Reverend Arthur Tooth

A carte de visite portrait of the Reverend Arthur Tooth, the ritualist priest who was prosecuted in 1876 for using proscribed liturgical practices and as a result served a brief prison sentence in January 1877.

Born on 17 June 1839 at Swifts Parks near Cranbrook in Kent, he was educated at Tonbridge School and at Trinity College, Cambridge (BA 1862, MA 1865). He was ordained a deacon in 1863 and became a priest in 1864. He briefly served two curacies; from 1865 to 1868 he was the minister at a mission church in Chiswick. In 1868 he became vicar of St James’s Hatcham, a working class parish in south-east London, where his introduction of ritualist practices soon attracted large congregations. He also established parish organisations that helped the area’s most needy residents.

When the Public Worship Regulation Act was passed in 1874, those who disapproved of his High Church and quasi-Catholic liturgical practices initiated legal proceedings against him. The charges included the use of incense, candles on the altar, the elevation of the Host and processions with crosses. The case came before Lord Penzance at Lambeth Palace on 13 July 1876 but Tooth, refusing to recognise the authority of the court, did not attend. He ignored the judicial warnings that resulted from his non-attendance and also the legal attempts to restrain him from exercising his ministry. His opponents were by now hiring people to cause disruptions whenever he presided at worship.

Eventually, on 22 January 1877, as a result of repeatedly ignoring the decisions of the Court of Arches, he was taken into custody for contempt of court and imprisoned at London's Horsemonger Lane Gaol. This action immediately transformed him in the eyes of Anglo-Catholics from a rebel into a Christian martyr. The object of the imprisonment was not to punish him but merely to prevent him from conducting his proscribed services, and this aim having been achieved, he was released a month later.

In 1878, he had acquired a property at Woodside, Croydon, where he established a chapel, a convent and an orphanage school. He spent the rest of his life involved in the running of Woodside orphanage and of St Michael’s home for boys at Otford Court in Kent.

Arthur Tooth died at Otford on 5 March 1931 and was buried in Crystal Palace District Cemetery. There is a memorial to him in the Anglican chapel at Walsingham.

Photographed by Samuel A. Walker of London.

The portrait was entered at Stationers’ Hall, along with six others presumably taken on the same occasion, on 22 January 1877, the same day that Tooth was imprisoned. The accompanying form reads: 'A photograph of the Reverend Arthur Tooth sitting, left hand on chair, right hand holding a book, looking to the left.’