not their religious scruples.
The diaries of teachers and pupils at the Quaker Mount School in York demonstrate a network of reciprocal inter-household visiting in which informal sociability was combined with religious practice. In January 1836, the teacher Eliza Anne Morley accompanied her pupils to ‘friends’ houses to dinner’, where the ‘conversation [was] abounding with instructive matter’.Footnote 31 On a visit to the Quaker Ann Alexander in 1835, a pupil, Anne White, reported that they shared news of their families’ health, and then ‘After we had some cake & wine, she read us the 23rd psalm versified by Sarah Grubb…She then spoke to us a little…& told us how happy it would be for us, were we in the condition of David, when he wrote that psalm.’Footnote 32 Visits were not solely religious in content or purpose. The everyday social rituals of sharing refreshments and asking after health were combined with religious practices like reading, in this case the popular and edifying Life and religious labours of Friend Sarah Grubb, that varied in the extent that they were overtly didactic. For the York Friends, visiting was an opportunity to participate in the education of the pupils of the Mount School, which was founded and maintained by their community.
Evidence from other Quaker diarists suggests that inter-household sociability was significant for the faith of most northern urban Quaker communities, and was not particular to the Mount School. William Robson (1797–1881) regularly attended tea parties at the home of his uncle Thomas Robson in Sunderland, in which the company read or discussed their faith. In March 1818, he ‘Drank tea at Uncle T[homas] Robsons with a number of young men – after tea read in Psalms – after which we had a solemn religious opportunity, in which my dear Aunt addressed different states then present, in a beautiful and impressive manner.’ William used the same language to describe his Aunt Elizabeth's religious speech both in meetings and following tea at home: she ‘appeared in testimony’ or ‘in testimony and supplication’.Footnote 33 This suggests that a home full of fellow Friends was seen as an extension of meeting space, and that a period of spiritual testimony was part of the routine of a social visit as much as taking tea.
This blurring of religious and living space was enhanced by Quakerism's emphasis on immediate revelation and the church as a community of laity rather than a building; individuals were encouraged to speak whenever moved to by God, which could happen in any situation or space.Footnote 34 The Robsons’ home was also a venue where local Quakers could meet visiting lay preachers. In December 1817, William ‘Drank tea with the two strangers’ Elizabeth Fry and Hannah Field: ‘a great many friends called, I think there were about 40 present, when we had a solemn opportunity, in which a great deal of excellent advice was handed to us, by Hannah Field…she said she felt such a degree of Gospel love to all her dear friends now present’. Field spoke to William directly about his faith, in the hope that ‘I should find comfort and consolation’.Footnote 35 The occasion of drinking tea was, for William, an opportunity for spiritual instruction and edification as much, if not more so, than the weekly meeting. This evidence supports arguments put forward by Pullin and Herbert that Quakers perceived sociability as a central support in their piety, but underlines that this could happen during regular, informal sociability and was not necessarily related to a specific function, such as a meeting, or a visit following a birth.Footnote 36
There was a spectrum of sociable piety, where informal visits could progress to more formal religious practice, all occurring in domestic space. This is illustrated particularly well through conversion accounts. The Leeds bricklayer Benjamin Woolley (1796–1866) ‘got acquainted with a few Methodists, & though he did not leave the [Anglican] Church, he often mixed with friends not connected with the establishments. He began to meet in Band…attended cottage prayer meetings, & finally went to meet in class at Johnny Briggs Cottage.’Footnote 37 Acquaintance progressed to friendship, which was the gateway to the more formal sociable piety engineered through the Methodist structure of bands and classes. Faith Gray became exposed to the Methodist leanings of the clergyman William Richardson when she met him at tea parties at her Aunt Mortimer's house in the 1770s. On these occasions, the party sang hymns, exchanged books, discussed biblical passages, and debated theological topics such as ‘the Witness of the spirit and perfection’. Faith always referred to these occasions through the language of sociability: she ‘Drank tea’, and had ‘an interesting conversation’ or a ‘profitable evening’. These were not formally organized prayer or bible reading groups, and were lay-led, although usually in the presence of a clergyman. Gradually, Faith converted her whole family: in March 1776, three years after she first attended Aunt Mortimer's parties, her siblings drank tea there; by May 1776, she recorded in her diary that ‘Mr Richardson drank Tea with us the first time’; and finally, one week later, ‘My Father & Mother at Belfries Church, all my Brothers & Sisters there too. I admired the goodness of God in thus removing prejudices.’Footnote 38 The family never left the established church, but the invitation to Mr Richardson to drink tea at their home signalled their decision to attend one particular church and adopt the evangelicalism of its clergyman.
