The Death of Christian Britain

— Women in Discourse and Narrative 1800–1950 —
look well in bronze; but any of the dead-leaf shades are too staid and
sombre for a girl in her teens. Girlhood lasts such a little while that
we ought to do our utmost to set off its early bloom. For an evening
gown I like to see you in pale blue . . . 57
From 1900 the reader-to-reader advice column became a primary location
for moral advice:
What to Do. Problems of Conduct No. 689.
Miss Lily Alexander has worked in a soldier’s canteen for nine
months. She is leaving to go to similar work in France. Unknown to
her the other workers subscribe for a present. She does not approve
of presentations in war time . . . What should Lily do? 58
Equally, the religious woman’s magazine was by the 1880s and 1890s a
major site for manufacturers’ advertisements for ladies’ products. Every
advertisement and article format delivered the same message: women’s piety
was not a struggle but a negotiation. Most enduring, penetrative and influential
of all the types of article in magazines was the fictional story.
TELLING STORIES ABOUT WOMEN
From the late eighteenth until the mid-twentieth centuries, the British developed
a passion for stories. Whether in the full-length novel, the magazineserialised
novel, the novella or the short story, the nineteenth-century mind
was brought up and regularly fed on grand, sweeping narratives focusing
invariably on the life history of one central character. ‘The dominant artistic
form’, as the modern novelist Ian McEwan has recently written of the nineteenth
century, ‘was the novel, great sprawling narratives which not only
charted private fates, but made whole societies in mirror image and
addressed the public issues of the day.’ 59 The characteristic form of the
nineteenth-century novel was a vast landscape of personal time – invariably
great chunks of an individual’s life (and critically the period from
puberty to young adulthood) – in which a medley of characters come and
go whilst the hero/ine navigates the self to a ‘higher’ plain. With the takeoff
in popular publishing in the 1840s, such life narratives formed the almost
daily diet of most literate Britons. They were reared on stories, fictional
and non-fictional. Indeed, the non-fictional story was invariably told in the
same format as the novel, charting the individual’s life through critical years
in a highly descriptive and dramatic story-form. As McEwen says:
‘Storytelling was deep in the nineteenth-century soul.’ 60
The study of narrative structures is a growing and productive area of
historical research. It reveals how societies imagine their own configurations,
how they typecast and stereotype the individuals in social dramas.
69