Dissenters

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Cultural formation Maria Abdy
As a member of the English professional classes and an adherent of the established Anglican church, she was presumably white and relatively privileged, but little is known of her life. Her mother's family were Dissenters .
Cultural formation Mary Linskill
Seventeenth-century Linskills were active in the Society of Friends and in local trade.
Quinlan, David, and Arthur Frederick Humble. Mary Linskill: The Whitby Novelist. Horne and Son, 1969.
5-6
Mary Jane was strongly religious. Stamp relays a story of her mother not only frightening her with stories about hell, but...
Cultural formation Sarah Austin
SA came from a presumably white, professional, English Liberal background; hers was one of the most prominent dissenting families in Norwich, known for their talent and energy and their many contributions to ....
Cultural formation Elizabeth Major
EM was a Gentlewoman and probably a Dissenter . She was deeply pious.
Cultural formation Elizabeth Barrett Browning
She grew up in great privilege and luxury, since her mother's wealth and father's income from Jamaican plantations allowed the family to live according to their rank as English gentry, particularly in her earlier years...
Cultural formation Hannah More
HM had almost no contact with the Methodists, but despite her strong commitment to the Church of England she was broadly tolerant of classical Nonconformity . During the Blagdon controversy she admitted in a letter...
Cultural formation John Henry Newman
Brought up, educated, and ordained in the Anglican Church , JHN began, with others, to entertain fears for its future as a national church. Emancipation of Catholics and Dissenters led them to suppose that the...
Cultural formation Elizabeth Cairns
EC was a Dissenter and apparently a Covenanter (that is, one of those who opposed episcopacy in Scotland). She carefully charts her religious development from childhood: her early delight in God's creation, her awe in...
Cultural formation Frances Notley
FN 's christening in the Church of England is listed as having taken place at Old St Pancras Church in London on 24 January 1843. If there is no mistake in this record, her being...
Cultural formation Mary Chandler
MC belonged to the English middle class; her family background was both Old Dissent and Old Whig (which meant that during the Civil War they had been anti-royalist).
Shuttleton, David. “Mary Chandler’s Description of Bath (1733): the poetic topographies of an Augustan tradeswoman”. Women’s Writing, No. 3, pp. 447 - 67.
451
Cultural formation Margaret Oliphant
Her family were Dissenters . When Margaret was fifteen the Free Church of Scotland split from its parent body; her parents espoused the rigidly opinionated new sect.
Cultural formation Mary Maria Colling
Baptised a Congregationalist , that is in contemporary terms a Dissenter , MMC later became a practising Anglican . She was deeply religious.
“FamilySearch Internet Genealogy Service”. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Bray, Anna Eliza, and Mary Maria Colling. “Letters to Robert Southey”. Fables and Other Pieces in Verse by M.M. Colling, Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1831, pp. 1 - 85.
17
An Independent church in England is normally Congregational, though the Wesleyan Independent sect also existed.
Bozman, Ernest Franklin, editor. Everyman’s Encyclopaedia. J. M. Dent, 1958.
Cultural formation Amelia Opie
She came from a cultured, financially comfortable middle-class but Unitarian English family. Her class status meant that even after she converted from Dissent to Quakerism ,
Opie, Amelia. “Introduction”. Adeline Mowbray, edited by Shelley King and John B. Pierce, Oxford University Press, 1999, p. i - xxix.
xxxviii
her attitudes remained worldly in comparison with those...
Cultural formation Ivy Compton-Burnett
Both parents came from Dissenting backgrounds; Ivy's maternal grandfather was a fervent Methodist . She herself, after inventing fictitious deities as a child and being baptised and confirmed in the Anglican church, chose from an...
Cultural formation Sarah Savage
SS was a Welshwoman but with strong ties to England, belonging to the professional classes but accustomed to the stigma of Nonconformity in a society where the Established Church was a vital plank in the...

Timeline

March 1673
Charles II withdrew the Declaration of Indulgence promulgated one year earlier, which had offered a limited degree of freedom of worship to both Dissenters and Roman Catholics .
1676
A tally taken by Church of England clergymen and known as the Compton Census set out to number adult Catholics and Dissenters in England and Wales.
March 1686
James II 's General Pardon and Royal Warrant released another batch of persecuted Quakers from prison.
4 April 1687
James II 's Abolition of the Test Act (a change which was also called the Declaration of Indulgence) extended freedom of worship without penalty to Catholics and Dissenting sects; but it remained in force only...
8 June 1688
The seven bishops (the Archbishop of Canterbury and six others) were imprisoned in the Tower of London for refusal to proclaim and distribute James II 's Declaration for Liberty of Conscience.
11 May 1792
Fox again proposed in the House of Commons that civil rights should be extended to Dissenters ; Burke, who had defended Dissenters in the past, furiously disagreed.
8 August 1851
The system of tithes (one-tenth of the produce of agricultural land paid yearly for the support of the Church of England ) was abolished at the instigation of William Blamire the younger (1790-1862).