Nonconformist clergy and lay preachers also recognized social occasions as a tool in the fight for believers.Footnote 39 The biography of Henry Longden stated that, ‘In his visits to dinner or tea’ and ‘In large and mixed companies’, he ‘would call forth into exercise the talents and graces of some of those present; or he would introduce a leading topic of conversation’.Footnote 40 Social conversion may have been particularly significant for Methodism prior to the movement's secession from the Church of England as it could expose individuals to alternative views without requiring a formal commitment. The Methodist emphasis on organized classes outside Sunday worship may also have been especially attractive. The obituary of Faith Gray's cousin Frances Pawson (1737–1809), a Methodist convert, stated that ‘it was their Classes and other opportunities which attracted her, and suited a turn of mind that was peculiarly social’.Footnote 41
But, the emphasis on social conversion was not confined to Methodists. The Kendal Quaker Thomas Rebanks related in 1759 that ‘Two Strangers…Baptists by profession’ were encouraged to attend Quaker meetings after they ‘became intimate’ with their neighbours.Footnote 42 Anglicans also perceived visits as a way to inculcate good religious habits in their less pious friends. Thomas Brancker, a Leeds cloth merchant, berated himself for not attending to family prayers when his wife's parents, the Wrights, came to stay in 1825. Although they attended church twice that day, he felt ‘really ashamed’ for omitting their ‘usual family prayers’. He thought that as the Wrights ‘are not accustomed to have them at home…it might have put them into the good habit’.Footnote 43 Jon Mee has argued that evangelical Anglicans such as Hannah More and William Wilberforce encouraged their followers not to hide their piety in the service of appearing polite, but to use mixed company as an opportunity for conversion.Footnote 44 Sociability was the gateway to more organized group worship and full conversion, particularly by exposing individuals to other denominations without needing to formally leave or join a church.
Despite its acknowledged importance as a tool and support of devotion, the pious experienced some anxiety over sociability. Carys Brown and Michael Smith have found that early eighteenth-century pious individuals did not avoid sociability, but sought to guard their behaviour while engaged in it.Footnote 45 Evidence presented here from a later period similarly suggests that it was the piety of one's companions, rather than the space in which it occurred or the nature of sociability itself, that caused concern. The occasional conformist Elizabeth Prince regularly engaged in ‘mixed converse of secular and spiritual matters’ when visiting friends. But she did take care that the conversation and activities were consistent with her religious principles. In 1830, she admonished herself for mistakenly attending ‘a Card party’ and breaking ‘my resolution not to enter any place, where they were played’. The week before she feared that, when ‘A few friends called’, she was ‘betr[a]yed into much levity of conduct and thoughtless conversation inconsistent with my religious profession’. Prince was motivated by a desire to live every day according to her faith and avoid hypocrisy. She continued, ‘Alas “profession is no principle” and how often have I to regret and exclaim with Titus “I have lost a day.’”Footnote 46
An unknown Sheffield Methodist diarist similarly sought to avoid ‘trifleing Conversation which deadens the Soul’ by being ‘Carefull over my words and Conversations’.Footnote 47 This was part of the watchfulness that characterized the diaries of many nonconformists in this period, but watchfulness was not the same as abstention from sociability.Footnote 48 The key was balance. The evangelical Anglican William Gray warned his father that ‘You will find yourself just as much edified by conversing with…experienced Believers…as you are injur'd by joining with worldly Acquaintance.’Footnote 49 The Quaker William Robson suggested that balance was difficult to achieve and was a matter of contention between denominations: ‘We consider that the Methodists make religious matters too common, and consequently too light a subject of conversation, and that Friends by endeavouring to avoid this get into the other extreme and consequently suffer loss.’Footnote 50 Most of the diarists discussed here, regardless of their denomination, do seem to have considered that it was not sociability in itself but the right kind of sociability that was the issue. The pious followed moral or religious guidelines in their sociability, just as they did in their business or family lives. Sociability could be viewed simultaneously as both a help and a hindrance to piety, but the central concept was balance. Moreover, individuals did not have to resort to seclusion to maintain faith.
Contemporaries held conflicting opinions as to whether the increased social opportunities of living in a town helped or hindered piety. Urban noise and bustle were particularly thought to impede pious thoughts. The Leeds Methodist Sarah Crosby complained in 1787 that ‘Instead of Stillness, & Retirement, we have hurry & Noise around us, & Many Interruptions by liveing in A Town, particularly to Writing.’Footnote 51 Elizabeth Prince enjoyed pious sociability, as we have seen, but preferred to live on the peaceful edge of Liverpool, as she feared ‘how ill would the bustle of a town accord with my quiet habits’.Footnote 52 However, many individuals thought that the sacrifice of quiet was amply compensated by the spiritual benefits of living within a large community of coreligionists. In the 1770s, William Gray sought to persuade his father, a linen weaver, to remain in Hull rather than move to the village of Hedon, ‘on Account of the spiritual disadvantages it wou'd throw you under’:
there seems to be no knowledge of real vital Christianity in [Hedon], and any person who possessed such a knowledge, and wish'd to live up to it, must differ so much from his Neighbors as to be thought very disagreeable…besides, there are no Ordinances of Religion scarcely to attend…I find by my own Case daily, that very great Comfort and Improvement flows into my Soul by the Example and Conversation of real Christians, and that, the least Connexion with worldly, indifferent people does me great Harm, tho’ I am sometimes forc'd into it. If this be your Experience, what wou'd become of you if you were forc'd to give up the former, and live constantly among the latter?Footnote 53
The seclusion of the village was not conducive to piety, and the plurality of urban denominational choice, rather than weakening faith, allowed individuals to choose a place of worship that best suited their own faith, and to engage in a more exclusive sociable piety that would support and sustain them. A smaller place required religious compromise. This was the case for smaller nonconformist sects like Quakers, as well as for evangelical Anglicans. The Doncaster Quaker Martha Smith considered in a letter of November 1792 to her cousin, who lived in the small community of Oakham in Rutland, that ‘Sho'd Jos. Burgess son come to reside amongst you it w'd be an acceptable addition, for altho’ strength does not consist in numbers yet those of the right stamp are doubtless helpfull one to another.’Footnote 54 Faith Gray could not understand why her friend Elizabeth Lucas had left the established church as ‘her religious opportunities, in the Church were very sufficient, having at Leeds the Ministry of Mr Atkinson &c, the friendship of his family, Mr Hey's, Mr & Mrs Fawcetts, Mr & Mrs Reads Families’.Footnote 55 It was important to live within a community of like-minded people who could sustain your piety and provide spiritual comfort and friendship. This necessary critical mass of coreligionists could often be more easily found in a town.
