Urban Church Attendance and the use of Statistical Evidence, 1850–1900
Over the last two decades historians of the Victorian church have been paying an increasing amount of attention to the various forms of statistical evidence which are available for the period. There are in fact three major categories of such evidence. Firstly there are the membership figures and oth...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
1979
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| In: |
Studies in church history
Year: 1979, Volume: 16, Pages: 389-400 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | Over the last two decades historians of the Victorian church have been paying an increasing amount of attention to the various forms of statistical evidence which are available for the period. There are in fact three major categories of such evidence. Firstly there are the membership figures and other statistics published by churches and meant for external consumption; many of these have now been brought together in a useful compendium. Then there are the returns of the first (and last) national religious census, held in 1851, and of various local censuses, especially those taken for several large and medium-sized towns in 1881; these were also made public either in summary or detail depending on the nature of the census. Finally there are the statistics compiled by churches at various levels purely for their own use, but now open to public inspection in record offices: Anglican visitation returns and service registers, those records of nonconformist churches that yield such valuable information about membership and communicant figures and the numbers of Sunday scholars. Not all of these statistics have been used with an equal degree of enthusiasm, and very few studies have made effective use of all three. The aim of this paper is to look in some detail at the uses to which they have been put so far and to indicate some other uses to which they might be put in the future. |
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| ISSN: | 2059-0644 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Studies in church history
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1017/S042420840001010X |
