One of the most outstanding diarists in modern Britain, the leading churchman and public figure Herbert Hensley Henson (1863-1947) commenced his Journal in Birkenhead in 1885, while tutoring the indolent son of William Rathbone, a Liverpool shipping magnate. This extensively annotated edition publishes the first four volumes in full. It covers his experiences in a ship-building town hit hard by the industrial depression of the mid-1880s, and mired in religious sectarianism; his return to All Souls College, Oxford, and establishment of the Oxford Laymen's League for the defence of the Church, while agonising over whether he should become ordained; and his work at the Oxford House, the Anglican settlement in Bethnal Green, in combatting the influence of secularism. The value of the Journal from its earliest volumes is evident in its incisive commentary on people, places, and events, its searching reflections on Christianity and the authority of the Church, and in its fine literary style.