II
Evidence of how individuals spent their Sundays suggests a temporal association between churchgoing and sociability. Most discussion of public worship and sociability has focused on the church's role as a communal space or on its relationship with popular festivals and holidays, in which supposedly traditional rural leisure patterns are opposed to the urban working week which prioritized ‘industrial efficiency’ over either religious observance or leisure.Footnote 56 I suggest, in contrast, that urban churchgoing was significant in providing a temporal rhythm to Sunday socializing, as well as an opportunity to meet and issue invitations. Sociability was interleaved with churchgoing, particularly for those who visited or dined with friends in between morning and afternoon services. This practice may have been more pronounced in towns as well as in the north, as these areas were more likely to have two services per day.Footnote 57 Urban dwellers lived in closer proximity to a place of worship, and therefore would have been more able to go home and return for afternoon service. On a visit to his uncle in Liverpool in 1828, Thomas Brancker ‘went to St Philips Church in the morning…We lunched at my Uncles…In the afternoon my uncle went with us to St. Peter's Church…We dined at my Uncles where we met the three Miss Parr's very lively pleasant girls…Immediately after dinner we rose and walked on to the Blind Church.’Footnote 58
Churchgoing and socializing followed a rhythm, and occurred with the same group of people. Sometimes visits were spontaneous, directly resulting from a meeting at a place of worship. In January 1836, Eliza Ann Morley ‘Overtook Mrs Horner coming from meeting who…kindly invited us to go and see her’. One example from Eliza Ann's diary demonstrates the sheer volume of visiting on Sundays (known by Quakers as first day), partly in consequence of the large Quaker population in York:
31st [January 1836]…William Small and one of the Boys from John Ford's at dinner. J[oseph] R[owntree] went to Holdgate to tea and JRH came here…JR returned in time for Reading soon after 7…Two of the young men went to R Jackson's to tea. SM & J were invited as were also most of the young men and women in the meeting.Footnote 59
There was an expectation among Quakers that first day was a day for reciprocal inter-household visiting, on a scale unmatched by individuals of other denominations and perhaps reflecting the relative insularity of the community. However, among all denominations, formal religious meetings directly led to social gatherings, and vice versa.
The significance of Sunday rituals of visiting, and of places of worship as central meeting places, is particularly evident in accounts of courtship. The suitor of Ann Prest (b. 1748), a currier's daughter visiting York in the 1770s, regularly called on her to escort her to church, which was almost always followed by tea.Footnote 60 Attending church together was perhaps a mark of attention and public attestation of their courtship, as well as precious time to walk alone or sit together. The Anglican gentleman John Courtney used church as a courtship opportunity a number of times in the same city in the 1760s, by sitting in pews near women he admired or handing them into their coaches following the service. After pursuing the elusive Miss N— in this manner he finally ‘obtained leave to come on Sunday to drink tea’. It was after one Sunday visit that he was finally rebuffed: ‘This afternoon after Church went to Mrs G—s. Miss N— look'd something fluster'd.’ A similar situation arose a few years later when he noted optimistically ‘I saw Miss Sally [Gorlton] at Church & she curtsy'd to me’, but the next Sunday her mother called to refuse him.Footnote 61 For Courtney, church was a place where he could be sure to meet acquaintances again, engineer social contact as if by chance, and obtain an invitation to tea later that day.
