Attendance at Shortwood, ca. 1850

The fall in the conversion rate began in the wake of the 1848 depression. In a September 1848 letter to the Western Association of Baptist Churches, the Minchinhampton Baptists described "a long dreary Winter [with] most of our people having been out of employ, and others struggling with privations from the deadness of trade."^[17] Referring three years later to four recent conversions, T. F. Newman remarked sadly: "amidst [a] scene of barrenness, it is a mercy to have a little crop."^[18] According to contemporaries, a

fall in attendance at open communion services occurred among "hearers" at all churches and accompanied a "great fall" in conversions, especially at Shortwood. R. M. Newman, in a short history of the church, attributed this development to the advent of the factory system:

When the [people] had to walk to their work in the mills, attendances at all places began to fall considerably; the hours of work were long, and they probably rested on Sundays at home and looked after their gardens. This change brought about a great fall in membership [at Shortwood] about 1850.^[19]

The fall in the rate of conversions affirms Newman's observation, although the evidence of attendance of those in full communion at Shortwood suggests that the impact of factory life had not yet come into full operation.

It is necessary to examine, as far as possible, the quality of religious experience at this time. Individuals often translated the atmosphere of a depressed economy, and the consolidation of a new form of work discipline, into feelings of personal despair. Rather than acting as a buffer against anomie, the religiosity of members living locally in 1852/53 often reinforced it. In the long term, this failure would lead to the "great fall" in attendance to which Newman had alluded; in the short term, attendance by members living locally revealed a transitional pattern.

A survey of the local membership, undertaken by T. F. Newman in 1852/53,^[20] complements the earlier time-series analyses by permitting study of attendance at the moment when conversions and membership levels began to decline. Names appearing in the minister's survey were linked as closely as possible to the enumerator's lists for the 1851 census.^[21] Of the 547 members listed in the survey, 177, or 32.3 percent, were sampled. Only those living locally and in the immediate vicinity of the Vale were selected because of the otherwise highly scattered membership. Besides the regularity of attendance, recorded by the survey, the census adds information regarding occupation, age, sex, and residence. "Attendance" served as a dependent variable, and the others as independent variables,^[22] in a multiple classification analysis.^[23]

Table 65 presents the analysis of attendance based on five variables, and table 66 contains the significance tests of the interactions

between them. The variable "frequency of attendance" (F_att ) was transformed into numerical scores and broken down into the variables of class, sex, age, and region.^[24] "Class" divides neatly into three groups, based on occupations listed in appendix K, and "age" is more conveniently analyzed when similarly divided into cohorts. "Region" coincides with distance intervals radiating from the center at Nailsworth village and its adjacent hamlets. The first region stands for the central Vale and the second, for the hamlets on its immediate periphery: Barton End, Horsley, Dowend, and

Rockness districts.^[25] The gender distribution of the sample reveals a preponderance of females at nearly 2:1, which corresponds to the sex ratio of conversions since 1775.^[26]

In general, the findings show that attendance by class and age demonstrates the comparative health of the church, although fore-shadowing future difficulties; attendance by region, however, clearly reveals a more negative pattern. No significant difference

existed between the sexes, despite the much higher number of female members in the sample.

Attendance by social class shows the middle class attending nearly at the mean; small retailers, artisans, and skilled factory workers, who constituted class 2 (see table 65), attended just above the mean; laborers, unskilled clothworkers, and the miscellaneous poor, who composed class 3, attended just below it. The variation, although insignificant, suggests an incipient trend. Since evangelical Christianity provided a framework for the integration of classes,^[27] the absence of significant variation implies continuity with the height of the Revival. At its height the poorest individuals very likely attended with the greatest regularity, but in our sample they attended the least frequently, a pattern suggesting incipient alienation from the Chapel community. In the long term, secularization would be associated with the alienation of the poorest strata from organized religion.^[28] At the same time, class z showed the highest frequencies of attendance. This group included many skilled weavers who were working in factories^[29] and for whom the workplace had partially supplanted the Chapel as the center of communal life. Nevertheless, the especially high attendance of weavers at 43.6 times per year indicates continuity with the height of the revival.

