Prelates and People

First published in 2006. The reform of the Church of England in the first half of the nineteenth century was moulded considerably by the same pressures of industrialization, urbanization, and population growth that rapidly altered English society adn its institutions as a whole. The present work examines the responses of the episcopal leadership of the Church of England and Wales to the transformation of teh soceity to which they ministered. It considers primarily their social ideas and policies from teh decade preceding the French Revolution to the middle of the nineteenth century: from the period when a few bishops began to worry abotu the effectiveness of their abuse-ridden Church to the time when teh established Church, ecclesiastically reformed and spiritually revitalized, looked forward to evangelizing the multitudes who peopled the new age.

The study concentrates on the attitudes and policies of those prelates installed in the years before 1783, between 1783 and 1812, between 1812 and 1830, and finally between 1830 and 1852. Professor Soloway also examines their social connections, showing the predominantly aristocratic nature of the Church's leadership in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He emphasises the importance of the role of these men in guiding, administering and reforming the established Church in a period of unprecedented economic and social change.