Evangelical Periodical Culture: Or, Evangelicalism Was Everywhere

In 1897, Hugh Price Hughes, founder of the Methodist Times, declared that "under the conditions of existing civilization, every Movement must have a Newspaper or Magazine" (1). Hughes was not referring to social movements, such as those supporting temperance or women's suffrage, but specifically to religious ones. And at the end of the nineteenth century, most religious movements did issue a periodical publication of some sort. Perhaps nowhere was the plurality of denominations of Christianity, and of parties or movements within denominations, more readily apparent in Victorian Britain than in the periodical press. Over the course of the nineteenth century, periodicals supplanted printed sermons and tracts as the primary printed means by which churches and religious organizations spread their word locally and nationally. Unlike tracts, however, religious periodicals did not generally seek to convert readers but instead to unite communities of belief around shared doctrines and practices. Josef L. Altholz's The Religious Press in Britain, 1760–1900 offers a comprehensive account of nineteenth-century religious periodicals by denomination. My aim in this short piece is to give an overview of the evangelical periodical press, the distinctiveness of which has been overlooked by scholars of Victorian literature and culture.

As essays in this forum from Timothy Larsen, Chad Stutz, and Mark Knight attest, evangelicalism was a "movement rather than a denomination" (Knight and Mason 122). As such, it was devoted to actively spreading the Gospel: evangelicals promoted individual improvement and social transformation through the practice of Biblical teaching. While virtually every religious denomination produced its own distinctive periodical publications, the evangelical press comprised a fluid network of publishers, editors, and writers, many of whom worked for multiple publications. Evangelical periodical culture, like evangelicalism itself, was remarkable for its "breadth and diversity" (Knight and Mason 122). It included some periodicals that were specific to a particular denomination, such as the Presbyterian Evangelical Witness (1862–73) and the Baptist Freeman (1855–99), and some that were non-denominational, such as the Evangelical Magazine (1793–1904) and the Leisure Hour (1852–1905). Evangelicals of all denominations shared a concern with the spiritual and practical well-being of those regarded as intellectually inferior or morally dependent: children, women, servants, and labourers. The abolition of the Advertisement Tax in 1853, the Newspaper Stamp Duty in 1855, and the Paper Duty in 1861 made possible the publication of magazines specifically for these classes, and the Elementary Education Act of 1870 increased the demand for cheap and morally edifying reading material. Already prone to consider themselves "people of the Word" (Knight and Mason 131), evangelicals took advantage of these developments in the periodical press to create a sense of community that would encompass multiplicity.

The evangelical press took advantage of all available forms of periodical publication, issuing expensive quarterly, mid-range monthly, and cheap weekly magazines. The Free Presbyterian Church envisioned its journal, the North British Review (1844–71), as a competitor to elite quarterly reviews such as the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review and sought quite successfully to become an arbiter of national culture (Shattock 457). By contrast, the broadly evangelical Sunday at Home (1854–1940) cost just a penny and aimed to provide the working classes with "profitable employment [for] those intervals of the Lord's day which are not devoted to Divine Worship and the reading of Holy Scriptures" ("A Few Words"). While these penny papers did not eschew fiction entirely, they tended toward the overtly didactic and uplifting sort. Newspapers were problematic for evangelicals because, although they were cheap enough for working-class readers to purchase, the format carried connotations of worldliness (Altholz 49–51). Newspapers were by definition concerned with the here and now rather than with the timelessness of Christianity. Nonetheless, the repeal of the taxes on knowledge in the 1850s inspired several attempts to establish non-sectarian biweekly newspapers, including the Christian Cabinet (1855–64), the London Christian Times (1863–64), and the Christian Times (1866–71). As their relatively short lifespans suggest, these newspapers did not develop large enough readerships to become financially sustainable.

Although it employed a range of...