Rival Jerusalems
The Geography of Victorian Religion

A complete geography of religion in England and Wales, including exhaustive analyses of many religious questions and debates.

K. D. M. Snell (Author), Paul S. Ell (Author)

9780521771559, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 26 October 2000

516 pages
23.6 x 16 x 3.7 cm, 0.93 kg

'a specialists' book, there is much to attract in this primary research. There are results in all sorts of geographic, graphic and tabular presentation, and a greater nuanced understanding emerges of many features of the religious and denominational characteristics of England and Wales in 1851.' Journal of Urban History

This pioneering book is based upon very extensive analysis of the famous 1851 Census of Religious Worship and earlier sources such as the 1676 Compton Census. The authors stress contextual and regional understanding of religion. Among the subjects covered for all of England and Wales are the geography of the Church of England, Roman Catholicism, the old and new dissenting denominations, the spatial complementarity of denominations, and their importance for political history. A range of further questions are then analysed, such as regional continuities in religion, the growth of religious pluralism, Sunday schools and child labour during industrialisation, free and appropriated church sittings, landownership and religion, and urbanisation and regional 'secularisation'. This book's advanced methods and findings will have far-reaching influence within the disciplines of history, historical and cultural geography, religious sociology and in the social science community general.

Introduction
Part I. Religious Geographies: The Districts of England and Wales: 1. The 1851 Census of Religious Worship
2. The Church of England
3. Old dissent: the Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, Quakers and Unitarians
4. The geographies of new dissent
5. Roman Catholicism and Irish immigration
6. Denominational co-existence, reciprocity or exclusion?
Part II. Religion and Locality: Parish-Level Explorations: 7. The prospect of fifteen counties
8. From Henry Compton to Maurice 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: A. Denominational statistics
B. Correction of registration-district data
C. The religious measures
D. Computer cartographic methods
E. Landownership and the Imperial Gazetteer
F. The 1861 Census of Religious Worship?
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], British & Irish history [HBJD1]