The Death of Christian Britain

— The Salvation Economy —
Indeed, self-criticism of motives was frequently to be found in religious
magazines. ‘Some persons are for ever running around for revivals,’
commented the British Messenger in 1862, ‘careless of home, neglectful of
children, and seeking their own pleasurable excitement frequently in a kind
of religious carnival.’ 45 It was, nevertheless, ultimately necessary work
and essential to the personal development of the converted Christian.
Michael Connal, an evangelising merchant in Glasgow, kept typical notes
in his diary:
1838, November 6th: Visited two poor women, as a member of the
Stirlingshire Charitable Society; one a Mrs Buchanan, a poor object,
five children, just out of scarlet fever, three stairs up in a back land
in the High Street; dreadful poverty, suffocating smell, rags, filth; these
sights should make me more and more active doing good.
June 29th, 1847: It is good to go the houses of the poor and see how
they struggle through with their difficulties. It puts to flight every
shadow that may have hung upon one’s spirits. Visited an Irishman
– a very specious fellow; I shall keep my eye on him. 46
An essential part of the salvation industry was tract publishing. The tract
was a flyer, commonly one piece of paper with between one and four
pages of text, comprising exhortation, a short sermon, a didactic attack on
the recipient sinner, or a short ‘true’ story of how a sinner was reborn.
Some tracts could get longer, with eight or sixteen pages, but these tended
to be tracts which were used sparingly. Tracts were characteristically
distributed free of charge to the end-user, but the distributor or the distributing
organisation usually had to buy them from a tract publisher or
wholesaler. They were bought by the hundred or the gross, bundled in
paper wrappers, sometimes in special ‘mixer’ packs of six or twelve different
titles. In its first year 1799–1800, the London Religious Tract Society sold
200,000 tracts and 800,000 in its second year. 47 Regional societies emerged
with their own tract-publishing and distribution agents, providing along
with Sunday schools the main avenue for lay evangelisation between 1800
and 1820. The growth of religious literature for a popular market really
started in the 1830s, with ‘improving’ and religious magazines from private
publishers and evangelical organisations. In 1837 the London Religious
Tract Society started its Monthly Volume series of 192-page books on religion,
nature, religious heroes and biblical stores, ‘fully adapted to the
educated families of our land, to day and Sunday schools and the libraries
of mechanics and others’. 48
Tract publishing was by the 1850s and 1860s a vast enterprise, with
publishers – or ‘tract depots’ as they were characteristically called – in many
different towns of Britain. Probably the largest and one of the longestsurviving
was the Drummond Tract Enterprise in Stirling. Started by Peter
Drummond, a seedsman, after he launched a pamphlet war in 1848 against
49