Courtney's strategy was not unusual. A Leeds merchant's son, Walter Spencer Stanhope (1750–1821), reportedly found a love poem written in a prayer book in which the author promised that following worship ‘When at the church yard stairs you'll stand / I'll sure be in the way / In hopes that you'll vouchsafe your hand / And ask me to drink tea.’Footnote 62 This function was also not specific to Anglican churches or centres of fashionable sociability such as York. Key moments in the relationship between the Manchester grocer George Heywood and his future wife, Methodist Betty Bowyer, followed the rhythms of shared worship and post-chapel sociability. In October 1814, he recorded that ‘B. Bowyer ask'd me to go with her to the new Chapel at Pendleton’, and when he took the important step of moving into his own lodgings the following July, ‘I walked with B. Bowyer after Chapel time and told her what I had done.’ Sundays provided time alone for couples to discuss their future, and the timetable of public worship allowed lovers to opportunistically meet each other on the way to and from chapel. In October 1815, when he was thinking of suggesting marriage, Heywood ‘waited in Church St. to see B. Bowyer if she went to Chapel…after Chapel time we walked together I had a great wish to open my mind to her’. It was during Sunday tea after chapel that they met each other's family. Significantly, they only began seeing each other before work on weekdays after they had agreed to marry, suggesting that Sundays were sanctioned as a time to get to know one another informally, without committing oneself or endangering one's reputation.Footnote 63
Sunday socializing was particularly significant for migrants, whose perception of feeling at home in a new place was in part based on regular churchgoing and its accompanying sociability. When the Liverpudlian Thomas Brancker and his wife, Eliza, moved to Leeds in 1823, they chose to attend the same church as his business partner, Mr Ikin. This church was not the most convenient – during bad weather they frequently worshipped elsewhere – but it enabled them to have dinner with the Ikins, their only acquaintance in Leeds, between services. Brancker judged himself to be ‘something like settled in Leeds’ only when they had ‘taken a house, a pew in church, have one servant already…we are also slowly making acquaintance’. Alongside establishing a household, going to church was part of becoming socially embedded in the community. Some years later, Brancker was still furthering his acquaintance through church attendance. In October 1826, he and his wife ‘Walked after evening service with Mr…Gatliff, he seems in low spirits and very desirous to be on neighbourly terms with us.’ Inviting someone to go to church with you was also part of hospitality towards strangers, as if welcoming them into a new, albeit temporary, community. When his new warehouse clerk, Mr Sheraton, arrived in Leeds from Liverpool in December 1823, Brancker wrote in his diary that, ‘as he is quite a stranger at Leeds, I invited him to go to St Pauls with us & to spend the day which he did’.Footnote 64
The Anglican parish church has been seen as a bastion of community cohesion that was declining over the eighteenth century as nonconformity increased, to be replaced by a more individualistic religious experience.Footnote 65 However, public worship was equally important for nonconformists seeking to establish and strengthen urban communities. The Quaker David Binns, a Lancastrian who moved to Sunderland in the early nineteenth century, found the post-meeting sociability of his fellow Quakers essential to his integration in a new place. ‘We had many worthy Friends resided at Sunderland…some of whom were very Kind in taking notice of Young Friends and inviting them to their houses to tea of First Day Evening. [W]hich we often felt gratefull for and was a means of creating freindship amongst the members.’Footnote 66
Fourteen-year-old Oswald Allen, a member of the small nonconformist Sandemanian sect founded by the Scottish Presbyterian John Glas in 1730, migrated from rural Wensleydale to York in 1781 to become apprentice to an apothecary, and moved into lodgings with a coreligionist, Mr Baldock. In his memoir, Allen recalled his arrival as a moment of religious and social significance in his new home:
I greatly enjoyed the worship of the Sabbath, and also their conversation at Mr Baldock's in the evening; indeed I have never since witnessed such simplicity and brotherly affection, as appeared amongst this religious community; it seemed to harmonize with the accounts we have recorded in the Scriptures of the primitive Christians after the day of Pentecost.Footnote 67
Sociability was a key part of Sandemanianism. Between morning and afternoon service, followers had to attend dinner ‘at the Houses of such of the Brethren who live sufficiently near’. This had a spiritual purpose – ‘to cultivate mut[u]al Knowledge & Friendship’ – but also reflected their identity as primitive Christians who followed the literal word of the Bible and sought to recreate the ‘Practice[s] of the Apostolic Churches’.Footnote 68 Allen's emphasis on the novel sense of community and ‘considerable pleasure and satisfaction’ he found in these meetings suggests that, although he had been brought up in a village with a Sandemanian church run by his father, the larger community he found in York had a greater impact on his spiritual development.Footnote 69 The Sandemanians were unusual in requiring post-meeting sociability, but the combined evidence of Brancker's and Binns's experiences suggest that across denominations it was sociability following public worship which was the foundation for neighbourliness, new friendships, and a feeling of belonging. In urban areas, long after the Toleration Act, the domestic sociability surrounding public worship continued to be a significant aspect of religious practice and community cohesion, albeit in a way that was more religiously exclusive – with sociability linked to attendance at a specific church – and less based on a geographical parish. Community worship did not disappear, but rather shifted into multiple, smaller communities based more heavily on denomination.
