ABSTRACT
Plucking examples at random like this does not carry analysis far; and there were many counter-examples. All it serves to do is to blur lines which can be drawn too sharply. The point here will be to re-draw such lines, but rather to set religious organisation into a context in which the biscuit factory was indeed a determining organisation. The constraints involved some necessary or objective, and some unnecessary or self-imposed contradictions between aspiration and actuality. The single most important fact about early twentieth-century Reading, in the experience of the largest number of people who lived there, was poverty. In view of this, the quantity of comment by people within religious organisations suggesting some success in reaching and involving sections of the working class was interesting in Reading. Religious organisations may not have been very successful in appealing across class lines; they may, however, have been more successful than organisations, and more successful than circumstances would lead one to expect.
