The old vicar lived miles away, was used to empty pews and was not greatly bothered by the robbery during his tenure of a large fifteenth-century standing tomb from the church’s east end. In the parish of Ketteringham in Norfolk, the eighteenth century chugged to a belated close during the 1830s. It turned out to be a nice example of the kind of book I am talking about. Wishing I had time to read all of them and wit to take them in – Anne Boleyn’s life, the impact of Darwin, the Knights Templar – I picked out Victorian Miniature. Ten years ago I found myself glancing through a shelf of Canto paperbacks (in Cambridge, where the University Press publishes them), all nicely and cleanly produced, with an appealing colour picture on the front cover, and many within my preferred limit of a couple of hundred pages.
Wishing I had time to read all of them and wit to take them in – Anne Boleyn’s life, the impact of Darwin, the Knights Templar – I picked out But once in a while, in real-life testimonies like those of Parson Woodforde, Sydney Smith, George Herbert and William Cowper, and in several fictional lives – Archdeacon Grantly, Mr Collins, Parson Adams, the Vicar of Wakefield – you find something that shows an aspect of the ecclesiastical past as it was, with living people and heaven a long way off. Most books that cover this sort of thing tend towards the weighty, the fusty, the pompous and the pietistic. The history of the Church of England is 500 years of English society biffing itself, and then biffing itself back, with every conceivable feature of human behaviour and emotion displayed. The more you see of churches the more you can read the signs of what went on in, around, despite or because of them. In fact, I have something like an addiction. Very little religious has happened in the forty years since, but – probably because of all this – churches have hung on.
I caught teenage religious ardour, and at Cambridge was stretched by the contrary pulls of King’s College Chapel music and intellectual doubt. At boarding school I allowed myself to be confirmed C of E. I, all of 8 and with no better reason than that he had, stopped too. I had been baptized into the Roman Catholic Church but some years on my father rather bravely stopped being Catholic. God, church, priests, prayer, faith – they all started off strong in my life but few kept up.
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