The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
Tract Society, continued to proliferate and dominate: Household Words
(and its 1870s’ successor All The Year Round), the Girl’s Own Paper, the
Boy’s Own Paper, The Strand Magazine, The Leisure Hour, Cassell’s Family
Magazine Illustrated, Chatterbox, and The Sunday at Home Illustrated.
For news, Christians could turn to the British Weekly, the Christian Herald
and others. Though less-improving magazines grew in number, especially
from the 1890s, the bulk of the domestic literature of the British family
remained strongly evangelical in origin until at least the 1910s.
The salvation industry was by no means confined to mere associational
and literary endeavour. It deployed a panoply of techniques to spread
symbols and signs of evangelical discourses in everyday life in Britain. One
of the most notable of these was music which in the nineteenth century
changed from being merely church music to being a music of popular
culture. Though the Wesleys had introduced popular hymns in the eighteenth
century, it was in the next century when the hymn became the basis
of a widespread diffusive Christianity, spreading out from the church to
the fair, the workplace, the street and the home. The development of the
church choir as a feature of not just the major Anglican but also the
Nonconformist churches really took off in the 1780s with psalmody classes
in Sunday schools, but spread even more in the 1840s with Nonconformist
congregations developing weekday practice sessions and semi-professional
choirs. Evangelicals of the Victorian period introduced a new energy, enterprise
and enthusiasm for religious music, exemplified in the vigorous
melodic construction of the hymn as an exemplification of the evangelical
call to action: ‘Let us sing, never mind what we sing.’ 65 Most Scottish
presbyterian churches adopted hymns in mid-century and organ music in
the 1870s, symbolising the growing popular demand amongst evangelical
people, against the wishes of many ‘traditionalist’ puritans, to enliven and
enrich formal religion with new forms of praise. In the 1840s choral societies
and unions spread across Britain, the first of many specialist
magazines, The Musical Times, appeared, and the culture of romantic
Christmas – marked diversely by Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843),
the Christmas tree and the Christmas card – created the setting for the
developing popularity of the Christmas carol. 66 State recognition for music
developed from this decade, for, as J.P. Kay, a government commissioner,
noted: ‘The songs of any people may be regarded as an important means
of forming an industrious, brave, loyal and religious working class.’ 67
This was extended further by the musical revolution wrought by the
revivalist Ira Sankey from 1874. Sankey introduced hymns which retained
a popularity in working-class congregations until the 1930s and even later
(notably amongst stricter Protestants like the Brethren), and the harmonium
which he played on his revival tours with Dwight Moody, leading
to a mass market for the domestic harmonium imported from the United
States. The availability of musical instruments, and especially the piano,
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