The Death of Christian Britain

— Notes to pages 112–118 —
133 See H.N. Fairchild, Religious Trends in English Poetry: vol. II: 1740–1780:
Religious Sentimentalism in the Age of Johnson, New York and London,
Columbia University Press, 1942.
134 This moral turn is chronicled in R.H. MacDonald, ‘Reproducing the middleclass
boy: from purity to patriotism in the boys’ magazines, 1892–1914’,
Journal of Contemporary History, 1989, vol. 24, pp. 519–39.
135 Boy’s Own Paper, vol. 52, 1929–30.
136 C.G. Brown, ‘Popular culture and the continuing struggle for rational recreation’,
in T.M. Devine and R.J. Finlay (eds), Scotland in the Twentieth
Century, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1996; M. Clapson, A Bit
of a Flutter: Popular Gambling and English Society, c. 1823–1961, Manchester,
Manchester University Press, 1992, p. 67.
6 PERSONAL TESTIMONY AND RELIGION
1800–1950
1 Notable examples are D. Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study
of Nineteenth-century Working Class Autobiography, London, Methuen,
1981, and the study of 4,000 unsolicited letters on religion from the mid-
1960s ‘Honest to God’ debate in R. Towler, The Need for Certainty: A
Sociological Study of Conventional Religion, London, RKP, 1984.
2 P. Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourse and
Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War, Manchester,
Manchester University Press, 1998, p. 15.
3 A technique pioneered in L. Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory: The
Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1987; and A. Thomson, ‘Anzac memories: putting popular
memory theory into practice in Australia’, Oral History Journal, 1990,
vol. 18.
4 D. Cameron et al., Researching Language: Issues of Power and Method,
London and New York, Routledge, 1992, esp. p. 5; an example of reflexivity
in action is L. Sitzia, ‘Telling Arthur’s story: oral history relationships and
shared authority’, Oral History Journal, 1999, vol. 27, pp. 58–67.
5 I am very grateful to Penny Summerfield for leading me down this path.
6 Some oral-history work undertaken by ‘religiously-informed’ researchers can
show signs of more confused intersubjectivity – for instance, of interviewees
being asked in detail about religious experiences, and replying that they
‘should have had’ spiritual or conversionist occurrences but confessing
inability to recall them. See R.P.M. Sykes, ‘Popular religion in Dudley and
the Gornals c. 1914–1965’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Wolverhampton,
1999, pp. 297–8.
7 Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom, pp. 9–10,
8 L. Stanley, The Auto/Biographical I: The Theory and Practice of Feminist
Auto/Biography, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1992, pp. 59–88.
9 For conventions adopted for use of real names or pseudonyms of oralhistory
interviewees in Chapters 6 and 8, see ‘Note on Oral History’ on
page xi.
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