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 />
beau <strong>of</strong> the parish, as you are the belle’. With that he stomped away from<br />
the village, to return four years’ later ‘a poor ragged famished wretch’ at<br />
death’s door. Mary came to his side:<br />
. . . and the poor runaway grasped her hand between his trembling<br />
ones (Neptune fondling them all the time,) and life, and health, and<br />
love were in the pressure; and the toils, the wanderings, the miseries<br />
<strong>of</strong> his four years’ absence, were all forgotten in that moment <strong>of</strong> bliss. 96<br />
In ‘Miles Atherton’, a short story <strong>of</strong> 1832, Mary was married to a lazy man<br />
who gave his son to a chimney sweep in return for cash, but the boy was<br />
returned to his mother by a passing soldier. So taken with the guilt <strong>of</strong><br />
neglect, Mary was immediately converted:<br />
‘Not yet gone to bed!’ said Miles Atherton, with a harsh voice, as he<br />
entered the room in that reckless and violent manner habitual to the<br />
pr<strong>of</strong>ligate. His wife was now above the power <strong>of</strong> fear – no beating<br />
at her heart – no trembling in her limbs; for the comforter had been<br />
with her, and there was such an expression <strong>of</strong> blessedness on her<br />
countenance, as moonlight shewed it pale, wan, sunken, but rejoicing,<br />
that the wretched intruder was fixed in amazement. 97<br />
At which point Miles was also converted, and both Miles and Mary fell to<br />
their knees in prayer. ‘Evil found now no abiding place in his spirit’, and<br />
both then went to church every Sunday.<br />
<strong>The</strong> theme <strong>of</strong> spiritual journey was central to Victorian and Edwardian<br />
novels. <strong>The</strong> plots were ‘<strong>of</strong>ten episodic and based on the journey trope: the<br />
idea that life is a road with a moral destination, a pilgrim’s progress’. 98<br />
Ermarth comments that evangelical self-examination ‘literally provided a<br />
narrative structure’ for Victorian fiction: ‘<strong>The</strong> history <strong>of</strong> “turning” or<br />
conversion from one way <strong>of</strong> life to another moved from the diaries <strong>of</strong><br />
Methodists straight into the autobiographies and novels <strong>of</strong> the nineteenth<br />
century’. 99 <strong>The</strong> 1840s was a decade when the evangelical narrative structure<br />
emerged in the ‘secular’ novels <strong>of</strong> the Brontes, Thackeray and the early<br />
Dickens novels. 100 <strong>The</strong> quest for salvation, even when none appears, informs<br />
the narrative pattern <strong>of</strong> even Vanity Fair, a novel consumed with the<br />
pr<strong>of</strong>ound arbitrariness <strong>of</strong> life. 101 Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress <strong>of</strong> 1678 was a<br />
model for so much <strong>of</strong> the romantic and religious fiction <strong>of</strong> the nineteenth<br />
and early twentieth century – for Thackeray and Charlotte Bronte 102 – and<br />
many other novels were infused with religious structuring or motifs<br />
(including the use <strong>of</strong> Anglican references to the Book <strong>of</strong> Common Prayer<br />
in Dombey and Son <strong>of</strong> 1846–80), whilst the genre was utilised by churchmen<br />
like Cardinals Newman and Wiseman. 103<br />
What Ermarth calls the evangelical ‘experimental narrative structure <strong>of</strong><br />
error, crisis and conversion’ gave way in the later Victorian period, with<br />
the impact <strong>of</strong> Darwinism, higher criticism and scientific ‘doubt’, to a new<br />
81