The Death of Christian Britain

— The Salvation Economy —
with household tips ‘calculated to make them capital wives’. Boys were to
get ‘lots of nice stories’ about travellers in Asia and Africa, and aspirational
tales:
I shall give them accounts of men who were at one time poor little
boys like themselves, but who, on paying a daily attention to their
studies, and being always honest, and having a great desire to become
eminent, and not be mere drudges all their days, gradually rose to be
great statesmen, and generals, and members of learned professions,
and distinguished authors, and to have fine houses and parks; and that
at last they even came to be made kings or presidents of powerful
nations.
After four years and rising circulation, Chamber’s Journal claimed to have
been addressed ‘to the whole moral and intellectual nature of its readers’,
impressing ‘sound moral lessons, and elevating human character as far as
possible above its grosser elements’. 60
The magazine, the pamphlet and the tract were, after the Bible, the most
common form of personally-purchased reading in Britain before the 1870s.
The novel was characteristically serialised in magazines, including religious
ones: ‘Novels are read right and left,’ wrote Anthony Trollope in the
mid-1870s, ‘above stairs and below, in town houses and in country parsonages,
by young countesses and by farmer’s daughters, by old lawyers and
by young students.’ So pervasive were they, says Trollope, that ‘a special
provision of them has to be made for the godly’. 61 From the 1820s to the
1890s, the ‘serious’ novel was characteristically a three-volume and massive
purchase of 31s. 6d., far too expensive for most readers, and usually issued
in relatively small print runs at high cost sold to circulating libraries – a
system kept alive by a cartel of publishers and circulating libraries (including
W.H. Smith’s). It was only in the 1880s that the single-volume novel of
4s. became the standard format. 62 In that context, the fictional novel was
only made popular between the 1830s and 1880s by the improving magazine.
When the modernist novel appeared between the 1890s and the 1920s,
it deposed the evangelical narrative from its unchallenged position in British
fiction. Though religion still sold novels, especially a skilful combination
or religion and romance, 63 a disjunction started to emerge between ‘high’
literary novels read by small sections of the middle classes and the reissue
in the 1890s and 1900s of republished Victorian masterpieces: notably the
Everyman’s Library and similar series. 64 As a result, it was in the 1890s
and 1900s that the British working classes really became familiar with ‘high’
Victorian moral fiction, published as cheap reissues, and at the same time
drank at the well of the still-rising evangelical output of popular magazines.
Popular access to new novels tended to be very narrow and selective,
limited to a few celebrated authors like H.G. Wells and Arthur Conan
Doyle. Improving magazines, many of them published by the Religious
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