Subscribing to Faith? The Anglican Parish Magazine 1859–1929 by Jane Platt (review)

In Subscribing to Faith, Jane Platt aims to do for the Anglican parish magazine what E. P. Thompson once did for the English working class. Far from viewing parish magazines as "dull pastiches of secular magazines," Platt asserts that they have something valuable to tell us about the "place of religion and its concerns in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain" (5). She also expands our knowledge of the parish magazine as a periodical form (3). There is little doubt that Platt succeeds in this project in an empirical sense. This book is exhaustively researched and considers the magazines produced in over 350 individual parishes in England. But for all the breadth of empirical rigor which constitutes this book, it struggles to convincingly show that parish magazines have anything new to tell us about either nineteenth-century religion or the magazine's periodical form.

In the first four chapters, Platt explores the origins and economics of the parish magazine, establishing some of the major themes that recur throughout the rest of the book. She locates the parish magazine's origin in the 1850s as a response to growing agitation around the tithing system and the re-establishment of Roman Catholic hierarchy. The parish magazine became a way to reinforce the centrality of the parish in both local and national life, but local efforts at creating magazines quickly ran into both economic and political trouble. Poorer parishes in particular had problems creating consistent content for their local magazines and drumming up the requisite funds to print them regularly. Platt argues that John Erskine Clarke was the first to pioneer a successful solution to this problem. In 1858, Clarke created a "commercial parish-magazine inset" that included chapters from serialized novels alongside more typically moralizing tracts and religious writing (27). While Clarke's inset showed an awareness of the magazine's religious audience, it also highlighted his commercial concerns. He constantly attempted to recruit fiction authors to write for him, even propositioning George Eliot to write for one pound per page, an offer she graciously declined. Though he may not have recruited Eliot, Clarke's model proved sustainable and became widely adopted. His inset was wrapped with blank pages and an illustration of the parish church that had bought a subscription. This template was then sent off to the local parish churches, which added local news and commentary. The insert thus responded to local concerns while at the same time offering readers glimpses of national church opinion and entertainment.

The parish magazine not only faced economic problems but also political concerns as well. After the Oxford Movement had riven the Church of England during the 1830s and 40s, Church factionalism only hardened and intensified. Evangelicals, Broad Churchmen, and Anglo-Catholics all quickly jumped into the parish magazine enterprise as a way of supporting their sympathetic clergymen and attacking rival factions. In the parish of Saint John's, Keswick, for instance, a newly installed Anglo-Catholic priest used the parish magazine to reform the church's Evangelical proclivities. Saint John's had been previously using the Evangelical inset Home Words, but upon the new vicar's succession, the magazine was mysteriously delivered late. Eventually, the vicar substituted the Anglo-Catholic inset, the Sign, claiming that he was saving the church money by using a cheaper inset. Interestingly enough, however, Platt claims that these problems became solutions in their own way. Combining commercial and religious discourse, as well as mixing ads with sermons and fiction with tracts, allowed the parish magazine to serve multiple functions for its readers and to achieve economic success and longevity. Likewise, though the factional disputes that dominated religious life in this period were often religiously off-putting, they too drove increased demand for a parish magazine that could be amenable to local conditions while also reinforcing the position of broader factional sympathies.

Chapters five and six cover the familiar ground of Christian gender roles as they appeared...