The Death of Christian Britain

— The 1960s and Secularisation —
stunted nature of religious and moral motifs, and the unavailability of a
narrative structure – is not replicated in autobiography written in the
same period. The post–1945 working-class autobiography, describing lives
from the 1880s onwards, shows no reluctance whatsoever in discussing
religion. This dissonance between the two primary forms of experiential
source is revealing and important.
We noted in Chapter 6 the dominance of religious narrative structure
and evangelical discourses in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century autobiography.
The autobiography focused on the subject (the writer) as on a
life-journey, using notions of progression, improvement and personal salvation,
whether within religion or opposing it, as the construction and
purpose of the literary work. Working-class autobiographies of the second
half of the twentieth century form a revealing contrast in structure and
treatment. Dealing with lives begun in the main between the 1860s and the
1920s, they record living through the period of discursive Christianity’s
greatest power. They discuss religion in great detail and in some considerable
length; virtually all went to Sunday school or church, many went to
temperance activities such as the Band of Hope, and they remember their
lives as children and young adults as infused by religious leisure and recreation.
Yet, very few of them deploy an evangelical narrative structure. Few
recall conversion experiences or even mention the subject. Religion is recollected
as an activity (going to church and Sunday school), as a moral regime
(the suppression of Sunday games and wearing of ‘Sunday-best’ clothes),
and as a definer (rightly or wrongly) of respectability within the community.
The way this is structured is within a specialist agenda item in the
autobiography. Indeed, very large numbers of post-1950 autobiographies
pigeon-holed religion in a separate chapter on ‘Sundays’. Religion is taken
in these as the motif of the past, a feature – perhaps in many the central
feature – which distinguishes a world we have lost, in which symbols of
religious activity are cited as ciphers for a world of quaint activities. The
discursive world of evangelical Christianity of late Victorian and Edwardian
Britain had become, for the autobiography of the 1940s to the 1970s, a
curiosity. Religion had become something to be remembered and something
commoditised as nostalgia, for purchase in paperback. The religious
past of Britain had become a best-seller.
The biggest selling autobiographies were those predominantly set in rural
and village locations, featuring tightly bound communities with intense relationships
between the inhabitants. Books by Winifred Foley (set in the
New Forest), Lillian Beckwith (set in the Scottish Highlands) and above
all Flora Thompson (rural Oxfordshire) use the high religiosity of their
communities as the central symbol of the ‘lost worlds’ they are selling as
literary commodities. 56 Urban and industrial autobiographies also became
popular: books by Robert Roberts (Salford), Margaret Penn (Manchester),
Molly Weir (Glasgow), Dolly Scannell (London), Jim Bullock (coal-mining
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