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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 September 2015
This article examines accounts of continental church life to be found in the travel journals, letters and books of leading High Church Anglicans in the nineteenth century. It argues that these constitute a neglected source of evidence for understanding the interaction between continental church developments and the High Church revival in Anglicanism. It focuses particularly on accounts of travel in Catholic countries, and concludes that there are good reasons for assuming that experience of Catholic worship on the continent influenced High Church attitudes towards liturgical and ritual reform in Anglicanism.
1 See S. Neill, The interpretation of the New Testament, 1861–1961, Oxford 1964, 1. See also A. R. Vidler, The Church in an age of revolution, Harmondsworth 1961, 33.
2 ‘Germany entered this phase in the history of ideas nearly half a century earlier than England’: W. O. Chadwick, The Victorian Church, i, London 1966, 530. See also David Hempton's assertion that Francis Watts, professor of theology at Spring Hill College in Birmingham in the 1840s, was one ‘of the few Englishmen aware of the issues raised by German higher criticism of the Bible’: Evangelical disenchantment: nine portraits of faith and doubt, New Haven–London 2008, 32.
3 See E. R. Norman, Roman Catholicism in England, Oxford 1985, 62–73. This is part of a much wider current of controversy over the connection between national identity and religious belief, for which see T. Claydon and I. McBride (eds), Protestantism and national identity: Britain and Ireland, c. 1650–c. 1850, Cambridge 1998.
4 See F. W. Cornish, The English Church in the nineteenth century, London 1910; S. C. Carpenter, Church and people, 1789–1889: a history of the Church of England from William Wilberforce to ‘Lux Mundi’, London 1933; Vidler, Church in an age of revolution; Chadwick, Victorian Church; and B. M. G. Reardon, Religious thought in the Victorian Age: a survey from Coleridge to Gore, London 1980.
5 See G. Rowell (ed.), The English religious tradition and the genius of Anglicanism, Wantage 1992.
6 W. R. Ward, The Protestant Evangelical awakening, Cambridge 1992.
7 N. Railton, No North Sea: the Anglo-German Evangelical network in the middle of the nineteenth century, Leiden 2000, and Transnational Evangelicalism: the case of Friedrich Bialloblotzky, 1799–1869, Göttingen 2002; T. C. F. Stunt, From awakening to secession: radical Evangelicals in Switzerland and Britain, 1815–35, Edinburgh 2000.
8 L. Allen (ed.), John Henry Newman and the Abbé Jager: a controversy on Scripture and tradition (1834–1836), London 1975; W. G. Roe, Lamennais and England, Oxford 1966; J. N. Morris, ‘“Separated Brethren”: French Catholics and the Oxford Movement’, in S. J. Brown and P. Nockles (eds), The Oxford Movement: Europe and the wider world, 1830–1930, Cambridge 2012.
9 R. W. Franklin, Nineteenth-century Churches: the history of a new Catholicism in Württemberg, England, and France, New York–London 1997.
10 According to Purcell, the descriptions of continental Catholicism by various travellers such as Faber and Allies came ‘as a revelation’ to the Tractarians: Life and letters of Ambrose Phillipps de Lisle, i, London 1890, 116. See also T. W Allies, Journal in France, London 1849, and F. Faber, Sights and thoughts in foreign churches and among foreign peoples, London 1842.
11 P. D. Avis, Anglicanism and the Christian Church, Edinburgh 1989, p. xiv.
12 Christopher Wordsworth, Diary in France, mainly on topics concerning education and the Church, London 1845, and Notes at Paris, particularly on the state and prospects of religion, London 1854.
13 A. P. Perceval, Results of an ecclesiastical tour in Holland and northern Germany, London 1846.
14 M. MacColl, The Ammergau passion play, London 1870; [H. S. Holland], Impressions of the Ammergau passion play, by an Oxonian, London 1870.
15 The chief source is J. M. Neale, Letters, edited by his daughter (London 1910), but there are also some copies of unpublished letters and diaries at Lambeth Palace Library; the originals are missing.
16 J. Oldknow, A month in Portugal, London 1855. Neale was Oldknow's companion on this journey too.
17 B. Webb, Sketches of continental ecclesiology, or Church notes in Belgium, Germany, and Italy, London 1848.
18 According to Piers Brendon, Bulwer Lytton reckoned that the income of those travelling on Cook's continental tours would usually have been between £300 and £600 a year: Thomas Cook: 150 years of popular tourism, London 1991, 85.
