The writings of an eccentric Spiritualist priest

Modern religious culture is sometimes described as a ‘spiritual supermarket’ – diverse forms of religion and spirituality are offered by competing brands in a fragmented, deregulated marketplace in which the consumer is king.

The spiritual supermarket is not a recent development. In Britain, its first sighting dates back to Victorian times – when London, the anarchic imperial capital, was host to a baffling array of churches, sects and cults.

One of the most remarkable bodies of information that we have on religion in Victorian London consists of the Unorthodox London books by the writer and journalist Rev. Charles Maurice Davies. These contain a long series of field reports on the activities of religious bodies at the time.

Davies was struck by the sheer diversity of the options on offer in 1870s London, even though most of them at this time were different forms of Christianity:

[J]ust as in Alexandria of old, where the schools of philosophers jostled the Christian churches, every shade and colour of religious belief may be found. Around the beautiful Pro-Cathedral at Kensington a Catholic population has sprung up just as around the cathedral-close in ancient times. [Anglo-Catholic] Ritualists in every stage of advancement throng the frequent services and swell the teeming coffers of St. Mary Magdalene’s, Paddington. The synagogue and the [Scottish presbyterian] kirk stand wall to wall in the Harrow-road, and the [mystical Swedenborgian] New Jerusalem Church has stationed its apostle, Dr. Bayley, almost under the shadow of the Vicarage-elms in the old Court suburb…. [O]ur National Church is represented in its every phase…. [O]ne might exhaust the theological thermometer, ranging from fever-heat at St. Matthias, Earl’s Court [Anglo-Catholic], to zero at St. Matthew’s, Bayswater [Evangelical]….

Elsewhere, Davies describes how he attended a Plymouth Brethren meeting in Islington which coincided with a nearby talk by a speaker from the Indian Brahmo Samaj movement at a Unitarian chapel and a sermon by the reformed criminal Ned Wright to working men at the Agricultural Hall.

Who was Charles Maurice Davies?

Charles Maurice Davies (1828-1910) was a fairly popular author in his time, as well as being a significant figure in the history of Spiritualism; but he is largely unknown today outside academic circles.

Davies was a clergyman, journalist, writer and teacher. As with many other Anglicans of his time and background, his religious views changed and evolved over time. He seems to have started out as an Evangelical, but as a young man he became an Anglo-Catholic. He appears to have become disillusioned with Catholicism while living in France, and he subsequently moved to a Broad Church position.

Something else also happened while Davies was living in France: he was prompted by his brother to take an interest in Spiritualism. This interest persisted for much of the rest of his life, and he seems to have become a fully convinced Spiritualist for a short time after the death of his son Johnny in 1865. By the 1870s, he seems to have arrived at the view that spiritualistic phenomena are real but their cause is unknown. In this period, he agreed to serve on the council of the British National Association of Spiritualists. He also seems to have published an anonymous satirical novel about Spiritualism entitled Maud Blount, Medium (1877).

Davies’ enthusiasm for Spiritualism grew again at the start of the 1880s. He attempted to found a Spiritualistic form of Christianity called the Guild of the Holy Spirit, which combined prayer services and séances. It failed to catch on, however, and after 1882 his religious and spiritual interests appear to have declined. He ceased from active ministry in the Church of England and mostly left Spiritualism alone – although his wife went on to join the magical order known as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and he allowed his home to be used by a Christian mystical society called the Order of the Spiritual Temple. In 1895, Davies published his final book, an anonymous work entitled The Great Secret, in which he recounted his personal experiences with the paranormal.

The Unorthodox London books

The Unorthodox London series consists of four distinct works, which were published during the 1870s in a number of editions and volumes: Unorthodox London, Orthodox London, Heterodox London and Mystic London. In large part, the books comprise journalistic pieces which Davies had previous published in different periodicals, including the Daily Telegraph (at that time a Liberal paper).

