The Narrative of the Good Death

The Evangelical Deathbed in Victorian England

Mary Riso

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317023371
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Theology

The Christian idea of a good death had its roots in the Middle Ages with ars moriendi, featuring reliance on Jesus as Savior, preparedness for the life to come and for any spiritual battle that might ensue when on the threshold of death, and death not taking place in isolation. Evangelicalism introduced new features to the good death, with its focus on conversion, sanctification and an intimate relationship with Jesus. Scholarship focused on mid-nineteenth-century evangelical Nonconformist beliefs about death and the afterlife is sparse. This book fills the gap, contributing an understanding not only of death but of the history of Methodist and evangelical Nonconformist piety, theology, social background and literary expression in mid-nineteenth-century England. A good death was as central to Methodism as conversion and holiness. Analyzing over 1, 200 obituaries, Riso reveals that while the last words of the dying pointed to a timeless experience of hope in the life to come, the obituaries reflect changing attitudes towards death and the afterlife among nineteenth-century evangelical Nonconformist observers who looked increasingly to earthly existence for the fulfillment of hopes. Exploring tensions in Nonconformist allegiance to both worldly and spiritual matters, this book offers an invaluable contribution to death studies, Methodism, and Evangelical theology.

Chapter 1

The Cultural Landscape of Evangelical Nonconformist Death

The Reverend J. Glyde was born at Exeter on the 1st of January, 1808. It was his frequent custom to refer to the blessings of a pious ancestry, and to claim descent from three ministers ejected in the time of Charles II. His parents were distinguished for piety; the father being a deacon of one of the Independent churches of Exeter, and his mother an eminent example of tenderness, virtue, and consecration to God … Mr. Glyde’s conviction was that ‘where a religious education has been enjoyed, and where, from infancy, it has been the aim of parental anxiety to keep the conscience awake, and to promote religious impressions, it is often impossible to fix the precise period of the consecration of the heart to God’. Nor did he know the exact moment of his own conversion, – in this he resembled Richard Baxter, and other eminent servants of Christ.

He received his sentence of death with much composure; … yet his constant desire, with humble reference to God’s will, was to be permitted to resume his favourite work – the work in which he expressed himself to have been so ‘happy’. ‘Oh how unfit I am for the company of such men as Whitefield and Wesley, Baxter and Owen!’ A friend asked him – ‘On what are you resting your hopes?’ ‘On Jesus dying, living, reigning! … Jesus Christ the crucified – the cross! The cross!’

Piety was, in his estimation, not a mere system of orthodox theological belief, nor a consciousness, more or less developed, of certain states of religious feeling and experience, but a real spiritual life, energizing in every thought, and manifesting itself in every circumstance and relation in which humanity can be placed. Religion was not to be a thing for Sundays and solemn occasions only. In the market and the exchange, in relations between employers and employed, between representatives and electors, in the social circle, around the domestic hearth, the same principle was unremittingly inculcated.¹

This excerpt from the memoir of Jonathan Glyde, a Congregational minister of Bradford in Yorkshire, who died on 15 December 1854 at the age of 46 from exhaustion due to his ministerial labours, is an example of the richness of evangelical Nonconformist obituaries and memoirs as primary source material in several respects. It follows a pattern that is evident in almost all the memoirs and obituaries analysed for this book, one which represents evangelical conviction as a continuum from birth to death encompassing the early life, conversion, living out of the Christian faith and deathbed piety of the subject. Further, the reference to a conversation makes it clear that death was an experience that was shared between the dying person and those who observed and recorded the event. Finally, it provides a sense of how the account of an individual’s encounter with death could open a door into a rapidly changing society, one in which religion touched on a complex set of experiences encompassing social class, theology, culture, emotion and spirituality. In Religion and Rural Society: South Lindsey, 1825–1875 (1976) James Obelkevich states that ‘The secret of religious history is social history.’² The present work, as social history, may be one confirmation of that assertion as it attempts to contribute to the understanding of the history of Nonconformity in the mid-nineteenth century.

Four evangelical Nonconformist denominations are considered here and they must be distinguished from the evangelical Anglicans and those Nonconformist denominations that were not evangelical, such as the Unitarians. The Nonconformists were those Protestants who separated from the Established Church, beginning in the mid-seventeenth century.³ Among these early ‘Dissenters’ were the Congregationalists (or Independents) and the Baptists. These two denominations belonged to the ‘Old Dissent’. The ‘New Dissent’ was comprised of the Methodists, a new group that emerged from the Established Church as a result of the Evangelical Revival in the 1740s. The two Methodist denominations that are central to the present research are the Wesleyan Methodists and the Primitive Methodists, who formed in 1811, holding to Methodism’s revivalist roots, which were being abandoned by the Wesleyans. The Congregationalists and the Baptists were among those Old Dissenters who were affected by the Evangelical Revival, as noted in The Methodist Magazine of 1814. While some Old Dissenters ‘had little but the form of godliness … all was not lost …. The holy flame is burning, we may trust it is increasing in strength and clearness … Holy Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists (one in Christ), unite to teach, to warn all they can’.⁴ These denominations of the Old and the New Dissent were Evangelicals.

