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.Footnote ¹ 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.Footnote ² 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.Footnote ³

These comments indicate the importance of periodicals for nineteenth-century missionary societies in order for them to influence the masses, to conjure support for the missions, to construct an image of the foreign “other” and to help legitimize the missionary endeavor. For contemporaneous historians, the analysis of missionary periodicals provides important insights into the relationships between religion and politics, and between editors and reading communities, as well as into the construction of an ideal Western Christian in the nineteenth century. The work of many British missionary societies was bound up in what scholars have called “imperial idealism,”Footnote ⁴ or an “imperial theology”;Footnote ⁵ that is, foreign missions were seen to manifest Britain's moral and divine obligation for the providential gift of colonial rule. In this light, missionary periodicals were a powerful tool in reiterating a universal moral responsibility of all Christians—denominational distinctions notwithstanding—and were, particularly for countries with colonial possessions, instrumental in the creation of a patriotic Christian identity. In reporting the abhorrent moral conduct of the so-called heathen, missionary periodicals reflected the moral anxieties of the age, and thus reveal how editors wished to shape their reading communities, the support of which in both spiritual as well as material goods was fundamental to the missionary endeavor. Missionary periodicals needed to be believable, authoritative, entertaining, edifying, and morally above repute. Moreover, they needed to be assured of the continuing support of their readership, as the work among the so-called heathen was not finished, and indeed had no end-point in sight, as attested to by the continuing nature of periodicals.

Despite the plethora of issues about which missionary periodicals can inform us, missionary periodicals have long languished under the disinterested gaze of academics,Footnote ⁶ for they, according to Terry Barringer, are seen to be a boring medium, “covered in a pietistic haze.”Footnote ⁷ A decade after Barringer's call for a heightened academic focus on missionary periodicals, research into the form, function, origins, content, and effects of these periodicals on religious and secular histories still remains limited,Footnote ⁸ a situation made all the more surprising by the fact that until the mid-nineteenth century missionary periodicals comprised the major component of the religious press, after which time they were overtaken by religious periodicals stemming from the temperance movement.Footnote ⁹ This is not to suggest that missionary periodicals have been overlooked completely. The works of scholars such as historians Elizabeth Elbourne and Catherine Hall and the literary scholar Anna Johnston provide just a few prominent examples of how missionary periodicals have recently been used to inform us about the construction of self/other dichotomies and imperial networks built through reading communities, as well as how mission work influenced the construction of identities within the metropole.Footnote ¹⁰ However, unlike missionary archives, which have been scoured as sources by historians, anthropologists, and linguists for many decades, there has been little research undertaken on missionary periodicals as a genre in and of themselves. In using such sources, it is imperative that they are critically reflected upon. Over twenty years ago Fredrick Cooper and Ann L. Stoler noted that: “we are confronted with the obvious fact that every document in a colonial archive—no matter how ignorant its author was of indigenous society or how unimportant his ideas were to future policy—is layered with the received account of earlier events and the cultural semantics of a political moment.”Footnote ¹¹ In a similar vein, the writings of missionaries, or the contributions from editors, that formed the textual bases of missionary periodicals were infused with cultural, political, and religious norms that belonged to historical and political moments. Not only must missionary periodicals be seen in their historical contexts, they cannot be examined in isolation from them. As artifacts encapsulating historical and political moments, missionary periodicals can be read as documents that were contingent upon common historical bases as well as shared imagined futures which were bound up in the “cultural semantics of a political moment.” Missionary periodicals are furthermore infused with the religious semantics of a political moment, which need to be taken as seriously as did those who wrote such texts if we are to uncover the form and function of this medium.

This forum is dedicated to the form and function of missionary periodicals. Through analyzing inaugural editorials, Felicity Jensz sheds light on the rationale behind establishing periodicals as well as the projected positive effects that they were expected to have on their readership. Over the nineteenth century, the number of missionary periodicals expanded greatly, notably through titles addressing particular audiences such as children, women, or converts in the field. This growth reflected the expansion of missionary societies into the non-European colonial world as well as their willingness to embrace new technologies that allowed for cheap printing and affordable transportation. In Britain alone, some 300 different missionary periodicals were established in the nineteenth century,Footnote ¹² for all of which the creation and maintenance of audiences was an important editorial task. However, little is known of the reading communities themselves—a difficulty shared by both book historiansFootnote ¹³ and those aiming to study missionary periodicals. Indeed, aside from occasional letters to the editor, the voices of readers were rarely expressed at all within the pages of missionary periodicals.

