The magazine supplies context for
Ruskinʼs juvenilia, for example by reflecting the familyʼs zeal for missionary causes
(see, e.g.,
“a theme”) and the character of their Congregational worship.
The magazine was also an influential source of elements of print culture, for example by supplying models for compiling, entitling, and fair‐copying poetry anthologies, and for specific kinds of poems,
especially
New Yearʼs Poems.
Prominent in each issue were lengthy obituaries and biographies of celebrated clergy,
embellished by their engraved portraits, which supplied the sole graphic interest in each issue apart from the engraved banner.
Ruskinʼs clergyman and tutor, the
Reverend Dr. Edward Andrewsʼs,
was featured in one of these full‐page engravings. The biographies exposed the reader to peoples, landscapes, and customs of cultures around the world,
albeit filtered through the perception of missionaries.
Foundational Aims and Audience of the Magazine in the Movement for Evangelical Unity
The
Evangelical Magazine was founded in
1793 as a non‐denominational voice of evangelical culture,
embracing Anglican Evangelicalism, Old Dissent, and New Dissent
(
Altholz, Religious Press in Britain, 45).
In the preface to the first issue, the magazine situates itself in a world of advancing literacy in which “it will be a rare thing to find a beggar in the land who has not been taught to read” and in which
“[t]housands read a Magazine, who have neither money to purchase, nor leisure to peruse, large volumes”. Yet, this progress is co‐opted by
“a certain description of writers” who, “by monopolizing a work of this kind, have made more converts to their opinions, and done more mischief to the cause of religion, than all the folios of
Socinus
[i.e., Socinianism]”. To counter this influence, the
Evangelical Magazine will convey “the collected knowledge and experience of various Ministers and Christians”
in a form that is level “to every oneʼs capacity, and suited to every oneʼs time and circumstances”, as “elucidated” by the “fundamental doctrines of the Gospel”
and by “the lives and experience of eminent Christians”—that is, “Experimental and Practical Theology”. On a more learned level, against the more “artful attacks of atheistical philosophers”
and “infidel and illiberal critics”, the magazine will undertake “a manly and impartial Review of Religious Books”
(
“Preface” [January 1793], 1–2).
In its aspiration to represent a catholicity of evangelical aims and opinion based on experiential religion, the magazine was oriented to a broad movement
for evangelical union that originated in the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century. In
Scotland, the movement was forwarded in the
first decade of the nineteenth century
by the preaching and organizational efforts of the Haldane brothers,
Robert (
1764–1842) and
James (
1768–1851). Their organizing was associated with the rise
of Scottish Congregationalism—the worship that the Ruskins favored in their first decades in
London—and in their preaching, the Haldanes were partnered by English evangelicals,
Charles Simeon (
1759–1836) and
Rowland Hill (
1744–1833). Their itinerant preaching tours took in central
Scotland, especially
Perthshire,
where
John James Ruskinʼs sister,
Jessie, eventually settled. Throughout central and northern
Scotland,
Robert funded the establishment of independent chapels or
tabernacles, including the three‐thousand‐seat
Leith Walk Tabernacle in
Edinburgh—a large place of worship that, like
Hillʼs
Surrey Chapel in
Blackfriars,
London,
and the
Reverend Dr. Edward Andrewsʼs Beresford Chapel, which the Ruskins attended, was
built to occupy a space between evangelicalism and the church establishment. Nonetheless, in
Scotland, the Haldanesʼ evangelical fervor and criticism
nettled the ministers of the Church of Scotland, whose pulpits the Haldanes and their associates often borrowed during their itinerant tours.
Moreover, a social division prevailed between the populist movement and the more formally educated and conservative
clergy of the established church, the kirk. (
John James Ruskinʼs mother,
Catherine, was the daughter of a minister of the Church of Scotland.)
Robert Haldane, in particular, provoked conservatives early in his career by fomenting his advocacy of principles of the French Revolution.
Eventually, the Haldanes splintered their movement owing to their conversion to Baptism, among other reasons, but this latter development appears only marginally
connected to the Ruskinsʼ experience of Congregational worship in the suburbs south of
London
(
Brownell, “Robert and James Haldane and the Quest for Evangelical Union”;
Lovegrove, “Haldane, James Alexander [1768–1851]”;
Lovegrove, “Haldane, Robert [1764–1842]”).
