The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
the ‘evil’ of breaking the Sabbath and the Stirling races (which were closed
down as a result in 1853), the depot had printed over 200 publications and
eight million copies within ten years. Between the 1860s and 1914, the
depot supplied evangelicals all over Britain and the Empire, running
five evangelical magazines, holding over 300 different tracts at a time
(constantly replacing and updating them on a cyclical pattern), and also
published short stories, religious poems and novels. Novels and fiction
became an increasingly important part of the output; by the 1930s, there
were still over 2,000 titles in the Drummond catalogue, a third of them
novels, each with print runs of between 10,000 and 50,000 copies. The rest
were tracts and children’s books varying from two to sixteen pages, many
with print runs totalling over 100,000 copies, and monthly religious journals
for different age groups. The Enterprise was by 1900 specialising in
evangelical fiction, published in a wide variety of formats and lengths,
from the ‘Stirling Penny Stories – Intensely Interesting and Thoroughly
Evangelical’ to the full-length novel. It survived longer than most,
absorbing in the 1950s most of Britain’s remaining tract and religious
magazines. 49
Many different forms of tract came into being. The buyers of tracts,
ranging from large missionary organisations to congregations and individuals,
demanded effective material which had to be ‘of an interesting
character, principally narrative – plain and pointed. People here will not
read anything “dry”.’ 50 New ideas were constantly emerging. Drummond
started the ‘Stirling Tracts for Letters’ series in 1862 in which small tracts
could be bought (at 6d.–8d. per dozen) for insertion in postal letters. 51 Miss
V.M. Skinner in Cambridgeshire started the Friendly Letter Mission as a
small private undertaking in 1877, visiting public houses to hang Scriptural
texts such as ‘This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that
Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners’. Initially centred around
Huntingdon she had personally claimed within months to have hung texts
in 236 tap-rooms and hotels. A publican wrote to her:
Thank you for so kindly sending me the text and those other things,
which I know you must be doing for a good cause, and I hope
precious souls. I have hung up those texts in my tap-rooms, and hope
they will be the means of bringing some souls to the Saviour: then
brighter will be your crown, and although I know you not here,
I hope I shall meet you in heaven. 52
After publicity in The Christian magazine in the next two years, she started
a mail-order system to other evangelical women, extending the work around
England. In two years it was claimed that 2,673 pubs stretching from
Cornwall to Brighton had texts, plus police stations across much of England.
This led in the 1880s to the development of a ‘Friendly Letter’ industry at
the Samuel Jarrold Tract Depot in Norwich, which produced specialist tracts
50