70. Esther Wells: the daughter-in-law who converted to Anglicanism

It is Alfred's eldest son Arthur who suggests that the marriage gave John and Alice some concern on religious grounds.  Esther had come into the Hopkinson family in 1865 as a 19 year old governess.  Alfred was then 14 years old and he quickly fell for Esther – within months John was writing to Alice 

Alfred was expressing great approval of Miss Wells to me last night. [1]

One of John and Alice's criteria for applicants for the job was that they should be able to fit in with the family's religious education, and Esther's letter of application was supported by a letter from her 31 year old sister Miss Anne Eliza Wells, a teacher:

Ours is, I may say, hereditarily a congregational family … My uncle Mr Arthur Wells' name is probably familiar to you in connection with many religious and denominational efforts.  And my two sisters with myself, have long been members of the Church here.  Esther has, of course, been brought up in the same persuasion, but is not yet a member.  The Rev C Colemance, our present minister, considers her in a hopeful state of mind; but she has not yet made a public profession.  And we should be most thankful to see her admitted into a truly Christian family where impressions which I know she has received would be encouraged and brought forward. [2]

John and Alice were very pleased with the letters from the Wells sisters and offered Esther the post.  We don't know how long Esther stayed with them.  Her father Henry Wells, a Nottingham solicitor, died aged 61 in October 1869 and she may have been called home that year.  By 1870 she was back in Nottingham living with her rich uncle Arthur Wells and returning to Manchester as a guest and friend of Alfred's sister Ellen, seven years her junior and evidently a great admirer.

Esther barely appears in Ellen Ewing's account after her appearance as a governess.  As Gerald Hurst says in his Preface,

the Esther Wells whose first appearance in its pages under the date of 1865 presents to later generations what seems a strange contrast with the vivid and dominant personality whom they knew in after years. [3]

But we know that Alfred had fallen deeply in love with her.  And Ellen Ewing includes a letter in which Alice wrote to John on 9 March 1872 

Alfred proposes to come home by Nottingham, staying a few days.  Poor lad.  I feel his heart is there.  I am sorry for it under the present circumstances [4]

but it isn't clear why Alice was sorry nor what the "present circumstances" were.  Possibly Alice is thinking of her struggle to adapt to young John's engagement to Evelyn, as "the Mother's sympathy, confidence and love are no longer needed".  Possibly Esther was steadily turning Alfred down.  Possibly Alice wasn't convinced that Alfred and Esther were really suited; the marriage was to be an unhappy one.  And possibly it was because Esther had by then been confirmed into the Church of England and this development had made them doubt Alice and John's understanding of Esther and whether she was the right wife for Alfred.

Esther's son Arthur – who was devoted to his mother and entirely on her side – gives Esther's side of the story and we have no other.  Before her marriage

She came under the influence of a great priest, Canon Hutton of Sneinton, and was confirmed.  It was a brave step, and she needed grace and courage then and thereafter, for at the time of her marriage to my father he was strongly anti-Church, and especially bitter against Baptism.  His people were Congregationalists or, as they preferred to be called in the old days, Independents.  They would have been glad to get my mother back to the denomination in which she had been brought up.  But nothing shook her loyalty to the Church, nor her determination to have her children baptized.  I expect the battle was fought and won over me, for my six younger brothers and sisters were baptized as a matter of course. [5]

And so on 3 July 1873 Alfred and Esther were married at St. Leodegarius' Church in what was then the village of Basford outside Nottingham.  Their grandchildren had a story that John had pressured Esther into marrying Alfred by saying that the lad would take his own life if she didn't agree to marry him.  After spending so long in John's (virtual) company, I find this absolutely impossible to believe.  I can imagine one of the sisters, perhaps Ellen, would be very keen to emphasise to Esther quite how much Alfred was besotted with her, but I cannot think those serious girls would make so light of the idea of suicide, so grave a sin as it was to them, and also still a crime under English law.

The officiating clergyman at the wedding was Alfred's uncle Revd George Ibberson Tubbs of St Mary's, Reading.  Like Esther, he had undergone a conversion.

When I last mentioned George Ibberson Tubbs it was at his wedding to John's sister Ellen in February 1839.  He was then a Congregationalist minister in Warminster in Wiltshire.  Eight years later he amazed his congregation at the Common Close Chapel by announcing that he was leaving for the Church of England.  The Patriot on 13 May 1847 reported that the subscribers of the Common-close Chapel of Warminster had unanimously adopted a resolution expressing their "most unfeigned regret" at the resignation of their "beloved pastor".  They deeply deplored 

the circumstances which have made it appear to him his imperative duty to sever those bonds which they had fondly hoped would have been long perpetuated

(I can only think that his studies had converted him to the Book of Common Prayer and the necessity for Bishops).  They were sending a deputation to wait upon Mr Tubbs "to request him to reconsider".  George didn't change his mind.  

St Mary's, Castle Street, Reading
by Stephen Richards

He became a priest in the Church of Ireland.  In 1850 he left his curacy in the diocese of Lismore for London, to become a curate at Trinity Church, St Mary Newington, south of the river in the parish of Lambeth.  Two years later he became incumbent of St Mary's Episcopal Chapel in Castle Street in Reading.  There he stayed for more than 30 years.  

It had been founded by breakaway Anglican evangelicals and for nearly 40 years had been outside the Church of England, taking its ministers mainly from the Calvinistic churches of the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion.  In 1836 it had been accepted back into the Church of England, but it must always have been close in spirit to the Nonconformist churches – no wonder it was a good home for George Tubbs.  The church has come full circle in recent years.  In 1994 the Church of England (Continuing) was founded there and it is once more outside the Church of England.

We have no idea what John and his mother and sisters made of George's conversion to Anglicanism, nor whether George's wife Ellen agreed with him, nor how difficult it was for her to adjust to being a vicar's wife in County Tipperary.  On the other hand, we can have a pretty good idea of what John and Alice thought when Esther's brother Arthur became a Roman Catholic priest.