Davies writes about a range of religious bodies, from the Quakers and the Swedenborgians to the Southcottians and the Irvingites – as well as non-religious bodies like the National Secular Society and the Comtean Positivists. Davies is where you go if you want to know what happened when nuns were admitted to the novitiate or what a synagogue service was like. He introduces us to the atheist campaigner Charles Bradlaugh and to a Mormon polygamist. He takes us to a concert by formerly enslaved black Americans and describes a consultation with an astrologer. Spiritualism inevitably comes in at various points.

A whole book, Orthodox London, is devoted to different camps in the Church of England, ranging from missionary activity among sex workers in the East End to Anglo-Catholic Masses.

The books also include accounts of secular events, including a hanging.

Davies’ project and its context

Davies’ particular kind of religious reportage – the carefree, ironic dispatches of a tourist wandering around unfamiliar parts – was something genuinely new. It is difficult to imagine that there would have been an audience prior to the mid-Victorian period for this kind of material.

In some ways, Davies’ journalism is more informative than rigorous academic analysis. Passages like this tell one more about Victorian religious observance than a whole page of statistics:

….[A]n unctuous-looking youth of about sixteen, with a mouth from ear to ear, and just the suspicion of an approaching moustache, not only sang the hymns vociferously, with his saintly eyes shut, but kept up a running fire of comment — “So it is,” “Hallelujah,” and so on — at the more exciting portions of the prayer. Eventually, however, he… devoted himself to strong flirtation with the sister next him, whose red fat hand he held in his own during the subsequent discourse.

There are other little vignettes of this kind. We might mention a missionary supper for felons at which some attendees got two or three bags of free food by rejoining the back of the queue; and the attendees at an Anglo-Catholic church who, when bowing, thought that they were venerating “the magnificent brazen eagle which serves as a lectern”.

This was a time of acute strife between the different parties within the Church of England. The High, Low and Broad Church camps were in open conflict. Something of a moral panic had grow up over Anglo-Catholic Ritualism; at the same time, liberalism in the church was increasing, and there are occasional references in Davies’ reports to the controversial influence of progressive German theology.

Beyond the intra-Anglican strife, the Church of England was facing stiff competition from Nonconformist and sectarian bodies. Davies covers, for example, the evangelism of C. H. Spurgeon, who commanded a congregation of around 6,000 at the Newington Tabernacle on Sundays and had 4,200 members on his books (“and if one of them got tipsy I should probably hear of it before the week was out”). He also reports on one of the revivalist tours of the Americans Dwight Moody and Ira Sankey, who attracted a congregation of 15,000 at the Agricultural Hall.

Yet Davies was less concerned by competition offered to the Church of England by other Christian bodies than he was by the threat from what one might call organised irreligion. He devoted most of the two volumes of Heterodox London to this subject. The freethinking movement in England essentially dated back to the 1790s, but the 1870s was perhaps the decade in which it began to achieve real public influence. Openly secularist and anti-religious currents were directly confronting Christianity, the conflict being neatly summed up in a vignette in which Davies hears two simultaneous street speeches at separate rostrums from a freethinker and a Christian. Secularism was even taking on institutional form. Non-religious rituals for rites of passage were beginning to be composed, and Davies reports on a secular naming ceremony conducted by Charles Bradlaugh.

Davies’ concerns here seem in hindsight to be misplaced. The threat to Christian England came not from organised irreligion but from mere indifference. Committed adherents of movements like Bradlaugh’s National Secular Society were (then as now) vastly fewer in number than those who simply drifted away from the churches or were never really in them to begin with. Davies’ anxieties are distinctly clerical: he is worried about an opposing ideology rather than apathy because he assumes that others care about the veracity of religious truth-claims as much as he does.

Davies’ positionality

Fundamentally, Davies is writing as a liberal Anglican. He accepts the label of Broad Churchman. He favours eclecticism within the Church of England and wishes that the divisions between its parties could be healed.

