HISTORY / RELIGIOUS STUDIES / URBAN STUDIES

PIETY AND POVERTY

Working-Class Religion in Berlin, London, and New York, 1820–1914

Drawing on moving personal accounts—letters, oral histories, and memoirs—as well as original documentary evidence found in parish records, histories, and demographic data, Hugh McLeod explores the role of religion in the everyday life of working-class communities.

The book reveals how belief and unbelief are related to the experiences of poverty, social class and alienation, to the ways in which people celebrated rites of passage and survived personal crises, to relationships between men and women, and to political organizations.

McLeod examines the link between secularization and the growth of cities as centers of working-class life, and chronicles how new forms of religiosity arose alongside secular political movements and remained a force among the poor even as institutional attachments diminished. Another important contribution is the book's discussion of the gendering of religious experience.

"A major piece of comparative research. Piety and Poverty will be of basic interest to anyone who wants to understand the nature of modern urban culture."
—John R. Gillis, Rutgers University

Hugh McLeod is professor of Church History at the University of Birmingham and president of the British branch of CIHEC (International Church History Organization). He is the author of several books in the comparative history of religion, including Class and Religion in the Late Victorian City and Religion and the People of Western Europe 1879–1970.