The Church of England and Victorian Oxford

Abstract

The Church of England and Victorian Oxford: The History of the Oxford Churchmen's Union, 1860–1890 explores key questions about the Victorian Church. How did it respond to challenges, what was the role of Tractarian clergy and laity, and to what extent did the Church’s effort to prove its continuing relevance and usefulness involve compromise? The author uses the Oxford Churchmen’s Union to investigate these matters in a new and integrated way. The OCU participated in Church defense and developed outreach programs. Men were to be brought into the Church through lectures and classes, concerts, sporting events, Christmas parties, and summer excursions, but for many OCU members, the social and recreational became more important than the religious side of the enterprise. Moreover, the Union was born in controversy, because its founders included Tractarians and others looked upon it with suspicion. Controversy also surrounded the OCU’s non-religious activities. There was a sense that leisure and amusement, if they prompted a departure from a strict focus on self-improvement, ought to be shunned, yet this was an age in which pleasure was to some degree divested of its traditional association with sin. This academic study in Church history uses the Union to elucidate the religious, social, and political conditions within which the Church and its supporters had to operate.