The Death of Christian Britain

— Men in Discourse and Narrative 1800–1950 —
Longer tracts of eight or sixteen pages took time to embrace men’s
culture with an authentic voice. One dealt with the moral dialectic at Epsom
on Derby day: ‘the roar and rush of life’ with ‘bookmakers, tipsters, costers,
backers, the purse-trick gentlemen’. ‘The showmen on the hill are shouting
– “Walk in gents, no children admitted; wonderful freak of nature, walk
in sir;” and the preachers on the course are singing “O Calvary, dark
Calvary, where Jesus shed His blood for me.”’ The whole Hogarthian scene
was a pan-class moral joust:
The whole scene is a panoramic medley, the sound a perfect Babel,
a mixture of culture and cruelty, of blue blood and blatant blackguardism;
a mingling of peer and peasant, of duke and dustman; of
prince and plebeian; from castle and from cottage, from the court and
the camp; autocracy and democracy hobnobbing in the ignoble sport
of gambling; the cream of society and the scum of the earth rubbing
shoulders with each other. 35
Tracts were socially levelling, targeting men of substance as well as of
poverty: ‘Quickly, ye men of business and might! Your life is more than
half gone already. You have passed the crest of the hill, and are looking
towards the sun-setting.’ 36 Tracts attacked merchants who gave short
measures or adulterated produce; true religion would banish ‘pebbles from
the cotton-bags, sand from sugar, chicory from coffee, alum from bread, and
water from the milk-cans’, and ‘looks on a man who has failed in trade, and
who continues to live in luxury, as a thief’. 37 Tracts were written and distributed
for specialist sinners: drinkers on the way to the pub, gamblers,
smokers, the ‘impure’, theatregoers, New Year revellers, Sunday traders. In
the theatre were to be found ‘wicked men, profligates, profane swearers,
debauchees, prostitutes’. 38 One tract aimed at London theatregoers said you
would find ‘the scum of vicious poverty’ in the gallery, ‘the froth of vicious
mediocracy’ in the pit, and ‘the cream of aristocratic pride, vanity, and scandal’
in the boxes. 39 Tracts for every occasion and occupation were available:
tracts for railway travellers, cabmen, tram-drivers, publicans, even ‘backsliding
professors’. Tracts for and featuring miners and fishermen were common,
and notably stories of real-life pit disasters. Six weeks after a disaster
at Hartley which killed two hundred men, the British Messenger used it as
an example for sinners, speaking of how the ‘the bodies of the miners were
nearly all found clustering close by the root of the old closed shaft’: ‘In the
prison of our spiritual death’, it continued, ‘most of those who miss eternal
life perish in the very act of struggling to force a way that has been closed.’ 40
There were tracts which attacked ‘our respectable young men, our young
men of most gentlemanly manners and appearance, members of most honourable
professions’ who though ‘free from the brand of open profligacy or
avowedly infidel principles’ were yet addressed as ‘thoroughly licentious
alike in sentiment and conduct, and alike regards morals and religion’. 41
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