The Victorian clergyman is a familiar character in the fiction of the period, especially in the novels of Anthony Trollope and George Eliot. Through text and pictures, this book sets out to tell his story and to set him firmly in the context of the nineteenth-century Church of England, revealing how Victorian clergy differed from those of the present day. Anglicanism presents a broad spectrum of belief and practice, and the reign of Queen Victoria, when religion waxed much larger in the national consciousness than it does today, was a time of many controversies. At one extreme there were so-called 'Low Church' Evangelicals; at the other 'High Church' Tractarians, keen to set the church into its catholic (though not necessarily Roman Catholic) tradition. These controversies, which at times generated more heat than light, reached every level of the church, from the bishop in the House of Lords down to the parson in his parish. The book looks at the way in which men 'entered the church' and at the growing professionalism of the clergy. Topics included range from clerical incomes to clerical costume, changing patterns of worship, and the pastoral work of clergymen in town and country. Book jacket.