This purely quantitative finding, however, masks a dramatic change in their collective spirituality during the first half of the nineteenth century. Evangelicalism may have provided a framework for social integration. As Eric Hobsbawm initially observed, however, it also contained a "Ranter" potential that middle-class Chapel deacons eschewed.^[30] Evidence regarding popular disorder in the Stroud region between 1827 and 1839 shows a language of protest framed by antiauthoritarian enthusiasm.^[31] By 1850, however, this militancy gave way to what E. P. Thompson has accurately termed the "chiliasm of despair."^[32]

Deference, sanctioned by religious feeling, had certainly coexisted with the militancy of the late 1820s and 1830s, but the latter clearly predominated. Still, despite hostility to the factory system in 1839, protestors began adapting half-consciously to its discipline. Although Chartists agitated throughout the Stroud region during the 1840s, leading clothiers successfully countered them by campaigning against the Corn Laws.^[33] The depression of 1848

coincided with the final defeat of Chartism, and the combined effects of these events created an atmosphere of desperation. Many who had previously displayed a robust confidence regarding their Election came to internalize anxiety concerning their salvation. "Enthusiasm" now expressed itself more readily in deference to authority, self-abnegation, and acquiescence to an alien form of work discipline.

In 1854 the suicide of Isaac Keynton, a Minchinhampton Baptist weaver, evoked this widespread mood of psychological depression;^[34] details from the inquest imply that suicide was common among the working classes of the region at this time.^[35] Keynton's distress illustrates, moreover, how a Calvinist ethos, when negatively expressed, could inform deferential attitudes.

At the inquest, Keynton's wife reported that he had suffered paralysis in his limbs and had become despondent as a result. According to newspaper accounts, he had two chief concerns while in this state: fear of being unable to satisfy the manufacturer for whom he worked and depression with a general feeling of hopelessness, revealing a religious tendency.

The second witness, a fellow clothworker, corroborated Mary Keynton's testimony. He described how the deceased "often talked to him lately in a desponding way; seemed like one completely broken down. Often spoke of himself as a reprobate , and one for whom there was no mercy" [emphasis added]. Jeffreys, the clothworker, found the deceased drowned in Longfords Lake and had good reason for going at once to this spot: "[It] was where another man had drowned him-self some months ago, and on that occassion deceased said to him 'he could hardly bide in his loom; he could not beat it out of his head that he must go and drown him-self in the very same place.'" These two manifestations of Keynton's depression were undoubtedly related. Clearly, he viewed his paralysis as a providential act, as a sign that God had not chosen him after all, although overwork very likely caused his illness. Nor did illness permit him to satisfy his employer, a failure he treated as further proof of his own unworthiness. Nonconformity, by promoting sobriety, had long encouraged this link between virtue and utility, although sympathy for human frailty often softened normative rigor. Under the new factory system, however, a more negative emphasis finally persevered. Still, the

"great fall" in attendance, much lamented by contemporaries, had not yet occurred among those in full communion, although among hearers, as we have seen, a decline in attendance accompanied a faltering conversion rate. This paradox highlights the transitional nature of the early 1850s, and attendance patterns, when examined by age cohort, affirm this observation.

Attendance, when measured by age cohort, reveals an optimistic picture for 1852/53, but darker elements present also foreshadowed a future negative trend. Referring again to table 65, "age" proved to be the most important independent variable because of its higher eta score. In general, if we count cohorts 1 and 3 together, there is a slight bias toward youth in the sample despite the high outmigration of the period; this fact suggests a comparatively healthy church membership. We have already seen that for a sample of Nailsworth's hamlets including Shortwood, the age-sex composition actually improved during the 1840s. The size of the twenty-five- to thirty-four-year cohort increased significantly, as the early middle-aged, thirty-five to forty-four years, fell correspondingly and almost all other cohorts remained stable.^[36] The marginal effect of outmigration on youth shows that contemporary complaints exaggerated the problem.^[37] Although Nailsworth suffered from severe trade depressions in the 1830s and 1840s, its economic decline proved to be a more protracted process, extending into the late nineteenth century.

The pattern of variation in attendance between age cohorts reinforces this impression of comparative health. The three youngest cohorts together had higher attendance than did the older ones, and the second cohort (ages twenty-seven to thirty-seven) had by far the highest, whether controlling for other independent variables or not. Young adults viewed Sunday services as an appropriate courtship setting, as much as a means for expressing religious devotion.^[38] The next eldest cohort (ages sixty to seventy) attended at the second highest rate because of the proximity of death and the special concern for salvation its nearness evoked. Still, the very eldest attended least frequently because of the infirmities of age.

Those aged forty-four to fifty-nine years were the great exception to this broadly optimistic picture. Their mean attendance fell significantly below the grand mean. They were the most numerous cohort and constituted the pivotal middle-aged group; neither

motives of courtship nor proximity to death could encourage higher attendance.^[39] Death was neither imminent nor something, should it strike, that could rob them of the fruits of a full life. The middle-aged were more preoccupied by the cares of this world than were either their juniors or seniors and, for this reason, were the most secularized of all Shortwood's membership.