Notes

[1] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910 (1948) ed. Mary Hopkinson and her niece Lady Ewing, with a Preface by Sir Gerald Hurst, K.C., p. 46

[2] ibid., p. 45

[3] ibid., p. VII

[4] ibid., p. 61

[5] Arthur W Hopkinson, Pastor's Progress (1942) pub. Michael Joseph Ltd., p. 134 of Religious Book Club edition

69. Evelyn Oldenbourg: the daughter-in-law with no religious belief

Dr Maclaren's guidance must have been a great resource when she was coping with the challenge that came in the person of her new daughter-in-law Evelyn Oldenbourg, and perhaps we can see both challenges in her letter to John on 9 March 1872.  Ellen Ewing quotes her saying, after she had been writing about Evelyn,

I am wondering whether it is good for us or not to hear statements contrary to what we believe to be truth; it tries me most when I see some reason in what is advanced and yet feel the view at variance with what I have long been accustomed to regard as undoubted truth.  If, by this means, we are driven to prayer and more earnest searching, no doubt the result will be good.  Certainly it is more easy to go on undisturbed, enjoying our belief and living upon it, refusing to listen to any opposition.  What is right is another question [1]

Evelyn, a school friend of young John's sister Ellen, came from a very different background.  Her father Gustave Oldenbourg, who died when she was a baby, was a German-born stuff and yarn merchant in Leeds, and her mother Angelina was from Yorkshire.  Ellen Ewing quotes her mother Evelyn's memoirs:

Perhaps my young life abroad and such a varied outlook and education did not quite fit with the somewhat serious severe atmosphere of this family, though I was happier there than anywhere else. [2]

Katharine Chorley, remembering her Aunt Evelyn, thought that the "months on end" Evelyn had spent with family in the "so much softer and sunnier and more expansive" surroundings of Dresden and Munich had 

infused into her outlook the richness and the freedom which raised her mentally a head and shoulders above almost all the women I knew when I was young. [3]

She described with great fondness Evelyn's unconventionality and eccentricities, her energy and bravery, indicating that Evelyn, who was to suffer such dreadful losses in her life, had no religious faith

her philosophy of life threw her on to her own resources and offered her neither comfort nor explanation.  She did without and, unarmed, threw back the challenge of suffering with a gallant 'No Surrender'. [4]

A greater contrast with her future mother-in-law cannot be imagined.  Evelyn's daughter Ellen Ewing wrote

Evelyn sensed that she was not entirely acceptable, though she probably failed to realize the spiritual upheaval which her advent in the family had caused, especially in the Mother and even the level headed Ellen. [5]

Almost everything about her seems to have been a challenge.  When Alice visited John and Evelyn in their first home near Birmingham, she wrote to John on 21 April 1873

Evelyn is really a fascinating hostess; her bright, happy face is quite contagious.  I must follow up your advice and not trouble about scratched furniture, plate, etc., and all best things in daily use.  I say to myself it is only a matter of money – earlier replacement, no great concern if they can afford it, and, if not, they must use the spoilt or do without.  What say you to my conclusions? [6]

But Alice grew steadily more and more comfortable with Evelyn, writing on 18 May 1890 to John 

When left alone with Evelyn we get on very well; she is very daughterly and interesting as well, and I can say more of my mind to her than to any of the four daughters-in-law [7]

John and Evelyn had married on 4 March 1873 at St John's Church in rural Longsight, half an hour's walk west of his parents' home at Grove House (the church is now a mosque).  His younger brother Alfred was married four months later, and his marriage also took place in a parish church.

Notes

[1] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910 (1948) ed. Mary Hopkinson and her niece Lady Ewing, with a Preface by Sir Gerald Hurst, K.C., p. 61

[2] ibid., p. 54

[3] Katharine Chorley, Manchester Made Them, pub Faber & Faber Ltd (1950) p. 232

[4] ibid., p. 227

[5] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910, p. 61

[6] ibid. p. 63

[7] ibid., p. 97

68. Challenges to faith: a son's imperviousness, science & new theology

John, their first child, was a strong and independent character even from babyhood.  On 21 June 1851, when he was 18 months old, his father John wrote to the little boy's grandmother Alice 

he is a dear little fellow, most loving and affectionate but so determined and headstrong that we sometimes hardly know how to treat him.  He has so much perseverance and energy that he will make either a very good or a very bad man [1]

In 1852 little Johnnie was impeding his mother as she wrote to John

I am writing whilst Johnnie is at my side telling me he wants to be naughty; you must excuse incoherency. [2]

We can see how much careful thought Alice and John gave to the best way of bringing up their children in a letter of Alice's in February 1854

Johnnie has been getting very crooked with Grandpapa this afternoon.  The scene made me pray that we might be spared to bring up our dear children – harshness and hastiness would ruin Johnnie, whereas gentle loving correction seems to bring out all his tenderest affection.  I have had occasion to put him to bed twice lately; when he comes to himself the dear little fellow has clung to me with more than his usual affection.  Alfred is rather obstreperous; he has a prouder spirit than Johnnie.  I fancy he will be more difficult to subdue yet he is a winning pleasant child [3]

They hoped fervently that their children would come to experience conversion, the experience that Fanny Dickens had described to the Revd James Griffin:

By degrees my eyes were opened, and I saw with shame and confusion my utter worthlessness in the sight of God, and that unless I came to Him through His dear Son, I could not be saved  

They hoped and prayed that daily Bible reading, chapel attendance and careful teaching would help the children on their way.  They often spoke of it to each other, as John wrote to Alice in August 1867 from Paris, when young John was 18  

We went to a little prayer meeting at eight.  There were several very earnest faithful addresses.  Oh how I longed that it might be the turn of our dear John's conversion [4]

