As a doctoral student many years ago I spent several delightful weeks in the salubrious surrounds of the Rhodes House Library, Oxford, immersed in the archives of the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (USPG). While sifting through archival sources relating to colonial clergy and missions to the British settler colonies, I remember being struck by the abundance of sources relating to emigration and emigration chaplaincy efforts, as well as by the fact that no one had really ever undertaken a major study of either the rich vein of sources or of the subject itself. Historian Rowan Strong’s comprehensively researched and finely observed Victorian Christianity and Emigrant Voyages to British Colonies, c. 1814–1914 has now admirably filled that glaring historiographical gap.
Strong’s book charts the considerable efforts of Victorian British churches – and primarily the Church of England – to meet the religious and spiritual needs of the myriads who emigrated from the metropole to the colonies between 1814 and 1914. In addition, he details emigrants’ shipboard religious experience and the multifarious ways in which this modified or solidified prior religious beliefs and practices.
An important finding of the study relates to the Church of England’s response, not only because it represents a neglected aspect of both migration history and the religious history of the nineteenth century, but because, as Strong shows in the first chapter, the Anglican Church was the only church to offer a structural, comprehensive response to mass British and Irish emigration during this period (in contrast, the late-century efforts of the Salvation Army and the Mormons focused mainly on their own adherents). Anglican efforts extended across denominations, offering a revealing snapshot of the grassroots Victorian Christianity that was embodied by British and Irish Christians who sought new lives in the British colonies. These Anglican efforts, as Strong deftly demonstrates, were also accompanied by trends towards denominationalism and a globalizing Anglicanism that gathered momentum after the 1840s, the decade in which the immensely influential Colonial Bishoprics Fund was established.
The second chapter, which focuses on ‘religious constructions’ of British emigration, illuminates a range of visions, both religious and secular, for meeting the religious and spiritual needs of both emigration and the expanding empire that was enabling it. Among some Anglicans, for example, the Church had an important role in creating a more pious empire, while for others the empire was viewed primarily as a providential conduit for extension of both the Church and Christianity more generally. Such visions were not, of course, mutually exclusive. What is striking, however, is the extent to which the imperatives of Christ’s kingdom were often stressed over explicitly imperialistic sentiments (p. 106).
Chapter 3 focuses on the shipboard ego documents of ‘steerage’ emigrants (often drawn from the lower, working or petit bourgeois classes) and sheds valuable new light on religious attitudes among migrants. Strong finds sufficient evidence to challenge received views that many immigrants had outlooks of ‘anti-clericalist religious indifference’. In turn, this challenges a prevailing historiography, especially in Australia and New Zealand, that has viewed colonial populations as largely indifferent or hostile to the Christian churches or to religious beliefs.
Those sailing in cabins (first or second class and listed as ‘passengers’) between the 1840s and 1870s are the focus of chapter 4. Strong shows that this was largely a middle-class affair, though defined in its broadest sense in terms of occupation, as this class of travel was based on who could afford it. Religiosity among these passengers was significant, not least because of the strength of evangelicalism among the middle and petit bourgeois classes, and in part because of their greater wealth and leisure, and hence opportunities to engage in religious practices and activities (p. 174).
These two chapters also highlight the diversity of Victorian British and Irish Christianity, whether Anglican, Nonconformist or Catholic. There are revealing glimpses of various theological and ecclesiological commitments; of differing styles of hymnody, liturgy and worship; and of a variety of evangelistic efforts that elicited responses that fell across a spectrum ranging from determined resistance to conversion. One interesting finding here is that Christmas celebrations and music were often able to transcend denominational boundaries. Likewise, evangelicalism’s pan-Protestant character meant that it cut across denominations. Cabin passengers also tended to reflect the contemporary trend towards Victorian middle-class leadership in moral and religious affairs (for example, when no clergyman or ship captain was officiating). That said, Strong cites evidence for the initiation of prayer meetings among Bible Christians in steerage, which suggests that not all were passive recipients of middle-class leadership.
Religious professionals in emigrant ships are the focus of chapter 5. Here Strong notes a diversity of denominations and sectarianism, as well as challenges for clergy in usually being the sole religious professional on a ship (and, upon arrival in some isolated colonies, on land as well!). Denominational identity and competition were important in such contexts, but personality and temperament could also be factors in contentiousness and adversarial postures.
The final chapter charts changes during the ‘age of steam’ from the 1870s up to 1914. During this period, larger and faster ships led to greater segregation and less intermingling, which meant that emigrant diarists had less interaction with, and observation of, the religious habits and beliefs of fellow passengers beyond their particular class (p. 265). Even Sunday worship might be divided into areas of the ship bound along class lines. Voyages were also safer, so there is less reference to existential precariousness or to religious sentiments among the 20 shipboard diaries Strong examined. One interesting finding relates to the enduring influence of Thomas Paine’s eighteenth-century Age of Reason among workers and free-thinkers; at the same time, there is strikingly little definitely atheistic literature, which supports Hugh McLeod’s suggestion that identifiable atheists comprised a ‘minority within a minority’ among secularists and agnostics of the period (p. 270). Indeed, many believers held throughout the period to notions of a providential God actively involved in the world and responsive to adherents and their prayers (p. 277). Such beliefs cut across classes and, along with a large body of evidence for religious interest that is marshalled in this study, offer a challenge to any glib secularization thesis. In this sense, Strong’s findings lend support to recent work, most notably that of Timothy Larsen, that has identified a ‘Victorian crisis of doubt’ and a return to Christian faith during the second half of the nineteenth century, in contrast with the traditional view of the ‘Victorian crisis of faith’.
Another important theme of the book is that of engagement with ‘the religious other’. While there is plenty of evidence for sectarian sentiment and difference among emigrants and clergy alike, some did nevertheless develop a newfound respect for the religious other. As Strong points out, ‘the floating villages that brought the Christian British and Irish across the seas to new homes in British colonies were an existential experiment in living with diversity in an area of life that was central in various ways to many emigrants – probably to most of them. It was a novel experience of living closely for weeks or months with Christian diversity, and in some voyages, where there were even a few Jews, of increasing this diversity beyond the confines of Christianity’ (pp. 277–78). Strong adds that British colonies, like their ships, would be places ‘where Victorian Christianity was not just successfully exported in its British and Irish forms, but also changed as emigrants became settlers and drew on their experience of shipboard diversity in the new circumstances of their colonial environment’ (p. 278).
Strong’s study makes an important contribution to a growing and robust recent scholarship on the religious (and not least Anglican) dimensions of Christian missions to British settler colonies, including Hilary Carey’s God’s Empire: Religion and Colonialism in the British World, c. 1801–1908 (2013), Joseph Hardwick’s An Anglican British World: The Church of England and the Expansion of the Settler Empire, c. 1790–1860 (2014), this author’s Anglican Clergy in Australia: Building a British World, 1788–1850 (2015) and Strong’s edited The Oxford History of Anglicanism: Vol. 3, Partisan Anglicanism and its Global Expansion, 1829–c. 1914 (2017). Given the study’s necessarily limited scope and breadth of sources (for example, in relation to sample sizes of shipboard diaries), Strong’s generalizations in Victorian Christianity and Emigrant Voyages to British Colonies, c. 1814–1914 are entirely reasonable and measured. It would be difficult to make broader generalizations about emigrant religion in the absence of major quantitative studies. Nevertheless, in this cogently argued and richly informative account of the vital Victorian export of religion, Strong has – somewhat like the intrepid nineteenth-century British emigrants that are the focus of his study – charted an important new course for future historical research.
