LAUSR

and in visual representations of Christ as a man in a dress, “a woman with a beard” (77). The model of the muscular Christian, the manly man, found its apotheosis in various heroic clergymen, both fictional and real-life, who were featured in the insets. Although male writers outnumbered women, the contributions of women to the parish magazines were significant because of the importance and space given to serialized fiction, a genre dominated by women writers and often implicitly or explicitly aimed at women readers. Writers who had made their name elsewhere in popular journalism or sentimental fiction were invited to contribute as part of the publishers’ bid to increase the parish magazines’ appeal, particularly to women readers. Platt is sharply critical of writers like L. T. Meade, a prolific journalist for women and girls’ magazines, who wrote for the insets, arguing that she and others like her in the late nineteenth century abandoned the genuine piety of earlier women writers, instead sugaring their sentimental fiction with an easy religiosity for the sake of commercial success. The contradictions between the professional lives of such women and the messages of their fiction contributed to the contradictory messages of the magazines themselves. In a fascinating chapter on readers, Platt first discusses the implied reader, arguing that the male reader was implicitly constructed as inferior in terms of class and education to the writers and to the clergy. While the hierarchies of class and gender continued to shape the discourse of the magazines, gradually these became more complex as the place of lay people in the life of the church developed. By the First World War, a more egalitarian approach to readership was emerging. However, a distinction needs to be made in terms of implied readership as well as content between the nationally produced insets and the local pages. The outer pages of the magazine aimed to form both a means of communicating local news and a historical record of the local or even the familial, with notices of births, baptisms, weddings, and deaths. As for the actual or historical readers, here the question mark in Platt’s title gives a clue to an important question she raises, namely the extent to which the parish magazine can be read as a religious publication or just another family magazine with a sprinkling of religion or whether, again, it formed for most readers a means of connecting with the local community which was not necessarily dependent on their regular attendance at services or indeed their commitment to a particular form of Anglicanism. The many subscriptions from those scattered across the empire suggests that the parish magazine represented a certain kind of Englishness as much as a certain kind of Anglicanism. All the evidence suggests that the vast majority of readers were women or girls, for some of whom the local news was important, for others the serial. For clergy and for those lay people in the parishes who were deeply involved in the life of the church, the parish magazine represented a responsibility in terms of finance and fund-raising. In short, some readers taking the parish magazine were indeed “subscribing to faith,” but for others, the magazine dropping through the door or delivered by the clergy wife carried other and contradictory meanings.