There was contemporary debate over the impact of the sociability surrounding public worship on individuals’ experience of faith. Some dissenters associated sociability with a worldliness that would prevent the faithful from achieving the contemplative state of mind needed for worship. ‘J.W.’, a correspondent to the Independent Methodist Magazine, advised readers to remain silent after worship so that ‘the word of God will be kept and pondered in the heart’.Footnote 70 The Sheffield nonconformist James Montgomery refused an invitation to tea one Sunday in 1814 from his patrons, the Congregationalist Read family, as, despite being ‘a pleasure to my friends and me’, he dared not deprive his friend Mr Raniforth ‘of a moment of retirement, which he much wanted, for meditating his third sermon of that day’.Footnote 71 In the 1780s, a Quaker advised Henry Longden to ‘walk…in silence’ to worship, ‘seeking a preparation in the temple of the heart, to wait upon God, who is a spirit’. The Quaker complained that:
When [Methodists] come out of meeting, it is like the disturbing of a bee-hive. Every one has his calls to make, his messages to deliver, or instructions to receive. When all this is ended, some friend is waiting for him according to appointment, to inquire how he liked the preacher, &c. The reply probably is, ‘He is an excellent preacher! What a flow of language! How zealous he is! This is one of the best sermons I ever heard!’ &c.Footnote 72
Although many considered retired contemplation as a necessary part of Sabbath observance, for others a lively discussion of preaching may have been a similarly rewarding part of their weekly worship which was then continued at the Sunday dinner table. To return to the anonymous correspondent ‘J.W.’, a certain amount of sociable discussion following worship could be invigorating. He acknowledged that ‘it is very common for people who return [from church] in company, to be talking over the subject of the discourse, and to be asking one another the opinion of the persons in company, of the speaker and of his performance’. In the right amount, such conversation could ‘tend to the conviction, humiliation, consolation, and encouragement of one another’.Footnote 73
Criticism of specifically urban Sunday sociability was very common, appearing in newspapers and letters to Sunday school boards, as well as in the disciplinary sections of congregation minute books and conversion narratives. However, the criticism was specific, and often based on class and age hierarchies rather than on any opposition between sociability and piety. An anonymous author, ‘Amicus’, wrote to Stockport Methodist Sunday School in 1810 in fear that local children were ‘playing away the Sabbath Evening & chocking the good seed which has been sown in their Hearts in the day by their play & folly at night’.Footnote 74 The magistrate Thomas Allen was similarly concerned, in his ‘Address to the mechanics and working classes of the borough of Macclesfield’ (1825), that the town witnessed a ‘grie[v]ous profanation of the sabbath day’ when its labouring inhabitants engaged in ‘fighting themselves; fighting dogs; fighting cocks; playing at pitch and toss; and every other unlawful game’.Footnote 75 However, objections focused on the children and the leisure pursuits of the labouring poor, implying that it was specifically these groups who could not be trusted to spend their Sunday leisure time in an edifying manner. ‘Good’ sociability was in turn perceived as the antidote. Sheffield Sunday School Union recommended the establishment of prayer meetings on Sundays: ‘These meeting[s] to be so many in number and so variously situated, that they would embrace the whole Town.’ Attendance would be enforced by ‘a number of Gentlemen’ who would ‘join themselves into the Sabbath parties, and examine the streets and places of rendezvous of Youth on the Sabbath’.Footnote 76 Sociability, when safely confined within a middling home or between gentlemen, was a pleasure of far less religious concern than the sociability that took place out of doors, among the children of the poor.
III
Further proof of the intertwining of lay and religious motivations in domestic sociability is found through the practice of offering hospitality to visiting clergy and lay missionaries. Felicity Heal's influential work on early modern hospitality suggests that it was perceived as a religious duty, and generosity as a display of household virtue.Footnote 77 However, she sees hospitality towards clergy as an expression of largesse by the landed elite, which declined by the eighteenth century and was less common in urban areas.Footnote 78 Since Heal's work, historians such as Naomi Pullin have suggested that religious hospitality was primarily undertaken by nonconformists as a functional infrastructure that allowed them to sustain primarily lay-led churches.Footnote 79 I suggest that religious hospitality was also practised and seen as a significant spiritual duty by Anglicans, and that there were significant commonalities between denominations. The presence of hospitable middling households living in urban centres was significant in keeping the established church running, as well as placing clergy in social situations which sustained the faith of both visitor and host.
