Dickens's England (15 page)

PRIMITIVE METHODISM IN DARKEST NORFOLK

I entered the village [of Hockering] in the summer of the year 1830, and endured one of the most awful conflicts with the enemy of souls that I ever experienced. Prior to the service, I got into a dry ditch covered over with briars and thorns, and for hours wrestled against principalities and powers; the conflict was so horrible, that I was afraid at one time I should lose my reason. I opened my pocket Bible on Psalm cxxi, and read it; and while reading the last verse, the snare was instantly broken, the powers of darkness were scattered, and hell's legions routed; my soul was in a moment filled with light and love.

I at once commenced my work. Seeing a piece of waste land before a respectable house, I knocked at the door, and asked an old lady to allow me the use of it for an hour, in which to preach the people a sermon. The old lady, very abruptly, replied, ‘Go away with you; I and the parson are good friends.' I replied that I did not want to break off the friendship existing between her and the parson; I only wanted to stand on the waste piece of land to tell the people about the Saviour. ‘Go away with you!' the old lady shouted out, and was about to shut the door in my face. I then told her that I was a servant of Christ, and if she shut the door against me, my Master might shut the door of mercy against her. But the door
was
violently closed, and a little time after I was informed the old lady was a corpse. I make no comment here; I only chronicle the fact.

I went a little further, met a man, and told him I was going to preach. ‘Preach, preach!' shouted the fellow, ‘if you have got a barrel of beer to give away, I will come.' I took my hymn-book from my pocket, and commenced singing through the street, ‘Turn to the Lord, and seek salvation, &c.', with a number of children running after me, which, I must confess, was rather humbling to human pride (but I was quite willing to be counted a fool for Christ's sake). I then took my stand on a large stone-heap for a pulpit, and the greater part of the inhabitants forming a congregation. A more wild, wicked, rough uncultivated lot I think it would be difficult to find in the back settlements of America, or the wilds of Africa; but no violence was used, although there was quite enough of noise and clamour. . . .

To return to our narrative; a house was soon provided by W. Copling, in which public worship was regularly conducted. . . . A large society was formed, and a great awakening took place. Some were seized with deep conviction in their beds, and others in the fields and barns; others of course mocked, and some became very much afraid: some said that I was a wizard, and carried some charm about with me in my waistcoat pocket, and that I threw it upon the people and bewitched them; and so much did this feeling prevail among a certain class of persons, that I have actually seen some whom I was about to meet, cross over to the other side of the street, to avoid catching the contagion.

One night after preaching, I announced that the class would meet, and invited those that were desirous to get their souls saved, to stay. Mr Hatley and Mr Nelson were present at the teaching service; they left the house at the close; but after a few minutes, Mr Hatley said to Mr Nelson, ‘Let us go back and see what they are up to in their class meetings.' He had been a sad reckless character, and he intended to play off a trick upon the preacher. He told his companion that he would make old Key believe that he was a very godly man; and he began to get his fine tale ready, as he said.

They re-entered the house, took a seat, and soon found out what was going on. Mr Hatley kept trying to get his tale ready. I went on leading the class, leaving these two gents till the last. I went to Mr Hatley, who was leaning his head upon his hand, with his tale all ready to come out. I laid my hand upon his head, and thundered out, ‘How is it with thee!' The moment I touched him the thread of his tale was broken to pieces, and deep distress seized his soul; he fell upon his knees, and began to pray mightily to the Lord to have mercy upon him. After a severe conflict for about half an hour, mercy lifted off his load and made him unspeakably happy. He had never, according to his own statement to me afterwards, had any light, or religious feeling, before that night. . . .

Mr Hatley was by trade a baker and, like many others, he had foolishly thought that he could not live without Sunday trading; but as soon as this gracious change took place, he made the trial, closed his shop and oven on the Lord's day, and resolved to follow Christ, whatever might be the consequences.

The parson, hearing what had taken place, paid him a visit, and the following conversation took place between them.

‘Mr Hatley, I understand that you have left off baking on the Sabbath day.'

‘Yes sir, I have.'

