Suscribing to Faith? The Anglican Parish Magazine 1859-1929

This book introduces the reader to a subject which, until now, has been almost totally ignored by scholars. Seeking to change the Cinderella status of parish magazines, the book reveals their importance as a source for the studies of both religion and mass-market publishing. Parish magazines usually contained commercially published 'insets', making them a microcosm of the Anglican Church's role as a conduit for national issues into the local community; yet, despite the propagandist potential and wide circulation of such magazines, their content offered subscribers a diet of anxiety and despair over religious and social change, along with a laissez-faire approach to the effects of commercialism. Suffering from a collapse of confidence and vision, and mired in its internecine wars, the Church of England, 1859-1929, eventually proved unable to utilise the technological advances presented by mass-market publishing to its own advantage.

Jane Platt is an independent scholar specialising in church history. From 2011-2014 she was Honorary Researcher in History at Lancaster University, UK. She is the editor of The Diocese of Carlisle, 1814–1855 (2015).

Contents
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, 1871-1918
5. Manhood
6. 'Scribbling Women': Female Authorship of Inset Fiction
7. Readers
8. Stormy Waters: 'How can the waves the bark o'erwhelm, with Christ the Pilot at the Helm?'
9. The Challenges of Modernity: Scientific Advances and the Great War
10. Anglican Parish Magazines 1919-1929 and Beyond