The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
were themselves key features of religious experience, an often-necessary
stage on the personal pilgrimage to God.’ 81 And it was always men, not
women, who were afflicted in the Victorian novel: evangelicals like Mr
Slope in the Barchester novels, the Methodist minister in George Eliot’s
Adam Bede (1859), and Mr Chadband in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House
(1852). The best of men, the most Christianly ‘manly’ of men, were being
shown to be weak before their Lord. Masculine strength and power was
constantly being undermined in evangelical discourse. This continued in
the more affectionate and humorous clerical novels of the late nineteenth
century, such as the ‘Kailyard’ school of Scottish romantic stories of J.M.
Barrie, S.R. Crockett and Iain Maclaren. Many of the these were fictionalised
versions of the ministerial biography, encompassing the same themes
and dramatic structures. Crockett, for instance, wrote a volume of twentyfour
short stories in which nearly every one featured presbyterian ministers
as ‘common men’ – men whose poor parents struggled to pay their son’s
way through parish school and university, and who then faced penury as
‘stickit’ ministers. 82 In such stories, the minister faced parsimonious, argumentative
and tale-bearing congregations whose gossip ‘brought with them
the foul reek of the pit where they were forged, paralysing his work and
killing his usefulness’. 83 J.M. Barrie’s trilogy of Thrums novels, Auld Licht
Idylls (1887), A Window in Thrums (1889) and The Little Minister (1891),
were probably the most well-known of all clerical novels of the Victorian
period, focusing on the life of a small dissenting congregation and its minister,
the Revd Gavin Dishart, and their struggles to pay him. The parishioners,
nearly all weavers, were said in the 1840s to ‘have been starving
themselves of late until they have saved up enough money to get another
minister’. 84 When they lost a minister, ‘They retired with compressed lips
to their looms, and weaved and weaved till they weaved another minister’. 85
The piety of the minister was located by Barrie in the context of women. It
was taken ‘for granted that a minister’s marriage was womanhood’s great
triumph and that the particular woman who got him must be very clever’. 86
Dishart fell for the bohemian ‘Egyptian woman’, Babbie, who emerges as a
device for exploring the moral strains and contradictions of the clergyman.
Initially criticised by the congregation for the liaison with Babbie, the
minister in the end ‘preached to them till they liked him again, and so they
let him marry her, and they like her awful too’. 87 The Little Minister
explored personal conduct in the context of ‘old-time religion’, liberalising
values and sexual attraction, and, with a melodramatic conclusion set in a
flood, it had widespread resonance on both sides of the Atlantic. The book
proved so popular that it was turned into an oft-revived play in both Britain
and the United States, and generated three American film versions.
The clergyman was the core figure in discourse on the evangelical ‘holy
man’ of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but there were other candidates
deployed. Primary amongst these were the foreign missionaries
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