Periodicals were one of an assortment of means and methods that missionary societies used to encourage home audiences to support their endeavor both financially and morally. Through the example of the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews, Agnieszka Jagodzińska demonstrates how such support was elicited through different periodicals aimed at different communities. Periodicals can be seen as a form of propaganda working in combination with monographs, pamphlets, flyers, photographs, magic lantern shows, lectures, sermons, missionary meetings, and the activities of non-missionary members of missionary societies to spread word of their endeavor. Yet of these media, the missionary periodical was the only one that combined regularity, frequency, periodicity, broad appeal and accessibility. Its distinction from other media made it an excellent medium to engage people in supporting the missionary endeavor. The regular and frequent nature of periodicals ensured currency and relevance in comparison to monographs. Periodicals were also more accessible than monographs, a fact attested to by circulation numbers, which could reach, as in the case of the British Methodist At Home and Abroad, monthly figures of around 55,000. Moreover, periodicals reached broader audiences, for, as Elbourne has noted, they “could reach further down the social scale, and faster, than books.”Footnote ¹⁴ Periodicity was another aspect that made missionary periodicals a unique form of propaganda. Published monthly or fortnightly in the same (or only slowly changing) formats and often acquired only by subscription, periodicals provided a recurring element in their readers' lives. The authors of the published articles and letters often remained the same for years and even decades, fostering intimate relationships with readers. As Hugh Morrison demonstrates, editors often used their positions of influence to shape their readerships, in his case, in terms of denominational and national identity amongst children. In some periodicals, readers were encouraged to write letters to the editor for printing, thereby demonstrating their commitment and support of the missionary endeavor to their peers. On a more general level, readers were frequently addressed directly as “dear friends of the mission,” with their engagement—whether financial or moral—emphasized as a significant part of the missionary endeavor, an engagement further enhanced through the publication of donors' names in appendices. Periodicals made it possible for members of missionary societies and other interested persons to follow the lives of individual missionaries and converts, as well as the routines of certain mission stations in other parts of the world over extended periods of time. Such internal consistency also minimized dissent, and nurtured a high degree of intimacy, familiarity, and identification with not just one particular missionary society, but, through the citation of other periodicals and the reprinting of articles from other mission fields, with a broader Christian community. The reading communities of missionary periodicals in the metropoles thus have to be considered as an important factor in the production of powerful knowledge on the colonial peripheries. The readers, often personally addressed as “you,” were constructed as potent agents holding the destiny of millions of so-called heathens in their hands.Footnote ¹⁵

Throughout the nineteenth century, missionary periodicals provided information about the non-European world to various readers in imperial centers, readers in countries not involved in imperialism, as well as to those on mission stations and in non-European lands. The information provided was censored and edited both to manipulate readerships as well as to comply with political norms. Moreover, descriptions of the “other” were often edited to provide more compelling and emotive images often at odds with the realities of mission life. This produced a particularly stylized language.Footnote ¹⁶ Especially when canvassing for funds, emotive metaphors and linguistic images were often fused with Biblical allusions. Scholars have shown the function of missionary publications in soliciting donations produced a strong focus on eliciting pity by depicting the so-called heathens as suffering and in deep need of help.Footnote ¹⁷ The editors of missionary periodicals treated the image of the helpless yet potentially convertible “heathen” more sympathetically than that of the infidel who rejected the missionary message and thus placed the missionary endeavor in question. Consequently, missionary periodicals presented a very selective image of the “other” which was compatible with missionary societies' aims, and that biased the production and dissemination of “objective” information of the “other” within European networks.

The knowledge produced and reproduced by missionary periodicals in turn influenced how Europeans constructed their own image. Albert Wu's article for this forum demonstrates this point through an exploration of the similarities and differences between Catholic and Protestant missionary periodicals' reporting on China. Both interdenominational and inter-confessional rivalries were expressed within their pages, with such expressions of allegiance contributing to the construction of shared local and international identities within their readership, which often crossed oceans, national borders, and even denominations. They presented their readers with normative Christian, and generally European notions of “civilization,” reminding their audiences through both implicit and explicit means of their places in society and their duties as Christian citizens of empire and of the world. Indeed, as Thoralf Klein posits in the context of the Boxer movement, missionary periodicals followed the secular mass media in function and response to a changing world.

Within such a wide range of publications from a variety of religious denominations, there were naturally many different aims, such as the dissemination of religious propaganda; the production of edifying material; the creation of shared religious, national, or political identities; the maintenance of religious and worldly authority; the transfer of new geographical, ethnographical, and scientific knowledge to European audiences; the discussion of missionary theology; and the dissemination of information about missionary undertakings. However, one common aspect of missionary periodicals was their ability to be used as propaganda for missionary societies and orders to shape and influence the thoughts and perspective of their readership. The broad range of denominational and confessional periodicals examined in this forum provides insights not only into the similarities and differences within the genre, but also into how the form of periodicals affected their function, and, conversely, how function affected form. Missionary periodicals, as these forum articles attest, were a necessary and important mode of communication both within and beyond nineteenth-century missionary organizations. The delegates of the 1860 Liverpool missionary conference were alert to the importance of missionary periodicals as a propaganda tool, with the articles in this forum, published a century and a half later, manifesting their continuing importance for understanding the contribution of religious bodies to Western hegemonic ideals as well as to the West's understanding of self.