The Death of Christian Britain

— Women in Discourse and Narrative 1800–1950 —
which is of the world – worldly’. 47 Reading habits also constituted a problematic
for the pious woman to negotiate. Whilst it was folly ‘to refuse to
the overtasked mind an innocent or rational recreation’, reading needed to
be taken in moderation: ‘I knew a lady’, reported a tract of 1853, ‘who
completely used up her stock of sensibility, by devouring novels at the rate
of fifty or a hundred a-year; and when she came to a dying bed (an awful
one), her complaint was that she could not feel.’ 48 The pious were warned
off even the most popular novelists. The Christian Treasury analysed David
Copperfield in detail, and found ‘all the characters in the story [that] are
so painted as to awaken the abhorrence of the reader, are described as
professors of religion’. 49 Even Walter Scott’s Rob Roy and Kenilworth
tended to associate reformed evangelical religion with ‘repulsive and forbidding
sternness, with avarice and meanness’, and as such were adjudged to
have done more to undermine true Christian faith and reverence for the
Bible than Tom Paine’s Age of Reason.
However, the evangelical press was far from purely negative in its
discourse on the femininity of the young woman. Evangelical magazines
and books lingered long on feminine fashions, especially for young teenage
girls, with illustrations of heroines in the latest clothes. By the 1890s and
1900s, religious papers like the British Weekly were full of advertisements
not merely for women’s fashions but for sanitary towels (which were explicitly
described in their operation and fastenings), corsets (including electrical
corsets for curing all manner of ailments), stockings and other products to
save women from biliousness and other discomforts. 50 Such advertisements
– pages of them and heavily illustrated – signified how women’s bodies,
and especially younger women’s bodies, had become a major focus of attention
in religious, improving and domestic magazines.
Meanwhile, denominational magazines debated women’s role in society
from a strategic and scriptural standpoint. In 1824, the Baptist New
Connexion queried: ‘In what way may females be most usefully employed
in a Christian church consistently with the apostolic decision, 1 Tim. ii.
12?’, 51 to which respondents agreed that women could teach children in
Sunday schools if a man was absent unavoidably, but it was really a job
‘incumbent on male teachers’. When women visit ill women, said one writer,
‘they can pray with them with affection and holy fervour; when they meet
together for the express purpose of prayer, they can pour out their souls
before God, with earnestness, feeling, fluency and correctness’; women
should not be ‘limited within their own circle of acquaintance, or be withheld
in such cases of emergency’. 52 In 1844, the Free Church Magazine
discussed ‘Female Methods of Usefulness’, describing women as ‘benevolent
from natural sensibility, active from constitutional inclination, amiable
from temper’. Yet, such ‘respectable, and in many ways highly useful
persons’ could not be thought of as automatically ‘renewed characters’;
women had to be called forth in Christian action with a ‘becoming spirit’:
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