Davies’ broad-mindedness comes through from his writing. He reports sympathetically on Roman Catholic events and observances. He is even willing to participate in Roman Catholic worship, at a time when many Anglicans would have suffered martyrdom rather than do so; similarly, he takes communion at a Scottish Free Church in order to fit in. He likes the Greek Orthodox liturgy, and he is impressed with the musical beauty of Jewish worship, which reminds him of the Roman Catholics. At the non-ritualistic end of the spectrum, he admires the “fair and manly” approach of an ultra-Protestant, and he recognises the effectiveness of a Strict Baptist sermon.

Davies is not an especially attractive figure. He is a racist, a sexist and a social snob. The offensiveness of his bigotries is somewhat diluted by his whimsical tone. The reader has the impression that he does not take himself or his subject-matter too seriously. At one Anglican service, he remarks: “I could not but smile as I heard the sweet voices of the little boys… warbling forth the tremendous damnatory clauses” of the Athanasian Creed. At another, he reports: “There was one cub of a boy, whose head I felt a most unaesthetic longing to ‘punch’; for a broad grim suffused his cellar-door of a mouth whenever the curate made a mistake”.

Davies is open about his deep interest in Spiritualism and reveals himself as an experienced attender of séances. Some ambivalence on the subject is evident in his writings, with indications of both belief and doubt. His overall stance is that he is still engaged in investigating spiritual phenomena: he believes that at least some of them are real, but he is not willing to assert that they are caused by the spirits of deceased humans.

Class

The Victorian culture in which Davies operated was preoccupied with both religion and class. In particular, there were fears about the supposed irreligiousness of the industrial urban masses. While the clerics who entertained these fears were misled by the faulty assumption that formal religious observance is equivalent to religiosity, it is fairly well established that in the Victorian period formal observance broadly increased the further one went up the social hierarchy (at least below the level of the seriously rich). This was so even though working-class people still made up a large absolute number of churchgoers.

Davies had a rather liberal outlook, but he was incorrigibly bourgeois; no-one would mistake him for a class warrior. He assumes that his readers have a reasonably affluent lifestyle, and that they come from the class that studied Latin and Greek at school. He does not miss an opportunity to note when someone’s pronunciation deviates from southern middle-class norms. His perceptions of working-class people can be unattractive. They are “yokels”, or even “living bundles of rags, dirty and shock-headed”; they lead “dark and squalid lives”.

Nevertheless, Davies’ attitude to people who ranked below him in the social hierarchy had its complexities. The working people in his articles are not there simply to be looked down on. Davies is capable, at least, of allowing his prejudices to be challenged. When visiting the Bible Christians (Ranters) and the Seventh Day Adventists, he is surprised by the intellectual standard of the preachers and the ability of the underprivileged congregations to follow them. He arrives at a working-class Nonconformist event “rather inclined to scoff” but has a change of heart. He is impressed by the Christadelphians and writes of them, in words which were surely not intended to be patronising:

I was amazed to hear working men read and expound from their thumbed Bibles, showing the most complete familiarity with the sacred text. I listened to their sermons and lectures, and thought how well it was for them to be there, since very possibly more elaborate faiths would have failed to comprehend them. I joined in the singing of their simple hymns, and looked on at their homely breaking of bread, not without thoughts that it might typify more nearly than gorgeous rituals the original Supper.

This is the voice of a middle-class Anglican cleric who is predictably unfamiliar with working-class religiosity. He recognises this deficiency of cross-class understanding in Anglicanism generally, if not entirely in himself. The Church of England, he observes, does not really know what to do with working-class Christians, unlike the Nonconformists and Roman Catholics. He comments on the well-heeled atmosphere at Anglican Sunday services: “I always like a week-day service. The ladies do not seem to have on their best bonnets, or the atmosphere to be redolent of light kid gloves and gentility.”

It is not greatly surprising that Davies does not seem to encounter many working-class worshippers at Anglican services, although this may in part be a reflection of the socio-economic profile of the areas that he visits. The one exception to the middle- to upper-class bias of Anglican worship – and it is a significant exception – is the Anglo-Catholic subculture. At one Anglo-Catholic event, Davies is surprised at the number of working-class attendees, whom he thinks would not usually be in church; the affluent women in attendance were told to move back to allow them to be nearer the preaching. He elsewhere notes that the demographics on the ground tell against the widespread assumption that “the poor do not understand or appreciate these ‘High’ services”. He also encounters “a good proportion of poor” at the Roman Catholic pro-cathedral.

