Hello Again,
I mentioned in my last post that Tailored Truths is going on a Blog Tour with the Coffee Pot Book Club and for this I needed to write some guest posts for some of the lovely bloggers who are hosting me/ the book.
I actually wrote more than I needed, so I'll be adding the extras on here because they are all centred around the second part of Margaret Law's story in Tailored Truths. Today's post is about church adherence in the mid-Victorian Era. I, admittedly, made original assumptions when beginning my research of the city of Dundee, Scotland, during the 1850s and 1860s. I wrongly thought that the bulk of the population were good church attendees but this is what I discovered:
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| Dundee Parish Church St. Mary's - rebuilt 1842-1844 Medieval tower in behind |
I don’t believe it possible to write a trilogy set during the Victorian era in Scotland without mentioning church attendance at some point. However, the research I did for churches in Dundee (Scotland) during the mid-1800s wasn’t quite as I expected.
When Tailored Truths opens my character Margaret has just arrived in the city of Dundee to meet her best friend Jessie, who has also left her job in Edinburgh. Margaret’s own religious upbringing has been problematic and has left her with grave doubts about God, and the realities of following a pious church-filled lifestyle.
Margaret’s own parents have had a dysfunctional marital relationship, her father ostensibly fervently devout but never seemingly happy with any particular protestant denomination that he tries out. Growing up in the 1840s, in the small town of Milnathort, Kinross Shire, Margaret has been dragged to church regularly but over time to different church sects and church buildings.
In Scotland, the year 1843 was a time of ‘church’ turmoil, a time when the long-established and main Church of Scotland fractured and around a third of the ministers and lay people left to form new churches. These new churches, based on different ideologies, struggled to gain new followers. Margaret’s father never appeared to find the best fit for his zealous religious fervour, her mother blindly following and displaying almost no will of her own. By her early teen years, Margaret has formed no particular allegiance to any church, and isn’t entirely sure if there’s a point to putting all one’s faith in the god worshipped in protestant churches in Scotland.
Margaret and Jessie are in Dundee for an initial purpose – both seeking to confront their own fathers. Jessie’s father, who has never acknowledged that she is his bastard daughter, is a degenerate minister whose position in Milnathort has been rescinded and he’s been sent to pastor in a Seaman’s Mission Hall in Dundee. Jessie feels the need to confront this ‘Man of God’ – who has left a trail of unacknowledged bastard children in his wake – so that she can get on with her own life. Margaret’s father’s whereabouts are unknown though the last sighting for him is Dundee. She’s not seen him for a few years but she’d like to clarify some awful things she heard about his treatment of her mother, information divulged by her uncle on her mother’s deathbed.
Jessie’s quest for her father is easily resolved at the beginning of Tailored Truths, but Margaret is at an impasse. With no address like Jessie had, Margaret quickly realizes that asking at church doors if anyone has ever heard of her father is a fruitless exercise. There is a church building of some form on almost every street, or street corner, in Dundee. Many of these are of the established Church of Scotland but meeting halls and church buildings affiliated to lots of other protestant sects are dotted in between. When Margaret left home to work in Edinburgh as a twelve-year-old, her father was attending a United Free Presbyterian church, but he could be attending any one of a number of different ones in Dundee. When Margaret walks around Dundee, the church information boards outside their buildings declare them to be Congregational; Methodist; Baptist; Memorial; United Secession; Relief. Many church meeting halls had different names and practices like the Sandemanian and the Glasite communities. Margaret thinks it unlikely that her father would have changed to attending a Roman Catholic Church, or an Episcopalian Church (with rituals more like a Church of England) but it’s always possible. Though, her father may, by now, have given up on religion altogether.
What I found surprising were references to the fact that there were a good number of people living in Dundee during the mid-1850s who didn’t attend a church at all. Whether they were truly atheist, or just not inclined to attend regular worship wasn’t clear. What wasn’t surprising is that the Dundee city population rose steadily every decade of the 1800s and new residents to Dundee perhaps felt less pressured to conform to church attendance, if it wasn’t their calling. There was probably an anonymity to someone dwelling in a city, with fewer people watching their every move, unlike how it still was in a small town, or country setting.
A specific census of 1851, regarding church attendance across Scotland, attempted to determine how many regular church attendees there were. That data isn’t all available but a note was made that possibly around 60% in Scotland were regular attendees. However, it was also noted that attendance in the larger cities in Scotland – Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Dundee – was a lot lower than that of across the countryside.
In Tailored Truths we find Margaret sometimes attending the church of one of her friends but, as often as not, she doesn’t go at all. To still appear to be a respectable young lady there’s a hint that she makes sure to be out of her lodging house at some point on a Sunday, her landlady making the assumption that Margaret is being a good church attendee. Since church services and meetings took place in the mornings, afternoons and evenings on a Sunday it wasn’t so difficult to create an assumption.
Does that mean that Margaret spent godless and lawless Sundays? Tailored Truths reveals that answer…
Till next time,
Slainthe!
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