SOURCE: "The Seeds of Ritualism," in Glorious Battle: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism, Vanderbilt University Press, 1996, pp. 3-28.

In the following essay, Reed assesses the impact of Tractarianism on Anglo-Catholicism in nineteenth-century Britain.

The Church of England at the end of the nineteenth century was a very different institution from what it had been seventy or eighty years before.¹ Of course England was a different place, and many of the changes in the Church simply reflected that. The nation's population had more than doubled between the 1830s and the 1880s; that of London had nearly trebled. Hundreds of new churches had been built in an attempt to keep up with the growing urban and suburban population, and the numbers of clergymen and churchgoers had also greatly increased—if not as fast as the population.

The new clergymen struck many observers as more earnest, more hard working, more...