Suscribing to Faith? The Anglican Parish Magazine 1859-1929

Jane Platt

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137362445
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Cristianismo

This book reveals the huge sales and propagandist potential of Anglican parish magazines, while demonstrating the Anglican Church's misunderstanding of the real issues at its heart, and its collective collapse of confidence as it contemplated social change.

1

Inventing the Parish Magazine

Origins

Religious tracts

In a sense the parish magazine was born during the Reformation, when Martin Luther’s emphasis on Biblicism encouraged the spread of reading.¹ In the centuries that followed, the Bible and approved religious works continued to be central to Protestantism and were utilised and adapted by British evangelicals to spread God’s word to the poor and the heathen through charities such as the Religious Tract Society (RTS), the British and Foreign Bible Society and the SPCK.² In 1804 the RTS printed 314,000 tracts; by 1861 it published 20 million annually, together with 13 million copies of religious periodicals (which were in effect ‘serial tracts’).³ As Richard Altick memorably recorded in his groundbreaking work on the history of reading and readers:

Tracts were flung from carriage windows; they were passed out at railway stations; they turned up in jails and lodging houses and hospitals and workhouses ... they were distributed in huge quantities at Sunday and day schools ... they were a ubiquitous part of the social landscape.⁴

Hannah More’s Cheap Repository of Moral and Religious Tracts was a collection of moral tales published in 1795, partly to maintain control of the poor because of fear of French republicanism and the popularity of the works of Thomas Paine, but More was equally concerned with a perceived lack of suitable reading material for the newly literate graduates of Sunday and charity schools.⁵ Greater literacy among the poor had led to increased publication of cheap chapbooks, most of which were secular and often irreverent. More’s tracts were printed to look like chapbooks so that good literature would triumph over bad in the war against what churchgoers universally termed ‘pernicious’ publications.⁶ The parish magazine was placed squarely in the tradition of Hannah More and the tract societies in an advertisement of 1875 which claimed that each number was equal in content to ‘three ordinary penny tracts’.⁷ As late as 1914, an article in the inset, Home Words, argued that the magazine ‘more than fulfils the purpose of the old-fashioned tracts’, and would be read ‘where they were thrown aside’.⁸

Tract distribution and the district visitor

The tract societies combined local volunteers and paid regional colporteurs to distribute religious literature. Clergymen maintained stocks in parish libraries, lending them to parishioners, as explained by this country vicar in 1858:

A parochial library has been established ... consisting principally of books and tracts from the Tract Society and the inhabitants ... supplied gratis ... I have been in the habit for ten years of taking them two or three times in the year and some years oftener to their houses, and changing them when read. The books and tracts have been generally read.⁹

Tract distribution became a crusade. In her thesis on Victorian tract societies Sheila Haines remarks that the Church, as protector of the nation’s spiritual and moral welfare, thought of the poor as lambs in continual danger from ‘ravening wolves’.¹⁰ This was a common contemporary metaphor; at the 1861 Church Congress, one speaker, noting that in some localities only two per cent of the ‘mechanics or working population’ attended any church, spoke of the difficulties ‘in penetrating the recesses of the wilderness into which the wandering sheep have strayed’. He recommended creating a volunteer force of laity to work with the clergy, subdividing the parishes into districts and systematically visiting the people, leaving ‘printed letters’ which invited them to church. The Church, he said, should go out to find the people, to impress upon them its sincerity.¹¹

The concept of district visiting was not new, having been introduced by the Church of Scotland minister, Thomas Chalmers, in a poor Glasgow parish in 1814. A method of reproducing the neighbourhood ties of the country parish, among widespread fears of religious decline in cities, it was widely imitated.¹² In the mid-nineteenth century, the old practice of parochial visiting by the clergy, the new practice of lay district visiting, the long-established practice of disseminating tracts and a huge growth of interest in reading periodicals were all to come together in the creation and distribution of parish magazines. The creator of the first commercial parish-magazine inset, John Erskine Clarke, vicar of Derby,¹³ reminded the 1866 Church Congress that one of the best ways of attaching people to the Church was through house-to-house visiting, which would be

not inquisitorial, not patronising, not condemnatory. Not even directly hortatory ... it must be hearty, sympathising, respectful. Offering the services of a friend, not of the relieving officer; having an eye for the children, and seeking for something to commend rather than to blame; dropping a few words of good cheer over the often embittered and reckless lives of these folk.¹⁴

Clarke’s approval of district visiting might have been an idealisation of the aims of his parish magazine, which was first published when the Anglican pastoral revival and developments in publishing were in happy alignment. Nonetheless, there were inherent tensions from the beginning, for, as Callum Brown has remarked, the ‘salvation industry’s’ presumptuous intrusion into the home led some householders to reject district visitors.¹⁵ The parish magazine, so eagerly proffered, was not universally accepted, let alone read, as future chapters will reveal.

