The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
last decade of the century. Some magazines avoided obviously ‘religious
material’, such as the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, launched in 1852
by Samuel Beeton, whose empire of improving publications went on to
include the Boy’s Own Magazine, Queen, and his wife’s Beeton’s Book
of Household Management. But when not explicit, piety was embedded in
discourses on femininity in articles on clothes, cleanliness and above all
romance. 92 From the 1860s, the romantic genre expanded massively into
popular papers for girls, cheap novels and short stories. The religious and
secular women’s press formed a continuum; the immensely popular
romantic fiction writer Annie S. Swan wrote serialised novels for the
religious paper the British Weekly and started her own ‘secular’ Woman at
Home in 1893. With more downmarket varieties like Home Chat, romantic
fiction had by the 1890s a fixed and prominent position beside needlework,
the agony aunt and domestic advice in the woman’s and domestic magazine.
93 The market for romantic fiction then grew with the arrival of the
cheap novel, reaching a mythic quality in the output of Mills & Boon from
1909.
In the early decades of the improving magazine, exhortation was more
common than fiction for circulating moral discourses. This was particularly
the case with the temperance message, which was inherent to all improving
literature.
See the temperate man entering his house to spend his evening with
his family. How delighted they are by his presence! Some of the pence
he has saved from the liquor vault have purchased a copy of some
cheap and useful publications . . . Let it not be said, then, that man
wants artificial excitements. He will have excitement and pleasure
enough in his evenings at home, and, in his frequent walks abroad
with his wife and children, pointing at the beauties of the heavens
and the earth, and discoursing with his family on the nature and
design, so far as yet discovered, of the works of the Almighty. 94
But from the early 1830s, improving fiction was developing as a genre
particularly aimed at women. With women rarely depicted as managing
economically without a man, picking the right husband was a prioritisation
drawn straight from evangelical discourse. 95 ‘The Runaway’ by Miss
Mitford, published in Chamber’s Journal in 1832, was set in a small English
village in which the heroine Mary Walker was an heiress to a small inheritance
who attracted so much male attention that she rarely went to the
inn for ‘dread of encountering some of her many lovers’. She became
engaged to William, a humble but likeable fellow, but on the day before
their wedding she accepted a present of two live pheasants from George,
the gamekeeper, ‘a good-natured a fellow as ever lived, and a constant
visitor at the sign of the Foaming Tankard’. On the wedding day, William
heard of the gift and became jealous, telling Mary: ‘George Bailey is the
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