or holy living. These were distributed by pedlars, some of whom were ‘Christian pedlars’
who dealt (or were supposed to deal) only in religious tracts; one series, the ‘Cheap
Repository Tracts’ sold over two million copies in the mid-1790s, and bound copies were
used in schools and wealthier homes.
Initially the tract writers aimed their production at adults, but as early as 1803, the
Religious Tract Society (founded in 1799) considered the possibility of producing tract
stories for children. The first, which appeared in 1809, were reprints of tracts for adults;
however, by the 1820s both the Religious Tract Society and many others were producing
tracts specifically for children. (With child mortality still high, there was a continuing
impulse to ‘save’ children before death.) Children at Sunday School could be taught to
carry the message of salvation home to their parents—a scenario that was developed in
numerous tracts. The tracts also reflect a growing interest in children and childhood;
and although evangelicals have traditionally been seen as opposed to the romantic view
of childhood (as they insisted on the corruption of individual sin rather than on inherent
childhood grace), they were not immune to childish charm and prettiness. A number of
periodicals also sprang up; William Carus Wilson, notorious as the model for Mr
Brocklehurst in Jane Eyre, edited The Children’s Friend—which contains the customary
holy deaths of children. Such magazines elevated English values, purveyed the message
that it was better to be pious than rich, and included grotesque narratives and pictures
of heathen barbarity. Death was luridly prominent with titles like ‘You are not too young
to die’ and ‘The dying Sunday scholar’.
The main purpose of the tract or evangelical story was not to entertain but to exhort.
Since the writers sought to appeal not to the imagination but to the religious conscience
of their readers, the stories follow set patterns and there is little difference between one
tract and another on the same theme. In some, particularly the early Cheap Repository
Tracts of Hannah More (and others, from 1795), virtue is rewarded and vice punished in
this life: honest servants gain promotion and (limited) wealth, while lazy or dishonest
children come to bad ends. In others, Christians in poor circumstances lead lives of
contentment and usefulness, and in many cases the witness of their lives and
conversation impresses others and brings them to salvation. Old cottagers are content
because they have ‘Christ with their crust and their crust with Christ’—and it is clear
that the stories served to teach social subordination as well as evangelical principles.
Thus although the circumstantial details of many tracts and tract-style books seem to
attempt realism, there is a blindness (deliberate or otherwise) concerning social
conditions. The houses of the poor are well kept or ramshackle according to the
spiritual state of the tenant, and not according to the quality of the landlord. Christians
may be poor but they are clean and neat and never uncomfortable. Very revealing is an
example like ‘The Lancashire collier girl’ (More 1798:2: 20–31) who goes down the mine
at 9-years-old to earn money for her parents. Because her father is in the mine, and she
has a careful supervisor, the author says, the work cannot be too hard for her to
sustain.
While assessing the tracts it is important to remember, as J.S. Bratton has pointed out,
that these stories were written by naïve writers for naïve readers (25). Not only is the
formula story effective for such readers, but the themes of ‘rags to riches’ and set-piece
dramatic death-bed scenes were popular in secular fiction too. Tract writers were thus
RELIGIOUS WRITING FOR CHILDREN 271