The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
Women’s importance in the evangelical design was nowhere so apparent
as in the obituary columns of religious magazines. From the outset of
the London Religious Tract Society in 1799, biographical obituaries – ‘the
writings, the experience, the devoted lives, and the triumphant deaths,
of eminent and exemplary servants of Jesus Christ’ – were vital to the
diffusion of ‘religious knowledge and moral instruction’. 10 The Wesleyan
Methodist Magazine in 1811 sought to perpetuate ‘the recollection of
exemplary and uniform piety’: ‘In Biographical accounts’, it went on, ‘three
things are peculiarly interesting; the commencement – the progress – and
the conclusion of a Christian’s course’, and it was most vital to ‘learn the
manner and circumstances of his conversion’. 11 Obituaries dominated
denominational magazines of many churches in the early nineteenth
century, and still remained a vital feature in the second half. Throughout
this period obituaries of women vastly outnumbered those of men. In many
evangelical journals, obituaries were written by the closest relatives –
husband or daughter was common – and full of details on the deathbed
piety and ‘signs’ of holy entry to heaven. In The Methodist Magazine, the
obituary was the privileged genre by the early nineteenth century, always
led with a ten- to fifteen-page ‘star’ male obituary, but followed by shorter
obituaries predominantly of women written by husbands or brothers.
Thomas Bartholomew from Blackburn in 1811 wrote of his wife’s death:
‘I found her magnifying and praising God. “Now,” said she, “I can die
happy.” . . . In the second agony, in a holy rapture, she twice cried out,
“Glory! Glory!” . . . Thus left this vale of tears my dear companion in the
wilderness, triumphing in joyful hope of eternal glory.’ 12 Twenty years
later, this journal was giving over half its space to obituaries of which 64
per cent were of women. 13 Similarly, The Primitive Methodist Magazine in
the 1820s was filled with women’s obituaries, all with detailed descriptions
of deathbed scenes and expressions of piety, and sometimes with deathbed
conversions. 14 In The General Baptist Repository and Missionary Observer
between the 1820s and 1850s, the wives of New Connexion ministers were
extremely numerous and prominent. A minister’s wife exemplified everything
that an evangelical dissenter could wish for. Mrs Frances Goadby,
wife of the New Connexion minister at Ashby de la Zouch, had had to
maintain the manse as the fulcrum of the Connexion’s community on a
mere £20 a year:
what a demand must have been made on the piety, patience, frugality
and industry of the mistress of a small family. Yet this, for some time,
was her position. But her ardent and unceasing flow of spirits, her
extreme activity and diligence, her punctuality, uprightness, and
remarkable frugality, combined with a firm reliance on providence
carried her through the severest of pressure, both with credit and
respectability . . . her range of opinion and remark even extended
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