Release date is 2025-11-27

Aaron Adrignola, Karin Spence and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

"Ten years in a Portsmouth slum" by Robert R. Dolling is a memoir of urban mission work written in the late 19th century. It charts a priest’s ten-year effort at S. Agatha’s, Landport (Portsmouth), to confront poverty, vice, and spiritual apathy by building a worshipping community and practical institutions that reshape daily life. Expect candid accounts of slum realities, reform strategies for men, women, and children, and the ecclesiastical tensions that accompanied his methods.

The opening of this memoir sets Dolling’s purpose and context: a hurriedly written appeal born of nonstop preaching and fundraising, followed by a U.S. note about support and letters attesting his character and work. He then sketches Portsmouth and the semi-isolated Landport district, recounting his appointment through Winchester College and a sympathetic bishop, and embracing Dr. Linklater’s ambitious model of a church-centered mission. First encounters reveal raw poverty, lawlessness, and children hardened by sin, alongside respect for Nonconformist lay efforts where the Church had done little. Dolling responds by rooting change in personal holiness and practical help: establishing a clergy house and a gymnasium in a purchased chapel, drawing rough lads from the streets, and using patient, often female-led, one-to-one care to reform them. For girls and women, he builds clubs that teach refinement, creates supervised dances to foster respectful courtship and Christian marriage, and turns “mothers’ meetings” into supportive homes of faith. For children, he centers the Sunday children’s Eucharist, secures and revives failing day schools through persistent prayer and fundraising, praises devoted teachers, and argues that clear sacramental teaching—not state “unsectarian” religion—truly forms souls. The section closes with penitentiary work: a compassionate rescue of “fallen” women, persistent pressure to close bad houses, and a parish orphanage to protect little ones. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Originally published: London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., Lim., 1897