Despite the pull for unity, the Congregational wing of the
early nineteenth century was firmly Calvinist in theology; and in keeping with that emphasis,
the
1793 preface to volume one of the
Evangelical Magazine proudly numbers among the “persons of evangelical principles in the kingdom” currently
“three hundred thousand Calvinists” while perhaps nodding distantly to the Arminian Wesleyans among the “many others, savingly converted to
God,
who trust in the merits of
Christ alone for salvation”. Still, the magazine pronounces itself “devoid of personality and acrimonious reflections
on any sect of professing Christians” and commits to including both “Churchmen and Dissenters” among the team of “twenty‐four Ministers” who serve as editors and contributors.
The editorial approach is to amass a “collected knowledge”, drawn not only from the ecumenical panel of editors but also from readers,
whose “judicious pieces” are invited for submission, “especially well‐authenticated accounts of triumphant deaths, and remarkable providences”
(
“Preface” [January 1793], 1–3).
Thus, whereas the Ruskins were not magazine readers by necessity—since they ranked comfortably among those with “money to purchase”, and “leisure to peruse, large volumes”
denied to many among the magazineʼs target audience—
John was exposed to an early Victorian model of crowdsourcing in print culture.
Addressing younger readers, “the children of religious parents”, the magazine offers to “allure” them “through pleasure,
into the paths of true wisdom” by means of entertaining genres such as “Biography, Memoirs, Diaries, Authentic Anecdotes,
Striking Providences, and the expressions of Dying Christians”. Add to these life‐writing genres the magazineʼs single feature of visual art,
the engraved portraits that accompany the lead biographies in each issue, these attractions cannot fail to “arrest the mind” and “make a deep impression” on young persons,
while the more exciting reading is tempered by sober instruction in “Ecclesiastical History, Jewish and Christian Antiquities, Sacred Criticism,
Select Sentences, Short Poems, and Natural Philosophy”. Thus, on the one hand “charmed” with the testimony of
“the illustrious virtues and rich experience of those very people whom the world has treated with contempt“
and on the other hand “impressed with admiration of the works of
God”, young readers
“will insensibly be led to examine the far superior displays of divine perfections, and the foundation of Christian hope and practice”
(
“Preface” [January 1793]).
The Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle, the London Missionary Society, and Middle‐Class Congregationalism
In
1823, with the start of the new series of the magazine, the spirit of pan‐evangelical catholicity of opinion and mission was reaffirmed,
but with the acknowledgment that the commitment had undergone strain over the first three decades of publication.
A
“Retrospect” published in the first issue of the new series
admitted to the emergence of rival denominational publications on both the Anglican Evangelical
and Congregational sides. In fact, the editorship of the
Evangelical Magazine
had itself become dominated by Congregationalists, just as that sect held increasing sway over the organization
that the magazine prominently represented, the London Missionary Society (LMS)
(
“Retrospect of the Former Series of the Evangelical Magazine”, 1;
Altholz, Religious Press in Britain, 46;
Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture, 24).
Starting in
1813, the magazine expanded its title to the
Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle,
having already begun in previous issues to devote “a fifth of their pages to . . . religious information, under the title of
The Missionary Chronicle;
which includes the Proceedings of all Societies instituted for the spread of the gospel” but especially the activities of the LMS
(
“Preface” [12 December 1813], iii–iv).
So prominent and detailed are the reports of LMS activity that the Ruskinsʼ (or at least
Margaretʼs) regular reading of the
Evangelical Magazine
necessarily implies a strong interest in missionary work. Indeed, the enthusiasm surrounding foreign missions appears to account for a significant part of what tied the Ruskins to Congregationalism at this time,
as documented by
Ruskinʼs
“a theme”, which is a transcript or summary of a meeting for soliciting support of missionary work.
The Ruskinsʼ interest in missions can also be measured by the entire familyʼs eager reading of the journals and poetry of the
Reverend Reginald Heber, Bishop of Calcutta.
They were drawn to
Heberʼs celebrity, just as they were impressed by the rising reputation of the
Reverend Dr. Edward Andrews, who likewise encouraged the missionary cause.
The Ruskins were not uncharacteristic in being bound to Congregationalism by the excitement surrounding foreign missions.
The spread of the gospel to foreign places was regarded as a key motivation driving the pan‐evangelical spirit that united Congregationalism
with the broader Evangelical Revival. As the Anglican and Methodist‐leaning clergyman and missionary,
Melville Horne (ca.
1761–1841), put the case
for a unified British Protestant missionary enterprise: “I would not have him [the British missionary] indifferent to his own peculiarities,
whether they respect the doctrines he receives as truth, or the points of ecclesiastical polity he considers most friendly to religion;
but I would have him thoroughly sensible, that the success of his ministry rests not on points of separation, but on those wherein all godly men are united. . . .