But young John was impervious to all their teaching.  From her visit in October 1881 to young John and Evelyn in Kensington, Alice wrote to John in something like bewilderment

There is very much to be thankful for in this home – a growing mutual affection and, in the main, a wholesome training of the children.  But I do feel the want of religion in the home; it is like the perpetual banishment of a cherished needed friend.  And yet, strange to say, John seems to be more of a 'good' man than many a professing religious man. [5]

This was a conundrum that she and John had not expected.  But it didn't affect their relationship with their remarkable son.  In Bertram Hopkinson's memoir, he wrote of old John Dewhurst that his nonconformist principles were 

the expression of a sturdy independence of character, and it taught an almost stern devotion to truth and duty.  These were the qualities which Alice Hopkinson learnt from her father and passed on to her son.  Of the narrowness which sometimes marred the nonconformist faith in those days there was none in her teaching.  Thus it was, that though John Hopkinson in part rejected the form of her creed, he was able to keep its essence, and this slight divergence never affected the sympathy between him and his mother.  To the end of his life it remained, a perpetual joy to both of them [6]

In the years after Alice's death in 1910 her children generally drifted away from Congregationalism but not necessarily from faith, her daughters especially remaining truly devout.  Alfred was clearly the most torn in mind, leaving a legacy in his Will to the Rusholme Road Chapel Sunday School, disapproving heartily of infant baptism, but finding himself strongly drawn to the paintings of the Madonna he found in his holidays on the Continent.  His niece Katharine Chorley wrote that he had "a rather troubled spirit" and, she suspected, "an unresolved philosophy of life." [7] Distinct social differences had opened up between chapel people and church-goers by the early 20th century, but she thought that the great draw of the Church of England among her family and neighbours was on aesthetic grounds and because of the "grave and noble dignity of the Book of Common Prayer".  Her father's brothers and sisters had deserted one by one the Congregationalist chapels of their upbringing and she felt they were "drawn by the alluring beauty and majesty of the Litany" [8]

The second challenge to John and Alice's faith were the momentous 19th century developments in science and scholarship which brought immense difficulties to so many.  Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) and the eruption into British scholarship of liberal German theology are the most famous examples of this.  

Alfred could remember the shock of the liberal theology.  He wrote in his memoirs of how in Puritan households like theirs the Bible was the literature that "absorbed most attention and was read most constantly" and was considered "literally and verbally inspired" and that

I can remember at the age of fifteen or sixteen feeling rather shocked by the remark of an older boy that what is recounted in the Bible before the Call of Abraham must be taken as really allegorical. [9]

Dr Alexander Maclaren
(1826-1910)

Alice's adjustment must have been made much easier by the minister at the chapel she now attended, the Union Baptist Chapel in Oxford Road, close to their home in York Place.  Her daughters Ellen and Mary had started attending in 1873 and Alice must have followed soon after.  The minister there was the celebrated Dr Alexander Maclaren (1826-1910) who was famous as an expository preacher – that is, he explained in detail the meaning of Scriptural texts.  Listening to his sermons would be like listening to an excellent lecture.  In a lunchtime lecture in 2010 (it can be found on the Evangelical Library website), the Revd Gary Brady quoted an American professor of homiletics who described Dr Maclaren [10] as one of the great preachers of the world – 

First of all, he had the physical outfit of an impressive speaker – an erect figure, a good action, a flashing eye, an expressive countenance, a carrying voice.  The character lying back of the utterance was one of singular purity, depth, simplicity and humility.

Alice's son Alfred describes meeting the great actor Sir Henry Irving at the opening of the John Rylands Library, when Dr Maclaren had given a speech.  Sir Henry had been greatly impressed – "Good heavens," he said to Alfred, "What an actor that man would have made!"[11] 

The Union Chapel was built to hold 1,500 worshippers and its seats were filled morning and evening to hear Dr Maclaren preach for anything up to 45 minutes.  And Alice could actually hear Dr Maclaren's clear, carrying voice and distinct enunciation long after her deafness cut her off from so many other things.  Extracts from Dr Maclaren's works can be read online on the Bible Hub website or from the link at the bottom of his Wikipedia page so we can see how he dealt with some of the puzzles posed by science.  On Genesis 1:26 he wrote [12]

We are not to look to Genesis for a scientific cosmogony, and are not to be disturbed by physicists' criticisms on it as such. Its purpose is quite another, and far more important; namely, to imprint deep and ineffaceable the conviction that the one God created all things …

The work of the first four days is the preparation of the dwelling-place for the living creatures who are afterwards created to inhabit it.  How far the details of these days' work coincide with the order as science has made it out, we are not careful to ask here ... 

On the sixth day the earth is replenished with living creatures.  Then, last of all, comes man, the apex of creation.  Obviously the purpose of the whole is to concentrate the light on man; and it is a matter of no importance whether the narrative is correct according to zoology, or not.  What it says is that God made all the universe, that He prepared the earth for the delight of living creatures

When it came to the new German "higher criticism" which applied scholarly historical and critical methods to Bible study, Gary Brady quotes Willis B Glover, who wrote of Dr Maclaren in 1954 that 

His greatness as a preacher rested on his emphasis on evangelical certainties rather than on the reconciling of old theology with new theories. Nevertheless, the example of so great a preacher who was tolerant of higher criticism and who even entertained the possibility that the story of the fall was mythical could not have been without effect.

While old Lord Shaftesbury in his undeviating and rigid Fundamentalism was dreadfully troubled by the threat from the higher criticism (scientific discoveries, as Alice's great-granddaughter Georgina Battiscombe explains in her biography of the Earl, [13] bothered him far less), Alice could leave it all to Dr Maclaren, secure in his learning and guidance.  

