Victorian Studies

Recent studies of the emerging English middle class in the late-eighteenth and early decades of the nineteenth centuries, including Catherine Hall’s Civilising Subjects (2002), Susan Thorne’s Congregational Missions (1999), and Clare Midgley’s Women Against Slavery (1992), have acknowledged the significance of evangelicalism. Alison Twells in The Civilising Mission and the English Middle Class, 1792–1850 contributes substantially to our understanding of the interface of evangelicalism with the delineation of femininity and gender codes in this period. She does so through a close examination, focused particularly on ample records of Sheffield but moving far more broadly into an English-wide narrative of the aims and deeds of evangelicals at home and their engagement in the spreading mission movement abroad. Twells herself has a research background in the history of both Victorian England and English foreign missions, which has allowed her to reach fresh insights. While the close connection between the civilising mission at home and abroad is not in itself new, her development of both aspects of the evangelical reform endeavour takes the discussion in fertile directions.

English evangelicals’ local philanthropic work and global missionary outreach, Twells finds, formed a seamless web of endeavour that she encapsulates in the term “mission philanthropy” (2). Twells nicely frames her central argument by beginning the book with a late-eighteenth century interchange between the famous evangelical sisters Martha and Hannah More about the inhabitants of the village of Cheddar. The people were no more than “depraved and wretched” savages who exhibited brutal natures and ferocious manners (Martha More qtd. in Twells 1). There was, the two women agreed, as much knowledge of Christ in the interior of Africa as in this miserable place. Such mission philanthropy shaped constructions of evangelical middle-class femininity through the special opportunities it afforded women in particular. Mission philanthropy did not simply offer evangelical women an expansion of their domestic responsibilities into the public sphere. It also drew women into a “social” sphere that existed somewhere between the private and public, once again complicating the conception of gendered separate spheres. Rather than excluding women from public activism, mission philanthropy demanded such activism since it was absolutely integral to notions of domesticity.

Evangelical women’s involvement in wide-ranging and varied pursuits through societies and philanthropic networks could be extensive indeed, as Twells, drawing on rich archives of letters and journals, demonstrates through an array of individual women’s experiences. To mention one example, the five daughters of Joseph and Elizabeth Read of the Sheffield Independent Church were involved in local branches of the Society for [End Page 120] Bettering the Condition of the Poor, the Campaign for Superseding the Necessity of Climbing Boys, the Sunday School Union and the Bible and Missionary Societies, and countless other causes. Nor were they isolated or in any way considered eccentric for their determined pursuit of the paths towards human betterment as evangelicals imagined them to be. This is reminiscent of Zoe Laidlaw’s account of the involvement of Buxton family women in researching and writing Thomas Fowell Buxton’s notable report of the 1835–37 House of Commons Select Committee on indigenous peoples in Britain’s expanding Empire. Twells’s work offers close parallels to much United States historiography on American evangelical women’s agency through associations in the nineteenth century. Many have viewed feminism in evangelical circles as emerging less from women’s resistance to social constraints than from an extension of the moral authority with which evangelical domesticity endowed them.

Twells attributes much of the remarkably rapid implementation of evangelicals’ burgeoning commitment in foreign missions to women’s active involvement. Evangelical women supported the first mission bodies in England: they canvassed mission-related initiatives in local parishes, they raised funds, they circulated material, and they prayed for foreign missionaries in public gatherings. In addition some enthusiasts yearned for active service to the...