Early Victorian Periodicals and the Colonial Church of England

Abstract

The decades after 1830 constitute a period of critical importance in the history of the Church of England in the British Empire. This was the moment when Anglicans were buffeted by political changes that left the Church – which had once been viewed as the empire’s “established” church – as a semi-independent institution with no privileged relation-ship with the British state. These changes brought with them new ques-tions: how was the Church to govern itself, what was the nature of An-glican identity, how would the different branches of the Church be uni-fied, and which communities should the Church serve? Did the Church’s traditional status as the “Church of the English” mean it still had a duty to minister to a wider, and rapidly expanding, colonial population? This essay shows that much of this debate was conducted in the pages of a new class of periodicals that were devoted specifically to the Church in the colonies. The significance of this literature has not been fully appre-ciated by historians. Focusing primarily on one publication – the Coloni-al Church Chronicle (first published 1847) – the essay examines the answers that a group of orthodox high churchmen gave to key questions engaging imperial Anglicans in this period, and considers whether peri-odicals could bring imperial Anglicans together to create a sense of “An-glican Communion,” or if print literature was another source of contesta-tion and division in colonial Churches.