ABSTRACT
The religious girl depicted in the pages of the Monthly Packet of Evening Readings for Younger Members of the Church of England is guided towards a feminine ideal of duty to her family and God, service to the community, and charity towards others less fortunate than herself. Under the strong editorial control of Charlotte Yonge, from its earliest days the magazine entwines religion and femininity as it directs girls towards moral and spiritual purity and respect for the traditional male hierarchies of church and family. The Packet was founded in 1851 in the immediate aftermath of the controversy surrounding Tractarianism, and its depiction of girlhood reflects this religious ideology. During its lengthy run of almost 50 years, the changing conditions of girlhood and the decline in popularity of High Anglicanism meant that the magazine needed to adapt its ideal of religious girlhood. The challenges of adapting the religious girl to meet new circumstances are evident in the correspondence published in the magazine. The girl readers are actively engaged in refining the image of the religious girl, and their interjections demonstrate a reality of girlhood increasingly at odds with the some of the more conservative aspects of the magazine's religious ideal. In its final decade, attempts were made to realign its feminine ideal of duty, charity, and sacrifice by removing Yonge as the editor and including content to reflect the new realities of girls’ lives. However, the powerful influence of Yonge—both as a novelist and as the editor of the Packet—and her ideal were virtually impossible to separate from the magazine, and these attempts were ultimately unsuccessful. The 1890s marked a concerted attempt in the Packet to contain Yonge's influence and reconfigure her religious feminine ideal to satisfy its fin-de-siècle readership, but the magazine ceased publication in 1899.