Anglicans and nonconformist families alike played a significant role in hosting clergy visiting towns to give sermons, attend conferences, or raise money for evangelical causes. The Anglican solicitor William Gray and his wife, Faith, established their household from the late eighteenth century as an open house for clergy visiting to preach in York. A typical entry in Faith Gray's diary from July 1804 reads: ‘17th. Mr Hollingsworth came to us. 18th preached at Belfries.’Footnote 80 Hospitality was often arranged at the last minute and suggests that the Grays were the designated hosts in York on behalf of the vicar of their preferred church, St Michael-le-Belfrey, Mr Richardson, and of Holy Trinity Micklegate, John Graham. In 1825, Margaret Gray recorded the visit of Mr Stewart (probably the Rev. James Haldane Stewart of the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews), who
arrived yesterday afternoon, at five o'clock. We did not know of his intention to come yesterday till Mr. Graham called at three to tell us so. Grandpapa [William Gray] met him at the coach and conduct[ed] him here, – grandpapa drank tea, and dear Mr. G— came at eight o'clock…Mr. Graham is going to dine to day with us, and grandpapa. Then Mr. Peters has sent a notice to all the Jew collectors [local subscribers to the society], inviting them to our house at seven this evening, to meet Mr. Stewart, and to be encouraged by him.Footnote 81
Mr Graham was married with a household of his own, but relied on the Grays to provide hospitality on his behalf. On other occasions, religious hospitality merged with the duties of kinship, as the Grays were related by marriage to several clergymen. In October 1804, ‘Mr & Mrs Jarratt & 2 Children…came to Dinner, Mr Jarratt preached at Belfries’, referring to their daughter Margaret Gray's brother-in-law.Footnote 82 In 1811 and 1812, they hosted the clergyman Mr Dikes, another relative by marriage, who preached at St Michael-le-Belfry and St Saviourgate churches.Footnote 83 The visiting clergy almost always preached during their stay, making it impossible to distinguish sociability in the service of secular friendship with that in service of the church. The Gray household's status as a hub for visiting clergy was directly related to the location of their large house, Gray's Court, in the centre of York right next to the minster and within a mile of several other medieval urban churches.Footnote 84 York's position as a regional centre for secular administration, charities, and societies, as well as a cathedral city, meant that secular and religious motivations for hospitality often converged. In 1814, for example, the Grays hosted clergy coming for ordination, and William Wilberforce stayed with them in 1802 during parliamentary elections.Footnote 85
The Grays’ hospitality was not limited to hosting Anglican clergy, but expanded to include ministers of other denominations who shared their evangelical outlook. In 1802 they embarked on what would become a life-long friendship with Walter Buchanan, an evangelical Church of Scotland minister, and his family. Faith Gray wrote in her diary that ‘we had heard much in their praise, but now we have seen them, we do indeed regard them as most valuable and interesting Christians’. Shared interests in missionary and bible societies were the foundation of much of the Grays’ interdenominational hospitality: William Gray was president of the York auxiliary of the Church Missionary Society, as Buchanan was a co-founder of the Edinburgh Missionary Society; and in later years they hosted individuals such as the Congregationalist John Paterson, who ‘had been in Russia &c promoting Bible Societies’.Footnote 86 From 1817 until 1825, the Grays hosted the annual meeting of the Church Missionary Society at their house, including accommodating visiting members for up to four days.Footnote 87 Hospitality was offered without direct prior acquaintance and its interdenominational nature suggests that it was as much based on the Grays’ desire to socialize with like-minded people whose piety they admired, as on their duty to serve their parish.
Similar duties were performed by other lay families who took a leadership role in their local church. As the historian Alison Twells has found, the Sheffield home of the Congregationalist Read family was a key stopping point in ‘national networks of evangelical nonconformity’ by hosting returning missionaries.Footnote 88 In addition, the unmarried daughters of the family, particularly Catherine (1804–65), took responsibility for finding visiting preachers for their local chapel, and offering their home, Wincobank, as accommodation. On a visit to Nottingham in 1831, Catherine recommended to her father that a ‘Mr. Howlett who has been supplying at St James's Street the last month is leaving this week…I thought that if you now were in the same distress for preachers that we were during the vacation, you would like him to spend them at Wincobank.’ In September 1831, she asked her sister to receive the clergyman Mr Curzon at Wincobank as ‘He looks as if he needed care and kindness and would feel the comfort of it, and I should like him to be where I know he would receive it…his piety, I should think, is of no common order.’ Catherine went on to discuss the accommodation for a Mr Coultard, stating ‘You need not put yourselves at any inconvenience to have him at Wincobank, he is a strong, robust Scotchman who will do any where.’Footnote 89
Hosting clergy was sometimes more of a duty than a pleasure, but one which resulted in the satisfaction of ensuring clergy wellbeing and therefore the prosperity of their denomination, as well as the opportunity to hear favoured preachers in their local chapel. The Reads differed from the Grays in that their home was in a relatively rural location on the edge of Sheffield. The location provided the rest and tranquillity needed by visiting urban preachers, but was nonetheless strategically useful for hospitality thanks to the Reads’ connections to the Sheffield evangelical and philanthropic elite.Footnote 90 The family's clerical patronage was part of their status as co-founders of their local Independent chapel, and went hand in hand with their involvement in the local Sunday school and the Sheffield missionary movement.Footnote 91
Hosting clergy was partly an expression of socio-economic status, as part of a genteel urban sociability that was also connected to associational and committee culture for Protestants of various denominations. In the 1810s, Robert Heywood, a Unitarian, prominent local politician, and head of a quilting manufacturing business in Bolton, attended Bible Society committee meetings held in inns and in his own home, and visited the homes of others to meet visiting clergy. In his diary for September 1821 he recorded his meetings with the visiting preacher Mr Jones: ‘breakfasted with Mr Jones…Mr Jones, R. Kay & C. Darbishire at our house’.Footnote 92 These engagements, in weekday evenings, on Saturdays, and after Sunday services, refreshed Heywood's religious practice outside church time and in conjunction with his other civic responsibilities.