As to the theologically ‘lower’ churches, Davies observes that “Protestant Dissent [is] a form of belief that tells largely upon the lowest middle and poor classes of London”. This seems to have been broadly true, although Davies’ prejudices as an Anglican looking down on Dissenters are showing here: he is downplaying somewhat the middle-class element in Nonconformism and conflating skilled workers, who were well represented in this milieu, with the “poor”. Other parts of his own reports reveal the limitations of his judgement. His pieces attest that some Protestant Nonconformist and sectarian congregations tended to be middle-class, or at least not “poor”.

Davies’ neurosis about class extends to groups outside the Christian fold. He remarks that Spiritualists “are extending their operations amongst all classes of society, notably among the higher”. As to theists and freethinkers, Davies starts out assuming that they come from the affluent sections of society. This is sometimes so. But his own observations bear witness to a greater level of involvement from less privileged demographics; and this is consistent with subsequent scholarship. Indeed, Davies himself observes at one point that freethinkers are targeting the poor of the East End rather than the “higher strata of society”.

Gender

No-one would mistake Davies for a feminist. His reports reveal the predictable sexism of a Victorian male. When Davies makes remarks bearing on religion and gender, it is difficult to know how far his prejudices are obscuring his view. Was it really true, for example, that girls were interested in either soldiers or clerics, and that the latter “invariably reckon frumpishness as a cardinal virtue”? What are we to make of his comment, regarding an Anglo-Catholic priest, that “pretty dévouées do like to carry Father Stanton’s photo about with them”? It is perhaps predictable that Davies has little regard for perceived effeminacy in men, which he links in stereotyped fashion with Anglo-Catholic clergy:

We are accustomed to think of such as a rather limp individual; “tender eyed” as Leah, and with a falsetto voice perpetually monotoning on G. He is strongly ascetic and severe against “all the pomps and vanities of this wicked world”.

It is generally thought that the preponderance of churchgoers in Victorian England were women; and this is backed up by the data. It is unsurprising, then, that Davies reports that congregations usually have a considerable majority of women. He comments when there are a large number, or an equal proportion, of men at events that he attends. Interestingly, none of these events seem to be mainstream Anglican services. The only general category of occasions that seem to have drawn a mostly male audience consisted of freethinking events and debates between Christians and freethinkers.

There is one notable absence in the reports that is immediately obvious to the modern reader but prompts no comment from Davies. Almost no women religious leaders are mentioned. Only two sects that Davies visits have women ministers: the Bible Christians (Ranters) and the Walworth Jumpers, who were led by the prophetess Mary Anne Girling. In addition, he attends an event addressed by a female preacher, the former courtesan Laura Thistlethwayte. Leaving aside these unusual cases, women in positions of religious authority are absent. Some things, it seems, were too unorthodox even for the Victorian spiritual supermarket.

Religious tourism and conversion

Davies was not the only religious tourist in 1870s London. Some others set out like him to look for entertainment and diversion in unusual or exotic liturgical settings. He comments in particular that many Anglicans were accustomed to go to Roman Catholic services, making the excuse that they wanted to hear the music. At a Roman Catholic ceremony for the admission of a novice nun, many of the congregation were Protestants, and this may explain why half a crown was charged for admission.

Not only did Victorian London have religious tourists: it also had converts. There was much movement between different denominations. One thing that comes through reasonably clearly from Davies’ work is that the various religious bodies of the time were not slow in competing for adherents, as well as seeking to hold on to their existing memberships.

Davies quotes a Presbyterian minister as saying that 2,000 people had converted to Roman Catholicism in north-west London alone – although this may be an exaggeration, given the anxieties of the time among Protestants about defections to Rome and Ritualism. The Eastern Orthodox tradition of Christianity was starting to arouse interest in inquirers, a development that continues to this day. Davies meets a Roman Catholic man in a Greek Orthodox church who appears to be considering converting. He also reports that several Anglicans had recently become Orthodox.

