The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
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— <strong>The</strong> <strong>Death</strong> <strong>of</strong> <strong>Christian</strong> <strong>Britain</strong> —<br />
style <strong>of</strong> ‘high’ fiction in which negative conversion narratives were characterised<br />
by unresolved doubt. In these, characters despaired <strong>of</strong> salvation,<br />
culminating in Joseph Conrad’s reversal <strong>of</strong> the salvation story in Heart<br />
<strong>of</strong> Darkness (1902). 104 However, the experimental novel with an inverted<br />
salvation narrative could not compete with the mass popularity <strong>of</strong> other<br />
genres which depended upon the evangelical structure. Foremost among<br />
these was the romantic novel, the most popular British novel form, which<br />
owed its origins to evangelicalism. Walter Bagehot opined in 1858 that<br />
romantic fiction was an ‘addiction’ <strong>of</strong> young readers, and ‘a kind <strong>of</strong> novel<br />
has become so familiar to us as almost to engross the name, which deals<br />
solely with the passion <strong>of</strong> love’. 105 For Victorian women writers, fiction<br />
was almost inconceivable without romantic relationships between men and<br />
women, even when exploring their anxieties, anger and ambivalence<br />
concerning women’s subordinate position in British society. 106 Its secular<br />
pinnacle was attained in the output <strong>of</strong> the Mills & Boon publishing house<br />
which started in 1909, whose novels followed the evangelical narrative in<br />
mixing the male public sphere and the female private sphere – not, as jay<br />
Dixon argues, to subordinate and imprison women in inferior roles,<br />
but by conflating them ‘to reaffirm the heroine’s world – her values and<br />
expectations, her needs and way <strong>of</strong> life’. <strong>The</strong> shared characteristics include<br />
the periods <strong>of</strong> tribulation and physical crisis which the man undergoes.<br />
Mills & Boon novels employed notions <strong>of</strong> a journey, describing the<br />
emotional and sometimes moral journey a hero must endure before ‘finding’<br />
his heroine. By validating her world <strong>of</strong> home, romance and family, and by<br />
the fusion <strong>of</strong> the hero and heroine in marriage as the final resolution, the<br />
romantic novel is emphasising that the female sphere is necessary to the<br />
public sphere. 107 This argument can be taken a little further. In the romantic<br />
narrative the home becomes the place <strong>of</strong> feminine power to which men<br />
become subordinate as the source – discursively the only source – <strong>of</strong> their<br />
moral authority. Indeed, in Mills & Boon’s pre-1918 novels, religion is an<br />
explicit element in the heroine’s romantic odyssey, and even after 1918<br />
when explicit references to religion waned, love continues to be described<br />
in terms <strong>of</strong> religious salvation: evangelical terminology continues to be used,<br />
such as ‘cleansing’, ‘fallen so low’ and finding love as ‘the Promised land’. 108<br />
Most fundamental <strong>of</strong> all, the Mills & Boon novel shares with the evangelical<br />
narrative structure the absolute certainty <strong>of</strong> marriage as the final act <strong>of</strong><br />
the story.<br />
One curious omission from secular fiction <strong>of</strong> the 1840–1940 period,<br />
unlike evangelical literature, is the mother. Ermarth comments that in<br />
historical and social novels they are ‘an especially endangered species’,<br />
appearing as dead or ‘ghostly women’, <strong>of</strong>ten <strong>of</strong>f-stage or characters previous<br />
to the plot. 109 But this divergence was perhaps not surprising. <strong>The</strong> time<br />
between puberty and marriage was the critical evangelical space for a<br />
woman to be saved and find a ‘good man’. 110 Even in the evangelical<br />
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