The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
Journal was running serialised murder mysteries about women of ‘unselfish
love’ and cruel, vindictive husbands. 129 Poetry, on the other hand, was much
less useful for the male audience. As Fairchild observed, Victorian poetry
which dealt with religion was ‘torrentially abundant’, yet its evangelical
variety was ‘poetically sterile in the nineteenth century’; it was ‘too suspicious
of any writing which is not motivated by the wish to convert or
edify’. 130 Much Victorian poetry was evangelical pulp, shamelessly proselytising
and most often written by women for women, relating women’s
virtues and sensibilities to Sunday dress and behaviour. By contrast, male
poets like Charles Kingsley who dealt with religion tended to dwell on its
impact upon the rhythms and symbols of everyday life:
Now the bells are ringing loud
People rising very early–
Boys and girls are dressing now,
And now they go to Sunday School
To Church–and then come back again.
Everybody does not work,
But idle people do not read their Bible
And God punishes them.
Now Sunday evening thus comes.
Everybody goes to bed,
Boys and girls still remain reading their Bibles
Till the time they go to Bed.
Then Monday morning
Men and women return to work. 131
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a long and much revered narrative poem on
‘The Loudon Sabbath Morn’, evoking similar sentiments to those of
Kingsley. Male poets tended to dwell on how, despite its romantic role in
community life, the Sabbath was a suppressant of normal male life: of games
and play, conviviality and conversation, a day of men at the arm of women
in Sunday best. Sunday forced men to the side of their women. Where male
poets sought to explore more deeply man’s religious purpose, there is frustration,
as with Robert Browning:
Man’s work is to labour and leaven–
As best he may–earth here with heaven;
’Tis work for work’s sake that he’s needing:
Let him work on and on as if speeding
Work’s end, but not dream of succeeding! 132
Where poets of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century explored
Christian sentiment and doctrine in some considerable detail, 133 the
112