Some people were what one might call serial converts – regular shoppers in the spiritual supermarket. Some insight into their experiences is given by Davies’ record of the testimony of a working-class Nonconformist:

He told us at the outset that he had been “a Christian” for fourteen years…. He had, for thirty-two years, been brought up in the Church of England, but had found no conversion there. He had no wish to speak against the Church, but such was the case. He wandered about a good deal in those years, from Roman Catholic to Old Methodist chapels; but the latter settled him. He was attending a class meeting in Kensal New Town one night, and suddenly a determination came over him that he would not sleep that night until he had kneeled down and prayed with his wife, though it would be the first time he had done so for thirty-two years. When it came to bedtime his courage failed him. He could not get into bed; and he did not like to tell his wife why. “That,” he said, “was the devil worritin’ me.” His wife said, “I know what’s the matter with you. You want to pray. We will see what we can do.” His wife, he told us, was “unconverted,” but still she “throwed open the door” on that occasion. He never knew happiness, he said, until he came to Jesus; and he added, “Oh, I do love my Jesus.”

In addition to explicit conversions, Davies claimed that unorthodox ideas had made silent inroads among the adherents and even the clergy of the mainstream churches. Perhaps predictably, he makes this observation in relation to freethought. It is easy to dismiss this as clerical anxiety, but it must have been true to a significant extent. More surprisingly, he reports that there are members of all the churches, including clerics, who hold Spiritualist views; and that Spiritualism is “spreading widely over” the Church of England. This was not just Davies talking his own book. Spiritualism had become a mass movement by this time, and clerics had been involved in it since the 1850s; for some, it was an important complement to their Christian faith. Interestingly, Davies reports on one experiment which prefigured (and perhaps encouraged) his own later attempts at liturgical creativity in this area: he tells his readers of a group presided over by a priest of the Church of England who mixed together Spiritualism with Anglican liturgy.

There were limits to the capital’s religious diversity. It is striking that non-Christian religions are almost entirely absent from Davies’ reportage. Leaving aside non-Christian movements that remained proximate to Protestant Christianity (Spiritualism and the various theistic variants on Unitarianism), the only non-Christian religions that Davies deals with are Judaism and the Indian monotheistic reform movement known as the Brahmo Samaj. There is nothing about Islam or mainstream Hinduism: they simply did not have sufficient diaspora populations in London at this time to sustain a visible worshipping presence.

Davies and Spiritualism

In accordance with Davies’ personal interest in Spiritualism, all of the books in the Unorthodox London series have some content on Spiritualism and the occult. The subject is mostly dealt with in Mystic London. Davies visits an astrologer, who seems to get a number of things right about him. He attends public demonstrations given by two eccentric young women who would go on to become quite well known in esoteric circles: the medium Anna Eva Fay (whom he correctly identifies as a fraud), and the mesmerist and alternative medicine advocate Chandos Leigh Hunt. Davies writes about several Spiritualist séances. One of these is held in company with a barrister and a former Catholic priest; the participants summon up a spirit who moves a table violently and claims to be Satan. Another séance involves contact with spirits who seem to be followers of the doctrines of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg.

We have previously mentioned how Davies’ loss of his son Johnny drove him to become a convinced Spiritualist for a time. He tells of how he seemed to have made contact with the spirit of the child shortly after his death. This contact was apparently renewed the following year at a sitting with the Marshalls, two well-known Victorian mediums:

In December, 1866, I went to the Marshalls’, entering as an entire stranger, and sitting down at the table. I saw some strong physical manifestations—a large table being poised in space, in full light, for some seconds. It was signified there was a spirit present who wished to communicate, and the message given by raps to me was—“Will you try to think of us more than you have done?” I asked the name, and my child’s was correctly given, though I had not been announced, and I have no reason to believe my name was known. The place where he passed away from earth was also correctly specified.

