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