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