Canto original
2 total works
Nancy Mitford once observed that some of the most bitter personal clashes of all time have been 'between the Manor and the Vicarage'. Owen Chadwick's Victorian Miniature paints a detailed cameo of nineteenth-century English rural life, in the extraordinary battle of wills between squire and parson in a Norfolk village. Both the evangelical clergyman and the squire, proudly conscious of his Huguenot ancestry, were passionate diarists, and their two journals open up a fascinating double perspective on the events which exposed their clash of personalities. The result is a narrative that is at once deeply informative about Victorian class distinctions, rural customs and festivities, and richly entertaining in a manner worthy of Trollope.
The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century
by Owen Chadwick
Published 29 January 1976
The declining hold of the Church and its doctrines on European society represents a major shift in Western life and thought. Owen Chadwick's acclaimed lectures on the secularisation of the European mind trace this movement in the nineteenth century, identifying and exploring both the social and the intellectual aspects of this momentous change. The rise of technology, the growth of big cities and a cheap press take their place alongside evolutionary science and Marxism in this fascinating analysis of the erosion of the Church's power. Woven into its brilliant discussion are brief but very illuminating studies of familiar major thinkers, including Marx, Darwin, Mill and Comte.