Conclusion: Britannia Converted?

Summary

The 1825 Report of the British and Foreign Bible Society records an unusual donation to the Society's library. Listed below Bible editions and tracts in various languages was a painting by ‘Thomas Stothard, Esq. R.A’. Britannia Recommending the Sacred Records to the Attention of the Different Nations of the World – the probable title – was presented by the Baptist miniature painter and publisher Robert Bowyer (1758–1834) and was almost certainly given to mark the twentieth anniversary of the BFBS, which fell in 1824. The original does not seem to be extant. But from a rare contemporary print its main lineaments are clear. The ‘sacred records’ occupy the central position. They are held by two angels who present them to the peoples of the world as a revelation from the Triune deity, symbolized by the dove and triangle. In a metaphor so frequently invoked that it became a cliché, the Bible dispels dark clouds of ignorance: clouds that perhaps also evoke the bleak backdrop of global warfare against which the Bible Society was founded in 1804. Because Britannia's helmet and trident are now conspicuously laid aside. She points the nations towards the Scriptures: their representatives include a kneeling black slave at the bottom left, recognizable from abolitionist publicity (‘Am I not a Man and a Brother?’), and a robed, shaven-headed Buddhist monk at the bottom right. It is not subtle. But it is revealing nonetheless. By giving their guineas, supporters of the BFBS were not only spreading the gospel but investing in a benevolent empire whose global grip rested on moral rather than military pre-eminence. And in the twenty years since the Society's foundation, it had witnessed success beyond its founders’ wildest dreams. If support for it had once been viewed as outré, a place on a subscription list now placed its holder in the company of bankers, merchant princes, bishops, MPs, aristocrats and royal dukes. Measures were afoot, the Christian Observer reflected, ‘for the conversion and happiness of an ignorant and perishing world’. Among them it cited ‘Bible and missionary institutions, books, tracts, education, reading-clubs, peace societies, the progress of civil liberty and ecclesiastical equality … infant schools, mechanics’ institutes, joint stock companies for public improvements, &c.’.