The Death of Christian Britain

— Women in Discourse and Narrative 1800–1950 —
When the novel boom began in the 1830s, evangelicalism almost instantly
captured the genre and popularised it. 66 If Dickens, Scott and Thackeray
were the most widely read individual storytellers, evangelical stories were
more widely disseminated. The religious magazine adapted the life-story to
the fiction format with ease. In fictional or ‘real-life’ stories, the life-story
was an odyssey between polarities: from youth to age, puberty to maturity,
poverty to prosperity, sadness to happiness, spiritual death to spiritual
life. 67 There was adventure in the form of heroic deeds and far-flung travels
in dangerous places, especially, as we shall see, in stories for older boys
and men, but the inner adventure of the individual was far more prominent.
It was the personal adventure, the negotiation of the polarities of
good and evil, right and wrong, morality and immorality, which dominated
the long discursive passages of the Victorian and Edwardian story.
If melodrama provided a familiar scheme for tales of personal advance
and negotiation, romance was equally critical for representation of the
conversion. ‘What story can you find for romance like His?’, wrote a majorgeneral
in the British Army. ‘It is the reality of romance, as well as the
romance of reality. It is indeed His story, and it is history.’ 68 By the 1870s
and 1880s the story was conceived widely in evangelical terms, becoming
sacrelised by the conversion which became the emblem of not just spiritual
but also social salvation of the individual. The story of conversion was
told and retold endlessly in the form of a fictional short story (usually
complete in one magazine edition, though sometimes serialised or in separate
longer-novel form). Starting in the early 1830s, improving magazines
pioneered the serialisation of novels, and from the 1860s these stories were
usually accompanied by at least one lithograph illustration of a scene from
the story which, by 1900, was customarily on the front cover of the magazine
with the story immediately following. The format was regular, familiar
and repetitive.
So too was the structure of the life-story narrative. Such qualities in the
construction of narrative have attracted scholars’ attention in recent decades,
but at different levels. Northrop Frye was struck as a child by the regularity
of Walter Scott’s ‘formulaic techniques’, and came later to locate the
structure of all romance in ‘four primary narrative movements in literature’
which constituted a ‘secular scripture’. 69 He subsequently postulated that
the Bible offered ‘the Great Code’ of seven main phases of ‘dialectical
progression’, providing the recurrent shape of all literature in U-shaped
narrative structures of apostasy followed by descent, repentance and rise. 70
Umberto Eco explored similar terrain in his analysis of Ian Fleming’s James
Bond novels as ‘a narrative machine’, in which he compared the rules of
the narrative to ‘a machine that functions basically on a set of precise units
governed by rigorous combinational rules. The presence of those rules
explains and determines the success.’ 71 Essentially constructed on Saussure’s
pioneering study of linguistics and Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology,
71