Victorian missionaries often delivered their message to the unconverted poor a little closer to home, writes Chris Upton.

We tend to think of the Christian missionary as someone who disappears into the heart of Africa or South America, a bible in one hand and a hand-drawn map in the other.

This was certainly a common enough enterprise in the 19th century, when the Christian churches felt duty-bound to take their message to places untouched by the Gospels.

But not all the heathen lived in far-away places. The ministers and priests who administered to the cities of Victorian England were all too aware that darkness and ignorance, as they saw it, lay just around the corner.

A stone’s throw from the hymn singing on a Sunday morning there were families who had not once set foot in a church, and had never opened a bible because they didn’t need it, or couldn’t read it.

It was in such circumstances that the urban missionary was born. Destined to plod the streets like a travelling-salesman, the urban missionary took his tracts and his bibles, his words and his consolation, down into the back streets.

In Birmingham it was the nonconformist churches in particular that sent out missionaries, and established missions in Hurst Street, Allison Street and elsewhere.

The Congregational Town Mission at Carrs Lane initially appointed three missionary agents in 1837, and allocated to each a group of streets, roughly 20 in number.

Inevitably, of course, the courts behind most Birmingham streets added considerably to the size of the district. One agent’s 21 streets also included 40 back-to-back courts.

The first appointees were Edwin Derrington, who was allocated streets around the Garrison Lane chapel where he already worked, Peter Sibree from Tamworth, who was based in Legge Street, and Mr Clay, who was allocated the Livery Street neighbourhood.

Each kept a journal of his daily round, which was then submitted to the church elders for approval. For all the Poor Law enquiries and medical reports drawn up in Victorian Birmingham, these missionary diaries contain the most vivid descriptions of the living conditions of Birmingham’s poor to be handed down to us.

By the summer of 1837 another missionary was added to the team. His name was Thomas Augustine Finigan, and his designated patch was the poorest and darkest of all.