The home of the dissenter Martha Rylands, the wife of a wine merchant, was regularly used as a meeting space for church business. In August 1810, she recorded in her diary: ‘Last night (sabbath) we had several here consulting about the separation that is likely to take place in our church.’Footnote 93 For Martha, providing hospitality and visiting others in return was both a social pleasure and a religious duty, enabling her and her husband to attend missionary meetings and to take an active part in leading their own local church. She stated in August 1815, after attending a missionary meeting in Chester:
Our Chester friends have behaved extremely kind to us – I would desire to be thankful that we have such friends to visit – it was very delightful having Mr Campbell in the house with us – he related many interesting anecdotes of what he had seen in his visit to the different missionary stations!
When the visit was returned a month later she stated: ‘had the ministers at our house I much enjoy'd it…Oh that we may all be zealous in this good cause.’Footnote 94
For the laity who wanted to be more directly involved in church business, they could show participation not only by attending committees outside the home, but also by opening up those homes to others. This provides further evidence of the fluidity between public and private in this period, as well as between religious and secular motivations of demonstrating the class-based values of hospitality and patronage.Footnote 95 For those with evangelical sympathies, hospitality was a religious obligation as well as providing spiritual sustenance and enjoyment; as Joseph Stubenrauch notes, evangelicals perceived themselves as the instruments of God, for whom it was their duty to use any resources at their disposal – such as a large home – in the work of spreading the gospel.Footnote 96
Hosting clergy had an impact on religious practice. It was an opportunity for laity to gain additional religious instruction, and diarists often mention the edification they derived from conversation with pious coreligionists. At the Grays’ York home, religious instruction by visiting clergymen, described by Faith Gray as ‘exposition’, was a routine part of social gatherings. In 1821, she attended a ‘Religious party at Mrs Harveys. Mr Richardson expounded (as he has frequently done) Isaiah 35th.’ Similarly, in 1825, she attended a ‘Company party’ hosted by her son Jonathan, which included ‘Exposition by Mr Sibthorpe’, a Church Missionary Society member who had attended the society's meeting at Gray's Court the previous day.Footnote 97 Some examples suggest that religious instruction within a domestic space as part of ordinary patterns of sociability was particularly valued for its direct contact between clergy and parishioner and its social exclusivity. Catherine Read wrote rapturously to her family of her stay in the same household as ‘an excellent American Minister’, Mr Nettleton:
I am so joyful and I hope thankful that I happe[ne]d to be here at this time. I only wish you could all be here…to enjoy…the society of this devoted servant of God. It seems quite a priviledge and honour to be in the same house with such [a] man.Footnote 98
In May 1821, Rebecca Hey, a cousin of the Grays, replied to a letter from her relative Miss Carr in Leeds which detailed a gathering attended by the clergyman Mr Hartley: ‘It is pleasing to hear that Mr Hartley is so disposed to render himself useful in a private party – after witnessing the applause he gained in public. One cannot doubt but that many must have derived benefit from his Expositions of the Scriptures, and his prayers.’Footnote 99 Margaret Gray particularly valued religious instruction that took place in a social, intimate and comfortable setting. When describing a visit by the Rev. John Graham to drink tea, she stated: ‘We had a very small party, that we might hear more what he said; and we sat round the fire so comfortably! And he talked delightfully the whole evening.’Footnote 100 This was partly related to the fact that the Grays had a similar social background to the clergy whom they hosted, producing a feeling of ‘social ease’ which Jacob argues was central to lay attitudes towards clergy.Footnote 101 This sociability was therefore one of shared socio-economic status as well as religious opinion.
In these accounts of religious hospitality undertaken by the urban middling sort, there is a feeling of exclusivity that suggests that sociable piety was a marker of both socio-economic status and public demonstrations of faith. When hosting visiting preachers, the Grays regularly attended the sermon and then invited small groups of parishioners to their home afterwards for dinner and tea. In October 1811, ‘The Dean of Carlisle came to visit us…Preached at Belfries…Mr & Mrs Thorpe, Miss Terry and Mr Russell dined and drank Tea with us.’ When Faith attended a Bible Society meeting in York Assembly Rooms in 1812, she again invited only five other attendees to her home afterwards for tea.Footnote 102 As hosts, the Grays were gatekeepers to a select gathering to which only some parishioners were invited. The segregation between elites and the poor, which Borsay emphasizes as integral to urban life, was also observed in the idea that these gatherings were by personal invitation and took place in a home.Footnote 103 In church, elites and non-elites had to mix, but only those invited into the home could continue the discussion and gain access to the personal instruction of the clergy. As Janet Mullin argues in her study of middling card parties, the power to issue invitations and to appear generous had considerable cultural capital.Footnote 104
Hospitality was an opportunity for material display, as regular hosting required a sufficiently large home and plentiful refreshments, and therefore a suitable income. The Grays’ musical parties, for example, allowed the family to perform religious music, but also to display their ownership of coveted household objects such as an organ, a ‘very fine’ example bought second hand for £250.Footnote 105 Poorer households did offer hospitality: Hannah Barker has found that the itinerant Methodist preacher Samuel Bardsley was accommodated by a baker, saddlers, shopkeepers, a hosier, a bookseller, a chair-maker, and a frame-smith in his travels across the north-west between 1770 and 1807.Footnote 106 However, hosting at this level was more precarious: during the 1799 Manchester Methodist conference, several householders were no longer able to house preachers ‘owing to the present state of trade’, depriving them and their household of valuable one-to-one guidance with a religious leader.Footnote 107
The evidence here suggests primarily that we should not attempt to separate religious and secular motives for hospitality. In blurring the line between sociability, religious practice, and the performance of status, sociable piety echoed the preoccupations of urban culture more generally, which, as Borsay argues, ‘serviced the demand for status’.Footnote 108 Hospitality was used not only in the patronage of business associates, as documented by Amanda Vickery, but also in the service of religious patronage.Footnote 109 This may have been of particular importance for upwardly mobile families such as the Grays or the Reads, whose success in business allowed them to move into larger, prominent houses which could then be used as a communal space for religious practice as well as entertaining. For William Gray, the son of a Hull linen weaver who himself rose to become a solicitor, his class and occupational identities were intertwined with his piety. He considered his family and his business to be divinely blessed, attributing his early professional success to having ‘pleased God…to prosper ye concern’.Footnote 110 The domestic sociability and hospitality discussed here was primarily motivated by faith, but this faith was also understood as an expression of socio-economic status.
