In this recent offering of the Histories of the Sacred and Secular series, Subscribing to Faith? The Anglican Parish Magazine, 1859–1929, Jane Platt makes a strong case for the cultural significance of the English Parish magazine despite its having been “the Cinderella of the study of both religious and mass market publishing” (4). As she shows, the generic parish magazine penetrated into many English households in the latter part of the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth centuries. Platt draws her material from three dioceses, each representing a different mix of urban and rural and a different strand of Anglicanism: Carlisle Diocese, mainly rural and Evangelical; Oxford, a university and cathedral diocese associated with Tractarianism and liturgical reform; and London, with its importance as a capital city, its mix of rich and poor, and its assortment of radical clergy with a social conscience laboring alongside leaders of more conservative parishes.

Though apparently working at the most local level, parish magazines from their inception in the 1850s typically consisted of a few locally produced pages wrapped round a nationally produced inset that the parish bought from one of the major religious publishing houses. These represented different kinds of Anglican churchmanship, varying from the Evangelical Home Words for Hearth and Home to the High Church Dawn of Day and the Anglo-Catholic Sign. Produced by major religious publishing houses like SPCK and Mowbray's, these insets had large circulations: Home Words had a circulation of 90,000 in 1872, a year after its launch, and reached 250,000 in 1876, rising to 1,100,000 in 1964, an indication not only of its popularity but also of its striking longevity (42). This was despite its constant complaint about the diminishing numbers and influence of the church. Of course, copies were often delivered to households individually by clergy or their wives, a process that may cast doubt on how many of these magazines were actually read. However, evidence of individual use and the enthusiasm of local businesses to advertise in the outer pages suggest that their readership, though not equal to the most popular family papers, was nevertheless extensive.

This popularity is not surprising since despite their religious purpose, the insets were commercial ventures. Their publishers needed to make a profit and to that end deployed strategies developed elsewhere in the popular press. The inset's typical mix of genres was familiar from the commercial press: serial fiction, poetry, eye-catching illustration, general articles, and domestic advice addressed to women as homemakers, as well as new genres like the celebrity interview. These publishers also adopted familiar money-saving practices like the recycling of materials, and they came to rely heavily on advertising, whether of branded goods, remedies for bodily ailments, or women's clothing. In this they overlapped with late-nineteenth-century popular periodicals, including cheap domestic magazines aimed at women, such as Home Chat. This also is not surprising, as such advertising targeted women as controllers of the household purse, and the evidence we have on readership suggests that the parish magazine was more often read by the woman of the house than by the man. Lori Anne Loeb in her study of Victorian advertising has argued for the importance of Evangelical discourse in the development of late Victorian advertisements, but Platt's discussion of the reverse current, that is advertising's influence on the discourse of “practical religion” in the parish magazine, casts a new light on this relationship.

Whatever the differences in their churchmanship, differences that determined which publisher a parish might favor, the nationally produced insets shared a hierarchical view of society, and they were dominated in the ranks of their writers and editors by men. In the 1890s, more than 80 percent of named contributors were male, and three out of five were clergy. They generated an influential discourse of Christian manliness—perhaps, Platt suggests, as a counter to the feminization of religion encapsulated in the idealized “angel in the house” and in visual representations of Christ as a man in a dress, “a woman with a beard” (77). The model of the muscular Christian, the manly man, found its apotheosis in various heroic clergymen, both fictional and real-life, who were featured in the insets.

Although male writers outnumbered women, the contributions of women to the parish magazines were significant because of the importance and space given to serialized fiction, a genre dominated by women writers and often implicitly or explicitly aimed at women readers. Writers who had made their name elsewhere in popular journalism or sentimental fiction were invited to contribute as part of the publishers' bid to increase the parish magazines' appeal, particularly to women readers. Platt is sharply critical of writers like L. T. Meade, a prolific journalist for women and girls' magazines, who wrote for the insets, arguing that she and others like her in the late nineteenth century abandoned the genuine piety of earlier women writers, instead sugaring their sentimental fiction with an easy religiosity for the sake of commercial success. The contradictions between the professional lives of such women and the messages of their fiction contributed to the contradictory messages of the magazines themselves.

In a fascinating chapter on readers, Platt first discusses the implied reader, arguing that the male reader was implicitly constructed as inferior in terms of class and education to the writers and to the clergy. While the hierarchies of class and gender continued to shape the discourse of the magazines, gradually these became more complex as the place of lay people in the life of the church developed. By the First World War, a more egalitarian approach to readership was emerging. However, a distinction needs to be made in terms of implied readership as well as content between the nationally produced insets and the local pages. The outer pages of the magazine aimed to form both a means of communicating local news and a historical record of the local or even the familial, with notices of births, baptisms, weddings, and deaths.

As for the actual or historical readers, here the question mark in Platt's title gives a clue to an important question she raises, namely the extent to which the parish magazine can be read as a religious publication or just another family magazine with a sprinkling of religion or whether, again, it formed for most readers a means of connecting with the local community which was not necessarily dependent on their regular attendance at services or indeed their commitment to a particular form of Anglicanism. The many subscriptions from those scattered across the empire suggests that the parish magazine represented a certain kind of Englishness as much as a certain kind of Anglicanism.

All the evidence suggests that the vast majority of readers were women or girls, for some of whom the local news was important, for others the serial. For clergy and for those lay people in the parishes who were deeply involved in the life of the church, the parish magazine represented a responsibility in terms of finance and fund-raising. In short, some readers taking the parish magazine were indeed “subscribing to faith,” but for others, the magazine dropping through the door or delivered by the clergy wife carried other and contradictory meanings.