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out billions of printed texts to all corners of the globe. In the words of one
of its historians, the movement was “the greatest single medium of mass
communication in the nineteenth century” (Bradley 1976: 41).
Seen theologically, this activity is not surprising. Evangelicals held
that Christ’s “great commission” to spread the gospel formed the core of
Christianity. There was an urgent imperative to disseminate Christian ideas
to as many people as possible.
Unsurprisingly, one prevalent theme in mission media was that of
conspicuous circulation. Mission exhibitions invariably included displays
of religious material that had been translated into foreign languages. This
translation dramatized the fact that these texts had circulated far and wide.
Likewise figures such as the colporteur or Bible woman enacted mission
texts in motion. Transport was a trope in mission narratives with ships
forming a common thread in mission publicity. Most large mission societies
owned sea-going vessels to ferry their personnel about. Such ships provided
publicity opportunities in terms of funding drives, stories, pictures, hymns,
and poems. The ship became a metaphor of the word itself, sailing out to all
corners of the globe.
In the early years of the Protestant mission movement, this belief in
conspicuous circulation expressed itself in the widespread notion that the
Bible, unaided by human hands, would magically circulate, converting all
those it encountered. The early propaganda of the British and Foreign
Bible Society (BFBS), founded in 1804, portrayed Bibles rather like mini-
missionaries (Canton 1904: 317). In these parables, texts are invested with
extraordinary powers of possession and enchantment.
This theory of enchanted reading is particularly clear in relation to a key
evangelical genre, the tract. Handbooks on tract distribution and reading
portrayed these “noiseless messengers” (USCL 1948: title) as mesmerizing
objects. In one account, a man is given a tract that he tears up in a rage and
throws down on the carpet, expecting that the servant will sweep it away.
The next day, the torn scraps remain. The man summons the servant. She
explains that she saw the word eternal on one of the pieces of paper and felt
afraid to sweep it away. The man sticks the pieces of torn paper together,
reads the tract and is converted (Watts 1934: 8).
On the face of it, this view of textuality may appear unremarkable. Across
all religions, sacred texts are assumed to have magical properties: they fall
from heaven, they are acquired in dreams, they are dictated by angels.
This example would constitute an evangelical Protestant instance of this
phenomenon, driven as such ventures were by urgency and fervor.
However, this miraculous circulation also has to be read in terms of
technological development on which it depended and at times stimulated.
As Lesley Howsam’s history of the BFBS demonstrates, the modernization