The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
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— Notes to pages 112–118 —<br />
133 See H.N. Fairchild, Religious Trends in English Poetry: vol. II: 1740–1780:<br />
Religious Sentimentalism in the Age <strong>of</strong> Johnson, New York and London,<br />
Columbia University Press, 1942.<br />
134 This moral turn is chronicled in R.H. MacDonald, ‘Reproducing the middleclass<br />
boy: from purity to patriotism in the boys’ magazines, 1892–1914’,<br />
Journal <strong>of</strong> Contemporary History, 1989, vol. 24, pp. 519–39.<br />
135 Boy’s Own Paper, vol. 52, 1929–30.<br />
136 C.G. Brown, ‘Popular culture and the continuing struggle for rational recreation’,<br />
in T.M. Devine and R.J. Finlay (eds), Scotland in the Twentieth<br />
Century, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1996; M. Clapson, A Bit<br />
<strong>of</strong> a Flutter: Popular Gambling and English Society, c. 1823–1961, Manchester,<br />
Manchester University Press, 1992, p. 67.<br />
6 PERSONAL TESTIMONY AND RELIGION<br />
1800–1950<br />
1 Notable examples are D. Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study<br />
<strong>of</strong> Nineteenth-century Working Class Autobiography, London, Methuen,<br />
1981, and the study <strong>of</strong> 4,000 unsolicited letters on religion from the mid-<br />
1960s ‘Honest to God’ debate in R. Towler, <strong>The</strong> Need for Certainty: A<br />
Sociological Study <strong>of</strong> Conventional Religion, London, RKP, 1984.<br />
2 P. Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourse and<br />
Subjectivity in Oral Histories <strong>of</strong> the Second World War, Manchester,<br />
Manchester University Press, 1998, p. 15.<br />
3 A technique pioneered in L. Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory: <strong>The</strong><br />
Cultural Experience <strong>of</strong> the Turin Working Class, Cambridge, Cambridge<br />
University Press, 1987; and A. Thomson, ‘Anzac memories: putting popular<br />
memory theory into practice in Australia’, Oral History Journal, 1990,<br />
vol. 18.<br />
4 D. Cameron et al., Researching Language: Issues <strong>of</strong> Power and Method,<br />
London and New York, Routledge, 1992, esp. p. 5; an example <strong>of</strong> reflexivity<br />
in action is L. Sitzia, ‘Telling Arthur’s story: oral history relationships and<br />
shared authority’, Oral History Journal, 1999, vol. 27, pp. 58–67.<br />
5 I am very grateful to Penny Summerfield for leading me down this path.<br />
6 Some oral-history work undertaken by ‘religiously-informed’ researchers can<br />
show signs <strong>of</strong> more confused intersubjectivity – for instance, <strong>of</strong> interviewees<br />
being asked in detail about religious experiences, and replying that they<br />
‘should have had’ spiritual or conversionist occurrences but confessing<br />
inability to recall them. See R.P.M. Sykes, ‘Popular religion in Dudley and<br />
the Gornals c. 1914–1965’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University <strong>of</strong> Wolverhampton,<br />
1999, pp. 297–8.<br />
7 Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom, pp. 9–10,<br />
8 L. Stanley, <strong>The</strong> Auto/Biographical I: <strong>The</strong> <strong>The</strong>ory and Practice <strong>of</strong> Feminist<br />
Auto/Biography, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1992, pp. 59–88.<br />
9 For conventions adopted for use <strong>of</strong> real names or pseudonyms <strong>of</strong> oralhistory<br />
interviewees in Chapters 6 and 8, see ‘Note on Oral History’ on<br />
page xi.<br />
255