The Death of Christian Britain

— Men in Discourse and Narrative 1800–1950 —
(notably David Livingstone) whose heroic exploits started to become wellpublicised
in both religious and secular press in the 1840s and 1850s, paving
the way for more secular imperial heroes. A parallel development was the
rendering of ordinary ‘manly’ life as heroic Christian melodrama. Christian
heroes could have many occupations, discursively portrayed in vignettes
which combined piety with masculine qualities. A good example of this
was the work of Samuel Smiles who combined his books on moral virtues
such as Self-Help (1859), Character (1871), Thrift (1875) and Duty (1880)
with a vast number of moral biographies, nearly all of them about engineers
and scientists: The Life of George Stephenson (1857), Lives of the
Engineers (three volumes, 1862, extended to five in 1874), Boulton and Watt
(1865), James Nasmyth, Engineer (1885), and Josiah Wedgwood (1894). As
Adrian Jarvis points out, Smiles used the genre of the detective story or
melodrama to turn the biography into ‘the lives of the saints’ in which
martyrdom to science was a frequent simile, and the engineers performed
miracles of science. Smiles’ biographies, like evangelical ones, were
constructed as novels with liberal use of direct speech, and the stories of
invention, discovery and application of science were quite incidental (and
often skirted over) in preference to the study of personal character and the
‘substantiation of saintliness’. As scientists, they were models not of science
but of moral, and specifically Christian, lives, pursuing a moral worth which
resonated with those of the readers. 88 Inventions brought moral good: the
coming of new road-making techniques, said Smiles, not only changed ‘the
industrial habits of the people’ but also ‘the moral habits of the great masses
of the working classes’. 89
Just as the evangelical call was democratic, so too were male exemplars.
One story recounted how at a copper mine in Cornwall in the 1860s a
faulty fuse left two miners seconds to escape a detonation of explosives.
One pushed the other up a ladder saying: ‘Up with ye! I’ll be in Heaven
in a minute.’ When both survived, he explained he had done this because
‘I knowed my soul was safe’, whilst ‘t’other lad was an awful wicked lad,
I wanted to give him another chance’. 90 But for occupational frequency,
military men – especially senior officers – outnumbered others as heroes
in evangelical literature. With their masculinity assured, the converted
soldier displayed the meekness of feminised piety. In ‘the conversion and
happy death’ of Lieut. Col. Holcombe, the hero read a well-known tract,
The Sinner’s Friend, and ‘he saw that, vile as he had been, he might be
saved. He became a new creature, trusting in the blood of Christ for
pardon of accumulated sins during a period of sixty years’. 91 The religiosity
of officers in the Great War was much asserted: ‘There is no doubt all
our greatest generals are religious men’, said the British Weekly in 1919. 92
Indeed, men achieved a new status in evangelical literature during wartime.
In World War II, a large number of tracts and story books were produced
for children which depicted their fathers on active service as heroes of
103