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 />
One important and common variation is that the godly woman herself<br />
may be the agency, or part <strong>of</strong> the agency, for the conversion <strong>of</strong> the ungodly<br />
man. In a story from 1903, ‘Won by his wife’, a ‘good woman’ Carrie<br />
Foster ‘made a bad match’ in Tom Grant, a London cabman, who with his<br />
drinking kept the family income low for twelve years and left the home<br />
threadbare: ‘So clean and tidy it was, but, oh – so bare! Sitting there I soon<br />
heard the story <strong>of</strong> the blighted hopes, the shadowed home, the saddened<br />
heart; and all through drink.’ <strong>The</strong>n Tom had an accident falling <strong>of</strong>f his cab,<br />
and through this accident and Carrie’s attentive <strong>Christian</strong> nursing, he was<br />
converted: ‘So it’s true enough that Tom Grant is converted, and if anybody<br />
asks you how it came about, you can just tell them that it was no parson<br />
and no preaching, but it was his wife’s life.’ 76 In this variation, the narrative<br />
order changes with the conversion and the chance event being inverted<br />
so that the latter becomes the instigator <strong>of</strong> the former. This was a very<br />
common narrative structure, its theme replicated many times. In ‘Fanny’s<br />
Mistake and Its Sequel’ (1924), orphan girl Fanny Irwin worked as a<br />
domestic servant and was ‘a joy’ to her employer until she took up with<br />
dissolute youth, Jim Pollock, who was ‘handsome and attractive, constantly<br />
in bad company, [and] he was known to bet and drink’. Fanny married<br />
him but could not reform him: ‘he soon plunged into drink more than ever<br />
to make him forget his betting losses’. A baby came along, Jim lost his job,<br />
and Fanny had to go out to work. <strong>The</strong>n, Jim was run over by a motor<br />
lorry (the chance event, shown in illustration) and told by the doctor that<br />
he would only survive his injuries if he gave up drink. Through this<br />
‘miracle’, Fanny is able to turn him to God: ‘Jim Pollock knows from<br />
blessed experience that there is power in the blood <strong>of</strong> Christ to break the<br />
chains <strong>of</strong> evil habit and to set the captive free.’ 77<br />
In this way, women’s religiosity was critical to moral change in men.<br />
Indeed, it is hard to find a fictional evangelical narrative in which a man’s<br />
conversion did not involve a godly woman. In a serialised novel in the<br />
British Weekly in the late 1880s, Annie Swan’s Doris Cheyne, the young<br />
heroine discovered that Mr Hardwicke in the manor house had lent money<br />
to her mother for the purchase <strong>of</strong> a school on the ‘understanding’ that<br />
Doris would wed him. Learning <strong>of</strong> this, Doris refused Hardwicke marriage<br />
and asked him to pass the debt to her. Overwhelmed by her nobility,<br />
Hardwicke in an instant cancelled the debt and became ‘a better man’:<br />
‘You’ve shown me that there are things better than money in this world.<br />
I’m in your debt, my dear, deeper than ever I’ll be able to pay. You don’t<br />
know what you’ve taught me. I’ve watched you, and I’ve been a better<br />
man since a thought <strong>of</strong> you filled my heart.’ 78<br />
In fictional evangelical narratives, the chance event was usually <strong>of</strong> a<br />
dramatic kind, appealing to the melodramatic appetite <strong>of</strong> Victorian and<br />
Edwardian readers. But in true-life stories, the chance event is <strong>of</strong>ten<br />
portrayed as duty. In ‘<strong>The</strong> Wife’s Six Mile Walk’, a story from 1862, a<br />
75