Copious Drink and Plain Religion: A Frenchman’s View of Victorian Britain (Snippets: 6)

Holy Trinity Church, Ashford-in-the-Water, Derbyshire, England , Via Wikimedia Commons.

In a series of visits to Britain between 1862 and 1870, outspoken Frenchman Hippolyte Taine wrote lengthily about his impressions, and his comments-at-a-distance give us a clear and fascinating view of our ancestors in a way that no other source quite achieves.   

Taine blamed the awful British weather for what he saw as a national problem with alcohol: ‘the principal temptation assailing men here is to turn drunkard.’ He was, however, highly praising of the very visible temperance movement and with the sobriety and good sense of Protestantism in general. Like many of his contemporaries, he found the pomp and ceremony of the Catholic Church in France quite distasteful. In Aberdeen, for instance, (staying in a Temperance Hotel) he attended a Sunday service in a Scottish Presbyterian chapel and was pleased to find, ‘no pictures, no statues and no instrumental music. The church is simply an assembly room, provided with a gallery and rows of benches, very convenient for a public meeting…. The sermon was well spoken, soberly and sensibly, without oratory….’   

Quotations are from: Notes on England by Hippolyte Taine, translated and with an introduction by Edward Hyams, London, Thames and Hudson, 1957 [Translated from the French Notes Sur L’Angleterre 1860-1870]