The Death of Christian Britain

— The Salvation Economy —
brought the making of music within the reach of not only middle-class
families but, by the 1850s and 1860s, many working-class communities as
well. 68 From the 1850s, and more especially the 1870s, came the dramatic
rise of the brass band, the vast bulk of which used predominantly religious
and temperance music. Brass and silver bands were initially associated with
temperance organisations, but by the 1880s many congregations, especially
Nonconformist ones, had bands playing as part of worship. These bands
together with the bands of the Salvation Army, factories and town councils
took their music to the streets, public parks and festive occasions,
especially on Saturdays and weekday evenings. Bands toured working-class
areas, standing on street corners, as a symbolic evangelisation, playing overwhelmingly
religious and temperance tunes which remained from the 1880s
to the 1920s a prominent feature of the popular culture of working-class
communities. 69
Religious music was a vital part of the growing popularity of music in
Victorian and Edwardian popular culture. Music symbolised so much of
the character of the evangelical discursive culture. It was loud, powerful
(and, as we shall see in a later chapter, masculine), uncompromising in its
auditory symbolism of battle with evil (especially drink), richly militaristic,
and at the same time resolutely communal in its role in streets and bandstands
of public parks. It was a clarion call which reminded the hearer
unequivocally of the complex discourses on religiosity which we explore
in the next two chapters. And above all it bred esprit de corps in the
evangelical ranks.
Music also symbolised something greater about the salvation industry:
its optimism. The religious magazines of the nineteenth century held
profoundly optimistic general views of ‘progress’. Optimism was doctrine:
‘How rapid is the progress of time! How fast eternity approaches! How
soon will the period arrive when our opportunities for religious improvement
in this state will be for ever gone! . . . During the past year, it has
pleased the Sovereign Disposer of all events, to continue to us the outward
means of grace.’ 70 In 1835, the Congregationalist minister in Pentonville,
John Blackburn, told the London Missionary Society that moral evils had
declined over the previous hundred years and that ‘a national reformation’
was being achieved by evangelical action. Violence and venality had
decreased, sales of Bibles were booming, and ‘The social vices of profane
swearing – Sabbath breaking – drunkenness – and of brutality, as once
displayed in popular sports and pastimes; are, in my judgement, greatly
decreased.’ 71 In 1867, the Wesleyan Christian Miscellany summed up the
previous thirty years:
Drunkenness has decidedly decreased, and habits of sobriety and
moderation have become much more general among all classes. Duelling
is abolished. There is far less of horrid profanity and blasphemy.
There are few open exhibitions of brutal passion and disgusting vice.
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