Next:  69. Evelyn Oldenbourg: the daughter-in-law with no religious belief

Notes

[1] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910 (1948) ed. Mary Hopkinson and her niece Lady Ewing, with a Preface by Sir Gerald Hurst, K.C., p. 18

[2] ibid., p. 20

[3] ibid., p. 24

[4] ibid., p. 50

[5] ibid., p. 77-8

[6] Original Papers by the late John Hopkinson, D.Sc., F.R.S. edited with a Memoir by B. Hopkinson, B.Sc (1901), Vol 1, pub. CUP, (available online at archive.org)

 p. xii

[7] Katharine Chorley, Manchester Made Them, pub Faber & Faber Ltd (1950), p. 218

[8] ibid., p172-4

[9] Sir Alfred Hopkinson, K.C., LL.D., Penultima (1930) pub. Martin Hopkinson Ltd, p. 79

[10] cf https://www.evangelical-library.org.uk/articles/Maclaren_Lecture.pdf

[11] Penultima, p. 242

[12] https://biblehub.com/sermons/auth/maclaren/the_vision_of_creation.htm

[13] Georgina Battiscombe, Shaftesbury: A Biography of the Seventh Earl 1801-1885, (1974), pub Constable & Company Ltd

67. "Spiritual worship" & "mockery of religion"?

John and Alice were deeply attached to the ways of their own chapel.  This wasn't without music, as is sometimes said, as we have seen in the story of Henry Burnett & Fanny Dickens (in Chapter 27 )

We can see that Alice enjoyed music in chapel from her letter to John on 30 October 1865 from Bristol, where she was staying with her sister-in-law Mrs Alice Wills

I was at Chapel twice yesterday.  I enjoyed the singing and the evening service.  The morning minister I could not hear.  The chapel is really beautiful.  I only hope that the idea of spiritual worship will be retained amongst us along with so much that charms the senses  [1]

As Bijan Omrani wrote in God is an Englishman (2025), Puritanism was

the move made from devotion through the senses to devotion through word and intellect 

and Alice is clearly rather unsettled by Congregational chapels adopting a rather more welcoming approach to the appeal to the senses.  Her grandson Arthur wrote of his grandparents

What saved them from the unattractiveness of Puritanism was their intense love for poetry … They loved the beauty of Nature as revealing the glory of God.  It is strange that only in religious matters would they banish sacramentalism from life.  My grandmother was an enthusiastic admirer of Wordsworth, the most sacramentally-minded poet of her time.  She used to enjoy telling the story of how one day she was walking near Grasmere and saw a venerable figure coming towards her: she asked a roadmender seated on his heap of stones, "Is that Wordsworth?" and met the rebuke, "That's Mister Wordsworth, mam."  My grandfather's chief enthusiasm was for John Milton, as combining poet and Puritan. [2]

As John's willingness to attend the Anglican service in the cathedral shows, he was all in favour of union between Protestant denominations.  Catholicism was another matter.  Arthur wrote that

the austerity bred by their type of religion was lightened by a true kindliness towards all honest folk, whatever their religious convictions – except, of course, Roman Catholics, whom they would not have regarded as honest folks.  This deep-rooted prejudice of "No Popery" was an ugly flaw. [3]

"No Popery" was the centuries' old cry of Protestant England.  Hostility to Catholicism became a live topic again with the mass migration of Irish Catholics into Manchester from the late 18th century, and the ancient fears were stirred up once more when Pope Pius IX reinstated Catholic church organisation and hierarchy in 1850.  But the edited letters show that Alice and John could take a more nuanced view than simply "No Popery".  They evidently weren't so ferociously a Protestant as to refuse to set foot in a Catholic church, though Alice found her first visit as a young woman an upsetting experience.  When she and John visited Paris in the summer of 1855 they attended the Baroque church of Saint-Roch in the rue Saint-Honoré.  She told Alice Wills on their return to England in a letter of 25 August 1855

Paris seems wholly given up to the worship of pleasure.  We attended a Roman Catholic service in St Roch: it really was painful to me – it seemed to me nothing more than a spectacle.  I could have wept all the time; it seemed such a mockery of religion [4]

By the time Alice was in her fifties her view was rather different.  In October 1881 she went to stay with young John and Evelyn and their five small children in their home in Kensington.  One Sunday, after going to chapel and leaving unhappily because she couldn't hear a word of the service, she and Evelyn had a good walk in the sunshine.  Then

We looked into the Roman Catholic Church and saw Cardinal Manning in his scarlet robes escorted in all form to the pulpit … The super-abundance of ceremony and symbol appears like the return to the infancy of religion instead of going on to perfection … My desire was to worship; but the bowings curtsyings and movements of the officiating minister (I suppose I ought to say Priest) completely distracted my attention.  A Quaker's silent meeting would have suited me better and proved a better help to devotion.  Minds are differently constituted, and in this way we explain to ourselves that there are those who find help in these outward forms. [5]

Cardinal Manning (1808-92)

So now she was considering the idea that there were people who found help in the "outward forms" that she once felt were "such a mockery of religion".  She and Evelyn had probably seen the 73 year old Cardinal at the Pro-Cathedral on Kensington High Street.  (The building of Westminster Cathedral had not yet begun; the Pro-Cathedral was destroyed in the Second World War and the Church of Our Lady of Victories stands on the site).  Cardinal Manning was one of the century's famous converts to Catholicism, having been an eminent High Church clergyman before his conversion.  The ceremonial and the "outward forms" of the Catholicism nearly a century before Vatican II would certainly be quite unlike anything Alice was used to.  

John's views are not made clear in the edited letters, though we can see he wasn't exactly friendly when he wrote on 29 November 1885 after Alfred was unsuccessful in the election

The brewing interest, the public house keepers and the Roman Catholics – these carried the day against Alfred [6]

but, having attended the service of the Established Church in the Anglican cathedral as mayor, he also went to a Roman Catholic bazaar and fancy fair in aid of the charitable works of the sisters who lived at St Gertrude's House, Alexandra Park.  

