The Death of Christian Britain

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