IV
A variety of individuals living in industrializing northern English towns perceived religious practice as a sociable activity. Combining religious and social practice was considered to sustain one's faith, and provide edification that complemented and enhanced formal public worship. Although there was a sense that the pious had to be watchful over the content of their conversation and the morality of their companions, the key concept was balance. In general, the opportunity provided by urban life for close and regular association with coreligionists was thought to outweigh its dangers, suggesting that the anxiety over sociability observed among late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century dissenters by historians such as Carys Brown may have declined by the later period.Footnote 111 Individuals from a variety of denominations, from Quakers to Anglicans, seem to have most valued the opportunity for face-to-face, personalized instruction, from lay preachers or clergy, in an intimate space. The exclusivity of religious sociability was one of its primary attractions.
More broadly, examining religious sociability indicates that religion was a major part of the lived experience of ordinary people in towns in this period. Urban middling and labouring individuals employed what Lauren Winner calls the ‘self-conscious’ incorporation of piety into everyday life, and this extended to interactions around the tea table or the decision of whether to play cards on a Sunday.Footnote 112 Even the lapsed, such as the physician's apprentice Thomas Giordani Wright, could not avoid the discussion of religious doctrine at the dinner table. Religious practice was not separated from ‘secular’ sociability, but occurred in the same time and space. Courtship took place at church and chapel, and the motivations of demonstrating piety and social status, in part through the social space of the home, were closely entwined. This underlines the importance of seeing the household as a religious space well into the nineteenth century, even during a period of accelerated church-building and the transition of nonconformist sects, such as Methodism, from domestic or outdoor spaces to purpose-built chapels as their membership grew.Footnote 113
Sociability was primarily motivated by faith, but demonstrations of status were an important by-product. Status could be demonstrated through the practice of piety, and this was entirely consistent with the worldview of the middling sorts in particular, who saw their wealth and position as providentially ordained by God, and their duty being to use these resources to spread their faith. It is important to see the practice of piety as reflecting and reinforcing the social and economic distinctions of a supposedly secular world. The sociability described here was socially exclusive. Although this article has used evidence from the labouring sort as well as the mercantile and professional urban elite, it is probable that individuals without a stable household of their own would have had a different relationship with religious sociability. Servants, apprentices, or lodgers, or the children of the poor whose Sunday sociability took place on the streets, were constrained in their ability to engage in respectable religious sociability.
Contrary to the majority of historiography on this theme, this article has demonstrated that religious sociability was not just employed by nonconformists. Social domestic religion was not about maintaining a ‘refuge from…common godlessness’, but occurred in urban areas with plentiful opportunities for formal nonconformist worship long after the Toleration Act.Footnote 114 Religious sociability was mainstream, and was as significant in the individual lives and wider ecclesiastical network of Anglicans as it was for Quakers. The examination of sociability also provides additional evidence of the nature of lay agency across denominations in this period. Sociable piety was not only a lay act of resistance or a consequence of absentee clergy, as Winner has suggested, but took place in urban areas where the laity had plentiful access to a variety of denominations and clerical opinions.Footnote 115 This suggests that domestic religion, practised partly through sociability, was an active choice made by the laity, and that they saw it as a vital part of their faith, in conjunction with public worship. Sociability allowed the laity to construct a personalized type of piety through socializing with coreligionists, or in one-to-one clerical instruction in the home. Sociability, especially hospitality, was also an opportunity for the laity to demonstrate their utility and leadership in their church, perhaps particularly for women. This article has shown that lay hospitality was the oil that kept the wheels of the established and nonconformist churches running, by facilitating a network of visiting preachers, as well as the national reach of the many evangelical charities and associations that emerged in this period.
