No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
‘Domestic Charms, Business Acumen, and Devotion to Christian Work’: Sarah Terrett, the Bible Christian Church, the Household and the Public Sphere in Late Victorian Bristol
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
Extract
Sarah Terrett died suddenly on 25 November 1889, aged 53, after speaking at a meeting of the White Ribbon Army, the temperance organization she had founded in 1878. Following her death many people sent letters of sympathy to her bereaved husband, William. One of these, from the Rev. W. F. James, a minister of the Bible Christians, makes for especially interesting reading. The Bible Christian denomination, to which Sarah and William belonged, was one of the smaller Methodist connexions, and had its heartland in rural Devon, the area where she had grown up. James recalled the hospitality he enjoyed when visiting the Terretts’ home, Church House, in Bedminster, south Bristol:
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2014
References
1 Bourne, Frederick William, Ready in Life and Death: Brief Memorials of Mrs S. M. Terrett (London, 1893), 148.Google Scholar
2 Lloyd, Jennifer M., Women and the Shaping of British Methodism: Persistent Preachers, 1807-1907 (Manchester, 2009), 73 Google Scholar. Note that Methodists referred to their networks of churches as connexions, not denominations.
3 Bourne, Brief Memorials, 124.
4 Davidoff, Leonore and Hall, Catherine, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850 (London, 1987).Google Scholar
5 Ibid. 33.
6 Williams, Sarah, ‘Gender, Religion and Family Culture’, in Morgan, Sue and de Vries, Jacqueline, eds, Women, Gender and Religions Cultures in Britain, 1800-1940 (London, 2010), 11–31, at 15.Google Scholar
7 Noted by Gleadle, Kathryn, ‘Revisiting Family Fortunes: Reflections on the Twentieth Anniversary of the Publication of L. Davidoff & C. Hall (1987) Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 ’, Women’s History Review 16 (2007), 773–82.Google Scholar
8 See, for example, Wilson, Linda, Marianne Farningham: A Plain Woman Worker, SEHT (Milton Keynes, 2007), 151–61.Google Scholar
9 Tosh, John, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven, CT, and London 2007; first publ. 1999)Google Scholar.
10 Ollerenshaw, Philip and Wardley, Peter, ‘Economic Growth and the Business Community in Bristol since 1840’, in Dresser, Madge and Ollerenshaw, Philip, eds, The Making of Modern Bristol (Tiverton, 1996), 124–55 Google Scholar, at ‘24.
11 Ibid.
12 Lynch, John, A Tale of Three Cities (Basingstoke, 1988), 19.Google Scholar
13 For instance, the establishment of University College in Bristol in 1877 was partly due to the generosity of the Wills family.
14 Crossley Evans, Martin J., ‘Nonconformist Missionary Work Among the Seamen and Dock Workers of Bristol, 1820-1914’, in Bettey, Joseph, ed., Historic Churches and Church Life in Bristol: Essays in Memory of Elizabeth Ralph 1911-2000 (Bristol, 2001), 162–95, at 179.Google Scholar
15 Bourne, Brief Memorials, 22, notes that she had been her father’s ‘chief helper’.
16 Ibid. 30.
17 Ibid. 151.
18 Wilson, Linda, Constrained by Zeal: Female Spirituality amongst Nonconformists, SEHT (Carlisle, 2000), 152–4.Google Scholar
19 Bourne, , Brief Memorials, 151.Google Scholar
20 Ibid. 125.
21 Kew, TNA, Census Returns of England and Wales, 1881, R.G11/2455, fol. 20, p. 33. Babbage was Sarahs maiden name.
22 Bourne, Brief Memorials, 152.
23 Bristol Mercury and Daily Post, 5 July 1881.
24 Hamlett, Jane, ‘The Dining Room should be the Man’s Paradise, as the Drawing Room is the Woman’s: Gender and Middle-Class Domestic Space in England, 1850-1910’, GH 21 (2009), 576–91 Google Scholar, at 583.
25 Davidoff, and Hall, , Family Fortunes, 33.Google Scholar
26 Bourne, , Brief Memorials, 128. On gender and rooms in the house, see Hamlett, ‘Gender and Middle-Class Domestic Space’.Google Scholar
27 Bourne, , Brief Memorials, 113.Google Scholar
28 Tosh, , A Man’s Place, 171.Google Scholar
29 Bourne, , Brief Memorials, 54.Google Scholar
30 Bristol Mercury and Daily Post, 29 January 1881.
31 Bourne, , Brief Memorials, 59.Google Scholar
32 Ibid. 137.
33 Ibid. 151.
34 Wilson, , Constrained by Zeal, 150–3.Google Scholar
35 Bourne, , Brief Memorials, 137.Google Scholar
36 Bourne devotes a whole chapter to this topic: ibid. 131-5.
37 Ibid. 153.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid. 125.
40 Wilson, , Constrained by Zeal, 147–9.Google Scholar
41 Bourne, Brief Memorials, 35. Note that her hearers would have been mostly working-class.
42 Ibid. 36.
43 Morgan and de Vries point this out: ‘Introduction’ to eaedem, eds, Women, Gender and Religious Cultures, 1-10, at 7.
44 Bourne, Brief Memorials, 152.
45 Ibid. 159.
46 Ibid. 32-45.
47 Lloyd, Women and the Shaping of British Methodism, 264.
48 Wilson, Constrained by Zeal, 210-11.
49 Bourne, Brief Memorials, 58-62.
50 Ibid. 59.
51 Harrison, B., Drink and the Victorians (London, 1971)Google Scholar, is still the standard work on the movement up to 1872.
52 Knight, Frances, ‘Recreation or Renunciation? Episcopal Interventions in the Drink Question in the 1890s’, in Brown, Stewart J., Knight, Frances and Morgan-Guy, John eds, Religion, Identity and Conflict in Britain from the Restoration to the Twentieth Century (Farnham 2013), 157–73, at 162.Google Scholar
53 Bourne, , Brief Memorials, 34.Google Scholar
54 Ibid. 95 (Bath), 94 (Drybrook), 83-4 (Plymouth), 87 (Dawley), 89 (London).
55 Bourne (ibid, 111) refers to a 55th battalion.
56 Ibid. 124.
57 See, for example, Bristol Mercury and Daily Post, 29 November 1882.
58 Crossley-Evans, , ‘Christian Missionary Work’, 178 Google Scholar; Bristol Mercury and Daily Post, 2 November 1882.
59 Bourne, , Brief Memorials, 124.Google Scholar
60 Ibid. 109.
61 Ibid. 99.
62 Ibid. 149.
63 Ibid, 111-30.