The Death of Christian Britain

— Women in Discourse and Narrative 1800–1950 —
One important and common variation is that the godly woman herself
may be the agency, or part of the agency, for the conversion of the ungodly
man. In a story from 1903, ‘Won by his wife’, a ‘good woman’ Carrie
Foster ‘made a bad match’ in Tom Grant, a London cabman, who with his
drinking kept the family income low for twelve years and left the home
threadbare: ‘So clean and tidy it was, but, oh – so bare! Sitting there I soon
heard the story of the blighted hopes, the shadowed home, the saddened
heart; and all through drink.’ Then Tom had an accident falling off his cab,
and through this accident and Carrie’s attentive Christian nursing, he was
converted: ‘So it’s true enough that Tom Grant is converted, and if anybody
asks you how it came about, you can just tell them that it was no parson
and no preaching, but it was his wife’s life.’ 76 In this variation, the narrative
order changes with the conversion and the chance event being inverted
so that the latter becomes the instigator of the former. This was a very
common narrative structure, its theme replicated many times. In ‘Fanny’s
Mistake and Its Sequel’ (1924), orphan girl Fanny Irwin worked as a
domestic servant and was ‘a joy’ to her employer until she took up with
dissolute youth, Jim Pollock, who was ‘handsome and attractive, constantly
in bad company, [and] he was known to bet and drink’. Fanny married
him but could not reform him: ‘he soon plunged into drink more than ever
to make him forget his betting losses’. A baby came along, Jim lost his job,
and Fanny had to go out to work. Then, Jim was run over by a motor
lorry (the chance event, shown in illustration) and told by the doctor that
he would only survive his injuries if he gave up drink. Through this
‘miracle’, Fanny is able to turn him to God: ‘Jim Pollock knows from
blessed experience that there is power in the blood of Christ to break the
chains of evil habit and to set the captive free.’ 77
In this way, women’s religiosity was critical to moral change in men.
Indeed, it is hard to find a fictional evangelical narrative in which a man’s
conversion did not involve a godly woman. In a serialised novel in the
British Weekly in the late 1880s, Annie Swan’s Doris Cheyne, the young
heroine discovered that Mr Hardwicke in the manor house had lent money
to her mother for the purchase of a school on the ‘understanding’ that
Doris would wed him. Learning of this, Doris refused Hardwicke marriage
and asked him to pass the debt to her. Overwhelmed by her nobility,
Hardwicke in an instant cancelled the debt and became ‘a better man’:
‘You’ve shown me that there are things better than money in this world.
I’m in your debt, my dear, deeper than ever I’ll be able to pay. You don’t
know what you’ve taught me. I’ve watched you, and I’ve been a better
man since a thought of you filled my heart.’ 78
In fictional evangelical narratives, the chance event was usually of a
dramatic kind, appealing to the melodramatic appetite of Victorian and
Edwardian readers. But in true-life stories, the chance event is often
portrayed as duty. In ‘The Wife’s Six Mile Walk’, a story from 1862, a
75