"On the threshold of manhood": Working-Class Religion and Domesticity in Victorian Britain and Canada
Authors
Nancy Christie
Abstract
Recent studies indicate that records of church membership are unreliable as a
barometer to measure the religiosity of Victorian working-class people. Specifically
working-class forms of religious practice, when combined with working-class views
of masculinity, tended to privilege the domestic space rather than church membership
as the primary site of Christian experience. The religious diary and family correspondence
of Frederick and Fanny Brigden, both working-class Londoners,
reveal Brigden’s own version of domesticated religiosity and his conception of
respectable working-class masculinity. His life-long obsession with temperance,
thrift, self-help, and religion was neither imposed by nor borrowed from the values
of the dominant classes, but grew directly from his experience of the inequalities and
vicissitudes of working-class life. As the Brigdens’ example shows, working-class
families’ conceptions of domesticity did not merely mimic those of bourgeois ruling
elites, but flowed from their own interpretations of religion and their own strategies
for survival.
