The Death of Christian Britain

— Men in Discourse and Narrative 1800–1950 —
evangelical message was less easily transferred from the Victorian melodramatic
narrative to the poem without losing stylistic credibility. Indeed,
in the hands of Victorian evangelicals, the poem became an aesthetically
feminised medium, purilely sentimental, romantic and ‘unmanly’.
There were no morally improving, religious-based popular journals
solely for men. They did not exist. Men would not read them, and there
was no suitable diversity of literary genre in which articles in such a journal
could ‘speak’ to men. There were only three ways to circulate religious
discourse to men: in negative and challenging form (in tracts for instance),
in the elliptical moral format of autobiographical heroism (in the format
popularised by Samuel Smiles and some men’s occupational magazines), or
through exploration of male piety in the context of women’s and children’s
magazines. Only the last of these could be truly exploratory of male religiosity,
for it was in men’s relations to the family that the key to issues of
their piety and impiety lay. In the family-centred improving magazines
which flourished from the 1860s to the 1910s (magazines such as Household
Words and its 1870s’ successor All The Year Round, The Strand Magazine,
The Leisure Hour, Cassell’s Family Magazine Illustrated, Chatterbox,
and The Sunday at Home Illustrated), men’s interests were catered for in
stories of adventure and bravado and in scientific news. But, by its very
form of multiple readership, the family magazine affirmed men’s piety
within a family setting: in other words, the form of the family magazine
was as discursively active as its content. By the 1920s and 1930s, family
magazines had in general become segregated into women’s, boy’s and
girl’s titles in which discourse on men remained little changed. However,
outwith evangelical literature, popular religious discourse which spoke to
men rapidly secularised. Men’s popular magazines were by the inter-war
period largely devoid of serious exploration of piety, being engrossed with
sport, militarism and science. For boys, magazines like the Boy’s Own
Paper, founded by the Religious Tract Society in 1879, provided strongly
evangelical messages of Christian purity into the 1890s, but from the 1900s
it gave a more virile conception of masculinity in tales of derring-do,
militarism and imperial patriotism, and by the 1920s it amounted to an
endless flow of items on adventure and hobbies. 134 By comparison with the
Girl’s Own, the Boy’s Own Paper of the 1920s was devoid of evangelical
discourse, with tales of war heroes, historical heroes, and items on how to
build a wireless. 135 The domain for circulation of discourse on male morality
was becoming exclusively located amongst women. By the late 1930s, the
contented and self-assured girl portrayed in the Girl’s Own Paper grew to
adulthood in Mrs Miniver’s contented home where anxiety about men’s
conversion was disappearing. Part of this process may have been the
tendency in the 1930s for the state to become markedly more relaxed about
sites of male immorality; the prohibition cause withered (and many temperance
organisations declined), gambling law was eased (and perceived to be
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