a month, to sew for it, and to foist off its contents on a shrinking male public. An exciting time it is when that turn comes round; some active-minded women, with a good trading spirit, like it, and enjoy exceedingly the fun of making hard-handed worsted spinners cash up, to the tune of four or five hundred per cent above cost price, for articles quite useless to them; other feebler souls object to it, and would rather see the prince of darkness himself at their door, than that phantom-basket, brought with ‘Mrs. Rouse’s compliments, and please, ma’am’, she says ‘it’s your turn now’.

Part of the change, of course, is due simply to the general rise in the public significance and general respectability of evangelicalism in British life. By the beginning of the Victorian period evangelical norms were adopted by all sorts of people who were not evangelicals. But it is necessary to make certain qualifications. For one thing, general approbation of the missionary project did not translate into general participation in that project. The missionary basket might pass round middle-class households, but throughout the nineteenth century the active promotion of missions remained the concern of a minority. Financial embarrassment dogged mission agencies throughout the century. In the very period of general approbation we have mentioned, the Wesleyans dismissed their most high profile missionary, a man who had opened up untold new possibilities for missions, essentially because he was spending too much money.4 The entire income of all the Bible and missionary societies, says Thomas Chalmers in 1819, would not maintain one ship of the line for a year.5 By the end of the century the insignificance of missionary contributions in comparison with expenditure on luxury goods and positively harmful products becomes a preacher’s commonplace.6 Until the 1880s, missions were also generally short of missionaries. Sometimes the shortage was chronic: the Church Missionary Society spent its first five years without a single missionary on the field. A prime reason for the widespread recognition given in mid-century to the policy of self-governing, self-supporting, self-propagating churches was that there were simply not enough missionaries for the dual task of maintaining existing churches and founding new ones; nor could the agencies envisage that there ever would be, nor that they would be able to support them if there were. The Victorian churches appropriated the missionary movement, but never saw it as more than marginal to their principal concerns. However fervently they sang ‘From Greenland’s icy mountains’, domestic concerns concentrated the minds of English and Scottish churchmen far more than how to deliver other lands from error’s chain. And those domestic concerns which so absorbed them could wreak havoc on the mission field. The Scottish Disruption, for instance, occurred just at the point where the Church of Scotland’s India mission (its first and then only mission) might be regarded as soundly established. All the missionaries declared for the Free Church; all their buildings and facilities remained the property of the Church of Scotland. The work was relocated but it was also duplicated, because, with the whole of the subcontinent before them, both Auld Kirk and Free Kirk found it necessary to continue what they