The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
Two historians of narrative have written that scholars of narrative are
showing that ‘stories guide action; that people construct identities (however
multiple and changing) by locating themselves or being located within a
repertoire of emplotted stories; that “experience” is constituted through
narratives . . . and that people are guided to act in certain ways, and not
others, on the basis of the projections, expectations, and memories derived
from a multiple but ultimately limited repertoire of available social, public
and cultural narratives.’ 61 Of critical literary significance in the nineteenth
century was the melodrama which, as Patrick Joyce has persuasively argued,
was a narrative form which began as ‘populist’ in the early decades but
which was adopted for the mass-circulation ‘improving’ magazines of the
1840s, 1850s and 1860s. In these, an audience, already accustomed to the
melodramatic form, were invited to identify with the virtues of social
improvement – teetotalism, churchianity, hard work, thrift, rational recreation,
imperial patriotism, and so on – through the narrative tales of
individual lives and social commentaries. Stories of heroes and heroines
overcoming insuperable odds – poverty, crime, drunken husbands – were
allegories of social redistribution and social reconciliation, a ‘probing of the
moral drama of an unequal society’. 62 Judith Walkowitz has shown the
centrality of the melodrama for sexual narratives in late Victorian London,
narratives which in newspapers, court cases, learned journals and elsewhere
imagined women almost exclusively as victims. 63 This melodramatic literature
of ‘improvement’ laid out the burning questions of moral relations in
a society of manifest inequalities of income, wealth, opportunity and gender.
It turned over these questions, investigated them, and postulated through
narrative example (supported by straight exhortation) the triumph of
morality over inequality. As Elizabeth Ermarth has written: ‘Social order
in nineteenth-century narratives . . . is not a reality to be reflected but a
problem to be solved.’ 64
The stories of the popular, as well as religious, magazines of the Victorian
period were invariably founded on implicit Christian interpretations of
‘improvement’ and of life ‘dramas’ as obstacles to that improvement. In
essence, moral ‘improvement’ became synonymous with Christian ‘salvation’,
and the journey, often melodramatic, to that state of grace acquired
exemplars. These exemplars were used to express the nature of male and
female irreligion and religiosity and the means of progress from the first
condition to the second. There was a strong inheritance of religious life
narratives to draw upon. First and foremost amongst these was John
Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678–84) which is frequently cited alongside
Dickens, Scott and Thackeray in autobiographies and oral testimony of
those born in humble homes in the nineteenth century. The Progress in
both its title and its narrative was a literary template for the nineteenthcentury
novel, religious and secular, and in the late eighteenth century the
dramatic autobiography of the ‘religious life’ became well established. 65
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