‘I am very sorry for that; you should bake the people's dinner on the Sunday, then they can come to my church.'

‘Yes, sir; but what is to become of the poor baker?'

‘Oh! you must look out for that.'

‘Yes,' said Mr Hatley, ‘I have looked out for it; and by the grace of God I intend to look out for it; and I will bake no more on the Sabbath for any man.'

R. Key,
The Gospel among the Masses
(1866; 2nd edn, 1872)

COUNTRY CHURCH AND CHAPEL

On Sundays you shall find in the church, if not the squire, at any rate his household, the ladies of it almost certainly and the servants. Most of the large tenants come too with their dependants. The gamekeeper's stalwart figure fills a seat, for though not conversant with doctrines, he and the other officials of the estate take a pride in thus evincing their loyalty to the established order of things. And with these must be numbered a sprinkling of the very poor, who hobble up the aisle, making a fine show of rheumatic pains and not forgetting the prospect of Christmas coals. In the chapel gather ‘ungenteel' farmers, usually the smaller tenants, artisans, and shopkeepers, with a sprinkling of ‘free' labourers and farm-servants. The congregation taken in the bulk is worth much less money than that in the parish church, and the dissenting parson is in many ways the same as his hearers. ‘Oh, we don't mind the minister, he is just like one of ourselves,' the cottager will say.

P. Anderson Graham,
The Rural Exodus
(1892)

THE PREACHER TO THE WORK-HOUSE

At eleven o'clock Mr Barton walked forth in cape and boa, with the sleet driving in his face, to read prayers at the work-house, euphuistically [
sic
: euphemistically] called the ‘College'. . . . A flat ugly district . . . black with coal-dust, the brick houses dingy with smoke . . . A troublesome district for a clergyman; at least to one who, like Amos Barton, understood the ‘cure of souls' in something more than an official sense; for over and above the rustic stupidity furnished by the farm labourers, the miners brought obstreperous animalism, and the weavers an acrid Radicalism and Dissent. Indeed, Mrs Hackit often observed that the colliers, who many of them earned better wages than Mr Barton, ‘passed their time in doing nothing but swilling ale and smoking, like the beasts that perish' (speaking, we may presume, in a remotely analogical sense); and in some of the ale-house corners the drink was flavoured by a dingy kind of infidelity, something like the rinsings of Tom Paine in ditch-water. . . .

But now Amos Barton . . . is reading, in the dreary stone-floored dining-room, a portion of the morning service to the inmates seated on the benches before him. . . .

Right in front of him – probably because he was stone deaf, and it was deemed more edifying to hear nothing at a short distance than at a long one – sat ‘Old Maxum' . . . the weight of ninety-five years lay heavy on his tongue as well as on his ears, and he sat before the clergyman with protruded chin, and munching mouth, and eyes that seemed to look at emptiness.

Next to him sat Poll Fodge – known to the magistracy of her county as Mary Higgins – a one-eyed woman, with a scarred and seamy face, the most notorious rebel in the workhouse, said to have once thrown her broth over the master's coat-tails, and who, in spite of Nature's apparent safeguards against that contingency, had contributed to the continuance of the Fodge characteristics in the person of a small boy, who was behaving naughtily on one of the back benches. . . .

Beyond this member of the softer sex, at the end of the bench, sat ‘Silly Jim', a young man afflicted with hydrocephalus, who rolled his head from side to side, and gazed at the point of his nose. These were the supporters of Old Maxum on his right.

On his left sat Mr Fitchett, a tall fellow, who had once been a footman in the Oldinport family . . . [and] had an irrepressible tendency to drowsiness under spiritual instruction . . .

Perfectly wide-awake, on the contrary, was his left-hand neighbour, Mrs Brick, one of those hard undying old women, to whom age seems to have given a network of wrinkles, as a coat of magic armour against the attacks of winters, warm or cold. The point in which Mrs Brick was still sensitive – the theme on which you might possibly excite her hope and fear – was snuff. It seemed to be an embalming powder, helping her soul to do the office of salt.

