CYNTHIA SCHEINBERGhistory. The growing influence and state recognition of non-Anglican
religious communities becomes most apparent in a series of Parliamentary
acts throughout the middle decades of the century. Of central importance
was the 1828 repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts that mandated that
all public offices in England be held by members of the Church of England.
Although these acts were primarily symbolic - since there were legal
loopholes that allowed Dissenters to serve in public offices prior to this act
- their abolition signaled, in Gerald Parsons's words, "the growing influ-
ence of Nonconformity and changing attitude towards religious establish-
ments." 5 In 1829 the Catholic Relief Act granted Roman Catholics the
same political rights held by Protestant Nonconformists. It would take
until 1858 before Parliament voted to modify the Christian oath of office so
that Jewish people could freely take up elected positions without having to
swear "on the true faith of a Christian."
These significant political reforms reflected the increased influence of a
number of different religious groups whose numbers and organizations had
grown enormously in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
The Dissenters of the earlier centuries now tended to be referred to as
Nonconformists. As Parsons has written: "the 1851 Religious Census" (the
first of its kind in Britain) "made clear the diversity of Victorian Non-
conformity ... It revealed no less than thirty separate Non-conformist
traditions"; he makes distinctions in these groups between "Old Dissent"
(groups whose roots came out of the religious controversies of the
seventeenth century) and "New Dissent" (which consisted of "Methodists,
Calvinistic Methodists and a minority of Baptists... and was a product of
the Evangelical Revival of the eighteenth century"). 6 Along with a marked
rise in the Nonconformist movements, the nineteenth century also wit-
nessed considerable transformations in both Jewish and Roman Catholic
communities. What linked these two quite different religious constituencies
was the Anglican assumption that Roman Catholics might claim a primary
allegiance to the Vatican and Jews might associate with a collective notion
of "Israel" that saw itself to some degree independent from the English
state. As a consequence, it was felt that both of these distinctive affiliations
might limit Roman Catholic and Jewish loyalties to English national
identity. The anxiety about Roman Catholic allegiance was surely aug-
mented by the fact, as Parsons remarks, that "between 1800-1850 the
number of Roman Catholics in England and Wales had increased dramati-
cally from under 100,000 to approximately 750,000." 7 "Most of this
increase," he adds, "was due to Irish immigration." Parsons notes that the
rapid growth in this Roman Catholic minority was only one cause of the
virulent anti-Catholicism evident in the mid-century. Other causes, he
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