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The Form and Function of Nineteenth-Century Missionary Periodicals: Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 May 2013

Felicity Jensz  and
Hanna Acke
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Extract

At the 1860 conference on Protestant missions held in Liverpool, a session was dedicated to the use of the reported 200,000 monthly missionary periodicals produced by various societies for encouraging the home support of missionary work. The 125 delegates from more than twenty-five Protestant missionary societies both in Britain and abroad had divergent opinions on the prospective contents and audiences for missionary periodicals. One thing that they did agree upon, however, was their necessity. The Reverend Thomas Green from the Church Missionary Society noted that missionary periodicals provided a means of “influencing” the minds of readers in order to excite the missionary spirit among the home community. The high circulation of missionary periodicals was, according to the Secretary of the Baptist Missionary Society, Reverend Frederick Trestrail, an indication that they provided a source of information that was received willingly and consumed by the masses.

Type
Forum
Information
Church History , Volume 82 , Issue 2 , June 2013 , pp. 368 - 373
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2013 

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References

1 The Secretaries to the Conference, ed. Conference on Missions Held in 1860 at Liverpool: Including the Papers Read, the Deliberations, and the Conclusions Reached; with a Comprehensive Index Shewing the Various Matters Brought under Review (London: Strangeways & Walden, 1860), 72.

2 Ibid., 76.

3 Ibid., 73.

4 Stanley, Brian, The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Leicester: Apollos, 1992)Google Scholar, 47.

5 Strong, Rowan, “A Vision of an Anglican Imperialism: The Annual Sermons of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts 1701–1714,” Journal of Religious History 30 (2006), 198CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 John North's 1978 observation that the systematic study of Victorian religious periodicals, including missionary periodicals, was limited remains pertinent. See: North, John S., “The Rationale—Why Read Victorian Periodicals?,” in Victorian Periodicals. A Guide to Research, ed. Don Vann, J. and van Arsdel, Rosemary T. (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1978), 10–11Google Scholar. This gap in the scholarship is still evident today, for within some recent overviews on the history of periodicals the religious periodicals have been left out entirely. See, for example, Stöber, Rudolf, “Historische Zeitschriftenforschung heute,” in Zeitschriften und Zeitschriftenforschung, Publizistik Sonderheft 3, ed. Vogel, Andreas and Holtz-Bacha, Christina (Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2002), 42–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Barringer, Terry, “Why Are Missionary Periodicals [Not] So Boring? The Missionary Periodicals Database Project,” African Research & Documentation: Journal of the Standing Conference on Library Materials on Africa 84 (2000), 33Google Scholar.

8 Historians such as Rebekka Habermas and Jeffery Cox have both recently noted that the periodical as a form of missionary communication has barely been researched. See Cox, Jeffrey, The British Missionary Enterprise since 1700 (New York: Routledge, 2008)Google Scholar; Habermas, Rebekka, “Mission im 19. Jahrhundert—Globale Netze des Religiösen,” Historische Zeitschrift 287 (2008), 661CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Altholz, Josef L., The Religious Press in Britain, 1760–1900 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), 11Google Scholar.

10 Elbourne, Elizabeth, Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853 (London: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Hall, Catherine, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830–1867 (Cambridge: Polity, 2002)Google Scholar; Johnston, Anna, Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Cooper, Frederick and Stoler, Ann L., “Introduction Tensions of Empire: Colonial Control and Visions of Rule,” American Ethnologist 16, no. 4 (1989), 619CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 The Missionary Periodicals Database, Yale University Divinity School Library, accessed August 2010, http://divdl.library.yale.edu/missionperiodicals/Default.aspx.

13 Pawley, Christine, “Seeking ‘Significance’: Actual Readers, Specific Reading Communities,” Book History 5 (2002), 145CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Elbourne, Blood Ground, 53.

15 Ahmed has analyzed a similar process in a contemporaneous “Christian Aid” letter. See Ahmed, Sara, “Collective Feelings: Or, the Impressions Left by Others,” Theory, Culture & Society 21, no. 2 (2004), 34–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Porter, Andrew, “Scottish Missions and Education in Nineteenth-Century India: The Changing Face of ‘Trusteeship,’” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 16, no. 3 (1988), 45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Gullestad, Marianne, Picturing Pity: Pitfalls and Pleasures in Cross-Cultural Communication. Word and Image in a North Cameroon Mission (Oxford: Berghahn, 2007), 18–23Google Scholar.