And now, eke out an audience of which this front benchful was a sample, with a certain number of refractory children, over whom Mr Spratt, the master of the workhouse, exercised an irate surveillance, and I think that you will admit that the university-taught clergyman, whose office it is to bring home the gospel to a handful of such souls, has a sufficiently hard task.

George Eliot,
Scenes from Clerical Life
(1857)

A CHEERFUL NOISE UNTO THE LORD

Gone now are the [church band] clarinet, the violoncello and the trombone, wild minstrelsy as of the doleful creatures in Ezekiel, discordant but infinitely pathetic. Gone is that scare-babe stentor, that bellowing bull of Bashan the village blacksmith, gone is the melodious carpenter, gone the brawny shepherd with the red hair. . . . They were doomed and had a presentiment of evil, even when I first saw them, but they still had a little lease of choir life remaining, and they roared out ‘Wicked hands have pierced and nailed him, pierced and nailed him to a tree', but no description can give a proper idea of the effect. When I was last in Battersly church there was a harmonium played by a sweet-looking girl with a choir of school-children around her, and they chanted the canticles to the most correct of chants, and they sang Hymns Ancient and Modern.

Samuel Butler,
The Way of All Flesh
(written 1872–84, pub. 1903)

SINGING AND A PREACHY

This evening [Sunday 31 August 1823] I have been to the Methodist Meeting-house [in Tenterden, Kent]. I was attracted, fairly drawn all down the street, by the
singing.
When I came to the place the parson was got into prayer. His hands were clenched together and held up, his face turned up and back so as to be nearly parallel with the ceiling, and he was bawling away, with his ‘do thou', and ‘mayest thou' and ‘may we', enough to stun one. Noisy, however, as he was, he was unable to fix the attention of a parcel of girls in the gallery, whose eyes were all over the place, while his eyes were so devoutly shut up. After a deal of this rigmarole called prayer, came the
preachy,
as the negroes call it; and a
preachy
it really was. Such a mixture of whining cant and of foppish affectation I scarcely ever heard in my life. The text was (I speak from memory) 1st St Peter iv.18. The words were to this amount: that,
as the righteous would be saved with difficulty, what must become of the ungodly and the sinner?
After as neat a dish of nonsense and of impertinences as one could wish to have served up, came the distinction between the
ungodly
and the
sinner.
The sinner was one who did moral wrong; the ungodly, the one who did no moral wrong, but who was not regenerated.
Both,
he positively told us, were to be damned. One was just as bad as the other. Moral rectitude was to do nothing in saving the man. He was to be damned, unless born again, and how was he to be born again, unless he came to the regeneration-shop, and gave the fellows money? . . .

The
singing
makes a great part of what passes in these meetinghouses. A number of women and girls singing together make very sweet sounds. Few men there are who have not felt
the power
of sounds of this sort. Men are sometimes pretty nearly bewitched without knowing how.
Eyes
do a good deal, but
tongues
do more. We may talk of sparkling eyes and snowy bosoms as long as we please; but, what are these with a croaking, masculine voice? The parson seemed to be fully aware of the importance of this part of the ‘service'. The subject of his hymn was something about
love
; and the parson read, or gave out, the verses in a singularly
soft
and
sighing
voice, with his head on one side, and giving it rather a swing. I am satisfied, that the singing forms great part of the
attraction.
Young girls like to sing; and young men like to hear them. Nay, old ones too; and, as I have just said, it was the singing that
drew
me three hundred yards down the street at Tenterden, to enter this meeting-house.

William Cobbett,
Rural Rides
(1821–32)

FAVOURITE VICTORIAN HYMNS

(I)

Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;

The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide;

When other helpers fail, and comforts flee,

Help of the helpless, O abide with me.

Swift to its close ebbs out life's little day;

Earth's joys grow dim, its glories pass away;

Change and decay in all around I see;

O Thou who changest not, abide with me.

I need thy presence every passing hour;

What but thy grace can foil the tempter's power?

Who like Thyself my guide and stay can be?

Through cloud and sunshine, Lord, abide with me.