Missionary and Sunday-school magazines

In the early nineteenth century, religious periodical reading was popular with all classes. Prestigious quarterlies, middle-class monthlies, violently partisan weekly newspapers and ‘quality’ reading for the ubiquitous day of rest all had respectable circulations.¹⁶ One consequence of this interest was the entry into the periodical market of the official magazines of religious charitable organisations.¹⁷ Their subscribers were often parishioners who belonged to local auxiliaries: people like Mrs Sloan, who took the Church Missionary Society Annual Report and who may have read its magazine, the CMS Gleaner (1841–1921). Printed cheaply on limp paper, missionary magazines were a familiar part of parish life by mid-century.¹⁸ The rise of the Sunday-school movement resulted in the publication of periodicals aimed at Sunday-school scholars, primarily by the RTS. The content of The Child’s Companion or Sunday Scholar’s Reward, first published in 1824, foreshadowed that of the parish magazine inset, containing tract-like short stories, a serial story, poetry, hymns and articles on missionary work.¹⁹ At the launch in 1878 of the SPCK’s inset, Dawn of Day, the Tract Committee regarded it as ‘just such a magazine ... as clergymen and others would like to put into the hands of Sunday scholars, or to distribute among simple folk’.²⁰ The newest members of the reading public were thought to be childlike at best; whether seen as lost sheep or as wayward children, they were in need of guidance in all areas of life.²¹

Fear of ‘pernicious’ publications

Periodical publishing boomed after the reduction (1836) and repeal (1855) of the Stamp Tax, and improvements in paper-making, printing and illustration,²² along with the increasing speed of distribution through the introduction of the Penny Post in 1840 and an expanding rail network.²³ Wilkie Collins marvelled so dramatically at the new mass audience consuming literature that Altick commented that it was ‘as if [Collins] had come upon the sources of the Nile’.²⁴ The publications of the secular Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (1827), Charles Knight’s Penny Magazine (1832) and Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal (1832) instituted a craze for cheap, improving literature, both in book and periodical form.²⁵ Their advocates, fearful that abolition of the ‘tax on knowledge’ would result in an avalanche of improper publications, deliberately employed a narrative of filth and disease to indicate the contrast between ‘pure’ literature and the huge volume of penny publications supplanting chapbooks in the affections of the poor.²⁶ In 1854 Charles Knight was quoted in the Christian Weekly News:

The circulation of pernicious literature is immense. In 1845 it was calculated from London alone there was a yearly circulation of ... newspapers and serials of a decidedly pernicious character to the extent of 28,862,000! ... The present circulation in London of immoral unstamped publications of upwards of a half-penny to three-halfpence each, must be upwards of 400,000 copies weekly.²⁷

In 1861, Erskine Clarke presented a paper at the Church of England Book-Hawking Union conference. The conference covered a variety of topics, including the choice of cottage wall-prints, the importance of book-hawking in counteracting evil, and self-education for the industrial classes. Clarke’s subject was ‘Cheap Books and how to use them’. Concerned that too much reading of the short articles which constituted periodicals ‘fritter away our minds into shreds and patches’, he argued that periodicals were only ‘leading strings to bring up to better things’, suggesting that better reading could be had in Milton, Shakespeare, Bunyan and that famous advocate of self-help, Samuel Smiles.²⁸ Nonetheless, his determination to provide ‘leading strings ... to better things’ had already led Clarke to become a publisher of a number of periodicals and the inventor of the first commercial parish-magazine inset.

Denominational rivalry and church party division

The father of the denominational magazine was John Wesley, founder of the Arminian (later the Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine), in 1778. The concept was widely copied, provoking the disdain of Thomas Carlyle:

[E]very little sect among us, Unitarians, Utilitarians, Anabaptists, Phrenologists, must have its Periodical, its monthly or quarterly Magazine; – hanging out, like its windmill, into the popularis aura, to grind meal for the society.²⁹

Though Wesleyans were the first to publish a denominational magazine, there is no evidence of localisation before the 1850s, despite interdenominational rivalry. Why was this so? The answer may lie with particular denominational priorities. During the 1850s the Roman Catholic Church in Britain was more vitally concerned with the creation and expansion of its infrastructure, including bishoprics, than the finer points of its parochialia. Cardinal Wiseman’s ultramontane bid to control Britain’s Roman Catholics, combined with the surge of Irish immigrants into the large towns, determined Roman Catholic centralist policymaking.³⁰ Roman Catholic emphasis on the sacraments rather than on the Word may also have militated against the early emergence of the Roman Catholic parish magazine. Nonconformists, whose reliance on the Word was a cornerstone of faith, were slower than Anglicans to localise their successful periodicals, but the popularity of nonconformist worship, together with its different congregational organisation, led to the creation of successful stand-alone chapel magazines.³¹ Moreover, the liberal politics expressed by many local newspapers, exemplified by the Bradford Observer and its ed...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Inventing the Parish Magazine
• 2  Erskine Clarke and Parish Magazine
• 3  Cheap as well as Good: The Economics of Publishing
• 4  Editors, Writers and Church Parties, 18711918
• 5  Manly Men and Chivalrous Heroes
• 6  Scribbling Women: Female Authorship of Inset Fiction
• 7  Parish Magazine Readers
• 8  Stormy Waters: How Can the Waves the Bark Oerwhelm, With Christ the Pilot at the Helm?
• 9  The Challenges of Modernity: Scientific Advances and the Great War
• 10  Anglican Parish Magazines 19191929 and Beyond
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index