Download files
Abstract
This thesis is a contextual study of Lord Ashley (from 1851 known as the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury) and the evolving character of Victorian Evangelicalism. Owing to his seminal contribution to social reform in Victorian England, most notably to the Factory Acts, Lord Ashley has been justifiably portrayed as a man of action. The aim of this study, however, is to analyse critically the traditions of theological and political thought which animated the work for which Ashley was remembered. After discussing the place of Ashley in the Evangelical Anglican tradition and examining the critical influence of Evangelical figures on Ashley in Part One, the thesis in Part Two will examine the various traditions of British paternalism and specifically assess the contribution of high Tory paternalism to the emerging political sensibilities of Ashley. In Part Three, it will be argued that, despite some differing premises and points of conflict, the two traditions of Evangelical Anglicanism and high Tory paternalism found a great deal of common ground in their shared vision for a hierarchical and communitarian Christian social order eschewing the excesses of laissez-faire liberalism, individualism and utilitarianism. With Ashley's own worldview indebted to each of these two traditions, he drew upon this coalescence to advance his keynote social reforms. Thus, with these twin pillars undergirding Ashley's ensuing religious outlook established, Part Four will study Ashley's place within the milieux of Victorian Evangelicalism and discuss the extent to which his own 'Tory-tinctured' Evangelicalism represented the prevailing preoccupations of Anglican Evangelicalism across a range of Victorian concerns including imperialism, Sabbatarianism, domesticity and gender. The thesis will conclude that the Evangelical Shaftesbury's absorption of Romantic-inspired high Tory paternalist ideals was symptomatic of the broader inflow of Romanticism into nineteenth-century Evangelical religion. By providing a contextual study of this Evangelical-Tory, the thesis carves out a new niche between the biographies of Shaftesbury and the historical narratives of Evangelical religion in the Victorian era.