supported by the Sunday School movement with its buying of prizes as a reward for
good attendance and by the fact that the books appeared to be good value for money,
continued to appear.
Some of the authors conveyed their message in the popular genres of the time.
Amongst the flood of writers of girls’ school stories in the period before 1930 was
Dorothy Dennison. Many of her books are conventional school stories but a few were
published by the Religious Tract Society, and in these an evangelical interest is forced into
the standard framework. For example, Rumours in the Fourth Form (nd, but published in
the 1920s) has a chapter, ‘Rosemary hears the call’, in which the heroine is invited to
accompany a friend to a Bible class, an experience which causes her to repent her
dishonest behaviour and to become a reformed character. It is such books that led
Judith Humphrey to suggest that the worth of a book ‘varies in direct proportion to its
evangelistic message’ (Humphrey 1994:220).
One of the most popular evangelical writers in recent years has been Patricia St John;
her earliest stories, beginning with Tanglewood’s Secret, published by the Scripture
Union in 1948, use some of the romantic devices typical of nineteenth-century
evangelical publishing, but she also writes stories with a tougher edge, set in trouble
spots of the world. Set in war-torn Lebanon, Nothing Else Matters (1978) describes
scenes she knew from her experience as a missionary. Although Patricia St John does
not reach the wide audience enjoyed by, for example, Hesba Stretton a century earlier,
her books have been very popular with Christian readers and have been translated into
other languages.
A major influence on evangelical writing for children in the latter part of the twentieth
century has been the popularity of the Chronicles of Narnia of C.S. Lewis. Recognising
the appeal and Christian content of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) and its
successors, many writers have tried to emulate Lewis’s example, creating imaginary
worlds in which the fairy tale forces of good and evil represent God and Satan. In an age
when few believe in the direct interventions of Providence or acknowledge their need of
salvation, such books are seen as a way of educating non-Christian readers in the ways
of God without appearing to preach directly. Some of the imitations of Narnia have been
poorly written, but Pauline Fisk’s Midnight Blue (1990) was awarded the prestigious
Smarties Prize, both as the best book for 9 to 12-year-olds and as the best children’s
book of the year.
Midnight Blue was published by Lion Publishing, established in 1971 and almost
unique in the twentieth century as a new imprint aiming to publish Bible stories and
books that ‘help children to find out about Christianity’. Other specialist imprints
include Pickering and Inglis, and the Victory Press. Those publishers established in the
nineteenth century realised the market was changing. The Religious Tract Society
became, first the United Society for Christian Literature and, in 1930, the Lutterworth
Press. The Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK), although it
continued to use the SPCK imprint, established the Triangle and Sheldon Presses in the
1960s. Thus, both societies chose names which do not advertise their religious
connections, and began to publish a wider range of titles.
When Burns and Oates, a leading Catholic publisher, asked the agnostic Charles
Keeping to illustrate two of their books in the 1960s, ‘it was made clear that he was at
RELIGIOUS WRITING FOR CHILDREN 275