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 />
with household tips ‘calculated to make them capital wives’. Boys were to<br />
get ‘lots <strong>of</strong> nice stories’ about travellers in Asia and Africa, and aspirational<br />
tales:<br />
I shall give them accounts <strong>of</strong> men who were at one time poor little<br />
boys like themselves, but who, on paying a daily attention to their<br />
studies, and being always honest, and having a great desire to become<br />
eminent, and not be mere drudges all their days, gradually rose to be<br />
great statesmen, and generals, and members <strong>of</strong> learned pr<strong>of</strong>essions,<br />
and distinguished authors, and to have fine houses and parks; and that<br />
at last they even came to be made kings or presidents <strong>of</strong> powerful<br />
nations.<br />
After four years and rising circulation, Chamber’s Journal claimed to have<br />
been addressed ‘to the whole moral and intellectual nature <strong>of</strong> its readers’,<br />
impressing ‘sound moral lessons, and elevating human character as far as<br />
possible above its grosser elements’. 60<br />
<strong>The</strong> magazine, the pamphlet and the tract were, after the Bible, the most<br />
common form <strong>of</strong> personally-purchased reading in <strong>Britain</strong> before the 1870s.<br />
<strong>The</strong> novel was characteristically serialised in magazines, including religious<br />
ones: ‘Novels are read right and left,’ wrote Anthony Trollope in the<br />
mid-1870s, ‘above stairs and below, in town houses and in country parsonages,<br />
by young countesses and by farmer’s daughters, by old lawyers and<br />
by young students.’ So pervasive were they, says Trollope, that ‘a special<br />
provision <strong>of</strong> them has to be made for the godly’. 61 From the 1820s to the<br />
1890s, the ‘serious’ novel was characteristically a three-volume and massive<br />
purchase <strong>of</strong> 31s. 6d., far too expensive for most readers, and usually issued<br />
in relatively small print runs at high cost sold to circulating libraries – a<br />
system kept alive by a cartel <strong>of</strong> publishers and circulating libraries (including<br />
W.H. Smith’s). It was only in the 1880s that the single-volume novel <strong>of</strong><br />
4s. became the standard format. 62 In that context, the fictional novel was<br />
only made popular between the 1830s and 1880s by the improving magazine.<br />
When the modernist novel appeared between the 1890s and the 1920s,<br />
it deposed the evangelical narrative from its unchallenged position in British<br />
fiction. Though religion still sold novels, especially a skilful combination<br />
or religion and romance, 63 a disjunction started to emerge between ‘high’<br />
literary novels read by small sections <strong>of</strong> the middle classes and the reissue<br />
in the 1890s and 1900s <strong>of</strong> republished Victorian masterpieces: notably the<br />
Everyman’s Library and similar series. 64 As a result, it was in the 1890s<br />
and 1900s that the British working classes really became familiar with ‘high’<br />
Victorian moral fiction, published as cheap reissues, and at the same time<br />
drank at the well <strong>of</strong> the still-rising evangelical output <strong>of</strong> popular magazines.<br />
Popular access to new novels tended to be very narrow and selective,<br />
limited to a few celebrated authors like H.G. Wells and Arthur Conan<br />
Doyle. Improving magazines, many <strong>of</strong> them published by the Religious<br />
53