Radical Churchman: Edward Lee Hicks and the New Liberalism

Historians of the Christian Social movement in the Church of England during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have paid little attention to its relation to the Liberal Party. But from about 1886 to 1918 there were some socially concerned churchmen who firmly supported the Liberal Party in its new role as an agency of social reform and tried to exercise influence as a group, taking Henry Scott Holland as leader and inspirer. Edward Lee Hicks, who succeeded Edward King as bishop of Lincoln in 1910, was a distinctive churchman associated with this group. He was an outstanding classical scholar who combined a long pastoral experience with active support of movements for temperance reform, improved housing, women’s education and enfranchisement, and international peace. This study shows how he developed these social concerns under the influence of such friends as John Ruskin and C. P. Scott, and how he was drawn from his radical liberalism to the support of the incipient Labour Party without becoming a theoretical socialist.