This thorough history of the Wesleyan Methodist educational efforts in Victorian England discusses the influence of Dr. James Harrison Rigg, Principal of Westminster Training College, who dominated his church and who made friendships with senior politicians of the day. The book also looks in depth at the influence of anti-Catholicism, which was rampant in the Methodist church of the era.

This book is about Wesleyan Methodist educational efforts of the Victorian era. It discusses the influence of Dr James Harrison Rigg who dominated his church and who made friendships with senior politicians of the day.

Filling an important gap in the historiography of Victorian Britain, this book examines the English Catholic Church's efforts during the second half of the nineteenth century to provide elementary education for Catholics.

Specially commissioned to mark the 40th Anniversary of History of Education, and containing articles from leading international scholars, this is a unique and important volume. Over the past forty years, scholars working in the history of education have engaged with histories of religion, gender, science and culture, and have developed comparative research on areas such as education, race and class. This volume demonstrates the richness of such work, bringing together some of the leading international scholars writing in the field of history of education today, and providing readers with original and theoretically informed research. Each author draws on the wealth of material that has appeared in the leading SSCI-indexed journal History of Education, over the past forty years, providing readers with not only incisive studies of major themes, but delivering invaluable research bibliographies. A ‘must have’ for university libraries and a ‘must own’ for historians. This book was originally published as a special issue of History of Education.

Revivals are outbursts of religious enthusiasm in which there are numerous conversions. In this book the phenomenon of revival is set in its broad historical and historiographical context. David Bebbington provides detailed case-studies of awakenings that took place between 1841 and 1880 in Britain, North America and Australia, showing that the distinctive features of particular revivals were the result less of national differences than of denominational variations. These revivals occurred in many places across the globe, but revealed the shared characteristics of evangelical Protestantism. Bebbington explores the preconditions of revival, giving attention to the cultural setting of each episode as well as the form of piety displayed by the participants. No single cause can be assigned to the awakenings, but one of the chief factors behind them was occupational structure and striking instances of death were often a precipitant. Ideas were far more involved in these events than historians have normally supposed, so that the case-studies demonstrate some of the main patterns in religious thought at a popular level during the Victorian period. Laymen and women played a disproportionate part in their promotion and converts were usually drawn in large numbers from the young. There was a trend over time away from traditional spontaneity towards more organised methods sometimes entailing interdenominational co-operation.

Brings together the work of a wide range of scholars to explore the history of churches and education.