The items for sale at the bazaar, reported the Manchester Evening News on 5 December 1882, included articles sent to the nuns from churches in Borneo, India, Mozambique and Fiji.  The 8th Earl of Denbigh, a Catholic convert, opened the bazaar and Lady Herbert of Lea, known for her philanthropic work, was running a stall.  She was Elizabeth Herbert, society hostess, writer, translator, a devoted friend, supporter and assistant of Florence Nightingale, and she had become a Catholic under Cardinal Manning's influence when she was widowed.  In this unlikely setting there was stout Protestant Alderman Hopkinson in his capacity as mayor, and giving a brief address after Lord Denbigh had called for support

whether we called ourselves Catholics or Protestants, we ought to do all we could, according to our consciences, to help the progress of Christianity among the heathen.  (Applause)

Into John and Alice's settled world of faith during their married life there came three challenges.  The first was from raising their beloved eldest son; the second from the challenges to faith from the new science; and the third came from unexpected in-laws.

Next:  68. Challenges to faith: a son's imperviousness, science & new theology

Notes

[1] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910 (1948) ed. Mary Hopkinson and her niece Lady Ewing, with a Preface by Sir Gerald Hurst, K.C., p. 47

[2] Arthur W Hopkinson, Pastor's Progress (1942) pub. Michael Joseph Ltd., p. 216 of Religious Book Club edition, 

[3] ibid.

[4] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910, p. 25

[5] ibid., p. 78

[6] ibid., p. 90

66. "Impossible for us to be Conservatives": being a Nonconformist

Nearly all the religious disabilities set up after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 had been removed when John was a little boy, but they were not quite gone and they were not forgotten.  Alfred wrote that 

It was impossible for us to be Conservatives – to be content with existing conditions at a time when Nonconformists were excluded from the Public Schools and the Universities; when contribution to Church Rates was compulsory and when even the graveyards by the churches which were called national, were closed to almost half of the nation [1]

The Great Gate of Trinity College
by Andrew Dunn

The last of the old religious "Tests" that restricted the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Durham to members of the Church of England had not yet been abolished.  So when Alfred's elder brother John reached the peak of his academic career at Trinity College, Cambridge, the Manchester Evening News of 9 February 1871 quickly picked up the report coming from the Cambridge correspondent of the Daily News (the paper founded by Charles Dickens as a radical rival to the right-wing Morning Chronicle):

A general rumour prevails that Dr Hopkinson, the senior wrangler and first Smith's Prizeman, will be unable to be presented to a fellowship of his college in consequence of his being a Nonconformist, his religious convictions preventing his signing the Thirty-nine Articles, and, possessing a stalwart conscience, he cannot consider signing these Articles a mere matter of form.

Incidentally, John didn't actually have strong religious convictions but, as his son Bertram wrote "at Cambridge he greatly relished his position as a Nonconformist and Radical among the Tory Churchmen, and seized every opportunity of playing the Philistine."  [2]

In the 1850s non-Anglicans had at last been allowed to go to the universities, but men who were serious in their own religious convictions were never able to take up professorships, fellowships and other senior positions because of the barrier of having to subscribe to the Thirty Nine Articles of the Church of England.  This had continued to be "a cause of dispute and bitterness both within and beyond" the universities, as The Times noted on 14 June 1871.  The University Tests Bill, which would abolish the restriction that fettered professorships, fellowships and the like, was making its way through Parliament and on 17 March 1871 The Times reported that it would probably become law, its opponents having at last reached the position that they were 

only anxious that the change shall be made consistently with the full maintenance of Christian teaching.  Such language is very different from what we have heard in years past, when the struggle was avowedly one of Church against Dissent, and the clerical garrisons of the Universities thought it their duty to defend the fortress against every one beyond their pale ... Within the last few years two Senior Wranglers have been prevented, and a third, if this Bill does not pass, will be prevented, from obtaining a Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge.  The individual suffers, the College suffers, ability and industry are discouraged.

The third Senior Wrangler was young John.  In fact, Trinity College changed its own laws before the Bill passed.  But John found himself in the eye of the storm and his brother Alfred wrote years later 

I remember well how at various meetings my brother's case was alluded to, as he had been both Senior Wrangler and first Smith's Prizeman, and how he used to say: "They made a little lion of me and made me roar against the disabilities of Nonconformists"  [3]

We can see how the memory of the civic disabilities stayed with old John Hopkinson from a letter he wrote on 29 November 1885 when Alfred had just had an unsuccessful run at being elected to Parliament and the Liberals had lost the election

the Tories can't do much harm in home legislation … They can't re-impose the Test Acts or treat dissenters as criminals … They can't restore the power of the landlords or take back the franchise  [4]

The Nonconformists in Manchester lived in a culture of striving.  Perhaps this came from their history – the Church of England's long struggle for sole supremacy in England and Wales from the time of Charles II's restoration had kept Protestant Nonconformists outside the power and status of the ruling classes.  It was true that they had been left free to succeed in the new and competitive fields of commerce and finance, but they were very conscious of their excluded position.  The effect of this culture of striving seemed, to later generations, strangely paradoxical.  As Gerald Hurst wrote in his Preface

The parents' Puritanism had windows which opened on two worlds.  One window always faced 'eternity'; the other, disregarding the mediaeval conceit that citizenship is in Heaven, constantly contemplated hard work, self-help, conquest. [5]

Alfred's eldest son Arthur, who became an Anglican priest, wrote of his grandparents' Puritanism

I was sorely puzzled by its inconsistencies, particularly the assumption that God will bless His own with worldly success, and that failure to achieve it is a sign of divine disapproval [6]

Alfred himself felt his parents' attitude was more nuanced.  Without denying that they welcomed and applauded worldly success, he explained that it was secondary to their faith:

In my old home Evangelical religion certainly prevailed and religion was the subject which was regarded by our parents as the most important of any, but it did not lead either of them to endeavour to impose their views upon their children after they were in a position really to think for themselves, but by precept and by practice they presented Evangelical religion in a favourable light.  

