Building A Victorian Country Church

The late 1860s saw church building on a large and unprecedented scale in Victorian England, one example of which was the parish church which forms the basis of this study. Contemporary documentation relating to the construction of the church has survived in remarkable fullness allowing J.R.L. Allen to present an extremely detailed reconstruction of the materials and equipment used, the funding of the project, the identity of the workmen, specialist masons and architect involved and their pay and conditions as well as the provisions made by the local population to accomodate the construction process.

Beautifully illustrated narrative history of the English country church In his engaging account, Sir Roy Strong celebrates the life of the English parish church From the arrival of the missionaries from Ireland and Rome, to the beautiful architecture and rich spirituality of medieval Catholicism; from the cataclysm of the Reformation, to the gentrified cleric we meet in Jane Austen novels, Roy Strong takes us on a journey - historical, social and spiritual - to explore what men and women experienced through the age when they went to church on Sunday. ‘Anyone with the slightest interest in the English parish church, of its life today, or its history will be intrigued, informed and enchanted by this lucid, and occasionally provocative, account’ Country Life

This is a reassessment of the phenomenon of church architecture in the 19th century. It presents a range of interpretations that approach Victorian churches as products of institutional needs, socio-cultural developments, and economic forces.

The architectural work of Joseph John Talbot Hobbs is impossible to overlook in Perth and Western Australia. It dominates public spaces as well as domestic and business landscapes. A strong sense of duty determined that the diminutive fifty year old architect solder, J.J. Talbot Hobbs would in 1914 voyage to the First World War, where he survived the horrors of Gallipoli and the Western Front. Hobbs' powerful organisational skills positioned him as Australia's highest ranking soldier in Europe after the Great War. Organiser of Australian war memorials in France and Belgium, his stellar designs both there and throughout Western Australia are now largely forgotten. Who was J.J. Talbot Hobbs that he was considered to be of such importance at the time of his death that a memorial was built in one of the most prominent places in Perth?

Professor Chadwick completes his study of the Victorian Church with detailed accounts of the problems which confronted the Church in the latter part of the nineteenth century: the question of science and religion, the acceptance of biblical criticism, the Church in village and town, changes in the attitude to the episcopacy, relationship with the Roman Catholics, and the growth of secularization. The material is organized in masterly fashion, the style of writing is characteristically engaging, and the innumerable sidelights on people in high and low places are as illuminating and relevant as in Part I of this work. The two volumes together provide an understanding of the background of many of the problems, which the Church faces today. For this second edition, Professor Chadwick has made many minor revisions to the text and included a number of additional bibliographical references.

Concerned here broadly with the period 1829-59, Professor Chadwick writes of the church's precarious position at the start of the period, and the problems of dissent; the Whig reform of the Church by the ministries of Peel and Melbourne; the Oxford Movement, the influence of Newman and the development of ritual; the relations of church and government under Lord John Russell; the growth of the seven principal dissenting bodies; the theory and practice of Church and State at mid-century, and the troubles that arose over eucharistic worship; and finally the unsettlement of faith and the several attempts at restatement at the close of the period. The history is completed in The Victorian Church, Part II 1860-1901.

A landmark illustrated history of rural church monuments - the forgotten national treasures of England and Wales Deep in the countryside, away from metropolitan abbeys and cathedrals, thousands of funerary monuments are hidden in parish churches. These artworks - medieval brasses and elegant marble effigies, stone tomb chests and grand mausoleums - are of great historical and cultural significance, but have, due to their relative inaccessibility, faded from accounts of our art history. Over twenty-five years, C. B. Newham FSA has visited and photographed more than eight thousand rural churches, cataloguing the monumental sculptures encountered on his quest. In Country Church Monuments, he presents 365 of the very best, each accompanied by detailed photographs, biographies of both the deceased and their sculptors and a wealth of contextual material. Many of these works commemorate famous historical figures, from scheming Tudor courtier Richard Rich to Victorian prime minister William Ewart Gladstone. But more moving are the countless others - minor aristocrats, small-time industrialists, much-loved mothers, fathers and children - who, if not for their memorials, would wholly be lost to time. As Newham blows the dust off these artworks and breathes life into the stories they tell, a new aesthetic history of rural England and Wales emerges. Country Church Monuments is a poignant record of the art we make at the borders of life and death, of our ceaseless human striving for eternity.