In addition, Davies reported an apparent encounter with another of his deceased children, although an attempt to repeat the experience failed.

The views that Davies held at the time when he was writing the Unorthodox London reports are somewhat elusive. He positions himself as an inquirer, and he is not afraid to make it clear when he thinks someone is a fraud. He affirms that he knows of no naturalistic explanation for some of the things that he has encountered – including the levitations of the paranormal celebrity Daniel Dunglas Home, which he saw as an eyewitness – but he does not accept that their causes are fully understood. When he tries to put one medium to the test, he gets the usual mixture of uncanny hits, possible lucky guesses, and outright misses:

I had provided myself with two locks of hair…. I handed her the first, and she immediately proceeded to describe a series of tableaux which appeared to pass through her mind. She kept handling the lock of hair, and said, “The person to whom this belongs is ill — weak,” which was true enough, but might, I thought, be a shot…. She then described a bedroom, with some person — she could not see what person — lying in bed, and a lady in a blue dress bending over her. This, again, I thought might flow out as a deduction from her premises of the hair belonging to an invalid. The blue dress was correct enough, but still so little special as to be a very possible coincidence. She then, however, startled me by saying, “I notice this, that on the table by the bedside, where the bottles of medicine are standing, milk has been spilt — a large quantity — and not wiped up.” This was a trivial detail, not known to me at the time, but confirmed on subsequent inquiry.

She then passed on to describe a second tableau, where the same person in the blue dress was in a room all hung over with plates, along with a gentleman whom she described very accurately. He was the occupant of the house where the patient lay, and, having a hobby for old china, had turned his dining-room into a sort of crockery shop….

….With the second lock of hair we failed utterly…. She was quite positive they came from different people…. I am sorry… to say they both came from the same person….

As we have mentioned, Davies affirms that belief in Spiritualism is found among clergymen of all denominations – although he does also acknowledge that the orthodox clerical view is that the phenomenon is diabolical in nature. He states his own position that belief in spiritual phenomena is compatible with Anglicanism: he points out that the Church of England explicitly acknowledges the reality of exorcism in its canon law.

Miscellaneous details

Much of the interest of Davies’ work lies in the incidental details of contemporary religious observance that he provides. We may briefly go over a few of these.

Church services were long by modern standards. Davies implies that a standard Anglican morning service could run to somewhat over 2 hours; although elsewhere he seems to indicate that the average length was lower, around 90 minutes. Even early morning Anglo-Catholic Mass, which should be a relatively short service, could last nearly an hour. Some sectarian groups worshipped at considerable length. The Sandemanians went on for more than two hours and 20 minutes, while the Irvingites approached three hours.

As for sermons, these could last for anything from 10 minutes to one hour and 15 minutes. The norm was perhaps 20 minutes; less than that, or more than 40 minutes, would seemingly have been unusual.

There are some interesting snippets about Holy Communion. Evangelical Anglicans might have a eucharistic service once a month. The practice was similar at the Baptist Newington Tabernacle, where members were actually sent 12 communion tickets every year. Yet members of Nonconformist congregations might attend the Eucharist without receiving communion, just as was the case (less surprisingly) among Anglo-Catholics. In one Anglo-Catholic venue, communicants were “interrogated by a layman” before receiving the sacrament. Elsewhere in the Anglican world, a book of intended communicants might be used.

Conclusion

Charles Maurice Davies has much to tell us about the religious climate of 1870s London, and also about liberal Victorian Christians of his own stripe. The Unorthodox London series is an essential source for contemporary religiosity; and it operates both at the level of broad themes and at the level of observation and anecdote.

It is fitting that the man who effectively serves our first guide to the quintessentially modern religious supermarket was a practitioner of the quintessentially modern trade of popular journalism. The competitive diversity of the London religious marketplace coincided with the arrival of an audience that wanted to read about its various expressions – for interest and amusement as much as for edification – and the emergence of a cleric like Davies who was prepared meet that demand in a spirit of ironic broad-mindedness. In all, Davies’ reports cast a unique light both on contemporary London and on the orientation of people like himself.