Their adhesion to it did mean undoubtedly that there was something, in their opinion, more important than worldly success and not dependent on the opinions held by other people.  It is true that, out of kindly consideration for the habits and opinions of others on matters that were not vital, they would conform to the customs current amongst the people they associated with.  

For example, my father, I know, disliked the paraphernalia then thought necessary at funerals in all classes and the extravagant expense to which people even of very small means were put in order to give what they thought a becoming funeral to their relatives or friends; but I have seen him on a hot day, when he would gladly have worn a straw hat, walking down to the old chapel with a heavy crape band round his silk hat and a scarf over his shoulders tied with a bow at the back.  The cost of providing crape and various signs of mourning, including black gloves, for everybody invited to a funeral, must have been a terrible burden to many families. [7]

Historian Tom Holland in Dominion (2019) in his description of the industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie gives us an understanding of how the emphasis on worldly success could come about.  When Carnegie's Scottish Presbyterian parents, he wrote, travelled to America

they had brought with them, just as the Pilgrim Fathers had once done, the knowledge that regeneration did not come easily to fallen humanity.  A man had to live in obedience to his calling.  Only if he laboured as though everything were dependent on his own exertions would reward then come from God.

And this striving and this view of life was especially unsurprising as John was raised and formed in 19th century Manchester – a city of competition, dynamic, innovative, immensely proud of its importance to the nation and Empire and keen to trumpet all its citizens' achievements to the world.

Next:  67. "Spiritual worship" & "mockery of religion"?

Notes

[1] Sir Alfred Hopkinson, K.C., LL.D., Penultima (1930) pub. Martin Hopkinson Ltd, p. 36

[2] Original Papers by the late John Hopkinson, D.Sc., F.R.S. edited with a Memoir by B. Hopkinson, B.Sc (1901), Vol 1, pub. CUP, p. xxvi

(available online at archive.org)

[3] Penultima, p. 243

[4] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910 (1948) ed. Mary Hopkinson and her niece Lady Ewing, with a Preface by Sir Gerald Hurst, K.C., p. 90

[5] ibid., p. XI

[6] Arthur W Hopkinson, Pastor's Progress (1942) pub. Michael Joseph Ltd., p. 217 of Religious Book Club edition

[7] Penultima, p. 131-2

65. John Hopkinson: a Nonconformist Mayor

On the day that John became Mayor, he told his fellow councillors and aldermen that he had been asked if he planned to attend the traditional Church of England service in Manchester Cathedral.  His answer to this question was picked up by newspapers as far away as Aberdeen – this is from the Aberdeen Evening Express of 10 November 1882

A Nonconformist Mayor and Union amongst Christians

Mr Alderman John Hopkinson, who was yesterday elected Mayor of Manchester, is a prominent member of the Congregationalist body in the city.  At the meeting of the Council yesterday, he said he had been asked by friends if he intended to go to the Cathedral on Sunday.  In connection with this matter he could not forget a recent occurrence at Bristol, where for the first time the clergy of the Church of England sent a deputation to the Congregational Union to offer to the members of that Union, his co-religionists, a fraternal greeting.  As his own individual and humble response to the desire thus expressed for more union amongst Christians of all denominations, he did intend to go to the Cathedral on Sunday.  The announcement was received with applause.

John's faith and his membership of the Rusholme Road Chapel were, and always had been, central to his life.  He was known as a Congregationalist, and this determined how he saw the world and how he was seen by other people.  His faith guided his decisions and his behaviour, and his membership meant that a significant proportion of his time and money was devoted to the chapel.  In fact, both he and Alice would have liked him to spend more time on the church than in the Council chamber.  Alice wrote to him on 2 October 1876

I think the town gets too much out of you.  I would rather the town had less and the church more

And he replied two days later

I should like, with you, to give the town less and the church more.  Yet somehow I feel as if I could do the one work better than the other.  And both are necessary to be done by someone.  And at present I feel I have some power for good in reference to things. [1]

As a Congregationalist he was far from unusual in Manchester, where Nonconformity was dominant.  When in 1844 a member of the Manchester Athenaeum translated two articles [2] from the Revue des Deux Mondes by Léon Faucher, economist, journalist and French politician, he annotated Faucher's comment

Manchester contains more Methodists, Quakers, and Independents, than adherents to the Established Church

with the footnote that out of 137 churches and chapels, the Church of England had only 39.

Gateway to Lancaster Castle
1890-1900

This was a time when all matters of religion were thoroughly discussed in the press.  Doctrine, practice and theology within denominations were important matters, as was religious affiliation.  

The Manchester press in the year of John's mayoralty carried detailed reports of the long-running case of the Anglican vicar of Miles Platting, who spent 12 months imprisoned in Lancaster Castle rather than remove the candles from the altar, stop kneeling during the prayer of consecration, stop using the sign of the cross towards the congregation, and give up all the other actions which his parishioners considered "false doctrine and deadly error".  (Lancaster Castle was used as a gaol for centuries).  

It wasn't unheard of for priests and ministers to move from Established Church to Nonconformist chapel and vice versa, and high profile conversions to Catholicism attracted attention.  There were chapels, churches and meeting houses whose message of meaning and comfort particularly attracted the working classes; there had once been Mormons (see this story from North Yorkshire), though most of them had left for Utah by the time John became Mayor.  

The references to God in the speeches of John and his fellow councillors in the Council chamber might give us the impression that Manchester was a uniformly Godly city.  But they knew only too well that this wasn't so.  On Sunday 30 March 1851 an Ecclesiastical Census had been taken which had been an unexpected disappointment to churches and chapels across England and Wales.  It was a bad blow to the Church of England to realise just how popular Nonconformity had become, but it was a blow to them all to realise that, in the words of the census report, "a sadly formidable proportion of the English people are habitual neglecters of religion".  Taking into account age, infirmity, work and so on, it had been estimated that 58% of the population were free to attend worship, but it turned out that nearly half of this 58% didn't.