His object is to serve the Church Universal” (
Letters on Missions [
1794], quoted in
Brownell, “Robert and James Haldane and the Quest for Evangelical Union”, 7).
Even more fundamentally, the commitment to missionary labor was, as
Susan Thorne argues,
key to coalescing a middle‐class identity within Congregationalism.
In the
late eighteenth century,
Thorne explains, “missions [both home and foreign] were a distinctively middle‐class alternative to gentry modes of authority,
a means of controlling the lower orders at home as well as abroad that was in direct opposition to traditional or gentry forms of rule”.
“This is not to say”, she goes on, “that the missionary language of opposition was antiauthoritarian, much less antinational”
(
Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture, 39, 43).
The latter caveat applies especially to the Ruskins, whose middle‐class, evangelical identity had no stake in radical Dissent,
and whose loyalties probably adhered more to a national Protestant and anti‐Roman Catholic sense of mission than a sectarian Dissenter spirit.
There appears no mention of the Ruskins attending the
Protestant Dissenting Meeting House,
as a Congregational chapel was called in their neighborhood of
Camberwell
in the second half of the
1820s. That congregation was led by
the
Reverend William Orme (
1787–1830),
who had parted ways with his first mentor,
Robert Haldane, in their Perth years,
when Haldane was known both as “one of
Scotlandʼs leading advocates of foreign missionary expansion” and as a fervent supporter of the French Revolution.
Was
Ormeʼs respectability insufficient to dispel an air of working‐class Dissent surrounding a "Protestant Meeting House"?
The Ruskins drove a longer distance to attend “
Dr. Andrewsʼs Chapel” as the Beresford Street Chapel was identified in the
Evangelical Magazine
(
Gordon and Pimlott, “Orme, William [1787–1830]”;
Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture, 44 [on
Haldane], 58–59 [on the increased working‐class presence in Congregationalism in the wake of the Evangelical Revival];
and see
“a theme”: Discussion).
Foreign missions and middle‐class identity were interdependent in Congregationalism in part because the London Missionary Society centered church activity on fundraising for the missions.
The first Congregational foreign missions (sent to the South Seas) were funded by a few wealthy patrons, as tended to be the case in other churches, and relied for success on the will of
God.
Fervent but ill‐equipped and uninformed, these first missions fell apart; and consequently,
the LMS reorganized fundraising on a broader basis, soliciting contributions both large and small, metropolitan and provincial, but most substantially from the urban middle class
(
Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture, 59–62).
The fundraising and network of related activities were reported in detail in the
Missionary Chronicle section of the
Evangelical Magazine.
The published tables of contributions to the LMS, along with reports of activities in the local and regional auxiliary LMS societies,
were calculated, as
Sujit Sivasundaram argues, to inspire readers with a collective experience of evangelical zeal.
The lists were observantly detailed, even listing contributors of used copies of the magazine to be sent to missionaries abroad,
who duly reported back with their gratitude to receive reports from the parent and auxiliary organizations, not to mention their relief for fresh reading to palliate the tedium of their missions.
Readers, in turn, felt they played a part in a worldwide evangelistic effort, regardless of their level of donation
(
Sivasundaram, “The Periodical as Barometer”, 43–48).
The Evangelical Magazine, the London Missionary Society, and Print Culture
This extensive outreach reported in the
Evangelical Magazine and
Missionary Chronicle was characteristic
of the LMSʼs broader effort in print culture including and beyond the journal.
As
Anna Johnston describes its aim, the LMS constructed “a reading audience through its canny manipulation
of textual and media technologies, a readership that would unite religious Britons in a common cause
despite differences of class, region, gender, and age” (
“British Missionary Publishing”, 30).
For
Ruskin as a young writer,
the magazine appears to have served as a model of print in a variety of ways.
Each month, the magazine featured a section of poetry, albeit almost exclusively pious in subject matter. While some of
Ruskinʼs poems share sacred themes and genres
with the religious verse in the magazine, he appears to have mined the pages mainly as a resource on which to model his small verse anthologies in his
Red Books.
For example, his verse anthology titles, “Poetry”, resemble the header used for the magazineʼs monthly collections
(see, e.g.,
MS I Poetry Anthology).
Ruskinʼs custom of presenting his father with an annual
New Yearʼs ode also was likely influenced by a similar feature in each January issue of the magazine.