Religion

Most of the Cornish immigrants in nineteenth-century Canada were Wesleyan Methodists who often joined with Methodists of other persuasions to establish new places of worship. Of particular note is the work of the Bible Christian denomination, which from 1831 onwards sent missionaries to Prince Edward Island and the newly opened lands north of Lake Ontario. During the 1840s and 1850s entire Bible Christian and Wesleyan Methodist congregations in Cornwall, such as the Pelynt congregation near Fowey, settled as agricultural communities in Upper Canada. Other congregations from northern Cornwall came as extended families. The Bible Christian Church flourished in Canada until 1884, when it merged with other Methodist denominations.

While the original Cornish migrants soon assimilated into mainstream English-Canadian society, their descendants sought to maintain a community life based on the core institution of the extended family. Characteristic of the Cornish, too, was a strong sense of individualism. This was particularly true of the women, who, because their miner-husbands were frequently away from home for extended periods, acquired a significant degree of domestic autonomy. In other respects, the image of Cornish-Canadian communities as a combination of Methodist religion and the working-class culture of mining, chapel choirs, brass bands, and rugby football can also be applied to migrants from south Wales and the north of England. However, in contrast to these immigrants, the Cornish emphasis on individualism and communal self-help did not translate into automatic support for institutionalized social action in the shape of socialism or trade unionism. Yet some Cornish were active in the temperance movement, Sabbatarianism, and education.