The English Cult of Literature: Devoted Readers, 1774–1880 (review)

The topic of religion in the nineteenth century is currently undergoing something of a revival, once again appearing as a field of contestation. The debate positions on the one side those who, like George Levine, are emphatically anti-Weberian and argue strongly for the growing secularity of the Victorian realist novel, against those who, like Colin Jager and Amy King, would see the theological heritage as far harder to shake off. William R. McKelvy's stimulating study, The English Cult of Literature: Devoted Readers, 1774–1880, firmly positions him within the latter camp. But rather than looking to the enduring presence of natural theology to underpin his arguments, McKelvy embeds his points within the history of print culture and of reading, exploring the role that religious professionals had in establishing, consolidating, and indeed questioning the authority of print throughout this period.

In the course of this study, McKelvy makes a number of cogent points. Above all, he advances the idea that one should not look so much for conflicts between the secular and sacred contexts of reading as for the overlaps that exist between them: overlaps that exist not just in an intertextual way, but—he is strikingly original in emphasizing this—at the very level of practice. The modern "cult of literature," which has long been assumed to constitute a sort of secular priesthood, in fact is not as easily separable from actual religious authority as commentators have tended to assume. In other words, rather than going along with the view that modern literary authority develops as a result of religion's decline, McKelvy argues that in many significant ways its establishment was dependent upon the continuation of various forms of religious scholarship and polemical dialogue. Central among these are questions of origins—to be found in Biblical hermeneutics and in debates about reading the literary remains of antiquity as much as in geology—and issues concerning vocation, interpretive independence, and the continued influence of the figure of the religious teacher and prophet on debates concerning national literature and culture.

McKelvy's general introduction outlines the theories and descriptions of the supposedly sacred function of literature in the nineteenth century that have been rehearsed and made familiar by many subsequent commentators. This is followed by chapters on, successively, Robert Lowth, Thomas Warton, and Thomas Percy; Walter Scott; John Keble and Thomas Babington Macaulay; W. E. Gladstone, with particular reference to his reading of Homer (and pornography); and the "pseudo-ecclesiastical career of George Eliot," a chapter that moves neatly from the clerical lives at the heart of her early fiction through to the prophetic voices of Daniel Deronda (1876). As this roll call of literary figures suggests, this is a book that stretches across genres as well as decades and reading audiences. McKelvy's frame of reference is exceptionally wide, anchored in place, to be sure, by the familiar triad of Samuel Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, and Matthew Arnold, but it shows an exceptional grasp of intellectual and literary culture during the period, and of its subsequent critical fortunes. (Given the scope, it was surprising that he doesn't engage with the relatively recent work of Stefan Collini on Victorian intellectuals, however.) McKelvy writes with commanding—if occasionally a little portentous—authority. The book's illustrations are well chosen: especially striking for its suggestive mingling of cultural influences is the 1775 depiction of Percy (in an engraving after Joshua Reynolds) standing in a moody yet heroic pose, his bulging manuscript under one arm, an unusual, rakishly oriental hat on his head, and his clerical collar shining luminous white round his neck.

A number of points stand out in the development of a convincing thesis. McKelvy deftly demonstrates the scale on which authorship and the clerical profession overlapped during the period. He writes well about the way in which the age confused, to an unprecedented degree, literary and religious lives. The implications of the anthology boom...