Friedrich Engels wrote in 1845 in The Condition of the Working Class that

The working man does not understand religious questions, and does not trouble himself about it. . . . All the writers of the bourgeois are unanimous on this point, that the workers are not religious and do not attend church.

Léon Faucher in 1844 described the middle class families on Mosley Street "walking along in silence, and with a reserved and formal attitude, towards the churches and chapels" while the workers loitered about waiting for the pubs to open.  He thought this was because the "bigoted Puritanism" offered to the working classes left them "sunk in an immoveable stupidity" and turning to drink, as the "sombre and gloomy aspect" of the religion offered to them addressed "neither the senses, the imagination, nor the heart".  (He evidently did not encounter Primitive Methodists, who were generally working class and used to walk in procession through the streets to their services singing hymns which were set to popular tunes).  

Since the 1840s John had been among the many people who had devoted a great deal of their time to trying to remedy this godlessness.  In addition to his devotion to his professional work and his commitment to his public duties, John had been a Sunday School teacher since he was a teenager and since the age of 28 he had been a deacon, an office he only resigned because of the move to Bowdon.  He had been invited to be a superintendent of the Sunday School in 1864, but when he suffered a breakdown in health in 1869 and his brother-in-law Dr William Harrison advised him to cut back on his work, he had to resign.  But I can see he returned to it because he is named in the Manchester Evening News of 10 June 1878 as one of the superintendents in the Whit Monday procession of that year.  The Whit Walk was the great Lancashire Sunday School carnival and thousands of excited children took part, with bands and banners and ribbons and white dresses – in 1878, it was under heavy rain.  Even today some towns still hold their Whit Walks. 

His son Alfred described his father's working week: 

It was the regular habit to go early in the morning to business and stay till late with a break for mid-day dinner, and the partners themselves did much work of a kind which would have been as well done as a matter of routine by others.  I remember one of the heads of a firm which has become one of the most financially successful within living memory saying in his old age: "I believe I have spent half my life doing routine work which would have been better done by a clerk at thirty shillings a week"

On Sunday morning, however, in spite of his hard work all the week, my father regularly started early to go to the Sunday School and conduct a large class of grown-up men.  The school opened at nine, and was something totally different from most of the ordinary Church Schools as known in the South of England.  People grew up attached to the school, and there were cases in which the grandparents attending the senior classes brought their grandchildren to the infant class [3]

Next:  66. "Impossible for us to be Conservatives": being a Nonconformist

Notes

[1] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910 (1948) ed. Mary Hopkinson and her niece Lady Ewing, with a Preface by Sir Gerald Hurst, K.C., p. 64

[2] Published as Manchester in 1844: Its Present Condition and Future Prospects (London: Simpkin Marshall and Co., 1844)

[3] Sir Alfred Hopkinson, K.C., LL.D., Penultima (1930) pub. Martin Hopkinson Ltd, p. 112-3

64. John after the mayoralty: the Art Gallery & the Socialists

John was active on the Committee of the Art Gallery, which was going from strength to strength.  The new Museum in Queen's Park and the Art Gallery were, reported the Manchester press in July 1884, filled with treasures from local collections and loans from the Committee members, while Sir Philip Cunliffe-Owen and the staff of the South Kensington Museum had been of great help and many of the most interesting exhibits had come from their storehouse.  

On 23 September 1885 John wrote to Alice with encouraging news

Our Art Gallery exhibition receipts are going on well – about £120 for the two weeks more than the same period last year.  Our police returns again show a great and most satisfactory diminution in drunkenness and other offences.  I am having graphical representations made of the statistics of a number of years – which I expect will quite bear out my optimist views of the improvement in these respects of the morality of our citizens  [1]

The culmination of his work was in 1891, by which time he and Alice had been obliged to leave their rented home at Grove House on Oxford Road because the Whitworth Institute had bought the freehold and wanted to begin work on turning the house into an exhibition hall (which became the Whitworth Art Gallery & Manchester Museum; the field next door became Whitworth Park) [2]

So John was travelling in to Manchester by rail from his new home 'Inglewood', one of the villas and mansions springing up in Bowdon, which had become a popular Cheshire commuter village.

On 21 March 1891 the Manchester Courier reported the opening ceremony of the Manchester Arts and Crafts Exhibition.  John, who was chairman of the Art Gallery Committee

occupied a central position on the gallery overlooking the main staircase, and he had on his right hand the Mayor of Manchester (Alderman John Mark) and Sir Philip Cunliffe Owen, of the South Kensington Museum

This exhibition was a new departure, John explained – to encourage young designers and, as they had done before, make the exhibition free to the public:

Hitherto they had endeavoured to do something to cultivate the taste of the public by the purchase of the pictures which adorned the permanent gallery, and also by the various exhibitions which had been held.  But the present exhibition was intended to be an educational step.  It was intended to give an opportunity to the numbers of young people connected with the various schools of design and other institutions of cultivating both the eye and the hand.  They had not exercised a great amount of selection because they thought that would defeat the object they had in view, which was to show what was being done among the young people of the city.  Those whose works were considered of sufficient merit would receive the City Council medal …

The Art Gallery Committee have, with wise discretion, decided that the exhibition should be entirely free.  (Hear, hear).  It was the people's art gallery, and it was the committee's desire that the people should enjoy it, without let or hindrance.  (Applause)

The South Kensington Museum had loaned many of the best exhibits, Sir Philip Cunliffe Owen explaining to the guests that "he trusted that the educational resources of the museum would never be entirely confined to the metropolis, but that they might always be shared in by the country generally".

But it was the press report of an event at the Art Gallery a few years earlier that is most revealing of the different undercurrents of society at the time.

