The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
these stories, some of which give authors’ names (often clergy) and others
merely attributed to ‘a close friend’. Peter Drummond in Stirling wrote
many tracts himself (notably on the evils of horse-racing, dance halls,
theatres and ballrooms, and on Sabbath sanctity), and selected items to use
as tracts. He would cut-and-paste items from his in-house journals like
the British Messenger and Good News to use as tracts; an article in the
Messenger in October 1862 he marked up to be a four-page tract, providing
instructions to the typesetter to alter and abbreviate dialogue quite freely,
altering tenses, but in general keeping faith with the sense of the original. 58
The volume of material published between the late eighteenth and early
twentieth centuries was enormous. It is virtually impossible to gauge the
full magnitude of the publications, or their print runs and distribution,
but it was a literature that enveloped Britain and the Empire. By the 1830s,
evangelising publications were joined by mass circulation popular ‘improving’
magazines whose whole tenor was implicitly religious, teetotalsupporting
and often openly evangelical. Mass publication magazines were
pervaded with evangelical morality. Chamber’s Journal, established in 1832
for a Scottish readership, had a circulation of almost 60,000 within three
years throughout Britain, and by 1860 had moved the focus of its material
overwhelmingly to London and the south of England. It was founded with
a keen eye to its market, aiming at young and old, men and women alike.
It was to be a journal of knowledge and stories, but with moral effect:
Every Saturday, when the poorest labourer in the country draws his
humble earnings, he shall have it in his power to purchase, with an
insignificant portion of even that humble sum, a meal of healthful,
useful, and agreeable mental instruction: nay, every schoolboy shall
be able to purchase with his pocket-money something permanently
useful – something calculated to influence his fate through life –
instead of the trash upon which the grown children of the present
day were wont to expend it. 59
The Chamber’s Journal was aimed at ‘diffusing knowledge . . . under its
most cheering and captivating aspect’, and ‘on respectable principles’.
For the benefit of poor old men and women who live in cottages
among the hills, and who cannot sometimes come to church, because
the roads are miry, or because the snow lies deep on the ground, I
shall give excellent pithy passages from the works of the great British
moralists, the names of which they hardly heard of. ... With the ladies
of the ‘new school’, and all my fair young countrywomen in their
teens, I hope to be on agreeable terms; and I have no doubt but that
in the end I shall turn out a great favourite.
The ‘new women’ were to be given in every issue ‘a nice amusing tale . . .
no ordinary trash about Italian castles . . . but something really good’, along
52