19 J. O. Johnston, Life and letters of Henry Parry Liddon, London 1905, 15. The account of this journey occupies pp. 15–27.
20 Ibid. 64, 92, 98, 100–10, 137–9, 150–1, 183–90, 201–2 (letter on attending services abroad), 206–13, 300, 318–28.
21 H. P. Liddon diary, entries for 2 Aug.–14 Sept. 1865, Pusey House archives.
22 Ibid. entries for 31 Mar.–20 Apr. 1865.
23 Ibid. entry for 4 Apr. 1865.
24 Florence, according to his daughter, to him ‘always seemed a home’: M. C. Church, Life and letters of Dean Church, London 1895, 7.
25 Ibid. 24, 47–51, 64–133, 158–66, 173–5, 250–1, 277–8, 308–17, 317–20.
26 One example seems to have been W. F. Hook. On an apparently unique trip to Paris, he wrote to his curate, ‘I am heartily sick of Paris; hate France, and think Frenchmen the most detestable of human beings. In three weeks I hope to be in dear old England, and never shall I wish again to quit her shores’: W. R. W. Stephens, The life and letters of Walter Farquhar Hook, i, London 1878, 203.
27 W. Whewell, Architectural notes on German churches: with notes written during an architectural tour in Picardy and Normandy, Cambridge 1842; H. Alford, Letters from abroad, 2nd edn, London 1865.
28 Life and letters of Henry Alford, DD, late dean of Canterbury, edited by his widow, London 1873, 110–11, 134–5, 147–8, 156–62, 246–55, 259, 274–80, 302–34, 345–7, 350–2, 365–77, 380–1, 409–12, 422–9, 444–5.
29 Ibid. 350–6.
30 Stanley and Benjamin Jowett visited Paris in the spring of 1848 to see for themselves the impact of the revolution of that year: J. Witheridge, Excellent Dr Stanley: the life of Dean Stanley of Westminster, Norwich 2013, 147–8. There are also many references in R. E. Prothero, The life and correspondence of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, London 1893.
31 Interleaved copy of Laura Ridding, George Ridding, schoolmaster and bishop (1908), Bodleian Library, Oxford, GB 0161 mss Eng.hist. d. 185–6, vol. i, 50B–50C. For a reassessment see J. N. Morris, ‘George Ridding and the diocese of Southwell: a study in the national Church ideal’, this Journal lxi (2010), 125–43.
32 See the discussion of terminology in P. B. Nockles, The Oxford Movement in context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760–1857, Cambridge 1994, 33–43.
33 This was an admission made in J. H. Newman, Lectures on the prophetical office of the Church, 2nd edn, Oxford 1838, 20, and repeated in his Apologia pro vita sua, 2nd edn, London 1964, 70.
34 The letters and diaries of John Henry Newman, III: New bearings, January 1832 to June 1833, ed. I. Ker and T. Gornall, Oxford 1979, 123.
35 The entry on Allies in the ODNB is inaccurate in putting the year of publication of the Journal in France as 1848 rather than 1849, in assuming that J. H. Pollen travelled with Allies in 1845 and 1847, whereas he did so in 1847 and 1848, and in making no mention of Marriott at all, nor of J. H. Wynne, who also travelled with Allies and Pollen in 1847: ODNB, ‘Allies, Thomas William (1813–1903)’.
36 Allies, Journal, 2–4.
37 Ibid. 4–5.
38 Allies was not alone in his interest. In 1842 the eminent Catholic layman John Talbot, sixteenth earl of Shrewsbury, had published a Letter… to Ambrose Lisle Phillipps, esq.: descriptive of the Estatica of Caldaro and the Addolorata of Capriano, London 1842. It seems likely that Allies was well aware of this publication. On Pollen see A. Pollen, John Hungerford Pollen, 1820–1902, London 1912, which also has many references to Wynne, including (pp. 223–4) a brief account of Wynne's conversion in 1851.
