Faith and Betrayal Read Online Free
were a home on Chiswell Street and all its “appurtenances,” the rents and profits from numerous other properties, and an annuity for the rest of her life, all “free from the control, debts, or engagements of her husband.”
Whether the family relocated from their Lake Street home to Doughty Street is unclear, but what is obvious is that Jean Rio Baker was a very wealthy woman in her own right by 1840. As she was living at the height of comfort, however, England was experiencing the most severe depression of the century. Since losing the American War of Independence, Great Britain had been in crisis. “Its politics were stuck in permanent factionalism and gridlock,” writes Arthur Herman. “A sense of malaise had settled over its ruling class, while popular unrest, encouraged by the French Revolution, spread across the provinces.”
Throughout the 1840s, the poverty and degradation brought about by the Industrial Revolution became more and more staggering, as depicted so famously by Charles Dickens in
Oliver Twist
and other novels of life in Victorian England. Women and children had entered the workforce in record numbers, and most of them suffered abhorrent factory conditions and earned a pittance for a backbreaking day’s work. People of various races and cultures were flocking to London in search of employment with the railways and shipyards, the new city-dwellers living in wretched conditions. Bedraggled children toiled for fourteen hours a day in factories; squalid brothels bred disease; the slums were awash in sewage; and there was a burgeoning criminal population. The grim deaths from the Irish famine that began with the blight of the potato crop in 1845 dominated the London newspapers, and Ireland was poised for violent revolution.
At the same moment, the Church of England was in a crisis of its own, as reformers increasingly sought a separation between church and state. All the critics seemed to agree that neither the church nor the government was adequately addressing the appalling social conditions. “When the inner cities are crying out, what are the [Ecclesiastical] Commissioners doing? They bought a palace for the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol, lots of bedrooms,” British scholar Owen Chadwick writes of the rising tide of dissent and suspicion. As the populace increasingly protested the church’s corruption—bishops were burned in effigy and crowds called for Canterbury Cathedral to be turned into stables—politicians began pushing for reform to pacify a restless nation.
The Church of England stubbornly resisted the oncoming changes, providing a wedge for the evangelicals who were transforming the European and American religious landscapes. “Its piety tended to be sober, earnest, dutiful, austere, or even prosaic in expression,” Chadwick observes of the church at that time. Meanwhile, the evangelicals “preached their way into the hearts of rich and poor, neglectful of parish boundaries, friendly with dissent.” Rejecting the staid, authoritarian dogma of the past, this faction encouraged believers to choose feeling over thinking in their path to God. “Romantic literature and art, the sense of affection and the sensibility of beauty pervading European thought, the flowering of poetry, the medievalism of the novel or of architecture,” as Chadwick describes the new arousal, posed a threat to church conservatives. The evangelicals brought poverty, corruption, and injustice to the forefront of the national dialogue as part of the New Age movement to elevate society, and advocated a Christian Socialism that predated Marxist and other socialist phenomena in politics.
For all the world’s “progress,” in the first half of the nineteenth century the sense of the precariousness and fragility of life was keen, the populace at the mercy of a physical world of microbes and human physiology still little understood. Epidemics of cholera, typhoid, and influenza decimated entire cities. What a
Whether the family relocated from their Lake Street home to Doughty Street is unclear, but what is obvious is that Jean Rio Baker was a very wealthy woman in her own right by 1840. As she was living at the height of comfort, however, England was experiencing the most severe depression of the century. Since losing the American War of Independence, Great Britain had been in crisis. “Its politics were stuck in permanent factionalism and gridlock,” writes Arthur Herman. “A sense of malaise had settled over its ruling class, while popular unrest, encouraged by the French Revolution, spread across the provinces.”
Throughout the 1840s, the poverty and degradation brought about by the Industrial Revolution became more and more staggering, as depicted so famously by Charles Dickens in
Oliver Twist
and other novels of life in Victorian England. Women and children had entered the workforce in record numbers, and most of them suffered abhorrent factory conditions and earned a pittance for a backbreaking day’s work. People of various races and cultures were flocking to London in search of employment with the railways and shipyards, the new city-dwellers living in wretched conditions. Bedraggled children toiled for fourteen hours a day in factories; squalid brothels bred disease; the slums were awash in sewage; and there was a burgeoning criminal population. The grim deaths from the Irish famine that began with the blight of the potato crop in 1845 dominated the London newspapers, and Ireland was poised for violent revolution.
At the same moment, the Church of England was in a crisis of its own, as reformers increasingly sought a separation between church and state. All the critics seemed to agree that neither the church nor the government was adequately addressing the appalling social conditions. “When the inner cities are crying out, what are the [Ecclesiastical] Commissioners doing? They bought a palace for the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol, lots of bedrooms,” British scholar Owen Chadwick writes of the rising tide of dissent and suspicion. As the populace increasingly protested the church’s corruption—bishops were burned in effigy and crowds called for Canterbury Cathedral to be turned into stables—politicians began pushing for reform to pacify a restless nation.
The Church of England stubbornly resisted the oncoming changes, providing a wedge for the evangelicals who were transforming the European and American religious landscapes. “Its piety tended to be sober, earnest, dutiful, austere, or even prosaic in expression,” Chadwick observes of the church at that time. Meanwhile, the evangelicals “preached their way into the hearts of rich and poor, neglectful of parish boundaries, friendly with dissent.” Rejecting the staid, authoritarian dogma of the past, this faction encouraged believers to choose feeling over thinking in their path to God. “Romantic literature and art, the sense of affection and the sensibility of beauty pervading European thought, the flowering of poetry, the medievalism of the novel or of architecture,” as Chadwick describes the new arousal, posed a threat to church conservatives. The evangelicals brought poverty, corruption, and injustice to the forefront of the national dialogue as part of the New Age movement to elevate society, and advocated a Christian Socialism that predated Marxist and other socialist phenomena in politics.
For all the world’s “progress,” in the first half of the nineteenth century the sense of the precariousness and fragility of life was keen, the populace at the mercy of a physical world of microbes and human physiology still little understood. Epidemics of cholera, typhoid, and influenza decimated entire cities. What a
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