The Death of Christian Britain

— Women in Discourse and Narrative 1800–1950 —
beau of the parish, as you are the belle’. With that he stomped away from
the village, to return four years’ later ‘a poor ragged famished wretch’ at
death’s door. Mary came to his side:
. . . and the poor runaway grasped her hand between his trembling
ones (Neptune fondling them all the time,) and life, and health, and
love were in the pressure; and the toils, the wanderings, the miseries
of his four years’ absence, were all forgotten in that moment of bliss. 96
In ‘Miles Atherton’, a short story of 1832, Mary was married to a lazy man
who gave his son to a chimney sweep in return for cash, but the boy was
returned to his mother by a passing soldier. So taken with the guilt of
neglect, Mary was immediately converted:
‘Not yet gone to bed!’ said Miles Atherton, with a harsh voice, as he
entered the room in that reckless and violent manner habitual to the
profligate. His wife was now above the power of fear – no beating
at her heart – no trembling in her limbs; for the comforter had been
with her, and there was such an expression of blessedness on her
countenance, as moonlight shewed it pale, wan, sunken, but rejoicing,
that the wretched intruder was fixed in amazement. 97
At which point Miles was also converted, and both Miles and Mary fell to
their knees in prayer. ‘Evil found now no abiding place in his spirit’, and
both then went to church every Sunday.
The theme of spiritual journey was central to Victorian and Edwardian
novels. The plots were ‘often episodic and based on the journey trope: the
idea that life is a road with a moral destination, a pilgrim’s progress’. 98
Ermarth comments that evangelical self-examination ‘literally provided a
narrative structure’ for Victorian fiction: ‘The history of “turning” or
conversion from one way of life to another moved from the diaries of
Methodists straight into the autobiographies and novels of the nineteenth
century’. 99 The 1840s was a decade when the evangelical narrative structure
emerged in the ‘secular’ novels of the Brontes, Thackeray and the early
Dickens novels. 100 The quest for salvation, even when none appears, informs
the narrative pattern of even Vanity Fair, a novel consumed with the
profound arbitrariness of life. 101 Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress of 1678 was a
model for so much of the romantic and religious fiction of the nineteenth
and early twentieth century – for Thackeray and Charlotte Bronte 102 – and
many other novels were infused with religious structuring or motifs
(including the use of Anglican references to the Book of Common Prayer
in Dombey and Son of 1846–80), whilst the genre was utilised by churchmen
like Cardinals Newman and Wiseman. 103
What Ermarth calls the evangelical ‘experimental narrative structure of
error, crisis and conversion’ gave way in the later Victorian period, with
the impact of Darwinism, higher criticism and scientific ‘doubt’, to a new
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