ABSTRACT
The Religious Tract Society, out of which the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) was founded in 1804, published tracts for wealthy persons to purchase for the purpose of free distribution to their servants and other working-class readers. Foreign Bible Society used a metaphor similar to Warde’s crystal goblet, when they assured their members that in thus cheapening the sacred volume. The deeply religious men (women got involved later) who founded the Bible Society were for the most part successful entrepreneurs and professionals, men of business and commerce who took for granted their shared religious fervour and got on with the job of publishing and bookselling. To examine the ‘evil of gratuitous distribution’ is to discover that each of these marks of identity could be used as a means to inflect the way the bible transaction was handled. The society’s leaders hoped that working-class people would value the Bible and thereby become more conservative politically and less dangerous socially.
