Into Unorthodox London: The Religious Ethnography of Charles Maurice Davies

Abstract

Through this work Davies engaged in the great mid-Victorian debate about the permissible limits to unorthodox religious practice that was taking place within the Church of England. Early in his life Davies had been associated with the "high church," "Puseyite," or "Tractarian" faction of the Anglican Church which emphasised its Catholic rather than its Protestant heritage. Indeed, he was a founding member of the Society of the Holy Cross, which went on to become a key organisation in the Anglo-Catholic movement. However, by the end of the 1850s he had turned against the factionalism of the Tractarians and he used his novels to position himself as a "broad churchman," arguing that the vitality of the Church of England depended upon comprehension, opening the church to many different modes of worship and elements of belief, rather than establishing a strict doctrinal position and expelling those who refused to conform to these principles to other churches, outside the state religion. 2 Davies first articulated this position in Philip Paternoster, which Robert L. Wolff identifies as one of a body of "anti-Tractarian" texts that emerged around this time (191). This anti-Tractarianism was something that persisted through Davies's later works, in which he mobilised the device of satire to undermine any romantic narrative of fulfilment or transcendence simply by embracing the "higher" ideals held out by Tractarianism, but these later texts contained additional and singular features which prompted some consternation, not only in contemporaries, but also in his late twentieth century reader Wolff. Davies's Broad Church was described by the Athenaeum as containing "Vulgarity and slovenliness," while the characters the reader was meant to identify with were "despicable." The Spectator thought the work "clever and readable" but also "distinctly offensive to good