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