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Overview
Readers of Trollope must wonder whether the clergymen who inhabit his cathedral closes and rural parsonages are true to life. The answer is yes. The Passing of Barchester provides an answer by a vivid account of the careers of a Victorian Dean of Canterbury and of the eight close relations he appointed to benefices.
Clive Dewey breathes life into the Dean, a redoubtable high churchman, and his relatives, as they worked their parishes, married eligible brides, made miniature grand tours on the Continent and congregated around Canterbury, the focus of their social life.
The Passing of Barchester brings out the attractions of a career in the Church, at a time when this could still provide an ample income and the leisure to pursue scholarly and other interests. Beautifully written, this book is not only highly entertaining but also a real contribution to the understanding of nineteenth-century society, illustrating the central place of patronage in Victorian England.
Photographs, engravings and paintings of all but one of this group of clergy survive and are included in the book, together with illustrations of their world.
Synopsis
Tractarians and Evangelicals, the extremists of the nineteenth-century church, have successfully imposed their propaganda on posterity. Every text assumes that these militants saved the Church of England from the slough of complacency and corruption that their most powerful enemies - 'high and dry' dignitaries - had created.
This book rehabilitates the bishops and deans who are commonly supposed to have lavished preferment on unworthy friends and relations. It shows how members of the Hackney Phalanx, the high-church equivalent of the Clapham Sect, used their patronage to co-opt the able and energetic sons of rising business and professional families: ordinands with the talent and ambition to make a substantial contribution to the church from families that might have otherwise been lost to dissent. A single clerical connection, of nine related clergymen revolving round a mid nineteenth-century Dean of Canterbury, William Rowe Lyall (1788-1857), illuminates a number of central features of church and society: patronage; the co-option of new men; and the attraction of the church as a professional career.
This exceptionally readable book contains vivid pen-portraits of Dean Lyall and his clients, rigorous economic analysis of the financial returns of a clerical career.