[‘I was aiding the poor in speaking so frankly to the rich’: Anthony Wilson Thorold, successively Bishop of Rochester and Winchester.] Long Autograph Letter Signed criticising the middle and upper classes for excluding the poor from churches.

An interesting and empassioned letter, highlighting one aspect of the debate over the class inequalities present in mid-Victorian England. See Thorold’s entry in the Oxford DNB. 8pp, 12mo. On two bifoliums. In good condition, lightly aged. Folded twice. Signed ‘A. W. Thorold’. The recipient is not named. He begins by stating that his speech at Islington lasted twenty-five minutes, as opposed to the report in the journal he has sent him, which ‘could be easily spoken in two’, and does not give a ‘fair notion of its point and aim’. He continues: ‘My mark was this - to try & convince my audience, chiefly composed of the higher classes that they were not doing enough for Chruch Extension in simply providing for their own accommodation, but that they should at the same time provide for the poor’. He contends that ‘ninety-nine out of a hundred modern churches are not built for the poor & not intended for them: [...] They were built for the middle classes who occupy them, who pay for them, whose souls need as much looking after as other mens, but who by a law of physics occupy a space that cannot at the same time be occupied by other people, & who actually & virtually are the congregation. / Most cordially do I sympathise with your feeling that in the House of God rich & poor should meet together[.] I have to see my own free seats occupied by intelligent & earnest people, whom I look upon as the salt that keeps the vast population from moral putrescence, & who by their life if not by their words adorn the Gospel.’ The journal may be right in its claim that ‘Mr Daniel Moore’ entirely dissented from Thorold, but for his part Thorold agreed with Moore on all but one point, which he considers ‘rather a low kind of rhetoric’. He asks whether it is the working or middle classes who fill ‘our Parish Churches & our District Churches’: ‘if the churches are filled with the upper & middle classes, unless churches are built for the poor, whose fault is it that they are without God in the world’. Thorold was ‘perfectly aware’ that his was ‘an unpopular statement, & addressed to an unsympathising audience’, but ‘For that I care nothing. / I believe that I dropped a seed of truth, which will be recognised sooner or later by candid & thoughtful men, judging not by what they wish to find there, but by what they see is there’. He concludes: ‘I think I am as much the friend of the poor man as any one in that hall was: I believed that I was aiding the poor in speaking so frankly to the rich.’