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As soon as divine service was over, the Thorpes and Allens eagerly joined each other.—Northanger Abbey 28
Jane Austen’s religious faith and Anglican worldview shaped her novels, as scholars such as Laura Mooneyham White, Michael Giffin, William Jarvis, Irene Collins, Roger E. Moore, and others have shown. Her novels often mention church and clergy as well as church-related issues. This is not surprising. Jane Austen’s father and many of her relatives were clergymen, and she grew up in the parsonage of a country church, so she knew the lives and world of clergy families well. Northanger Abbey begins and ends at such a country church. The heroine, a clergyman’s daughter, expands her horizon as she travels to Bath, a city with a wide range of churches and chapels. She attends a chapel there that would have been quite different from her parish church. Catherine then experiences an abbey, which Moore claims is a symbol of England’s lost Catholic heritage, degraded from a place of hospitality for all into a place welcoming only the rich (93–94). When Catherine is forced to leave the abbey, the spire of a cathedral points her way back home. Finally, she settles into the parsonage of another country church with her clergyman husband. These places of worship give us windows into Catherine’s experiences.
The four types of places of worship mentioned—churches, chapels, abbeys, and cathedrals—each had a distinctive place in English life and worship. A “church” was a Church of England parish church. Each of England’s 11,600 parishes had one parish church, intended for everyone in the parish to attend. If the church was too small or if some parishioners lived too far away, “chapels of ease” were built to ease the burden on the mother church. Bath, growing quickly and hosting many visitors, included many of these chapels of ease. Private, institutional, and Dissenter chapels filled other needs. Parishes in a geographical area were, and still are, combined into a diocese supervised by a bishop, whose “seat,” or center of authority, is in a cathedral. Abbeys were large monasteries or convents, but after Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries in the 1550s, some became churches like Bath Abbey, others became private residences like Northanger Abbey, and some deteriorated into...