At Home - Bill Bryson [10]
Woodforde was a decent enough human being—he sent food to the poor from time to time and led a life of blameless virtue—but in all the years of his diaries there isn’t any indication that he ever gave a moment’s thought to the composition of a sermon or felt any particular attachment to his parishioners beyond a gladness to join them for dinner whenever the offer was extended. If he didn’t represent what was typical, he certainly represented what was possible.
As for where Mr. Marsham fit into all this, there’s simply no telling. If it was his goal in life to make as little impression as possible upon history, he achieved it gloriously. In 1851, he was twenty-nine years old and unmarried—a condition he kept for life. His housekeeper, a woman with the interestingly unusual name of Elizabeth Worm, stayed with him for some fifty years until her death in 1899, so at least she seemed to find him agreeable enough company, but whether anyone else did, or didn’t, cannot be known.
There is, however, one small, encouraging clue. On the last Sunday of March 1851, the Church of England conducted a national survey to see how many people actually attended church that day. The results were a shock. More than half the people of England and Wales had not gone to church at all, and only 20 percent had gone to an Anglican service. However ingenious they may have been at creating mathematical theorems or compiling Icelandic dictionaries, clearly clergymen were no longer anything like as important to their communities as they once had been. Happily, no sign of that was yet apparent in Mr. Marsham’s parish. The census records show that seventy-nine worshippers attended his morning service that Sunday and eighty-six came in the afternoon. That was almost 70 percent of the parishioners in his benefice—a result much, much better than the national average. Assuming that that was a typical turnout for him, then our Mr. Marsham, it appears, was a well-regarded man.
III
In the same month that the Church of England conducted its attendance survey, Britain also had its decennial census, which put the national population at a confidently precise 20,959,477. This was just 1.6 percent of the world total, but it is safe to say that nowhere was there a more rich and productive fraction. The 1.6 percent of people who were British produced half the world’s coal and iron, controlled nearly two-thirds of its shipping, and engaged in one-third of all trade. Virtually all the finished cotton in the world was produced in British mills on machines invented and built in Britain. London’s banks had more money on deposit than all the other financial centers of the world combined. London was at the heart of a huge and growing empire that would at its peak cover 11.5 million square miles and make “God Save the Queen” the national anthem for a quarter of the world’s people. Britain led the world in virtually every measurable category. It was the richest, most innovative, most accomplished nation of the age—a nation where even gardeners rose to greatness.
Suddenly, for the first time in history, there was in most people’s lives a lot of everything. Karl Marx, living in London, noted with a tone of wonder, and just a hint of helpless admiration, that it was possible to buy five hundred kinds of hammer in Britain. Everywhere was activity. Modern Londoners live in a great Victorian city; the Victorians lived through it, so to speak. In twelve years eight railway termini opened in London. The scale of disruption—the trenches, the tunnels, the muddy excavations, the congestion of wagons and other vehicles, the smoke, the din, the clutter—that came from filling the