The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions. Vol. III

‘The nineteenth century’, as Eugenio Biagini observes at the beginning of his contribution to this volume, ‘was indeed a good one for the Dissenters of the British Isles from the point of view of their political significance and impact on society as a whole’ (p. 407). One might go further and conclude that it was, by a considerable margin, their best century. The numbers of Dissenting worshippers recorded by the (admittedly problematical) religious census of 1851 in England and Wales effectively equalled those of the established Church, amounting to almost half of the churchgoing population; the comparable proportion in Wales was four-fifths. In the British dominions and colonies, and in the United States, Protestant non-Anglican membership and attendance likewise reached new heights. It is perhaps appropriate, then, that this should be the first of Oxford University Press’s five-volume series devoted to the Protestant Dissenting tradition, from Elizabethan Puritanism to the global expansion of non-established Christian religions at the end of the twentieth century, to be published

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