"Especially the poor": The London City Mission, 1835-1914

This dissertation considers the work of the London City Mission (LCM) between 1835 and 1914. It presents an analysis of the evangelical faith, agency, and achievements of LCM’s working-class missionaries as they lived and worked among people whom many have believed to have been religiously ignorant and indifferent. This was not the case. This dissertation is not a study of LCM’s success measured by the details of new evidence of working-class churchgoing and churchgoers, but an analysis of the way in which LCM’s missionaries’ undenominational religious teaching became available to substantial numbers of those whom they sought to reach in anything they might be doing, and everywhere they might be met. It is a dissertation whose perspective is different. It is a discussion of working-class Christian faith that was experienced at a significant distance from the sacraments and structures of institutional and denominational religion. Its evidence is drawn from the hitherto unknown eye-witness accounts of LCM’s missionaries that are contained within LCM’s extraordinary archive. This study details the fundamental principles of LCM, identifies its unique character, and reveals the unrecognised scale and scope of their evangelical mission. It discusses LCM’s working-class missionaries, their backgrounds, their motivation in their work, and illustrates the way in which their spiritual imperative in mission was inseparable from their deep social concern. It explores the diversity and creativity of the missionaries’ agency. It demonstrates how over generations, in their districts and fields of special mission, because of their mutual understanding, and support, LCM’s evangelical mission thrived and was accepted as an integral part of everyday life by hundreds of thousands of working-class people