From the Dairyman's Daughter to Worrals of the WAAF: The Religious Tract Society, Lutterworth Press, and Children's Literature

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2007), "From the Dairyman's Daughter to Worrals of the WAAF: The Religious Tract Society, Lutterworth Press, and Children's Literature", Library Review, Vol. 56 No. 8, pp. 730-732. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530710818072

Anyone studying 19th‐century publishing is likely to encounter The Religious Tract Society. It started in 1799, inspired by Wilberforce's Practical Christianity and by an evangelical commitment to spread the Gospel, combat sin, and improve the lives and reading of the working classes. Its earliest publications took the form of religious tracts in the style of Hannah More's Cheap Repository Tracts (that pre‐date RTS publishing). RTS publications sold in their thousands at home and abroad, increasing at the century went on to middle‐class readers, broadened into fiction and magazines like the Boy's Own Paper (1879 onwards), and went into decline in the early decades of the 20th century.

Its success and decline make interesting reading for any historian of publishing, as factors like changing tastes for religious and political tracts and tensions for a religious enterprise of being entrepreneurial, the role of advertising and growing secularism and trade competition all reveal themselves during the lifetime of the RTS. It became a company limited by guarantee with charitable status in 1899, changed its name as a publisher to The Lutterworth Press in 1932, and merged with the Christian Literature Society for India and Africa to become the United Society for Christian Literature in 1935. It was sold to Adrian Brink, its current managing director, in 1984, and continues to this day as The Lutterworth Press. Its website is www.lutterworth.com. Brink contributes a short piece to this collection.

If we see tracts as being short moral works intended for adults and children, but also as including any work with a sententious line of argument and advocacy, it is logical to look not only at the early tracts published by the RTS and other such bodies (and these extend back to Puritan works much earlier and weave into the chapbook tradition), but also to include works like Mrs O.F. Walton's Christie's Old Organ (1874) and Hesba Stretton's Jessica's First Prayer (1867). As a measure of their popularity, Jessica's First Prayer had sold at least two and a half million copies by 1911. We are in the Harry Potter league here. The tract character persists. Indeed, Brian Alderson (in the last chapter on the universality of tracts) argues that children's literature today has its own ideologues for morality and political correctness, and that themes like duty and growing up continue to characterize children's literature in a thoroughly secular age today. Ann Thwaite, biographer of Philip Gosse and Frances Hodgson Burnett among others, contributes a chapter on the historical tract, and many other contributors widen things out and brings things up to date.

As well as being popular in their day and powerful in their sentiments, such works reveal important things about the relationships between editors and authors, and about contemporary authorship. The stable of RTS authors is remarkable (not just Hesba Stretton but Legh Richmond, the author of the tract The Dairyman's Daughter, in tract format in 1822, Ascott Hope and Gordon Stables, Evelyn Everett Green and May Wynne, Captain W.E. Johns, known for the Biggles series and its female counterpart Worrals, Kingston and A.L.O.E. and Agnes Giberne). One of the most interesting chapters deals with the copyrights and royalties of Hesba Stretton, drawing on original sources like the RTS correspondence records.

Other editorial and authorial issues come out in Mary Cadogan's well‐argued discussion of the Girl's Own Paper (1880 onwards), its appeal to girls and “the lower orders”, editors like Flora Klickman, authors like Mrs George de Horne Vaizey, the treatment of “the feminine character” and how its fiction dealt with wider social (and feminist) issues and with matters of the war. A further chapter identifies later authors, writing for an increasingly secular age interested more in fiction than piety, like Mabel Knowles and Phyllis Matthewman, who like Elsie Oxenham is now seen as a forerunner of what we know today as literature for teenagers.

Bibliographically and historiographically, works like this study of the RTS (it emerged from a conference held in 1999 in Norwich by the Children's Books History Society, of which the two editors are key members) do more than merely alert us to writers now forgotten except by experts: they uncover hidden facts about publishing and literary history, in culture and popular history, such as the wider role of RTS publishing, in parallel with the enterprise of Chambers and Charles Knight, in using mass publishing technology to reach a wide readership; and such as the role of tracts and fiction and above all popular magazines such as The Child's Companion (1824‐1922), another RTS publication, in providing reading material and in reflecting styles and tastes of the time.

Robert Kirkpatrick contributes an interesting piece on school stories which includes a checklist of authors like Gunby Hadath. The book also has a long listing of works published by the RTS between 1795 and 1943 (from an exhibition of RTS work organized by Alderson and Garrett in 1999). Aileen Fyfe's history of the RTS identifies not just the changing cycle of its fortunes but also identifies key works about it, like Samuel Green's 1899 history and more recent studies like her own study of evangelical and scientific publishing in Victorian Britain, Patricia Anderson's study of the printed image and popular culture between 1790 and 1860, and Simon Eliot's studies of publishing in 19th century for The Bibliographical Society.

So, in looking across so wide a period at one company (“the RTS was both evangelical and entrepreneurial”), we get a unique glimpse into a wider world of contemporary publishing, authorship and readership. Publishing for children in a distinctive form began at the RTS in the 1820s and remained a major strand of its work until the end. Decline took place for many external (like rivals and paper shortages) and internal (like strict advertising policy and shortage of money) and for reasons that cut across both (like being increasing out of step with the modern world). Indeed, one chapter highlights how story‐telling became more conventional and original religious and moral values dwindled into forms of “nominal piety” in later decades.

Yet, if we think that tracts are something merely in the past, in children's and other reading and media, a quick look at fact books that advocate reliance on soya or attack genetically modified crops or big business for harming the environment, or fiction that plays to stereotypes or treats political correctness with reverence, or fantasy that plays with ideas of faith and works through rites of passage, these modern incarnations are there to remind us that the tendency to be tendentious is alive and well. The papers from this conference have taken a long time to appear in print, but they have a lot to say about their chosen specialist field as well as wise points to make on a wider front. The price reflects the specialist character of this work but, for those who really want it, it is well worth getting.