The Death of Christian Britain

— Men in Discourse and Narrative 1800–1950 —
press. The ‘moral man’, meanwhile, was a more complex character. Indeed,
the discourse on him was confused, ambiguous and ambivalent. Nowhere
in evangelical narratives was there greater uncertainty than with the religiosity
of the secular hero.
Popular reading for men did not have the same intensity of moral
rhetoric as that evident in women’s or children’s magazines and books. The
man’s world of business, industry, politics and sport did not have the same
narrow focus of the domestic sphere, the home and children, which so
dominated female reading. Instead, the world was men’s oyster, and the
themes of improving reading were wide and varied. Technical journals for
artisans like The English Mechanic appealed to skill-based learning, the
working of machines, accolades to the technological prowess of the skilled
working class, whilst even the earliest general magazine for men, The Penny
Magazine of 1832, promoted ‘improvement’ as a technological and
economic phenomenon rather than a moral one. 118 Specialist magazines
reflected elements of the discourse on moral men: the nobility of knowledge,
industry and skill, strength and physical courage. They implicitly put
in relief parallel values: thrift and sobriety, civic responsibility and moral
courage, and it was in general improving literature that the meeting point
of values of the male domain was to be found. In biographical sketches,
historical series and short stories, a moral conjunction was created at which
the virtues associated with the male worlds of science, industrial skill and
power (virtues of hard work, independence, self-reliance, and education)
were placed within the overarching framework of female piety where they
met the moral virtues of home and family (virtues of self-sacrifice,
parenting, sobriety and thrift). The conjunction was a discursive minefield,
for it was the point where the ‘masculine’ world met the ‘feminine’ world;
the two had to be ‘merged’ in the evangelical conversion as the core of the
exemplary man. 119 It was here that gendered virtues clashed, where heroes
and villains were drafted as moral beings, where masculinity and femininity
were married. This required the feminising of maleness – a difficult and
perhaps impossible task.
The major site for this clash of gender opposites within male sexuality
was in the general improving magazine. For adult males, such literature
was rarely designed to be men-only, but it was overwhelmingly family
centred. The pioneer of the family improving magazine was Chamber’s
Journal, founded in 1832 as a weekly ‘threeha’pence’ paper for all the
family. As a family journal, it differed quite radically from women’s
magazines in having a much greater focus on men’s issues in a mixture of
short stories, science news, social observation, ‘moral essays’ and biographical
sketches of prominent men. The style of holy men found in
evangelical reading had enormous influence on the construction of
‘secular’ heroes in popular improving papers like Chamber’s Journal. The
use of the life biography and the obituary was particularly common, though
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