The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
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— Women in Discourse and Narrative 1800–1950 —<br />
which is <strong>of</strong> the world – worldly’. 47 Reading habits also constituted a problematic<br />
for the pious woman to negotiate. Whilst it was folly ‘to refuse to<br />
the overtasked mind an innocent or rational recreation’, reading needed to<br />
be taken in moderation: ‘I knew a lady’, reported a tract <strong>of</strong> 1853, ‘who<br />
completely used up her stock <strong>of</strong> sensibility, by devouring novels at the rate<br />
<strong>of</strong> fifty or a hundred a-year; and when she came to a dying bed (an awful<br />
one), her complaint was that she could not feel.’ 48 <strong>The</strong> pious were warned<br />
<strong>of</strong>f even the most popular novelists. <strong>The</strong> <strong>Christian</strong> Treasury analysed David<br />
Copperfield in detail, and found ‘all the characters in the story [that] are<br />
so painted as to awaken the abhorrence <strong>of</strong> the reader, are described as<br />
pr<strong>of</strong>essors <strong>of</strong> religion’. 49 Even Walter Scott’s Rob Roy and Kenilworth<br />
tended to associate reformed evangelical religion with ‘repulsive and forbidding<br />
sternness, with avarice and meanness’, and as such were adjudged to<br />
have done more to undermine true <strong>Christian</strong> faith and reverence for the<br />
Bible than Tom Paine’s Age <strong>of</strong> Reason.<br />
However, the evangelical press was far from purely negative in its<br />
discourse on the femininity <strong>of</strong> the young woman. Evangelical magazines<br />
and books lingered long on feminine fashions, especially for young teenage<br />
girls, with illustrations <strong>of</strong> heroines in the latest clothes. By the 1890s and<br />
1900s, religious papers like the British Weekly were full <strong>of</strong> advertisements<br />
not merely for women’s fashions but for sanitary towels (which were explicitly<br />
described in their operation and fastenings), corsets (including electrical<br />
corsets for curing all manner <strong>of</strong> ailments), stockings and other products to<br />
save women from biliousness and other discomforts. 50 Such advertisements<br />
– pages <strong>of</strong> them and heavily illustrated – signified how women’s bodies,<br />
and especially younger women’s bodies, had become a major focus <strong>of</strong> attention<br />
in religious, improving and domestic magazines.<br />
Meanwhile, denominational magazines debated women’s role in society<br />
from a strategic and scriptural standpoint. In 1824, the Baptist New<br />
Connexion queried: ‘In what way may females be most usefully employed<br />
in a <strong>Christian</strong> church consistently with the apostolic decision, 1 Tim. ii.<br />
12?’, 51 to which respondents agreed that women could teach children in<br />
Sunday schools if a man was absent unavoidably, but it was really a job<br />
‘incumbent on male teachers’. When women visit ill women, said one writer,<br />
‘they can pray with them with affection and holy fervour; when they meet<br />
together for the express purpose <strong>of</strong> prayer, they can pour out their souls<br />
before God, with earnestness, feeling, fluency and correctness’; women<br />
should not be ‘limited within their own circle <strong>of</strong> acquaintance, or be withheld<br />
in such cases <strong>of</strong> emergency’. 52 In 1844, the Free Church Magazine<br />
discussed ‘Female Methods <strong>of</strong> Usefulness’, describing women as ‘benevolent<br />
from natural sensibility, active from constitutional inclination, amiable<br />
from temper’. Yet, such ‘respectable, and in many ways highly useful<br />
persons’ could not be thought <strong>of</strong> as automatically ‘renewed characters’;<br />
women had to be called forth in <strong>Christian</strong> action with a ‘becoming spirit’:<br />
67