John and his colleagues on the committee had always believed that the Art Gallery was an important public good.  As the Manchester Courier of 4 September 1886 reported, the committee "were anxious that the benefits of the institution should be extended as far as possible to the poorer classes."  

And so free admission on certain days was the obvious answer.  On the afternoon of Sunday 4 December 1887 the Gallery's Autumn Exhibition was free to visit.  The next day the Manchester Courier reported that between two o'clock and eight o'clock there had been 6,618 admissions.  John and other committee members were there, lending the visitors catalogues, "all of which were returned in good condition"

A larger number of children than usual was noticeable yesterday, but the respectful demeanour of all classes exceeded any previous experience of the officials.  It was observed that many of the crowd passing along the street in the afternoon with the Social Democrats turned into the gallery, and apparently found its bright and cheerful interior more alluring than the damp atmosphere of the yard of Albert-street police-station. 

Henry Mayers Hyndman
(1842-1921)

Outside in the wet streets, the Manchester branch of the Social Democratic Federation were marching.  The Social Democrats had been founded in 1881 by Henry Mayers Hyndman who had been inspired by the works of Karl Marx to become a socialist.  Marx and Engels actually kept away from Hyndman, but William Morris and Eleanor Marx became members.

The Federation's weekly newspaper Justice had called the day before for simultaneous demonstrations across the country.  Their report spoke of  the Conservative Prime Minister Lord Salisbury's "aristocratic hatred of the people" and the "tyrannous Government".  "Success to the Social Revolution!" was the cry

The Tory Terror has now begun in real earnest, and it is no fault of the present government that Social-Democrats and Radicals were not butchered wholesale in our streets on Sunday, November 13th.  Meanwhile, the miseries of the unemployed are entirely neglected by ministers, and not a single step has been officially taken to help our suffering countrymen

According to the (Conservative) Manchester Courier of 5 December 1887, there were about 24 Federation members marching behind their red banners from Nelson Street to the Albert Street police station yard, which the police had made available to them after making it clear that a mass demonstration in front of the Town Hall would not be countenanced.  

The Courier thought that about 2,000 men and boys gathered to hear the speakers and that most of them were there out of curiosity.  The Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, which picked up the story on 6 December, put the figure at "about 400 unemployed" with "large numbers of sightseers".  The SDF's own Justice on 10 December claimed 6,000 or 7,000 people were there.  

The crowd, the Courier said, dwindled during the meeting which lasted a couple of hours until dark, with a drizzling rain falling on them all the time.  

The SDF speakers were calling for the authorities to provide useful and productive work for the unemployed at fair rates of pay by carrying out local improvements to roads and paths, levelling Moston Tip, making a playground and gymnasium on St Michael's Flags, and demolishing the unhealthy buildings in that area.  They could build "healthy artisans' dwellings, to be let at the cost of maintenance alone".  The speakers called for the Poor Law Guardians to relax the severity of the tests applied to able-bodied unemployed men wanting "outdoor relief" – which is to say, financial support without being obliged to go into the workhouse.  They called for the government to establish an eight hour day in government employment, only use firms paying trade union rates, and make it compulsory that railway, tramway and omnibus companies should only work an eight hour day.  "Work for all and overtime for none" was their cry.  

There were fiery speeches

better to die fighting with sword in hand than to die like rats in a corner … They had been law-abiding so long, and had acted in an orderly and peaceable manner for such a length of time, that they were getting tired of it.  If the Government and the authorities would not listen to their cry for work and for justice, and not for charity, they might yield to a stronger movement hereafter.

Because, despite John's optimism, there were people who did not trust the employers and who thought the ruling classes did not have the interests of the workers at heart.  They didn't share John's sunny view as he ended his term of office as mayor that

There was much poverty and hardship, but on the whole it was well borne, and it was well met by the helpfulness of the rich and of the poor

Their emphasis was on the physical needs, not the moral and spiritual needs, of the poor.  This was becoming a pressing need as economic conditions worsened.  Ellen Ewing tells us that there were many accounts of philanthropy in the letters to and by John and Alice, from friends, children and grandchildren.  She mentions young John lending £2 to one of his workmen so he could escape from the "thrall of his victualler" – he owed £1 to a shop on account which meant he couldn't leave that shop "as they would be down on him" – and making him promise not to buy on credit any more.  John's view was robust

The co-operative stores, which strike at the root of the evil, will do more for the labouring classes than all temperance and such like societies put together [3]

We remember John senior and Lord Shaftesbury touring the Manchester streets to spot drunkards – perhaps there had been interesting family discussions about temperance.  Young John clearly simply couldn't imagine how the poor could become addicted to drink.  His sisters, meanwhile, did their best to help their Sunday scholars when families got into trouble.  Their cousin Mary Tubbs was taking food to the poorest quarters of Plymouth. [4] But the Social Democrats and the Radicals saw the problem in terms not of charity but of social justice and rottenness in the whole economic system.  

From 1870 Great Britain had begun to face the inexorable challenges coming from the rise of the United States and Germany.  Severe unemployment had followed the global financial Panic of 1873, Trade Unionism had been expanding from the early 1870s and, though it would be temporarily checked in the trade depression of the mid-1880s, it would recover and grow, aided by socialist activists.  1889 would see the great Dock Strike in London, in which Cardinal Manning played a key role as mediator, and the 1890s brought turmoil in industrial relations.  

Luckily for John, he never saw the shattering of his dreams of progress.  He died before the "Great Unrest"  , the violent labour upheavals in the decade before 1914, and he and Alice were both gone before the outbreak of World War One.

Next:  65. John Hopkinson: a Nonconformist Mayor

Notes

[1] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910 (1948) ed. Mary Hopkinson and her niece Lady Ewing, with a Preface by Sir Gerald Hurst, K.C., p. 89

[2] cf. Manchesterhistory.net

[3] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910, p. 68

[4] ibid.