The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
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— Men in Discourse and Narrative 1800–1950 —<br />
struggles going on in the shadow <strong>of</strong> an overarching opposition between<br />
the conceptions <strong>of</strong> piety and masculinity. <strong>The</strong> problem for religion after<br />
1800 was the need to corral masculinity within the newly constructed and<br />
feminine-prioritised piety, to attempt resolution <strong>of</strong> men’s exclusion from<br />
the domain <strong>of</strong> piety.<br />
During 1887 and 1888 the religious newspaper the British Weekly<br />
published some forty articles on ‘Tempted London’, a series concerned with<br />
the moral condition <strong>of</strong> men and women in the capital. Men and women<br />
were dealt with separately – men during the first thirty articles, women in<br />
the last ten. <strong>The</strong> nature <strong>of</strong> moral weakness in the two sexes was conceptualised<br />
very differently. <strong>The</strong> articles on women were organised on the<br />
principle that occupational exploitation corrupted women. ‘We intend to<br />
arrange them in classes,’ the first article on women stated. ‘We shall begin<br />
with the lowest class – namely, flower-girls, watercress-sellers and street<br />
hawkers. From this class we shall pass on to factory hands, girls in trades,<br />
servants, milliners, dressmakers. ...’ 5 <strong>The</strong> iniquities <strong>of</strong> the trades in which<br />
the women worked were studied in detail, focusing on low wages, home<br />
working, long hours and the exploitation <strong>of</strong> employers and merchants.<br />
Home workers and street sellers were the main object <strong>of</strong> attention, from<br />
the palm-weavers and necklace-makers <strong>of</strong> Tower Hamlets to the fraudulent<br />
servants’ registries which ripped-<strong>of</strong>f poor migrant girls. 6 <strong>The</strong> women<br />
themselves were not deemed ‘immoral’, either explicitly or implicitly, but<br />
as victims <strong>of</strong> casual work, street work and home working. Women were<br />
regarded as degraded rather than demoralised or immoral, and interestingly<br />
there was no mention <strong>of</strong> prostitution.<br />
<strong>The</strong> British Weekly spent only four months studying women, but seven<br />
months on men. <strong>The</strong> organising principle here was different, with the focus<br />
not being on work but on sites <strong>of</strong> male temptation. <strong>The</strong> men’s articles were<br />
organised around three headings: drink, betting and gambling, and impurity.<br />
<strong>The</strong> venues for each temptation were studied in detail through the<br />
personal visits <strong>of</strong> the newspaper’s ‘commissioners’ to business houses, pubs,<br />
clubs, betting houses <strong>of</strong> various kinds, gambling clubs, music halls, dance<br />
halls and so on. ‘<strong>The</strong> danger <strong>of</strong> the quiet, orderly club’, a typical article on<br />
the ‘respectable’ gaming club ran, ‘is more invidious and its influence more<br />
unconscious to the youth who chances to be introduced there. He has been<br />
taken, say, by some one who does not appear a special blackguard, but<br />
simply a man who “knows the town”.’ 7 Gambling clubs, by contrast, were<br />
visibly dangerous: ‘If you go into Soho you may get your head broken, in<br />
others one is as safe physically as in one’s own dwelling. But in all the<br />
atmosphere is unhealthy and vitiated; the myriad microbes <strong>of</strong> moral disease<br />
abound in the very air.’ 8 <strong>The</strong> pubs were the key, being invariably the first<br />
stop on a man’s route to other venues <strong>of</strong> temptation: ‘Having a drink may<br />
almost be called the latch-key to everything that is vicious’. 9 Music halls<br />
‘engender looseness <strong>of</strong> behaviour and laxity <strong>of</strong> morals’, especially through<br />
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