Evangelicalism has been defined in a variety of ways. The revival that started in Britain in the 1740s under the leadership of John Wesley and George Whitefield sought to breathe new life into an ancient faith that had become remote and nominal for some eighteenth-century adherents. Evangelical religion was ‘vital’ in that it was necessary for life and was based on personal experience of an encounter with God. In Evangelicalism in Modern Britain (1989) David Bebbington presents a ‘quadrilateral’ that, according to this author, identifies the four key elements of Evangelicalism: conversionism, activism, biblicism and crucicentrism.⁵ To be evangelical was to have had a conversion from life without God to life with God at the centre, to live out that faith through service and evangelism, to believe in the Bible as the word of God and to trust in the crucifixion of Christ for salvation and eternal life.

Historical assessments of Evangelicalism in Britain have paid particular attention to its intersection with the broader culture. This is a reasonable focus in several respects. First, the nature of evangelical religion was such that it called its followers to be active in the world but to give spiritual matters priority: their primary allegiance was to Christ and their true home in heaven. This created an inevitable tension between evangelical commitments in this life and hopeful anticipation of the life to come. They were called to remain separate from the world’s temptations and pleasures, but also to renew the world for God’s glory. The evangelical movement in nineteenth-century Britain played a significant role in its identity as a Christian nation. Even when Evangelicalism is not the central theme, it is an inescapable element for scholarship pertaining to Victorian England or the British Empire – so central was it to the heartbeat of nineteenth-century Britain. Evangelical Christians were not isolated from the rest of British society. The interweaving of faith with the broader culture was subtle and fulfilled many dimensions: philanthropy, masculine and feminine ideals of character, social structures and the notion of respectability among them. These themes will appear continually in the pages that follow and are of particular relevance as they concern changing attitudes towards death – and towards life in this world and the next. This is not a book about the British Empire or British imperialism. However, it is vital to grasp the broader cultural setting for the evangelical Nonconformist deaths considered here – the atmosphere in which they took place. It was an environment characterised by character, confidenceand Christianity, as envisioned vividly, for example, by Jan Morris in her Pax Britannica trilogy, and especially for mid-Victorian England in Heaven’s Command (1974).⁶ It was an atmosphere that contributed to the richness and excitement of life in this world with its limitless possibilities and human potential as inspired by God. This is of incalculable importance for understanding Christian attitudes towards death in Victorian England.

Two terms that will receive considerable attention throughout the following pages in relation to evangelical Nonconformist social mobility and self-identity in the period are ‘middle class’ and ‘respectable’. The subjects of class status and the struggle for respectability are covered broadly in the context of Victorian Britain as in Geoffrey Best’s Mid-Victorian Britain, 1851–1875 (1972),⁷ F.M.L. Thompson’s The Rise of Respectable Society (1989),⁸ and Susan Steinbach’s Understanding the Victorians (2012);⁹ more narrowly in terms of Nonconformity as in Michael Watts’ The Dissenters (1995)¹⁰ and Clyde Binfield’s So Down to Prayers (1977);¹¹ with a focus on a particular evangelical Nonconformist group such as the Methodists in James Obelkevich’s Religion and Rural Society (1976);¹² and with an emphasis on particular topics such as the philanthropic efforts of middle-class women in Susan Steinbach’s Women in England (2004),¹³ Victorian philanthropy in general in Gertrude Himmelfarb’s Poverty and Compassion (1991),¹⁴ changing Methodist attitudes towards work in John Walsh’s and Martin Wellings’s contributions to The Use and Abuse of Time in Christian History (2002),¹⁵ and the relationship between gender and class in Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall’s Family Fortunes (2002).¹⁶ All would agree that the years between 1830 and 1880 were characterised by the rise of the middle classes and that Evangelicals participated in that movement. However, their scholarship provides an in-depth understanding of the social background of the period to which this volume contributes and casts a backdrop against which the obituaries fall into their place on the stage or stand starkly outside its boundaries. All of these works contribute to an understanding of evangelical Nonconformist social mobility, hopes, life span and attitudes towards death in the middle of the nineteenth century in England. ¹⁷

In the context of the obituaries, class can often be defined by occupation. Middle-class professions could include everything from bankers, lawyers and ministers to shopkeepers, merchants and civil servants. One way of distinguishing the middle classes from the labouring classes is that the labouring classes worked with their hands in such occupations as factory work, mining, sewing or agricultural labour. Although words such as prosperous and successful can point towards a middle-class subject, middle-class respectability was related more to social acceptance i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 The Cultural Landscape of Evangelical Nonconformist Death
• 2 Obituaries as Literature: Form and Content
• 3 Evangelical Nonconformist Theology and Deathbed Piety
• 4 The Claims of Heaven and Earth: Social Background and Social Mobility
• 5 The Old Dissent and the New Dissent: Denominational Variations
• 6 The Infinite in the Finite: the Romantic Spirit and Nonconformist Death
• 7 Last Words: the Experience of Death
• 8 The Good Death and a Good Life
• Appendix A: A Sampling of Occupations by Denomination and Time Period
• Appendix B: Shifts in Evangelical Nonconformist Obituary Content by Category 1830–1880
• Bibliography
• Index
• Name Index