Paradoxically, the spiritual concerns of youth and the elderly could be similar. The elderly prepared for imminent death; youth did the same from fear of its unpredictability. For youth, death's suddenness amid the fullness of life was a prospect both awesome and spiritually provocative. A young woman named Harriet Dangerfield, writing to the Shortwood minister in 1849, described her own spiritual odyssey in terms that substantiate these inferences.^[40] As a child, she had received instruction at the Shortwood Sunday School and "was blest with pious parents."^[41] Nonetheless, her spiritual engagement evolved over a considerable period, during which she discovered the meaning of death:

About the age of sixteen I was very much concerned about my never dying soul. I had many convictions of sin but stifled them and they where [sic ] has [sic ] the morning cloud and the early Dew. They soon passed away and I cared nothing for them and I turned to the world a little longer, till two years and six months ago[.] Then convictions returning again and made a lasting impression upon my mind. Has [sic ] I was about the busy cares of the world the thought came very powerfully [sic ] to my mind where would my soul be if it should be called out of time into eternity that night. At that time I deeply felt the need of a Saviour. This led me to kneel down before god and humbly ask him to forgive me for Christ's sake. I trust and believe from that hour that he heard and answered my prayer and [made] me a new creature in Christ Jesus.

Still, Harriet did not remain entirely free from doubt about the durability of grace:

So i [sic ] went on from step to step till death made its inroads in the family and removed one of my cousins Eliza Dangerfield. Has [sic ] I stood by her bedside I thought if I was in her place if I should be has [sic ] she was. And I prayed to god through Christ sake to prepare me for eternity. About that time I began to feel more of my own wicked heart and of my own unworthiness. I felt I could do nothing without Christ and . . . I put my whole trust in him . . . for salvation. . . . I was then brought to mourn the loss of another cousin. A few days before her death

she called me to her bedside and took me by hand and said, well Harriet if you have begun to seek the Lord persevere on, he will be your guide unto death. And I felt happy at that time.

These observations illustrate a spiritual development characteristic of Baptist youth.^[42] They also evoke a more universal religious sensibility, the "chiliasm of despair," already depicted in extreme form in the suicide of Isaac Keynton, and articulated in the moderate Calvinism practiced at Shortwood. By awaiting the appearance of a savior, Harriet had demonstrated a belief in free grace; yet through prayer she believed it possible to seek Election actively and in this manner demonstrated her confidence in universal redemption. Still, God's gift, not human agency, mattered most.

Harriet strictly adhered to this procedure. She composed her letter to Newman two years before baptizing herself and in the interim vacillated over whether she indeed belonged among the Elect. Not even baptism, however, could free her completely from doubts about her worthiness.^[43] Although the doctrine of final perseverance should have eliminated all doubt, the Shortwood Baptists practiced only "speculative antinomianism" and expected the Saints to conform to the letter of the law. Members might lapse, but not without feelings of despair, as the case of Daniel Gill further illustrates.

Gill, a Minchinhampton Baptist, "appeared before the church and was desireous [sic ] to delay his fellowship from fear of his unfitness."^[44] Gill baptized himself two months later in September 1847, but during the interval, his "mind . . . [became] much exercised with a variety of convictions and temptations," and, according to the church minute book, "he has received strength by the encouraging counsel of brother Jones." Nevertheless, in March 1848 Daniel Gill was "overtaken by temptation . . . [and was] very abject by his fall from rectitude," and the church suspended him for three months.^[45]

In the cases of Daniel Gill and Isaac Keynton, a morbid preoccupation with unworthiness yielded to despair. The quiet, depressive tone of Harriet Dangerfield's letter shows that she, too, bordered on despair but succeeded in establishing an emotional equilibrium, however much she may have vacillated thereafter.

She later withdrew from membership,^[46] and others eventually followed her example in greater numbers.

Still, the incipient decline of the Shortwood church became manifest more fully in rates of attendance by region. Those living within the Vale attended services 42.5 times per year on average, but those residing on its immediate periphery attended only 38.5 times.^[47] The difference became even more pronounced when holding other variables constant. Distances between the Vale and its immediate periphery ranged no more than two miles; by contrast, the congregation of an earlier era, as we have seen, came regularly from fifteen adjacent parishes, and some communicants traveled upward of fifteen to thirty miles.^[48] This change clearly reflected a secularizing trend. With its modern discipline and requirement that workers walk to work, the factory system encouraged those living a short distance from chapel to rest on Sundays rather than attend religious services; they tended their gardens instead.^[49]