39 Faber, Sights, 5.
40 J. E. Bowden, The life and letters of Frederick William Faber DD, London 1869, 85.
41 Faber, Sights, 200, 202.
42 Ibid. 363.
43 Ibid. 417.
44 Wordsworth, Diary, p. v.
45 Ibid. 66.
46 Ibid. 24–5, 55–6, 87, 98, 119.
47 Idem, Notes, 64–72.
48 Webb, Sketches of continental ecclesiology, p. xi.
49 Allies, Journal, 8.
50 Faber, Sights, 48 (italics mine).
51 Church, Life and letters, 24; Bowden, Faber, 71, 77–8.
52 Faber, Sights, 145–6.
53 Bowden, Faber, 78.
54 Ibid. 77.
55 Ibid. 186–200.
56 Wordsworth, Diary, 200–1.
57 Idem, Notes, 24, 60.
58 Church, Life and letters, 74.
59 Allies, Journal, 48.
60 Ibid. 63.
61 Faber, Sights, 118.
62 Ibid. 120.
63 Ibid. 119–20.
64 W. J. Copleston, Memoir of Edward Copleston, DD, bishop of Llandaff, London 1851, 50–60, 69–83. He was thus a visitor to Paris before the better-known traveller John Scott, whose Visit to Paris in 1814: being a review of the moral, political, intellectual and social condition of the French capital was published in 1815.
65 Copleston, Memoir, 53.
66 Ibid. 78.
67 Johnston, Liddon, 15–6. The whereabouts of the manuscript of Liddon's travel journal for 1851 is unknown.
68 Liddon diary, entry for 13 June 1864.
69 The most serious attempt was in October 1852, during his first visit to Rome: Johnston, Liddon, 25.
70 A typical entry from his stay in Berlin in 1867, whilst travelling with Charles Dodgson, runs ‘Went to early mass at St. Hedwig's Cath Ch, & said office’. However, the entry immediately proceeds to describe a visit after breakfast on the same day to the (Lutheran) Dom Kirche: ‘abendmahl, sermon, licentiate turned towards people except at consecration’: Liddon diary, entry for 21 July 1867.
71 Ibid. entry for 17 July 1864.
72 Ibid. entry for 17 July 1867.
73 Webb, Sketches of continental ecclesiology, 77.
74 MacColl, The Ammergau passion play, 44.
75 Liddon diary, entry for 24 July 1870.
76 See the brief account in D. M. Thompson, Cambridge theology in the nineteenth century: enquiry, controversy and truth, Cambridge 2008, 117–18. See also the account given by the Catholic convert J. S. Northcote: Pilgrimage to La Salette, or, A critical examination of all the facts, London 1852.
77 Thompson, Cambridge theology, 117.
78 H. P. Liddon, ‘Faith without miracles’, in Clerical life and work, 2nd edn, London 1895, 256.
79 T. W. Allies, A life's decision, London 1880, 36.
80 Ibid. 38.
81 Faber, Sights, 66, 114 (italics original).
82 Ibid. 132.
83 Ibid. 155.
84 Purcell, Manning, i. 153.
85 Ibid. i. 347, 349–50.
86 Ibid. i. 362.
87 Ibid. i. 365.
88 Ibid. i. 372.
89 Webb, Sketches of continental ecclesiology, p. xiii.
90 Ibid. 1.
91 Ibid. 120.
92 Neale, Notes, ecclesiological and picturesque, 34.
93 ‘[He] felt … the absolute necessity for loyal self–restraint within the limits of the legitimate interpretation of the Prayer-book’: Johnston, Liddon, 177.
94 Liddon diary, entry for 14 Apr. 1865. I have been unable to ascertain what ‘assisted’ meant here. It is scarcely likely that Liddon acted as an assistant or officiant.
95 Circular folded into Liddon diary for 1865.
96 Ibid. entry for 27 Apr. 1870.
97 D. Gray, Earth and altar: the evolution of the parish communion in the Church of England to 1945, Norwich 1986.
98 See V. Staley, Ceremonial of the English Church, London 1899.
99 J. G. Lockhart, Charles Lindley Viscount Halifax, i, London 1935, 245–52.
100 W. Frere, Recollections of Malines: a contribution to the cause of Christian reunion, London 1935.
101 A. G. Hebert, Liturgy and society: the function of the Church in the modern world, London 1935, at pp. 125–38 for the Liturgical Movement.
