Early Victorian periodicals and the colonial church of England

Hardwick, Joseph (2012) Early Victorian periodicals and the colonial church of England. Nineteenth-Century Prose, 39 (1). pp. 255-284. ISSN 1052-0406

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Abstract

The decades after 1830 constitute a period of critical importance in the history of the Church of England in the British Empire. This was the moment when Anglicans were buffeted by political changes that left the Church which had once been viewed as the empire’s “established” church as a semi-independent institution with no privileged relationship with the British state. These changes brought with them new questions: how was the Church to govern itself, what was the nature of Anglican identity, how would the different branches of the Church be unified, and which communities should the Church serve? Did the Church’s traditional status as the “Church of the English” mean it still had a duty to minister to a wider, and rapidly expanding, colonial population? This essay shows that much of this debate was conducted in the pages of a new class of periodicals that were devoted specifically to the Church in the colonies. The significance of this literature has not been fully appreciated by historians. Focusing primarily on one publication the Colonial Church Chronicle (first published 1847) – the essay examines the answers that a group of orthodox high churchmen gave to key questions engaging imperial Anglicans in this period, and considers whether periodicals could bring imperial Anglicans together to create a sense of “Anglican Communion,” or if print literature was another source of contestation and division in colonial Churches.

Item Type:	Article
Subjects:	Q300 English studies V100 History by period V600 Theology and Religious studies
Related URLs:	Publisher
Depositing User:	Ellen Cole
Date Deposited:	08 May 2012 17:03
Last Modified:	14 Mar 2024 10:04
URI:	https://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/6852

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