The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
By teenage years, religiosity was drawn in an intensely romantic context.
Magazines soaked the young female in poetised and illustrative visions of
the ideal woman. Wordsworth was frequently quoted in religious magazines
throughout the nineteenth century:
I saw her upon nearer view,
A spirit, yet a woman too!
Her household motions light and free,
And steps of virgin liberty;
A countenance in which did meet
Sweet records, promises as sweet;
A creature not too bright or good
For human nature’s daily food;
For transient sorrows, simple wiles,
Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears and smiles. 44
The teenage years were the woman’s most morally vulnerable period of
life. In the 1840s and 1850s evangelicals counselled parents about letting
their daughters near ballrooms or even private dancing parties. ‘Ah! how
many a cruel wound may have been inflicted on the yet tender conscience
of your child as she has threaded her way through the mazes of the dance,
while with throbbing breast she has drank in the soft flattering words of
the heartless trifler by her side.’ Through the dance, ‘circumstances so full
of peril to their purity and peace’ could arise which could irredeemably
lose female piety: ‘The grass hath withered, the flower thereof hath faded,
and the chiefest of the many charms of her sex and age, in the grace and
fashion of it, hath perished for ever.’ 45 Parental prevention of that loss was
critical. The dance halls, ballrooms and theatres were, for most evangelicals
of the mid-nineteenth century, strictly off-limits to the moral and pious
woman. Equally, sporting events were much too ‘rough’. Horse racing
events were corrupted by ‘the bearded, bestial-looking nondescript which
issue from their dens in every corner of the land’, but evangelicals had to
acknowledge the moral negotiation – the ‘dialogue’, as one tract of 1852
put it – that had to be entered into: ‘Respectable people, in large numbers,
attend on such occasions – the Queen herself attends, and she is held to
be a pattern of all that is correct and becoming, even in the female portion
of the community of our religious land.’ 46 The development of music hall,
variety theatre and the cinema from the 1880s to the 1920s created a particularly
tricky time for evangelical negotiation of ‘fashion’. Film was much
used by evangelical organisations between 1905 and 1914, but by the 1920s
most spurned it and advised young women against cinema-going for, as
the woman’s columnist in the British Messenger put it, ‘by the very fact
of your being there at all, however good a moral a few pictures may
illustrate, you are in a certain way sanctioning the whole vaudeville show,
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